Local Woman Missing
Mary Kubica
Praise for
Local Woman Missing
“I’m shamelessly addicted to Mary Kubica’s juicy, unpredictable reads, as much for her well-rounded, fully human, flawed characters as her sizzling plots—and she just keeps getting better. Local Woman Missing is a propulsive journey through a winding maze of secrets, leading to a jaw-dropping twist that I never saw coming. Loved every minute.”
—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Never Have I Ever
“Dark and twisty, with all the white-knuckle tension and jaw-dropping surprises readers have come to expect from Mary Kubica.”
—Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Home Before Dark
“Complex, richly atmospheric and thoroughly riveting, Local Woman Missing is a thoughtful look at how even the most innocuous secrets between happy couples and beloved friends in tightly knit neighborhoods can sometimes turn so unexpectedly and terrifyingly deadly.”
—Kimberly McCreight, New York Times bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia and A Good Marriage
Also by Mary Kubica
The Good Girl
Pretty Baby
Don’t You Cry
Every Last Lie
When the Lights Go Out
The Other Mrs.
Local Woman Missing
Mary Kubica
For Addison and Aidan
Mary Kubica is the New York Times bestselling author of several thrillers, including The Other Mrs. and The Good Girl, which has now sold over one million copies. She holds a BA in history and American literature from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She lives outside Chicago with her husband and two children, and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Delilah
Part Two
Kate
Meredith
Leo
Kate
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Kate
Leo
Meredith
Kate
Meredith
Kate
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Kate
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Kate
Meredith
Kate
Meredith
Kate
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Kate
Meredith
Kate
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Leo
Meredith
Kate
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
11 Years Before
There’s a smudge of lipstick on the collar of his shirt. She sees it. She says nothing about it. Instead, she stands there, bobbing the crying baby up and down like the needle of a sewing machine piercing fabric. She listens to his lame lies, his same, dispassionate Sorry I’m late, buts he reels off almost every night. He must have an arsenal of them amassed, and he uses them in rotation: a bottleneck on the expressway, a coworker with car trouble, getting stuck on the phone with some apoplectic policyholder whose house fire wasn’t covered because of insufficient documentation of the damage. The more specific he is, the more sure she is of his betrayal. Still, she says nothing. If she presses him on it, he gets mad. He turns it around on her. Are you calling me a liar? For this reason, she lets it go. And also because it would be a double standard for her to make a big deal of the lipstick.
“It’s fine,” she says, taking her eyes off the lipstick.
They eat dinner together. They watch some TV.
Later that night, she puts the baby to bed, feeding her at the last minute so that she won’t wake hungry while she’s gone.
She tells him she’s going for a run. “Now?” he asks. It’s after ten o’clock when she steps from the bedroom in running clothes and shoes.
“Why not?” she asks.
He stares at her too long, his expression unclear. “When people do dumb shit like this, they always wind up dead.”
She’s not sure what to make of his words, whether he means running alone late at night or cheating on one’s husband. She convinces herself it’s the first one.
She swallows. Her saliva is thick. She’s been anticipating this all day. Her mind is made up. “When else do you expect me to go?”
All day long, she’s home alone with their baby. She has no time to herself.
He shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He rises from the sofa and stretches. He’s going to bed.
She goes out the front door, leaving it unlocked so she doesn’t have to carry keys. She runs only the first block so that if he’s watching out the bedroom window, he sees.
At the corner, she stops and sends a text: On my way.
The reply: See you there.
She deletes the conversation from her phone. Is she as transparent as her husband? Is what she’s doing as obvious as the lipstick on his shirt? She doesn’t think so. Her husband is hot-blooded. If he had any idea she was sneaking out to hook up with some guy in his parked car on 4th Avenue, where the street dead-ends a hundred feet from the last house, he’d have beaten her to within an inch of her life by now.
She walks along the street. The night is quiet. It’s the only time of day she looks forward to, lost in the anticipation of some guy she hardly knows indulging her for a while, making her feel good.
He isn’t the first man she’s cheated on her husband with. He won’t be the last.
After the baby was born, she tried to quit, to be faithful, but it wasn’t worth the effort.
This guy says his name is Sam. She’s not sure she believes it. She’s been seeing him off and on for months, whenever he or she gets the urge. She met him when she was pregnant of all things. To some guys, it’s a turn-on. He made her feel sexy, despite the extra weight, which is far more than she could say for her husband.
Like her, Sam is married. And he isn’t the only guy she’s been seeing on the side.
The few times they’ve been together, “Sam” takes his ring off and leaves it on the dashboard, as if that somehow mitigates what he’s doing. She doesn’t do the same. She isn’t one for feeling guilty. She’s made herself believe that it’s her husband’s fault she does what she does. Turnabout is fair play.
