by Mary Kubica
“I think we can’t just gloss over the husband,” Bea says. “He and Shelby had problems. He was the only one who knew she’d gone running that night. He had a motive to kill her, and he had the means. And maybe Josh is right—maybe the husband only said what he said about Dr. Feingold to clear his own name.”
“But the midwife backed his story up.”
“I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m suggesting the husband had a hidden agenda in telling us. Because let’s be honest, Kate, until he did, we were convinced he was a wife killer. But now we’re not so sure. He planted that seed of reasonable doubt.” Bea is right; he did. Before yesterday there was only one name on my suspect list, and now there are two.
“But we saw Dr. Feingold,” I argue, still feeling the way he forced my knees apart, the way he thrust his fingers inside me as if hollowing out a pumpkin. Hours later, I could convince myself that he didn’t do anything unethical. It was the rote, forceful way that he did it that left me feeling violated and strange—that along with the knowledge of Shelby’s murder, with the image of him dragging her cold, naked body out there into the woods and discarding her like trash. “We spoke to him. The man is detestable. He’s a swine.”
“That doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“We need to call the police. We need to tell them what we know.”
Bea agrees. Her cell phone is on the coffee table. She grabs it and looks up a nonemergency number. The police are conducting their own investigation. They’ve already questioned Jason Tebow about a bajillion times and are trying to do a deep dive into the contents of Meredith’s phone, though without the phone itself, that’s proven problematic.
Bea says to whoever answers, “I have some information on the Dickey missing-persons case.” She’s put on hold. While we wait, I drink my wine, liking the way it both dulls my senses and gives me courage. I ask Bea to put the phone on Speaker so that I can listen in. She does, scooching closer to me with the phone between us. A female detective comes on the line.
“I heard you have some information for me,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, overanxious to speak.
“And who am I speaking to?”
It’s Bea who tells her.
“Okay, Kate and Bea,” she says. “What do you know?”
I go first. I start with Cassandra Hanaka from across the street. I feel extra guilty that we’ve been sitting on this information for over twenty-four hours now and haven’t told, but with the discovery of the body yesterday and all the intense emotion that went with it, Bea and I let it slip. I tell the detective about the night Cassandra was up with her son, seeing people in Josh and Meredith’s yard late at night. “We were thinking that maybe one of the neighbors has a home security system, and it caught a glimpse of them.” Bea and I don’t have a home security system. It never felt necessary, until now.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “many home security systems nowadays only offer a live feed—they don’t record. And those that do only store the footage for a couple of days. But we’ll look into it. We might just get lucky. I’ll talk to Mr. Dickey, too, and see if he recalls anything amiss that night or the following day. What day did Mrs. Hanaka say this happened?” she asks.
“She didn’t,” I say. “She wasn’t sure. She could only guess about a week or two ago.”
Bea goes next. She tells the detective about the Tebows’ malpractice suit against Dr. Feingold, because there’s another possible suspect to consider besides Jason Tebow. The detective already knows about the malpractice suit. What she doesn’t know is that Meredith was Shelby’s doula. Bea tells her.
I’m ashamed to admit to our own run-in with Dr. Feingold. I let Bea tell the detective, feeling embarrassed as she does. The detective tells us in the future to leave the police work to the police.
The detective says that she’ll be in touch. We end the call.
Bea and I turn on the TV. I drink my wine and try to wind down as another thunderstorm tears through town. But I can’t relax. Because I can’t stop thinking about Meredith and Delilah out there in this rain, cold and scared and wet. The lightning is rapid-fire. The thunder is so intense it feels like the entire house will give.
And then, suddenly, it’s black in the house. The storm has stolen our power from us.
The blackness is so unexpected that my heart nearly stops. Without meaning to, I scream. The low drone of the refrigerator goes suddenly quiet. The dryer, a ceiling fan and the TV turn off. The house is silent, abnormally so. I never noticed the whir of the ceiling fan, but the absence of it I do. The absence of it is deafening.
Wyatt begins to moan at my feet, and I rub his ears, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” but I don’t know that it is. I push myself from the seat, leaving in search of candles and flashlights, coming back with as many as I can find.
Until now we’d been one of the lucky ones with power. Our luck has run out, it seems.
I sit beside Bea. I light the candles, setting them on the coffee table. I hand Bea a flashlight, and then use mine to scan the darkest corners of the room. The furniture startles me as I try and make sense of the shadows to understand that they’re not human but synthetic. No one is here but Bea and me.
Outside the storm rages. It’s more thunder and wind than anything. Bea and I sit on the sofa with Wyatt, listening for the sound of the tornado siren to warn us to run and hide.
The wind rouses the trees and shrubs. Their limbs scrape against the side of the house, against the window screens, making them rasp.
And then, a door from upstairs slams suddenly closed and Bea and I both scream.
“Maybe it was Zeus,” I say, which is ridiculous, because our ten-pound cat could never slam a door like that.
