by Mary Kubica
This isn’t the kind of place the Meredith I know would ever go.
“What did they find?” Bea asks when Josh comes to stand by us.
“The car,” Josh tells us breathlessly, “is empty. No sign of either of them, though there’s mud all over the driver’s side. Blood in the passenger’s seat. An officer went inside and spoke to the clerk. He was told that Meredith checked in on the same day she disappeared. She paid cash. She rented the room for the month and declined daily maid service. The police are going to search the room.” He stops there, dragging his hands through his hair. His eyes are exhausted but hopped up on adrenaline. They don’t look right. “I’m supposed to sit tight and wait, but...” His voice trails.
Two things flash across Josh’s face in that instant: hope and despair.
Bea reaches for him. We stand together like that, the three of us in a row, holding hands.
The officers step inside a room and close the door behind themselves. It takes too long for them to return. With each passing minute, my concern grows exponentially. I fidget. I can hardly stand still, but I force myself to for Josh’s sake.
Josh asks things like, “What do you think is taking so long?”
God bless Bea, she comes up with reasonable explanations that put Josh at ease, like, “They’d want to talk to her. They’d have questions for her if she was there.”
But I think that if Meredith and Delilah were there in the room, the officers would be back immediately. But they’re not. Too much time passes as we watch from behind the barricade tape, staring expectantly at the closed motel door.
A few officers remain to keep watch on us. They speak to one another through walkie-talkies, though the voices are muffled and low; we can’t hear what they say. But then, as we watch, two of the officers leave and move toward the room. They’re let inside by someone we can’t see. The door closes. There is a window in the room, but the curtains are drawn. We can’t see anything.
“What’s happening?” Josh calls out, but no one responds. The number of bystanders has doubled since we arrived. Cars on the highway slow down as they pass, staring out their windows at us.
I swallow hard when the first officer emerges from the room. The day is overcast, though there’s no rain. Today, shockingly, there isn’t even a threat of rain. Somewhere behind the dense clouds, the sun fights to get through and at first I thought it was propitious—sunlight after all these days in the dark—but now I’m not so sure.
The officer holds his hat in his hands. He moves across the parking lot and toward us, his head hanging low. The female detective follows behind, three steps back.
Beside me, Bea grips my hand tightly in hers. No one says a word. No one breathes.
When the detective arrives, she asks Josh if she can speak with him. Josh quickly obliges, stepping beneath the barricade tape. He follows the detective. They go to a spot far enough away where no one can hear but everyone can see. There they speak. It doesn’t take long.
As a dozen spectators watch on, Josh falls to his knees in the parking lot. He cries. His plaintive sobs are audible even from this distance, as he lets out a desperate, elongated, “Noooooo!” that will stay with me my whole life. His movements become feral, rabid, as he smacks at the gravelly parking lot with his bare hands, then looks skyward begging, demanding to know why. “Why?” he screams. “WHY?”
MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
My eyes are closed. I’m belting out the refrain to a song. I don’t know the words. I make them up as I go. They sound perfect to my ears. Bea and I laugh, giddy, euphoric. We drive so fast the car becomes airborne. We fly.
We’ve left downtown. The lights are behind us now, the streets dark.
Bea must see something because there’s an inappreciable gasp a second before impact. I hear it later, only in retrospect.
The impact is pronounced, a dull, heavy thud, and then it’s quiet.
When it happens, I jerk upright in my seat. I’m stunned. My eyes go wide. Bea tries slamming on the brakes. But because of the speed of the car, we don’t immediately stop. We go forward another few feet. The car jounces, running over whatever we’ve hit. Bea brakes harder. This time we stop. My seat belt locks, pinning me in place. She slips the car into Reverse, going backward. Again the car jounces.
I fall silent. I gaze into the darkened world beyond the windshield, seeing nothing, only stars.
Beside me, Bea keeps saying, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
All I can ask is, “What was it?”
