A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

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