A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

I should have tried harder. I should have done more.
There are police cars outside Josh and Leo’s house. There are a
half dozen officers on foot, each searching in a different direction for
this missing girl.
We walk our property. It’s not large by any means, but there are
towering trees with branches and leaves that hang low. There are
also hedges where a person, if she wanted to, could conceivably
hide. The police officers search the hedges. She’s not there. We
make our way around the side of the house, following the concrete
walkway into the backyard. One of the officers investigates the
shrubs. Another asks, “Mind if we search the garage?”
He goes to it, sizing up Bea’s music studio from the outside. The
studio is a near-replica of our house. It’s smaller, of course, a story
and a half tall with a storage space on the upper floor. We don’t use
that storage space; we don’t need to. If anything, Bea keeps old
recording equipment in there. Between Bea and me, we don’t have
many belongings, and what we have can easily fit into the spare
bedroom in the house.
Bea goes to the studio and jiggles the door handle. She stands
taller than the police officer by an inch or two. I stand, watching her
in her jeans and her black T-shirt and her sneakers. She looks
troubled. Like Josh, Bea changed significantly after what happened
to Meredith and Delilah. I suppose we all did. Bea became less
relaxed, less carefree, more overburdened. She spent more time in
solitude working on her music, though she never produced much.
She lost interest in having kids.
“The door is locked,” she says to the police officer. Bea always
keeps that door locked. She has expensive equipment in there, and
nearly everyone in the neighborhood knows exactly what she uses
the space for. It isn’t so unlikely to think someone might try to make
off with her equipment when no one’s looking.
The officer asks, “Do you mind opening it for us?”
Bea says, “It’s been locked all day, Officer. No one could have
gotten inside.”
There’s something about Bea’s response that lies heavy on me.
Bea is right; short of telekinesis, there’s of course no way a person
could have gotten through the locked door. There’s one window on