Kate

KATE

11 YEARS BEFORE

May

There’s a river in town. It’s bordered by landscaped trails that curve around the water’s edge in an area known as the Riverwalk. The Riverwalk is the crown jewel of town. On weekends, people flock to it by the hundreds to visit. They walk on the brick paths, toss coins in the fountain, get their pictures taken on any number of the covered wooden bridges that pass over the river.

In the heart of downtown, the paths are maintained with ample lighting, an abundance of flowers and pristine landscaping. Nary a weed grows there. The streets nearby are all upscale boutiques. The number of bars and restaurants in our downtown nears fifty. On weekends, it’s exasperating trying to find a place to park.

But the farther from downtown you get, the river’s edge turns woody. The wide, well-kept paths metamorphose into a desire line created by years of erosion from people who pass through, feet wearing away the land. The path becomes narrow, just a ribbon of dirt that cuts through the grass and weeds, enmeshed in trees.

This time of year, the area is mosquito-infested. The excessive rain and flooding are the cause of this. Mosquitoes breed in damp conditions. They lay their eggs in stagnant water, like puddles. Because of the heavy tree coverage, the puddles never have a chance to fully dry out, and so the land stays muddy, mossy, the ground littered with the moldy debris from trees.

This is where the body was found.

Our group meets back at Josh and Meredith’s house. Everyone is talking fast, sharing what they know. It’s frenetic. The air hums with the sound of voices, a constant drone.

I look around. Josh isn’t here. But there are police officers here. Their cars are parked just outside, while an officer stands guard at the door. Other officers are inside the house, searching through Josh and Meredith’s things.

“Has anyone seen Josh?” I ask.

“He’s gone to the river,” someone says, “to see the body.” We all fall momentarily silent at the mention of that word: body. My heart is in my throat, hoping and praying that it isn’t Meredith or Delilah they’ve found.

We stand in a circle on Josh and Meredith’s lawn. The entire group is on edge and feeling anguished and defeated. The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle. Those of us that have them hold umbrellas over our heads to repel the rain. The rest just get wet.

“How do we know there’s a body?” Bea asks.

“My wife and I heard about it,” a man says, stepping forward.

“How?” she asks.

“We were on the Riverwalk, showing Meredith and Delilah’s photo around, asking if anyone had seen them. There were a couple runners there. We showed them the photo. No, they said. They hadn’t seen them. But they’d heard that the cops were just a couple miles downriver, trying to identity a body that was found. Hope that’s not who you’re looking for, they said.”

“We continued to dig for details,” the wife says. “We asked around to see if anyone knew anything.”

What they derived, she tells us, fighting tears, was that the body had been discovered early this morning by a man walking his dog. It was half-buried in the earth. The head and the torso were concealed underground, while the rest of it poked obscurely out. It had likely been buried better, some surmise, but last night’s rain may have washed the mud and the leaves away. The dog found the body first, driven there by the offensive scent. The river there is high, on the verge of overflowing; a day or two later and the body would have been at risk of floating away.

“Any signs of foul play?” a woman asks.

The husband and wife exchange a glance. They tell us they heard the body was unclothed, and, collectively, we gasp. Our minds go to the same place.

“Oh God,” Bea, beside me, says, taking my hand into hers and squeezing it tightly. Our eyes meet, thinking of what might have happened to our friend before her body was left abandoned and alone, thinking of Delilah. Praying that the naked body does not belong to Delilah, but also wondering, if it is Meredith, then where is Delilah? Death might be preferable to being taken by someone we don’t know.

Because of our close proximity to Josh’s house, Bea and I go home and gather snacks to pass around to the search party, which now nears thirty in number. When we step into the house, the workers are there. The music is loud, something techno with a low bass that makes the entire house shake. They’re hard at work, but they stop when we come in. They stop and stare.

“Excuse us,” I say, begging their pardon for being in my own home. I feel a man’s eyes on me as I collect strawberries from the refrigerator, wash and slice them in the kitchen sink. It’s unnerving. Bea grabs two bags of chips and as many bottles of water as her arms can carry. We go back, grateful to get out of there.

Everyone politely declines our offer of food. No one wants to eat. Everyone feels the same sickness in their stomach, a sadness and unrest, not knowing what’s happening down there by the river. It’s all anyone can think about. I, myself, try and imagine the scene: police and evidence technicians, reporters, yellow caution tape. A body being exhumed from the bramble.

After a while, I watch as Bea pulls the midwife aside. I see them talking on Josh’s front porch, where they’re sheltered from the rain.