The sky is full of stars. She stares at them awhile, finding Venus. The night is cold and her arms are covered with goose bumps. She’s thinking about his car, how warm it will be once she gets inside it.
She’s looking up at the stars when she hears something coming at her from behind. She spins around, eyes searching the street but coming up empty in the darkness. She chalks it up to some wild animal rummaging through trash, but she doesn’t know. She turns back, goes back to walking, picking up her pace. She’s not one to get scared, but she starts thinking of what-ifs. What if her husband is on to her, what if he is following her, what if he knows?
She tells herself he doesn’t know. He couldn’t know. She’s a very good liar; she’s learned how to silence her tells.
But what if the wife knows?
She isn’t sure what “Sam” tells his wife when he leaves. They don�
�t talk about things like that. They don’t talk much at all except for a few preliminary words to kick things off.
Don’t you look pretty.
I’ve been waiting for this all day.
They’re not in love. No one is leaving their spouse anytime soon. It’s nothing like that. For her, it’s a form of escapism, release, revenge.
Another noise comes. She turns and looks again—truly scared this time—but finds nothing. She’s jittery. She can’t shake the feeling of eyes on her.
She starts to jog, but soon trips over an untied shoe. She’s uncoordinated and nervous, wanting to be in the car with him, and not alone on the street. The street is dark, far too dark for her liking.
She senses movement out of the corner of her eye. Is something there? Is someone there? She asks, “Who’s there?”
The night is quiet. No one speaks.
She tries to distract herself with thoughts of him, of his warm, gentle hands on her.
She bends over to tie the shoe. Another noise comes from behind. This time when she looks, car lights surface on the horizon, going way too fast. There’s no time to hide.
PART ONE
DELILAH
NOW
I hear footsteps. They move across the ceiling above my head. My eyes follow the sound, but there ain’t nothing to see ’cause it’s just footsteps. That don’t matter none, though, because the sound of them alone is enough to make my heart race, my legs shake, to make something inside my neck thump like a heartbeat.
It’s the lady coming, I know, ’cause hers are the bare feet while the man always wears shoes. There’s something more light about her footsteps than his. They don’t pound on the floor like the man’s do. His footsteps are loud and low, like a rumble of thunder at night.
The man is upstairs now, too, ’cause I hear the lady talking to him. I hear her ugly, huffy voice say that it’s time to give us some food. She says it like she’s teed off about something we’ve done, though we’ve done nothing, not so far as I can tell.
At the top of the stairs, the latch unlocks. The door jerks suddenly open, revealing a scrap of light that hurts my eyes. I squint, see her standing there in her ugly robe and her ugly slippers, her skinny legs knobby-kneed and bruised. Her hair is mussed up. There’s a scowl on her face. She’s sore ’cause she’s got to feed Gus and me.
The lady bends at the waist, drops something to the floor with a clang. If she sees me hiding in the shadows, she don’t look at me.
This place where they keep us is shaped like a box. There’s four walls with a staircase that runs up the dead center of them. I know ’cause I’ve felt every inch of them rough, rutty walls with my bare hands, looking for a way out. I’ve counted the steps from corner to corner. There’s fifteen, give or take a few, depending on the size of my steps and if my feet have been growing or not. My feet have, in fact, been growing ’cause those shoes I came with no longer fit right. They stopped fitting a long time ago. I can barely get my big toe in them now. I don’t wear no shoes down here anymore ’cause I stopped wearing those ones when they hurt. I got one pair of clothes. I don’t know where they came from but they ain’t the same clothes I was wearing when I got to this place. Those stopped fitting a long time ago and then the lady went and got me new ones. She was put out about it, same as she’s put out about having to feed Gus and me.
I wear these same clothes every day. I don’t know what exactly they look like ’cause of how dark it is down here. But I do know that it’s baggy pants and a shirt that’s too short in the sleeves ’cause I’m forever trying to pull them down when I’m cold. When my stink reaches the lady’s nose, she makes me stand cold and naked in front of Gus while she washes my pants and shirt. She’s got words for me when she does. Ungrateful little bitch, ’cause then she’s sore she’s got to clean my clothes.
It’s pitch-black where we are. The kind of black your eyes can’t ever get used to because it’s so dang black. Every now and again, I run my hand in front of my eyes. I look for movement but there ain’t none. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my hand was gone, that it up and left my body, that it somehow tore itself off of me. But that would’ve hurt and there would have been blood. Not that I would have seen the blood on account of how black it is down here, but I would have felt the wetness of it. I would have felt the pain of my hand getting tore from my body.
Gus and I play chicken with ourselves sometimes. We walk from wall to wall in the darkness, see if we’ll chicken out before we run face-first into the wall. Rules are we got to keep our hands at our sides. It’s cheating if we feel with our hands first.
