Kate

KATE

11 YEARS BEFORE

May

As promised, Bea and I drive to the babysitter’s to pick Leo up. We park on the street, then walk to the door, sharing an umbrella. When we reach the door, it sounds like mass chaos on the other side. I rap my knuckles against the door. When that fails to get anyone’s attention, I pound. Charlotte, the babysitter, comes. As she draws the door slowly open, I catch a glimpse at the anarchy on the other side. A TV is on, volume loud, but no one watches it. Instead, a group of kids play Simon Says, while another plays tag. They chase each other in circles around the living room, leaping on furniture whenever necessary to get away from It.

It’s madness to play tag inside, and yet it’s raining outside. And even if it wasn’t raining, the ground is sopping wet from days of rain. It’s too wet to play in.

I try and get a head count. But the children are constantly on the move; they’re impossible to count. If I had to guess, I’d say more than a dozen, including the one who hangs from Charlotte’s leg, wanting a ride. The kids are hysterical, slaphappy.

I have to look a while to find Leo. He sits by himself at a small table in the corner of the room. He pieces together a puzzle, alone. The kids run circles around him. One knocks into the table. It’s by accident only, and yet it’s careless, insensitive. It’s a little girl who does it, taller than Leo by a head. If she knows what she’s done, she doesn’t apologize. She keeps running, laughing, while Leo’s puzzle goes flying to the floor. The pieces separate. No one but Leo and me notice. Leo’s face falls, but he doesn’t cry. He looks so small in comparison to the others as he scooches his chair out and drops to his knees, reclaiming the fallen puzzle pieces.

“Can I help you?” Charlotte asks, peering at Bea and me through the screen. I let my gaze fall from Leo, feeling sad. Charlotte’s hair is gray. Her eyes are gray. She has deep-set wrinkles around her mouth and under her eyes, made worse when she smiles, which she does. She has a kind smile.

“We’re here to pick up Leo,” I say, “Leo Dickey,” in case, in this mayhem, there’s more than one Leo.

“Yes, of course,” she says, “Josh called and told me you’d be coming. The weather,” Charlotte complains, leaning in closer to be able to speak over the noise. “Usually I’d have the kids downstairs, but the darn sump pump went out yesterday, and the basement flooded.”

“Oh, no, how awful,” I say. “What a mess.”

“We had a new one put in, but the basement is in the process of drying out. It will take a while. There are fans everywhere, but even after it’s dry, we’ll need repairs before the kids can go back down. Being cooped up inside like this,” she says, turning to look at the kids, “it’s making the children stir-crazy. All that pent-up energy. They need to get outdoors and play.”

She calls across the room for Leo. He’s still on his knees, picking up fallen puzzle pieces. He glances up at the sound of Charlotte’s voice, seeing Bea and me through the screened door. A slow smile spreads across his lips, and Bea waves. Like a good boy, Leo finishes gathering his puzzle to put it away before he leaves.

Charlotte hugs him before he goes, confessing to Bea and me, “He’s my favorite. I wish all the kids were as well behaved as him.” I wonder if she says this to all of the kids.

Charlotte opens the door and Leo steps outside with us. We make our way to the car. Leo is quiet, as always. He doesn’t ask about Josh, Meredith or Delilah. Still, Bea says something glib about why we’re not going to his home.

“Delilah’s sick,” Leo tells us at random.

Bea says, “Yep, buddy. That’s right. Delilah’s sick.” It doesn’t feel right lying to Leo.

At home, Bea makes dinner for Leo and me. She lets Leo help. They make pasta. Bea serves it with milk for Leo, a glass of wine for me. She makes an extra plate to save for Josh, not that he will eat it.

We sit at the table and eat. Bea tries to get Leo to open up about his day. He isn’t very forthcoming. When Bea asks if he likes it there at Charlotte’s, tears well in his eyes. He doesn’t answer with words. He doesn’t need to.

I finish my glass of wine and Bea brings me another. She switches topics to something more light. She and Leo get lost in a discussion of superheroes with the best superpowers. I don’t join in. My mind is elsewhere, circling on three things: What is happening at Josh and Meredith’s house? Who did Cassandra see on the Dickeys’ lawn that night? How can I meet Dr. Feingold for myself?

---

We’re playing charades when Josh comes for Leo. We’re in the living room. The TV is on but muted. For the last hour or so, Bea and I have watched the news ticker at the bottom of the screen warn us that we’re under a severe thunderstorm watch. As I open the door for Josh, I see that the world outside has turned ominous. It’s late and dark; he was with the police for hours.

