Local Woman Missing

by Mary Kubica

Josh is our neighbor. He lives next door with his wife, Meredith, and their two kids.

“Where’s Delilah?” Delilah is Josh and Meredith’s daughter. She’s six.

“the sitter told me only Leo was there. She said that Meredith had kept Delilah home for the day because she was running a fever. She said Meredith had called Delilah in sick to school, and had canceled her own classes.”

Shelby Tebow to consider, a young woman who went for a jog in our neighborhood ten nights ago and never returned.

I glance down at the phone in my hand, expecting it’s my client with some conditioned reply. Thx. Instead: I know what you did. I hope you die.

That’s not to say I didn’t think about you. I thought about you a lot when you were gone, though all I ever knew was the absence of you.

But for as much as people think the internet knows everything, the one thing it doesn’t say is that the girl who came back isn’t the same one who disappeared.

Mom was found dead of a self-inflicted knife wound with a note: You’ll never find her. Don’t even try.

I doubt it, thinking that would be indigestible to a four-year-old boy. Crayons go missing. Puzzle pieces go missing. Moms and sisters do not go missing.

“For as dark as it was, I still saw movement in Josh and Meredith’s yard. At first I thought it was my imagination. That I was seeing things. It was late and I was tired. Then, when it didn’t go away, I told myself it was their trees or a deer. A coyote, maybe. But the longer I watched, I realized it was someone, people, in Josh and Meredith’s yard. I watched for a while, not sure what they were doing, wondering if I should call the police.”

“Two,” she says. “It didn’t look like a break-in attempt.

sheepish.

What I notice is that Shelby wears sunglasses, though we’re inside and outside the day is gloomy and gray.

Death might be preferable to being taken by someone we don’t know.

“She suffered irreparable brain damage during the delivery. The Tebows are suing Dr. Feingold for malpractice. Dr. Feingold should have opted for a C-section, which Meredith suggested. The mother was exhausted. But Dr. Feingold wouldn’t listen; he wouldn’t be told what to do. He cut an episiotomy and used forceps instead, applying too much pressure to the infant’s fragile skull.”

If Dr. Feingold is the type of man Jeanette paints him to be, I wonder what kind of reaction he’d have to being sued.

Meredith planned to testify against Dr. Feingold. She was to give a deposition this week,”

I think that this doctor did something to silence Meredith so she couldn’t speak out against him.

Its too early to jump to conclusions.

It’s not like she could know about her husband, Marty, and me. Unless he told her, but he wouldn’t do that. We’d agreed to keep things secret, for Cassandra’s and Josh’s sake.

archaic

cynical,

I haven’t forgotten about Cassandra. I’ve been busy. But all the while, she’s been on my mind. I want to be a better friend to her than I’ve been. I’ve been so busy burdening her with my needs, that I’ve forgotten about hers.

He just goes and fucks you and comes back, and then he climbs into bed with me, nine times out of ten forgetting to put back on his ring.”

oh he was screwing shelby

“I hope you rot in hell, Meredith. I hope you both rot in hell.”

I still can’t walk by our old babysitter’s house without feeling the need to dry heave, even though last I heard she and her husband don’t live there anymore.

Josh shakes his head. “Forensics was able to determine that the bloodstain is only days’ old,” he says. After that, we go silent. There’s nothing to say. Something happened in that garage, but we don’t know what.

It’s a person—female, based on the hair length and body shape.

Wait did she just run over Shelby?

The woman on the street is Shelby.

Well shit

What I wouldn’t give to go back to last night, to go home with Josh instead of staying with Bea.

I’m not known as being the life of the party. I’m more of a wet blanket when it comes to nights out. I’m typically the first to want to go home.

“The way the psychiatrist explained it to me,” Dad says, “being isolated in the dark for as long as your sister was drives people to the brink of insanity. It impairs their sense of time, their sleep cycles. Without being able to see, they suffer sensory deprivation. It fucks them up, Leo,” he says.