I’m in the middle of talking to the woman who first heard about the body late this morning. She and her husband, she tells me, tried to make their way to the body, to see it for themselves, to see if it was Meredith or Delilah. But they got only so far before the local community service officers got in their way, blocking them and anyone else from getting too close. Many people had the same idea, fueled mostly by morbid curiosity: to see a dead body.

I excuse myself. I make my way to Bea, extending a hand to the midwife and telling her that my name is Kate. The midwife is midfifties with tender eyes and a kind smile. Her hair is long, graying, woven into a single braid down her back.

“Kate is my partner,” Bea says.

The midwife replies, “Yes, of course. Meredith spoke of you often. Good things only. I’m Jeanette,” she says, shaking my hand. “Meredith and I worked together on occasion.”

As a doula, Meredith worked in a variety of settings. She worked home births, often with the help of a midwife. She worked in hospitals. She went where her clients went, whether they gave birth in a bathtub or a hospital bed.

Bea is in the middle of telling Jeanette what we learned from Jason Tebow. “He said Meredith was their doula. It sounds like something went wrong with that birth, but he wouldn’t say what. He suggested some animosity toward the obstetrician.”

“Dr. Feingold,” Jeanette says, nodding thoughtfully. “Nobody likes him much,” she says.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“He doesn’t have the best bedside manner. He can be uncompromising. He wouldn’t have appreciated Meredith being there, questioning him, undermining his decisions. To Meredith, clients came first. She didn’t care who she pissed off in the process.” She explains to us the role of a doula: to be there for emotional and physical support, to empower the mother, to ensure the labor and delivery were the best experience they could be. “Meredith is a wonderful doula. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her clients,” she says. “We talked a lot about our clients, even those that we didn’t have in common. Labor and delivery can be overtaxing. The long, unplanned hours, the physical and emotional fatigue. It’s heady and exhilarating from time to time, but also the kind of career that can run someone into the ground. We relied on each other for support. Meredith is a good friend.”

“She is,” I say, thinking of all the times Meredith had been there for me. A thought comes to me. “Why would Shelby see an obstetrician like him, if he’s so unlikable?” I ask.

Jeanette says, “Shelby was already late into her pregnancy when she started seeing him. Very few OBs like to take a patient on that late in the game because they don’t have a full knowledge of the patient’s history. But Dr. Feingold did. Dr. Feingold was also one of the few who didn’t already have a full practice, which should have been a red flag.”

“Do you know anything about this particular birth?” asks Bea.

“I do,” Jeanette says. She breathes deeply, holds the air in. At first she’s reluctant to tell us. But then she does. She exhales slowly and says, “The baby isn’t right.”

Bea and I exchange a glance. We’ve both seen the baby. The baby didn’t look not right to us. “How so?” Bea asks.

“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.”

“But she will be all right?” I ask, worried for baby Grace. The fact that Shelby is suing for malpractice concerns me. Lots of doctors get sued. As a doctor myself, it’s one of my biggest fears. Many malpractice suits are settled or dismissed before they ever get to court. But still, it has lasting effects on a doctor’s finances and reputation. 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.

Jeanette shrugs. “We may not know for some time. Some of these children are diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Some seizure disorders. Still others have developmental delays. Meredith planned to testify against Dr. Feingold. She was to give a deposition this week,” she says, and for a second I don’t breathe. I think that this doctor did something to silence Meredith so she couldn’t speak out against him. The timing is significant. First Shelby went missing and then Meredith, the two women who were witness to his negligence.

We go quiet, each lost in our own thoughts. In time, Jeanette drifts away, standing under a tree in the distance, staring upward at the clouds. I watch her for a moment.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Bea says, stealing my attention away from Jeanette.

The rain picks up and then slows down. Dusk seems to come sooner than usual because of the rain. By late afternoon it’s turning dark, the clouds heavy and gray. Tonight there will be thunderstorms, some violent, newscasters predict.

Later, early in the evening, we watch as Josh’s car pulls down the street. He parks in front of the house. He stays there, not getting out, while the rest of us watch on, expectantly. We hold our collective breath, wondering what Josh knows that we don’t. Is Meredith dead?

I see him through the windshield. He sits in the car awhile, bent over the steering wheel. Is he crying? Or is he just collecting his breath? I think about approaching, of going to the car, knocking on the window and getting his attention. But Josh deserves this second of peace. He’s been gone for hours. It’s nearing five o’clock. For the last few hours, the rest of us have been gathered on his lawn, holding a near-silent vigil. Everyone stayed. Even with the weather as it is, no one left. No one would leave until they knew what was happening down there by the river.