I welcome Josh in, pressing the door closed against the weight of the urgent wind. Josh rushes to Leo, where he scoops him into his arms. They talk about Leo’s day. Leo asks where Mommy is. Josh hesitates, and I feel for him, having to come up with an answer to Leo on the spot. As with Bea, it’s a lie. The truth would be too much for Leo to handle right now, especially when none of the adults in his life know what the truth is. Where is Meredith?

“Mommy is at work,” he says.

“When will Mommy be home?” he asks. His voice is small, discreet, like he doesn’t want Bea and me to hear.

“You know how it goes, Leo,” Josh says. “Sometimes we don’t know when Mommy will be home from work. But she’ll be home as soon as she can. I promise you that.”

We let Leo pick out a cartoon. Once he’s fully immersed in it, Bea, Josh and I slip into the kitchen where we can speak in private.

“What happened?” I ask Josh. I go to the refrigerator, offer him a beer. Bea warms his dinner and brings it to the table, though, as expected, he doesn’t eat. Josh looks beat, disheveled, undone. He hasn’t shaved in two days. I’m not entirely sure he’s slept or showered.

He says reluctantly, “They found Meredith’s pills.” I know what he means by this. I know what the implication is. They’re blaming the victim.

I get angry for Josh and Meredith. “Did they have a warrant to search your house?”

He shakes his head, says remorsefully, “They didn’t need one, Kate. I gave them permission to search. I didn’t think we had anything to hide. We don’t have anything to hide.”

I get it. For Josh, the invasion of privacy was worth it if it meant the police finding something that might tip them off about Meredith and Delilah’s whereabouts. He just didn’t expect them to draw certain conclusions when they found Meredith’s pills in the medicine cabinet. Meredith struggled with postpartum depression after Leo was born. She wasn’t ashamed of it. She didn’t try and keep it a secret. In fact, she was unapologetic and unreserved, appreciating how her own experience made her better at what she does. Meredith saw a therapist for a while, and was put on antidepressants. The antidepressants helped; she was in no rush to get off them, because if they were working, then why would she be?

“So what?” I ask, wondering what Meredith’s antidepressants have to do with anything.

“They asked a lot of questions. About her mental health. About whether she’s ever tried to hurt herself or one of the kids.”

“My God,” Bea says, her hand going to her heart. The media has sensationalized postpartum depression, made it out to seem like all women who suffer are the kind to kill their children. It’s not true. Postpartum psychosis is something else. It’s different and rare, and even of those affected, only a small percentage do something violent. I know because Meredith told me. She talked once about writing a blog about the experiences of women, and this was one of the things she considered writing about. Postpartum psychosis both fascinated and saddened her.

“What did you tell them?” I ask.

“I told them no, of course not. Meredith is the most sound person I know. Ask anyone, I said,” Josh tells us, and it’s true. Meredith has always been the glass-half-full type. She teaches yoga, she meditates. She rarely has a bad thing to say about anyone else. She’s a good person. She’s not capable of hurting her kids, under any circumstance.

“The police are way off base if they think Meredith has done something to Delilah,” I say. I’m getting worked up. I’m angry. The wine hasn’t helped because I feel less inhibited, free to say whatever I want. But the police are wasting time if they think Meredith did this.

Josh takes a big, long swig of his beer and says, “There’s more.” He’s guarded as he says it. Quiet. He sinks back into his chair, takes another long drink from the bottle and sets it slowly down. He wipes at his mouth with the back of a hand, his eyes focused on the wood grain of the table, avoiding Bea and me.

“They found blood,” he says, and only then do his blue eyes rise slowly up.

There’s a sudden heaviness in my stomach. I push my glass of wine away, no longer able to drink from it. Josh’s words make me instantly sober up. Blood. “Where?” I ask. Bea leans forward to hear.

“In the garage.”

“You hadn’t noticed?” I ask.

Josh shakes his head. “It’s dark in the garage. One of the bulbs is burned out. I keep forgetting to fix it. It’s not what you’re imagining,” he explains. “There wasn’t a ton of blood, Kate. Even after the police pointed it out for me,” he says, “it was still hard to see.”

“But it was there,” I say, voice drifting.

“What do they think?” Bea asks. She’s standing at the head of the table, hands on the top rail of the backrest. Beside Josh, I sit. I reach my hand out and touch his. He takes my hand into his and holds it for a minute. Neither of us speak. I can’t imagine what he is going through. His hand trembles in mine. I doubt that Josh has had anything to eat all day and a beer, on an empty stomach, can’t be good. I let go of his hand, push his plate of pasta closer and encourage him to eat.

To appease me, he takes a couple of bites before setting the fork down. “They’re seeing if it’s Delilah’s or Meredith’s,” he says, about the blood. “We should know soon.”

I wonder what good knowing this will do. I think, if anything, it will make Josh, in addition to Meredith, look bad. More victim blaming.