Foxes scavenge the neighborhood at night. Coyotes, too. There are many of them. The neighbors are always warning people with outdoor cats and little dogs to watch out.
Bea doesn’t tell me. She just says, “Oh shit, oh shit.”
She slams her hands against the steering wheel.
The mood in the car has changed. It’s deathly quiet.
Bea gets out of the car. Her movements are stiff. They’re robotic. She leaves her door open. She steps around the front end of the car. I sit in the passenger’s seat, watching, still pinned in place by the seat belt.
Bea is all aglow in the light from the headlights. She looks angelic.
I’m buzzed. Things happen in slow motion. My depth perception is off. I feel disconnected, but still cognizant because the buzz is wearing off.
Bea and Kate have a cat. They foster things. Bea would never intentionally hurt anything. She’s beside herself with guilt. She folds herself in half, puts a hand to her mouth and cries. It happens only momentarily. Bea isn’t one to cry.
She snaps back up. She wipes her eyes. She rushes to the car.
As she descends into the driver’s seat, she’s chillingly composed. She’s hatched a plan.
The first thing she does is slam her door closed. The car fades to black. She kills the headlights. The street before us also turns black. Our streetlights are lanterns. They’re more decorative than practical.
“What are you doing?” I ask. If the animal is dead, there’s nothing we can do for it. If it’s still alive, we can call Kate. Kate could help.
Bea turns to me. She grabs ahold of my arm, so tightly it hurts. Her nails dig into me. “You can’t tell anybody about this. Do you hear me, Meredith? You have to promise me that. Do you promise?” she says.
I quickly sober up, because she’s scaring me. People run over animals all the time. It’s why there’s a word for it. Roadkill. I’m not insensitive, but these things happen.
“Get a grip, Bea.” My voice is light when I speak, an insouciant whisper. “People hit animals all the time. It’s fine. Is it still alive?”
I try to free my arm. Bea won’t let me. If anything, she holds more tightly. My forearm begins to throb.
The light in the car is negligible. I can just make out the shape of her, though the details are imprecise.
“Promise me,” Bea demands. Her voice is unshaken. But there’s something off about her eyes; they’re not quite right.
At her behest I do. “I promise, Bea. I won’t say a thing.”
I tell her that whatever ran out into the street did so before she had a chance to react. She can’t beat herself up over it. It’s the thing’s own fault. “When I was sixteen I ran over a whole litter of raccoons. Babies,” I tell her. I’d just gotten my license. I was driving at night. I never saw them, yet the guilt ate at me for months. I felt awful about it.
“It wasn’t a fucking raccoon, Meredith!” Bea screams.
In all the time that I’ve known her, I’ve never known Bea to lose her temper. I’ve never seen this side of Bea. She’s tough, she’s iron-willed. But this is a Bea that I don’t know. This is a Bea that’s reactive.
Silence fills the car. She stares at me, wild-eyed, her hair falling in her eyes.
I can’t hear my own panicked breathing, but I can fee
l the way my chest rises and falls.
“Bea,” I say. It comes out as a breath. “What is it? What did you hit?”
Her silence terrifies me. She lets go of my arm. She relaxes back into her seat, staring ahead.
I get out of the car. I stagger to the front end of it. I have to see what it is.
I prepare myself for the worst. Roadkill is never pretty. Decapitation comes to mind, as does limb loss. Something horrific has happened here. Something that’s shaken Bea to the core.
And then I see, in the faint glow of the nighttime sky.
It’s not an animal.
The horror washes over me. My heart palpitates. My legs are like rubber. My palms sweat. I stand frozen at first, gaping, my sweaty hands pressed to my mouth to hold a scream back.
It’s a person—female, based on the hair length and body shape. She’s lying facedown on the street, a barely perceptible pool of blackness spreading beneath her. Her arms are up like goalposts. It’s the same way Delilah used to sleep as a baby, on her chest with arms up and over her head. This woman’s long hair surrounds her. Her legs are tucked beneath the car.
