What the Neighbour Woman Told Leo’s Mother in a Dream

In the beginning, I was trying to untangle this whole story from its dense, soapy core. This was back in the early, bright-eyed phase of the investigation, when my grasp of the case was mostly a curated collection of whispers and premium-grade rumours, and I was still operating on a level of optimism that, in hindsight, is frankly embarrassing. People would speak about it all in that hushed, reverent way, suddenly remembering every tiny, utterly mundane detail that came before the main event. I was catching these little shards of information, trying to jam the jagged pieces into some kind of grand, terrible picture.

It was common knowledge — gospel, really — that Leo’s mother had been his primary confidant. The household legend, polished to a high shine by repetition, was that he told her everything, and she, in turn, served as his personal Fort Knox of secrets. I didn’t know then, and I still don’t, the exact vintage of his confessions, but the working theory was that he’d given her the whole library. Naturally, I figured if anyone had the master key, it was her.

The next morning, we all woke up as if it were any other day. I came downstairs to a breakfast spread that seemed aggressively cheerful under the circumstances: hot tea, a dense, savory cake practically hemorrhaging local cheese, and a creamy rice porridge. Leo’s mother was a blur of constant, automatic motion between the kitchen and the dining room, a masterclass in productive avoidance. I kept waiting for a quiet moment to slide in with my gentle, delicate questions, but the day had other plans, filling every potential silence with a thousand tiny, necessary tasks. My window of opportunity for a gentle interrogation never quite opened.

It wasn't until evening that I finally cornered her. We ended up outside in the yard — a large, fragrant space just teeming with flowers and ambitious, tangled plants. It was high summer, so everything was still stubbornly, lushly green. A place of almost offensive beauty, considering why I was there. I spotted her installed in a long chair under a sky that was doing its dramatic fading routine, and I went over and took the seat beside her.

“How are you?” I asked, lobbing the classic, entirely useless opener into the silence. It was the key you have to turn in a lock you’re not entirely sure you want to open.

She took a long, shaky breath, her eyes flicking to mine for a nanosecond before skittering off to the horizon. “How can I be?” Her voice was a frayed whisper, the kind of sound that could unravel at any moment. “In this… situation.” It was a note of such pure, uncut hopelessness that I felt that inconvenient prickle behind my own eyes.

“I know how difficult this is,” I said, pressing on with the ghoulish part of my job description. “But any small detail could be vital. Anything you can recall about that night.”

I was fishing for the solid stuff, the concrete nouns and verbs: who was with him, the sequence of events, a thoughtless comment. Instead, just as I was bracing for the hard, jagged facts, she took a sharp left turn into the Twilight Zone.

“About three days before,” she started, her voice finding a strange new gear, something distant and oddly strong. “I had a dream. There’s a woman who lives in our neighbourhood, just up there where the hills begin.” She aimed a trembling finger at a cluster of houses across the road. “In my dream, I was at home, lying on the couch, you know, in that fuzzy space, not quite awake and not quite asleep. I heard a voice call from the yard gate. I got up and went outside.”

She paused, her eyes gone glassy, clearly re-watching the whole production in her head.

“The woman was standing right there. She was holding a bucket and a hoe with dirt all over it. I went to the gate and opened it for her, invited her in. We said hello, but then her face… it just sort of caved in. The light went out of it. She looked straight at me and said, ‘This should not have happened to Leo.’”

The words just hung there in the cooling air, doing nothing.

“It was such a shock,” she went on. “I was stunned. I asked her what she meant, what she was talking about… but I don’t remember the rest of the dream. Only that. And it happened exactly three days before he passed away.”

She delivered this last part with the quiet finality of a prosecutor presenting Exhibit A.

I just listened, feeling a cold front of utter disbelief roll in. I had come asking for evidence, a timeline, a clue. She was offering me a prophecy delivered by a spectral farmhand from her subconscious. I knew, with a certainty that was both clarifying and profoundly disappointing, that I wasn’t getting anything else out of her tonight. Not the kind of truth I was looking for, anyway. I mumbled some excuse and left her to it, alone in that beautiful, overgrown yard with her secrets and her ghosts. One seemed about as useful as the other.