A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

Another change comes over Bea. She turns hard. “The hell you
are,” she says. Suddenly I’m a liability. I am the only thing standing
between her and her freedom.
I go to leave, but Bea is in my way, blocking me from leaving. I’m
wedged between the car door and the garage wall. There’s hardly
any room to scoot past.
I ask, “What if I told the police that I was the one driving the car
that night? What if I said that you had too much to drink, and I
offered to drive? I was the one who ran into Shelby. It was my idea,
taking her out to the woods, hiding her. I did it while you were passed
out drunk in the back seat.”
Her tone is flat. “No one will believe you,” she says. She steps
toward me. The lights in the garage are off. The only light comes
from outside, though the day is gray. Hardly any light gets in.
“Why’s that?” I ask. I’m not a good liar. But the police have no
proof to the contrary. It would be my word against theirs. They’d
have no choice but to believe it.
“Because you couldn’t have pulled all that off without me. You
weigh like a hundred pounds, Meredith, sopping wet. There’s no way
you could have moved her all on your own. There’s no way you
could have buried her.”
“I did my part,” I tell her. “I pulled my weight that night.”
“But you couldn’t have done it without me. No one will believe you.
We’ll still both go to jail.”
I remind her, “We killed a woman, Bea. We took a life.”
My phone is there on the car’s floor mat. My eyes fall to it. I lean
down and reach for it before she can stop me. Bea sees what I’ve
done and she comes at me, trying to take the phone out of my
hands. She’ll never let me call the police. The battery icon shows
red. Soon my phone will be dead.
We tussle over the phone. She tries to rip it out of my hands. I pull
back; I shove her. I don’t mean to. I just react. Bea reels back, into
the sheathing, which is riddled with exposed nails. Josh and I talk
about them all the time. We talk about how those nails on the garage
walls are a hazard. We worry about the kids cutting themselves on
one. We worry about things like tetanus. Josh has talked about using
the bolt cutters to cut the nails back, but he never did.