Bea steps from the car. She comes to stand beside me. “She should have been wearing reflective gear. A fucking headlamp. She should have been on the sidewalk.”
My legs finally give. I drop to my knees, not by choice but out of necessity. The gravel from the street digs into my skin. I reach out for the woman, but Bea says, “Don’t touch her,” as I do. Her words are sharp. They startle me.
“Why?” I ask, dismayed, looking over my shoulder at Bea. “We have to help her, Bea. She needs our help. We can’t just leave her here.”
“Of course we’re not going to leave her here. Help me,” she says, dropping down to the other side of the woman. Bea wears gloves now. They must have been in her car, remnants from the winter. My hands are bare. Bea tells me to bury my hands in my shirtsleeves so we don’t touch her with our hands. I don’t think to ask why. I just do.
We try to turn her over. She doesn’t weigh much. But she’s limp, sagging, all dead weight. At first we can’t pick her up. We have to roll her onto her back. In my head I think that we shouldn’t be doing this. You’re never supposed to move someone who’s injured. We should leave her where she is and call for help. But that thought never leaves my head. It stays where it is. I listen to Bea. I go through the motions mostly because I think I’m in shock. This isn’t happening. I’m not here. I’ve dissociated myself from what’s happening and though, physically, some part of me kneels on the street, turning this woman over onto her back, the rest of me watches, horrified, from a distance.
It’s only when she’s flat on her back that I get a good look at the woman. The alcohol inside me rises up, and I find myself rushing into nearby bushes to be sick. I begin to howl. In an instant, Bea is there, in my face, taking me to task. “Shut up, Meredith,” she snaps, more panicked than anything. “You’ll wake the whole fucking street.”
She presses a hand to my mouth and holds my cries in. I have to fight her off to breathe. Bea is scared, I know that. She’s panicking. I am, too.
The woman on the street is Shelby.
I push past Bea. I rush back to the car. I dig inside my purse for my phone. No sooner have I found it, than Bea is there. She snatches it from my hand.
“Give that back,” I say.
“What do you think you’re doing? Who are you going to call?”
I grapple with her for my phone, but Bea is bigger and stronger than me. She wins.
“I know her, Bea,” I say, and I explain. Bea’s face falls, but to her, it changes nothing. “We need to call 911,” I insist. “We need to call for an ambulance. She needs help.”
“We’re drunk,” Bea chastises, “and she’s dead, Meredith. She’s dead. I checked for a pulse—there’s none. There’s nothing we can do for her. I’ll go to jail if anyone finds out about this.”
“So what do you want to do?” I ask. “You want to just leave?”
It’s unfathomable, leaving Shelby here in the middle of the road for someone else to find.
Bea shakes her head. “Of course not, Meredith,” she says, “We can’t just leave her here,” and I’m relieved at first. At first I think Bea plans to do the right thing. But then she says, “We need to get rid of her,” and my heart stops.
“What do you mean?” I ask, aghast.
“We need to take her somewhere secluded, where she won’t be found for a while, if ever.”
“No,” I say, my head jerking wildly back and forth. “No, Bea. Why would we do that? You’re out of your mind.”
“Listen to me,” Bea says, her voice controlled. She grips my head in her hands, forces me to look at her. “Just listen to me. I know you’re upset. I get that, Meredith. I’m upset, too. But think about it for a minute. Just stop and think. This woman is dead. There’s nothing we can do for her. If she was alive, Meredith, I’d call an ambulance. I’d take her to the emergency room myself. But she’s dead. She’s fucking dead. Nothing we do now can change that. But if we turn ourselves in, we’re fucked. I’m fucked. We can’t save her but we can save ourselves.”
“We leave her here, then,” I say, decisive. “We leave her here and we make an anonymous call to the police.”
If the alternative is hiding her body, it’s better to leave her here.
“We can’t do that,” Bea says.
“Why? What difference does it make?”