“This friend of Delilah’s was a hallucination. But to her,” he says, “he was entirely real. Where she was kept, she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. In the absence of all other stimuli, Leo, her mind kept working, and it created Gus, who, to your sister, was as real as you are to me.

“You didn’t go to work today,” Bea

Bea has turned cringey. I hate her sudden attitude change

You’re lucky you never got to experience high school. High school is pretty fucked up.

I want to ask her if it’s true. If it is, I’d find it endearing.

Intrusive thoughts 🥴😆

Piper shows me the picture. You’re a little kid in it. It’s a close-up of yours and Piper’s faces smashed side by side together. You’re smiling. Half your teeth are missing. You’re all red hair and freckles, happy like the kid I saw dancing around on Dad’s home videos, not scared like the person you now are.

“It’s just that, I was, like, digging around on the internet, trying to figure out if cleft chins are one of those things that just goes away, you know? And they’re not.”

She sets both pictures side by side, the one some asshole photographer shot yesterday, and the one of you when you were six. They’re mostly similar—red hair, green eyes—except for that cleft chin. I never noticed before that you had a cleft chin.

Okay but a blood test and all that was supposedly done?

a butt chin. It’s rare. It’s genetic. It’s gone. You don’t have it anymore. It isn’t that you lost it. It’s that you are not my sister. I don’t know what to do with this information. Do I tell Dad and break his heart? Or let him go on believing this pipe dream of his?

So was the DNA test fake? I hope we didn’t forget about that

“The DNA test, Leo,” he says, “was conclusive. The DNA test confirmed that she’s Delilah. DNA tests don’t lie.”

“What if the DNA test got it wrong?” Dad asks. “DNA tests are lauded as extremely reliable, almost one hundred percent.” “I’d like to see those results,” Dad says, thinking the lab fucked up. There are things called a false positive and a coincidental match. The lady cop doesn’t move. She holds stock-still. “Carmen?” he asks. “I’d like to see the results, please.”

“And then the results came back. Negative. Not a match. I was incredulous. I was devastated. It was impossible. It couldn’t be. I thought of how I’d tell you, the words I’d say. I practiced. But when the time came, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take her away from you again. I’m so sorry, Josh. In some inane way, I thought I was doing the right thing, for you, for her. I thought if no one knew the truth, what harm would it do?”

Wow. Heart sinking moment. That’s sad af regardless she shouldn’t have lied! 😭

The lady cop doesn’t come in with us. After her confession, she was led away by some superior officer with her head hung low. There will be some form of discipline for what she’s done. Not only did she lie, but she tampered with police records. She’ll probably get canned. Maybe have charges pressed against her, too. I don’t know.

👏🏼

“What made you believe this man is your father?” There’s a tremor to your voice. “He’s not?”

I don’t think we should victim blame though

Tears pool in your eyes and then slip down your cheeks. That’s how I know you’re not lying. You honest to God believe him to be your dad. You say to him, “You are. You are my daddy,” and then even I’m crying, too.

Josh has been duped again.

“The door is locked,” she says to the police officer. Bea always keeps that door locked.

And yet, if I was Bea, I’d open the door and let the police officer see for himself that no one is there.

don’t know where the key is,” I admit. “There’s only one. It’s gone. Bea must have taken it with her when she ran off,” I say, ashamed for many reasons, but mostly that Bea cut and run and left me in the dark like this. It’s so unlike Bea.

I’m frozen to the ground, horror-struck as the police officers return with the girl. Except that when she emerges, she is not the same girl that I’ve been seeing on the news. Bruised and battered, malnourished, skittish. She is the spitting image of Meredith instead. Flaming red hair, fair skin, freckles, eyes the same as Meredith’s mineral green. She’s Meredith in her mannerisms, in the way she carries herself, in the way she stands. She’s clean, well fed, seemingly unharmed. She is no longer a cherubic little girl. She’s developed into a lovely young lady who takes my breath away.