The lady calls down from the top of the stairs, her voice prickly like thorns on rosebushes. “This ain’t no restaurant and I ain’t no waitress. If you wanna eat, you’ve got to come get it for yourself,” she says.
The door slams shut. A lock clicks and there are the footsteps again, drawing away.
The lady wouldn’t bother feeding Gus and me but the man makes her do it ’cause he ain’t gonna have no blood on his hands. I’ve heard him say that before. For a long while, I tried to make myself not eat, but I turned dizzy and weak because of it. Then the pain in my belly got to be so bad that I had to eat. I figured there had to be a better way to die than starving myself to death. That hurt too much.
But all that was before Gus came. Because after he did, I didn’t want to die no more, ’cause if I did, then Gus would be alone. And I didn’t want Gus to wind up in this place all alone.
I push myself up off the floor now. The floor is rock hard and cold. It’s so hard that if I sit in the same spot long enough, it makes it so I can’t feel my rear end. The whole darn thing goes numb, and then after numb, it tingles. My legs are worn out, which don’t make no sense ’cause they don’t do much of anything except sit still. They’ve got no reason to be tired, but I think that’s why they’re so tired. They’ve plumb forgotten how to walk and to run.
I slog to the top of the stairs, one step at a time. There ain’t no light coming into this place where they keep Gus and me. We’re underground. There’s no windows here, and that crack of light that should be at the bottom of the door ain’t there. The man and the lady that live upstairs are keeping the light all to themselves, sharing none with Gus and me.
I feel my way up the stairs. I’ve done it so many times I know what I’m doing. I don’t need to see. I count the steps. There’s twelve of them. They’re made of wood so rough sometimes I get splinters in my feet just from walking on them. I don’t ever see the splinters but I feel the sting of them. I know that they’re there. Momma used to pull splinters out of my hands and feet with the tweezers. I think of these splinters living in my skin forever and it makes me wonder if they fall out all on their own, or if they stay where they’re at, turning me little by little into a porcupine.
There’s a dog bowl waiting at the top of the steps for Gus and me to share. I don’t see it, either, but I feel it in my hands, the smooth round finish of the dish. There was a dog in this house once. But not no more. Now the dog’s gone. I used to hear it barking. I used to hear the scratch of nails on the ceiling above me, and would make believe the dog was gonna open the door one day and set me free. Either that or eat me alive ’cause it was a big mean dog, from the sound of it.
The lady didn’t like it when the dog barked. She’d tell the man to shut it up—either you shut it up or I will—and then one day the barking and the scratching disappeared just like that, and now the dog’s gone. I never did lay eyes on that dog, but I imagined it was a dog like Clifford, big and red, on account of the gigantic bark.
Inside the dog bowl is something mushy like oatmeal. I take it back downstairs. I sit on the cold, hard floor, lean against a concrete wall. I offer some to Gus but he says no. He says he ain’t hungry. I try and eat, but the mush is nasty. My insides feel like they might hurl it all back up. I keep eating, anyway, but with each bit
e, it gets harder to swallow. I have to force myself to do it. I do it only so that my belly don’t hurt later on, ’cause there’s no telling when the lady will bring us more food. My mouth salivates, and not in a good way. Rather, it salivates in that way it does right before you’re about to throw up. I gag on the mush, vomit into my mouth and then swallow it back down. I try to make Gus eat some, but still he won’t. I can’t blame him. Sometimes starving is better than having to eat that lady’s food.
They’ve got a little toilet down here for Gus and me. It’s where we do our business in the dark, hoping and praying the man and the lady don’t come down when we’re on the pot. Gus and I have an agreement. When he goes, I go in the other corner and hum so I can’t hear nothing. When I go, he does the same. There ain’t no toilet paper in this place. There’s no place to wash our hands, or any other part of us for that matter. We’re dirty as all get-out, but things like that don’t matter no more, except for when our filth makes the lady mad.
We don’t get to take no real bath in this place. But every now and again a bucket of soapy cold water arrives and we’re expected to strip down naked, to use our hands to scrub ourselves clean, to stand there cold and wet while we air-dry.
It’s damp down here where they keep us, a cold, sticky wet like sweat, the kind that don’t ever go away. The water oozes through the walls and trickles down sometimes, when it’s raining hard outside. The rainwater pools on the floor beside me, making puddles. I walk in them puddles with my bare feet.
In the dark, I hear something else splashing in them puddles sometimes. I hear something scratching its tiny claws on the floor and walls. I know that something is there, something I can’t see. I got ideas, but I don’t know for sure what it is.
I do know for sure that there are spiders and silverfish down here. I don’t ever see them, either, but sometimes, when I try and sleep, I feel their stealth legs slink across my skin. I could scream, but it wouldn’t do any good. I leave them be. I’m sure they don’t want to be here any more than me.
