A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

Before we bury her, Bea strips her of her clothes. She savagely
tears her shirt from her head. She yanks her pants down. She leaves
her underwear around her knees.
Naked, Shelby still carries the baby weight. She hasn’t lost the
extra pounds that worried her so. Her breasts are huge, sagging.
They fall out of the bra that Bea tugs from her arms.
I watch Bea as she takes Shelby’s shoes. I think of the shame and
indignity of being found naked. One final disgrace. I look away. I
can’t watch.
“Why, Bea?” I ask.
“If she’s naked, it implies something sexual happened here. The
police will go searching for a man.”
We drag her into the hole. We use the dirt and the mud that we’ve
unearthed to cover her up. We canvass the forest, gathering
whatever detritus we can find: leaves and sticks. We lay those on top
of the mud. Shelby’s body shows as a protuberance from the earth.
But it’s slight. With any luck, no one will find her here.
At some point in our drive home, it stops raining.
Bea stops just short of our houses, pulling to the side of the street.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
Bea kills the engine. She says only, “Follow me.” We get out of the
car and start moving down the sidewalk. We’re both filthy, caked with
mud. It’s on my clothes, my hands, my shoes. It’s in my hair.
Bea asks if I have bleach. I tell her I do. By now the rain has
washed Shelby’s blood from the street. It’s no longer visible. No one
will know it was there.
But Bea’s trunk still shows evidence of blood. That needs to be
cleaned.
“Where is it?” she asks, walking fast. Her legs are longer than
mine. She doesn’t wait up for me. I have to jog to keep up.
“In the garage,” I say. It’s where Josh and I keep all the cleaning
supplies, so that Wyatt and the kids can’t get into them by accident.
We come to my house. It’s surreal, standing outside it at this time
of night. I don’t recognize my own yard. “Go get it,” she says, about
the bleach. “I’ll wait here.” She stands in the yard. The yard is
wooded. The neighborhood is hundreds of years old. Some of the