Bea’s response is thoughtful, swift. She’s two steps ahead of me. “Because if we leave her here, the police are searching for the driver of a hit-and-run by morning, at the latest, if not tonight. If we get rid of her, they’re looking for a missing person. It’s different. Don’t you see that, Meredith? For all we know there are tire impressions on her body, paint on her clothes. Evidence that connects her to me. We have no other choice,” she says. “I know this is hard. But we have to get rid of her.”
I shake my head frantically. The tears come. They’re inaudible, falling from my eyes. “I can’t. I can’t be a part of this,” I rant. I turn away. I set my hand on the door handle. I think about leaving. Where would I go? What would I do?
Bea grabs me before I can leave. I try shrugging her off but can’t. I turn back to her. “Stop it, Bea,” I say. “Let me go. I won’t be a part of this. I can’t have this on my conscience. We should call the police. You should turn yourself in.”
“Snap out of it,” she says as she slaps me hard. I fall silent, shocked. My cheek stings. My hand goes to it as I choke on a sob. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” she asks. She has the presence of mind to keep her voice quiet. “You’re no innocent bystander,” she says. “You’re already a part of it. What do you think Josh would say if he knew we plowed down some woman in the street? You think that husband of yours would ever think the same of you?”
Shame and fear wash over me. What would Josh do if he knew? Running into Shelby was an accident. But would he judge me for getting in the car with Bea when she was so obviously drunk?
“I don’t know,” I say frantically, shaking my head. “I don’t know what he’d do.”
“Get out of the car, Meredith. Now. I can’t carry her alone.”
She’s firm. We’re no longer on a level playing field. Now Bea is in control.
We get out of the car. We go back to the body. With Shelby on her back, she’s easier to carry. Bea slips her arms under Shelby’s underarms, and lifts her upper half. She has to slide her out from under the car first, before I can take her feet. All the while I sob, my body in spasms. Bea tells me to be quiet, to walk faster. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes.
I go through the motions. I do as I’m told. This isn’t happening, I tell myself. This isn’t real. I keep waiting for myself to wake up. This is all just a dream, a horrible nightmare.
I never wake up.
We haul Shelby to the back end of the car. She’s as limp as a ragdoll. There’s a mark on her head from where she landed on the concrete. It’s swollen. It bleeds. Blood comes from her mouth. Whatever caused her death is far worse than skin-deep. Head trauma. Organ failure. Internal hemorrhaging.
Bea shuffles her into one hand so she can pop the trunk. It’s awkward and ungainly. Shelby’s head sags backward, practically snaps. As Bea opens the trunk, a negligible light comes out. But on the dark street, it might as well be the sun. Bea panics. “Hurry,” she says, nearly throwing her half of Shelby into the trunk, beside jumper cables, a box of cat litter.
There’s a dull thud when Shelby’s head hits the inside of the trunk. It sickens me. I won’t do the same. I carefully, tenderly, lay Shelby’s lower half inside and rearrange her so that she’s comfortable.
Bea doesn’t like this. “Hurry up, Meredith. Just put her in.”
Her eyes appraise the street. There are houses. Most are dark. Most everyone has gone to sleep. Of the few homes still lit, the windows are empty. No one’s watching.
I step back from the trunk. As Bea is closing it, I swear I hear Shelby moan.
My blood curdles. Only Bea felt for a pulse. I never checked.
“What was that?” I ask, panicked. “Open it back up,” I say, but Bea just looks at me.
“It’s time to go, Meredith.” She starts to walk away.
“She made a noise. I heard her,” I insist. “We have to see.”
What if she’s still alive?
What if Bea is mistaken?
Bea says, “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Please, Bea,” I beg. “Please open it so that I can check.”
“Get in the fucking car,” she says, walking around to the driver’s side and getting in. I follow suit, only because Bea tells me that when we get where we’re going I can see if she’s still alive. She starts the car. She doesn’t turn the headlights on.