A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

Bea tells Gwen the whole story. As she does, Gwen’s eyes fill with
tears.
“You’ll let me know when there’s news?” she asks. Gwen would
join the search party if she could, but Gwen is nearing eighty and not
as mobile as she used to be.
“We’ll let you know the minute we hear a thing,” I say.
Most of our immediate neighbors know Meredith. Though no one
has seen her, they almost all want to talk. They step out onto their
front porches and ask for details.
“Has something happened to her?” they ask, everyone concerned.
Meredith, like Delilah, is well liked throughout the neighborhood.
She’s been known to drop everything to help a neighbor in need.
When Gwen’s husband was gravely ill, she helped get him in the car
and drove him to doctor appointments when she could. When the
Timmonses’ little dog got out, Meredith walked miles around town,
pushing Delilah and Leo in the double stroller, until she found it.
Bea and I share the little we know with our neighbors, but the
information we gather in return is unremarkable. Jan Fleisher
remembers Meredith’s car parked in back; Tim Smith saw her pull
down the alley.
“Were the kids with her?” I ask Tim. He doesn’t know. He didn’t get
a good look inside the car because there was a glare. He just knows
that it was Meredith’s car.
“What time was this?”
He shrugs. “Eight, maybe. Or nine.” He thinks hard. “I had an
appointment at eleven so I left the house around ten-thirty. It was
before that. Sometime before ten-thirty, I’d say,” he decides,
apologizing for being unintentionally vague. He feels badly for it,
knowing he may have been one of the last to see her before she
disappeared.
Bea and I move on. This morning it isn’t raining. Still, the sky is full
of heavy clouds. We feel the moisture in the air. The trees drip rain
from last night’s storm down on us, making us wet in spots. We carry
umbrellas, but we don’t need them, not yet, though the humid
weather does nothing for my hair.
There are twigs everywhere, torn savagely from the trees and
tossed to the street by the rain and wind. The sidewalk is riddled with