11 Days After 90-Year-Old Goes Missing, Son Spots Neighbor Digging In Yard
Andrew sat in his living room, staring at the photo in his trembling hands. He felt like his heart had been ripped out of his chest, a hollow ache where warmth used to reside. He couldn’t believe how cruel fate had been. It would have been one thing for someone young and capable to be lost or missing, but when it was an elderly woman, a woman who relied on the familiar walls of her home and the predictable rhythms of her neighborhood, that’s when it was truly serious.
What kind of danger was the poor old woman in? The police had already told Andrew that they were trying to do everything that they could to find his mother, but he knew how these things often turned out. The world was vast and unforgiving for someone her age. She had already been missing for over a week, and with every passing hour, the flickering candle of hope grew dimmer.
There really wasn’t anyone else around to help. As an only child, the burden—and the love—rested solely on his shoulders. He knew that if he wanted to find her, if he wanted real answers instead of bureaucratic reassurances, he’d have to do it himself. Luckily, Andrew still had the spare key to her home. He decided that he would have to do his own investigating, retracing her final steps in the place she felt safest.
He drove to her home, the familiar suburban street now looking cold and alien. He opened the front door, something he hadn’t done since the police led their own initial investigation. He walked inside and walked through her house. It was just as she had left it—a half-empty cup of tea on the side table, her favorite cardigan draped over the arm of the chair. It evoked old memories and was hard to look at, the silence of the house screaming her absence.
But he was about to find a lead. That’s when Andrew found a pile of mail on her dining room table. On top of the pile was an opened envelope with a note half sticking out. He decided to check it out, having no idea what it was or how significant it might be. The note was addressed to his mother, Judith, but it wasn’t particularly friendly. The tone was sharp, the words jagged. The note seemed to be threatening Judith.
That’s when he realized who it was from. The note was from the neighbor on the other side of the fence. But why was he threatening her? The more he read, the more it all started making more sense—and the more sinister it became. It seemed that his mother and her neighbor had some kind of dispute that turned ugly. He knew that his next step had to be checking him out.
There was only one thing for him to do. He walked up the stairs to the second story of his mother’s house, moving quietly as if afraid to wake the ghosts of the past. He found a room that overlooked his neighbor’s backyard. That’s when he heard it: the rhythmic, wet sound of metal hitting soil. He decided to look over the wall and, sure enough, Judith’s neighbor was in his backyard, thinking no one could see him.
All of the blood drained from Andrew’s face as he noticed what he was doing. He was digging straight into the ground, relentlessly, as if he didn’t have a choice. But what was he doing? Dread crept over his spine as he considered the dark possibilities of what his neighbor was doing in the dead of night, or why he was working with such frantic desperation. He knew what he had to do. He shouted like an animal and raced over to the neighbor, but he should have brought backup.
Andrew Fitzgerald had always been a bright boy with an exceptional intellect. Growing up, his parents encouraged him to do well at school so that he could go on to great things. They saw a future for him that stretched far beyond their quiet neighborhood. But that wouldn’t be so simple. Just before Andrew graduated from high school, tragedy struck. It would be something that was hard to recover from.
As a single child, his only family was his mother and father. But in his last year of high school, his father tragically passed away. It was a sudden, violent tear in the fabric of their lives. It was something that would take years for Andrew to overcome, but for his mother, it would never be the same. She’d never get over the death of her husband; a part of her had followed him into the earth.
That’s what compromised Andrew’s future for a few years. After his father died, Andrew helped out in the only way he could. He stayed with his mother and looked after her, setting aside his own ambitions to be her anchor. Instead of going to study at a university, he found a modest job to keep them afloat. With that, things were okay for a while, but Andrew always wished he could still go and study. He felt the pull of the books and the lecture halls he had left behind.
But things wouldn’t stay the same forever. Three years after Andrew’s father passed away, he finally told his mother that he would be moving out. He needed to live his own life and hopefully start a family of his own. She understood, her maternal love outweighing her grief, and she gave him her blessing. He managed to find a small apartment on the other side of town that he could afford. He even started saving up for the education he dreamed of.
With Andrew starting a new education and working at the same time, he didn’t have time for much else. That meant that his monthly visit to his mother turned into a “once in a blue moon” kind of thing. He felt bad, the guilt a low-frequency hum in the back of his mind, but he still called her every week to see how she was. He just wished he could have seen her more.