When he steps from the car, Josh’s body sags. He trips over the curb, stumbling like he’s been drinking. But Josh isn’t drunk. His shoulders round forward, his head dropped so far his chin practically touches his chest. He has been crying. Though his tears are dry now, the evidence is written all over his face: the redness and the swollen eyes. He looks a decade older than he did this morning, and entirely spent. There’s dirt on his hands and on the knees of his pants.

He makes his way to us. But partway across the lawn he stops. He leans heavily against a tree, burying his face into his hands as if he can’t go on. There he sobs, his whole body convulsing, and, twenty feet away, Bea wraps her arms around me, steadying me so I, too, don’t collapse.

The worst has happened. Meredith is dead.

No one goes to him. We all stand by and let him have this cry. Many among us begin to cry, too. My hand goes to my mouth, expecting all the emotion that’s welled up inside me to come flooding out. But it doesn’t. I hold it inside, focusing instead on what needs to be done. We need to find Delilah. The search for her needs to be amped up. We can’t stand around and mourn Meredith’s loss when we have Delilah to find.

Behind me, Bea quietly cries. We’ve switched roles. Usually I’m the more emotional, Bea the logical, the one orchestrating plans. But Bea and Meredith were close. Bea and Delilah were close.

There will be a funeral. Arrangements will have to be made. Bea and I will help Josh with the arrangements. He shouldn’t have to do that alone. He’ll be completely beside himself now that Meredith is dead.

Those words get trapped in my head. They’re incomprehensible to me. Meredith is dead. They don’t belong together.

But when Josh finally manages to collect himself, he tells us.

“It’s not her,” he chokes out.

“What do you mean it’s not her?” someone asks.

“The body,” he says. “It wasn’t Meredith. It was that Tebow woman,” he cries out, and, God help me, I feel the greatest sense of relief. My knees buckle, and only then do the tears come. Tears of relief that it’s Shelby and not Meredith.

He tells us how Mr. Tebow came down to the station and identified her body. “What happened to her?” someone asks. “How did she die?”

It’s a question we all want to know. But only one of us has the nerve to ask.

“We won’t know until after the autopsy,” Josh says. But he tells us that Shelby’s death is being investigated as a homicide. It was clear that foul play was to blame. Everyone gasps, then falls silent.

Just then a plainclothes officer steps out of Josh and Meredith’s house, a woman, a brunette with strong features: an angular jawline, straight nose, jutting cheekbones. Her lips are thin, her eyes narrow, cheeks taut. She could be pretty if she smiled. She wears a pantsuit, a holster with a handgun tucked beneath the jacket of it. The wind blows, pulling the plackets of her jacket apart and I see it: the gun. She crosses the lawn for Josh, some male detective with a lesser paygrade following behind. Stupidly I think that she is going to comfort Josh, to give him some statistic, to say something reassuring about investigations like this.

But instead, when she speaks, her voice is flat and comfortless. “Mr. Dickey,” she says. “Detective Rowlings.” She flashes a badge. “If you wouldn’t mind stepping inside with us for a minute?” while making a motion toward Josh’s home behind him. I look. It’s a beautiful home, a blue Queen Anne, over a century old. It’s large and ornate, with round towers and cone-shaped roofs that give the impression of a small castle. As long as we’ve lived here, Josh and Meredith have lived here.

Josh stands upright. He wipes at his eyes, dries the remaining tears. Everyone else stands at attention and leans in to listen.

Josh looks around. He sees the mass of people waiting there for news. Every man, woman and child here has set aside their own day for Meredith and Delilah.

“If you have something to say about my wife,” Josh says, fighting for composure, “you can just say it. Everyone is here for the same reason. To find my family.”

“There’s no news, sir,” Detective Rowlings says grimly, shaking her head. “We have some questions for you.”

“What kind of questions?” Josh asks.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” she says, “we’d prefer to discuss this inside.”

A van pulls down the street. It comes to a stop behind Josh’s car. We watch as a man and a woman in Tyvek get out of the van and head for the house. I swallow against a lump in my throat. They’ve found something.

“I have to pick up my son,” Josh says. He looks at his watch. “I have to pick him up from the babysitter. I told her I’d be there by five. I’m already late. Can this wait?” he asks.

“Couldn’t you make other arrangements for your son?” Detective Rowlings asks, promising this won’t take long. She’s unsympathetic. I doubt she has children.

Bea steps forward. “We’ll get him,” she says to Josh. “Kate and I will get him and keep him until you’re done.” She touches Josh’s arm.

“That’d be a big help,” Josh says over his shoulder. “Thank you, Bea.”

While dozens watch, Josh, with his head hung low, follows the detective to his house and closes the door.