“The workers,” Bea says, trying to be the rational one, though I don’t know that either of us believe it. “They must have left a window open. The wind blew the door closed,” she says, though neither of us has the courage to go see, though if the window is open, it will soon take in water. We scoot closer together on the sofa, clinging to each other.
I’m scared. I feel vulnerable and exposed. I hate feeling vulnerable. I push myself up off the sofa again, and go to the coatrack. “What are you doing?” Bea asks. I don’t say. She shines her flashlight on me, watching as I go.
Beside the coatrack is an umbrella stand. I reach my hand in and take out our giant golf umbrella. We may need something to protect ourselves with.
My eyes reach up from the umbrella stand. They move to the window. The windows on our home are ornamental, made to look pretty more than to be practical. Even on the brightest of days, our house is dark; the windows don’t let much light in. Now they’re lined with rain.
But none of that matters, because no matter how small or ornamental, the thing that catches my eye when I look out the window is that the homes across the street from us are still lit. Unlike ours, they’re not dark.
Porch and garage lights are on. Inside the homes, I see people mulling about, backlit by bedroom and living room lights. Across the street, I see Marty, Cassandra’s husband, standing in the foyer of his own home beneath a caged chandelier. The chandelier is radiant. Yellow light spills down on him.
“Bea,” I breathe out, but my throat is so bone-dry that I can hardly speak. I choke on the words. Tears prick my eyes.
What I need to tell her is that the power outage isn’t city-wide. I need to say that the power to our house alone has been cut. Our circuit breaker is outside, that metal box, recessed into the side wall. Someone slipped around the periphery of our home in the dark. They went to the circuit breaker and purposefully turned the main breaker handle off.
The only way to get the power back on is for Bea or me to go outside and turn it on. The circuit breaker isn’t easy to find. It’s camouflaged, painted yellow to match the house. I only know where it is because the workers use it frequent
ly when they’re working on the house, shutting the electricity off here and there so they don’t electrocute themselves.
Someone would have had to scope the place out in daylight to know where it is.
My mind goes a step further, preying on my worst fears. Because there’s a key to our house just outside the front door, in that lockbox. Anyone who knows the combination to the lockbox could let themselves in.
“What’s wrong?” Bea asks, coming to me, patting my back to make the coughing fit stop.
“Look,” is all I manage to say as I point a shaky finger across the street toward Marty and Cassandra’s house. It takes Bea a moment to process what I’m saying. She sees Marty there in the foyer. She watches as he removes a coat and hangs it on a hook because he’s evidently just come home. She sees Cassandra come to him, and we watch as an altercation transpires. Cassandra hurls something in his direction before getting in his face. She’s upset; he’s apologetic. He reaches gently for her. She shoves him away. Just then, one of the kids comes running in and falls. He begins to cry, breaking up the fight. Marty scoops the boy into his arms and they all leave the lit foyer, Cassandra in one direction, Marty and the boy another.
“What am I looking at?” Bea asks.
What she doesn’t see is the bigger picture: that ours is the only house on the block without power. I tell her and though it’s too dark to see Bea’s expression, I see her back go straight like a scared cat. She stands momentarily taller, taking in what I’m saying.
“Oh God,” she says. “What are you thinking?”
“That someone shut off the main breaker to our house.”
“Why?” she asks. “Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her, whispering, because if my worst fears are true, then someone has already stolen the key from the lockbox and is in the house with us. The same key fits two doors in our house: the front door, by which Bea and I stand, and a side door, the one we use when we come in from the alley in back, where we park our cars. The workers know this because the side door is wider and a better angle at which to get large panels of drywall in. Anyone keeping close tabs on our house might know this, too.
The side door enters into the laundry room. From there, a person would have access to the kitchen, which would bring them to the servant stairs. From there, they could go anywhere.
Neither Bea nor me wants to go alone to check on the circuit breaker. But also, neither of us wants to be the one left behind.
In the end, we decide to go together. I turn on my flashlight. Bea tells me to turn it off, that we can’t be drawing attention to ourselves with the light. We have to go out quiet and blind. We leave our flashlights behind.
I set my hand on the door handle and turn. I peel the door slowly back. Bea stands behind me with a hand on my lower back. Together we take one hesitant step out. I’m hyperaware of my surroundings, though the wind is a distraction. It blows my hair about my face, threatens to tear the door right from out of my hand and throw it open wide. The world is dark and disorienting, making me lose my bearings even in my own front yard. I don’t know where things are and I find myself tripping down the porch step, though Bea latches on and steadies me. Lightning flares, not in the distance, but close, right above us. The storm is here.
Bea and I have just made our way onto the lawn, feet sinking into mud, when the heavens open and rain comes flooding down, drenching us both. The rain is cold, debilitating, but we keep going, eyes scanning the yard, searching wildly through the rain for signs of life.
The circuit breaker is on the side of the house. Our neighborhood is old and developed; the yard is full of trees, each of which looks human to me. Bea and I cling to each other as we walk. Bea looks left; I look right. From time to time, we both look behind. My neck stiffens, my sixth sense telling me that Bea and I are being watched, followed, tracked. Is it paranoia only or is someone there? I can’t tell. I stop Bea to have a good look, but she tugs on my hand, urging me on. We have to turn the power on so we can get back inside, out of this storm.