Years passed like this, with Andrew having barely any free time and not seeing his mother as much as he would have liked. But she understood and never took her frustrations out on him. She was a woman of quiet strength, or so he thought.
Then one day, Andrew got a call from his mother. He was busy writing his thesis, the culmination of years of hard work, and couldn’t take the call. It pained him to do it, but he rejected the call and continued with his work, promising himself he’d call back as soon as he finished the chapter. Andrew knew that he could make it up to his mother if he called her the next morning; she would understand that he was busy.
But he had no idea that it was his last chance to talk to her. He continued with his work throughout the night and forgot about the phone call. When he finished his work, exhausted but satisfied, he went straight to bed. But things would take a dark turn in the morning. Andrew woke up and prepared for his morning routine, but before he could get much done, he saw his phone start ringing.
It wasn’t a number he recognized, but he answered it just in case. When he answered it, a person in an authoritative tone answered. He was about to have the worst news imaginable, and it all had to do with his mother. Andrew Fitzgerald nearly collapsed when he got the phone call. He never considered something like this would happen to him.
The person on the other side of the receiver was a police officer. They told him that his mother, Judith, hadn’t been spotted for days. A jogger had found the door to her home opened and called the police, but they couldn’t find her anywhere. Andrew felt pangs of regret as he thought about the last time he had seen her. He’d moved out close to five years ago and called her regularly, but he wished he had visited more often. His life was so busy that he just never had the time to see her.
But now, it sounded like he might not ever see her again. He didn’t know what to do. The first step was talking with the police. Andrew went down to the station to talk to the police about his mother’s disappearance. They needed him to give out a statement, even if he knew little about what had happened recently in her day-to-day life.
He told them a bit about her, her habits, her health, but other than that, there wasn’t much he could do to help them. They assured him that they would do everything that they could to find her, but he knew what that meant. The police sent out a search party and looked around the town for the elderly lady, but Andrew knew the grim statistics. If they didn’t find her in the first 48 hours, then their chances of finding her would go down drastically.
All Andrew could do for now was hope that her fate was in more than capable hands. But the search wouldn’t turn up anything. A few days passed, and the reality of what was really happening set in. Andrew’s mind started to darken as he imagined never seeing the woman who had raised him again. She was the only family he had. Without her, he wouldn’t know what to do; he’d feel truly alone without his mother’s guidance.
That’s why he decided that he needed to do something about it. He returned to that living room, staring at the photo with those trembling hands, feeling that familiar rip in his chest. He couldn’t believe how cruel fate had been. He decided to do his own investigating. He drove back to her home and opened the front door. He walked inside and walked through her house. It was just as she had left it.
That was when he found the mail. That was when he found the note. That was when he realized the neighbor was involved. He walked up the stairs to the second story, looking out over the neighbor’s backyard. He heard the metal hitting the soil. He saw the neighbor digging.
He rushed over to the fence and looked over it.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he shouted to the neighbor digging the hole.
The man jumped back, surprised that someone had seen him doing shady things. That’s when the real confrontation started. Andrew was ready to resort to violence, his grief turning into a sharp, dangerous edge. But the neighbor was about to explain the truth to him.
“You’re Judith’s son? Well, she caused me a lot of trouble, enough that I even had to do this!” the neighbor shouted as he looked at the hole.
What had he done? Andrew hopped over the fence and started walking towards him, his fists clenched. That’s when the neighbor recoiled, seeing the fire in the younger man’s eyes.
“What did you do to my mother?” Andrew shouted as he walked up to the neighbor.
But it was all a misunderstanding. The neighbor, seeing Andrew’s genuine distress, started explaining everything.
“She wouldn’t let me create a bore hole on my property. She even got the local homeowners association to stop me! But now that she’s out of town, I can do it behind her back.”
Andrew stopped in his tracks, the anger vanishing as quickly as it had arrived, replaced by utter confusion.
“What do you mean ‘out of town’?” he said with a glance.
The neighbor then explained that Judith had taken a bus out of town to visit her husband’s grave for their anniversary, a trip she took every year but had apparently forgotten to mention this time in her excitement or perhaps she had tried to tell him in that missed call.
Why hadn’t she told him? Either way, he was relieved to hear that she was okay, even if he couldn’t reach her immediately. The “threat” in the note had been about a legal dispute over water rights, not a threat to her life. Andrew sat on the grass of the neighbor’s yard, the adrenaline leaving him, feeling the first true breath of air in eleven days.