It’s as if Josh can read my mind. He confesses, “They asked where I was that day, if someone at work could vouch for me.”

“An alibi?” Bea asks, and he nods his head. “They think you did something to her?”

“I don’t know what they think,” he tells us. “They’re just doing their jobs,” he says, and I admire his diplomacy. It would be easy to understand why he might get upset. I would be upset. I would be raging. But Josh doesn’t get upset. “I have an alibi, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he says, but he’s tight-lipped about it, unforthcoming. This suggests to me that Josh was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.

My heart hurts. Was Josh seeing someone else? Was Josh cheating on Meredith?

“What were you doing?” Bea hesitantly asks, thinking the same thing as me.

“It sounds so shallow in retrospect,” he says, and she has to ask again, more insistent this time.

“Where were you yesterday, Josh?”

He takes a deep breath, slowly exhales. “Playing tennis,” he says, describing for us the very chichi exclusive club where they play. He’s ashamed, knowing now that while something terrible was happening to Meredith and Delilah, he was having a doubles match with a prospective client. He wasn’t having an affair.

“I won, not that it makes any difference now.” He swallows hard, keeping his emotions at bay. I don’t think he’d cry with Leo just in the next room. For Leo’s sake, he has to be strong.

“You can’t beat yourself up about it,” Bea tells him, relieved like me to know that he wasn’t with some other woman, not in the way we thought at least. “You didn’t know.”

“There’s no way you could have known,” I echo.

Bea changes the subject. She brings up the body found down there by the river’s edge. Shelby’s body. Josh says it’s something that will haunt him for the rest of his life; he won’t ever get that image out of his mind. An autopsy would still need to be done, but speculation was that she’d been dead at least a couple of days. I’ve seen animals dead a couple of days. It must have been horrific for Josh, seeing Shelby’s whole body expanded in size due to the buildup of gases inside. I just thank God it wasn’t Meredith he had to see that way.

“Do they think her husband killed her?” I ask.

“No one said.”

“We heard she was naked.”

“Mostly, yes,” he says. “But she was covered up with a blanket.”

“A blanket?” Bea asks. She’s surprised, as am I. It’s unexpected. It strikes me as an affectionate, intimate thing to do, not the kind of thing a ruthless killer would do. Unless of course the murderer knew his victim and had a fondness for her. Then he might do something like cover her up with a blanket.

I think of Bea and my conversation with Jason Tebow, with the midwife and what we learned about Dr. Feingold.

“How much does Meredith tell you about her clients?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you know Shelby was a client of hers?”

The look on Josh’s face is clear. He didn’t know. “Meredith left her clients’ names out of it when we talked about them. Their privacy was important to her. She’d tell me when a husband was being an ass, or about a baby born with some abnormality, but she never called them by name.”

“Then you didn’t know that the Tebows are suing their obstetrician for malpractice. Meredith is to testify in a deposition against him,” I say.

The color fades from Josh’s face. “How do you know?” he asks, and I tell him. He looks at us in disbelief, his eyes going back and forth between Bea’s and mine. He asks, “You spoke to Jason Tebow? You should be more careful. He could be dangerous. What if he killed Shelby?” he asks. “How do you know he wouldn’t have killed you, too?”

Bea and I say nothing. Josh runs his fingers through his hair. The realization that Meredith might have gotten herself into something high-risk scares him. I can see the disbelief in his eyes. The worry. Once upon a time, Meredith told him everything. Even if she kept her clients’ confidentiality, testifying against this doctor was something she should have told him.

“What do you think, then,” he asks, “that this obstetrician did something to both of them, and Delilah, too?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “We’re just telling you what we know, Josh.” I say it softly because I know that he’s scared. He’s beside himself, barely keeping it together. He isn’t trying to be argumentative or defensive. I’m scared, too.

He inhales deeply, slowly lets the air out. “Maybe,” Josh says, thinking aloud, “that’s what Mr. Tebow wants you to think. Maybe it’s a lie.”

It’s possible, of course. I don’t know Jason Tebow. I have no reason to believe anything he said was true. In my mind, both men are equally culpable. But Jeanette the midwife corroborated much of what he said. What reason would she have to lie?

“We don’t know what to think, Josh,” Bea says. “God willing, Meredith and Delilah are fine. Completely and absolutely fine.”

“Still,” I say, hating to be the alarmist, but it’s something that can’t be ignored. “The connection between Shelby and Meredith. The fact that they knew each other. It’s concerning, right?” I ask.

They both look at me and stare, no one wanting to face the fact that it’s more than just concerning. What it means is that, with Shelby now dead, Meredith and Delilah are in serious trouble. We need to find them soon, if it’s not too late for them already.