Halfway to the circuit breaker, I regret not bringing the flashlight, not for light, but for self-defense. I regret not bringing the umbrella. We have nothing to protect ourselves with.
Bea and I move quickly, nearly running, but our movements are lumbering, the wind holding us back. It blows against us so that Bea and I have to swim upstream, fighting against the wind to get to the side of the house. We trip over fallen sticks. Our feet sink into mud. It splashes up my legs, making them cold and dirty and wet.
We round the corner of the house, Bea in the lead now, dragging me behind. We stay close to the house, using it for wind resistance, for protection from the elements. The rain comes down sideways, straight into our eyes, nearly blinding us.
Suddenly from behind, I hear footsteps. Breathing.
Bea and I are not alone.
I spin wildly, just barely making out the whites of a man’s eyes standing three feet behind me. I scream and something subliminal kicks in, an animal instinct. I make a fist. I use the weight of my whole body, driving my fist into the man’s abdomen so that he doubles over in pain.
It’s only when he cries out that I recognize the voice. It’s Josh.
“Oh God, Josh,” I say, going to him and helping him stand upright. I’ve knocked the wind out of him and it hurts. He’s bent downward in the rain, stooped, trying to find his breath. His diaphragm is in spasm; he can’t breathe. I latch on to him, steadying him, helping him rise back up to standing. “I’m so sorry. Oh God, Josh, I’m so sorry. I thought you were...”
But then suddenly I stop. Because I find myself wondering why Josh is out here in the rain, why Josh is hiding out on the side of our house, so close to the circuit breaker. Confusion fills me and I think of the police officers questioning Josh, of them asking for an alibi, of the blood they found in his garage.
But Josh loves Meredith. Josh would never hurt Meredith.
Or would he?
I step away from him. My pulse beats so fast it makes me dizzy. My legs become weak. “Did you cut the power to our house?” I ask, my voice swallowed up at first by the wind.
“What?” he asks, his own voice barely audible.
“Did you cut the power to our house?” I scream this time.
“What are you talking about?” Josh asks. He pushes against his knees to try and stand upright.
“The power is out in our house. Someone cut the power to our house. Was it you?”
“Kate,” he says, still nearly breathless, still in pain, “why would I do that? The power is out on the whole street.”
“It’s not,” I assert, pointing at the glowing homes that stare at us from the other side of the road.
He reaches out to lay a hand on my shoulder. I draw swiftly back. “It is on our side, Kate,” he says consolingly. “Our whole side of the street is dark. They must have a different power line than us. Look,” he says, motioning to his own black house just twenty feet away, “my power is out, too. A tree fell on a power line. The electric company is working on it. I checked the website on my phone. Power should be restored by morning,” he says.
Behind us, Josh’s house is black. The homes beyond his are black, too. I couldn’t see these homes when Bea and I looked out the living room window because they’re in line with ours. I only had a view of the other side of the street.
Josh didn’t cut the power to our house. No one did. The power is out because of the storm and I feel like a fool for thinking Josh had plans to hurt Bea and me. It’s not Josh’s fault that someone scared us, that someone might have followed Bea and me home from the appointment. It’s not Josh’s fault that I was stupid enough to leave my real name and address, or schedule an appointment with Dr. Feingold in the first place. I put myself in harm’s way.
The relief floods me. There on the lawn I begin to cry, all that pent-up emot
ion finally making its way out. Bea rubs tiny circles on my back, but it’s Josh who consoles me. He takes my wet, shivering body into his arms and holds me.
“What’s happening,” he says, “is destroying me. My life is nothing without Meredith and Delilah. This is hard on all of us—we’re all coming undone.”
Bea retrieves Wyatt, which is the reason Josh was on his way over: to get his dog. We all go back to Josh’s house, where inside Leo sleeps. We stand on the porch, protected from the rain by the roof, though we’re all soaked through and cold. I shiver, wrapping my arms around myself to keep marginally warm.
There on the porch Josh tells us, “Detective Rowlings called about an hour ago. The blood in the garage didn’t belong to Meredith or Delilah.”
I look up sharply. “Then who?” I ask.
“The police don’t know. It didn’t match anything in their database.”
“But maybe it’s old?” Bea suggests. “You said the blood was hard to see. For all you know it’s been there for years. Maybe it belonged to some previous owner.”
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.
MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
I can’t keep concealing so much from Josh. I’m falling apart at the seams, trying to keep the truth from him. It’s time to tell him what’s been going on. The events of the last couple of months have driven a wedge between us, whether he knows it or not. I want to get back to the couple we used to be. I need to tell him about Marty and me. I can’t count on Cassandra not going back on her word and letting me tell him first. If she told him, what would she say? Cassandra thinks that Marty and I are still sleeping together now.
Thursday night I call the teenage girl down the street to stay with the kids. They’re in bed when she comes. It will be easy for her. She just needs to be a warm body.