On an ordinary Saturday morning in 1997, Colby Martinez set out on her USPS delivery route in the Rio Grande Valley. She never came home.
At just 23 years old, Colby had been balancing her job at the postal service with her nursing degree, excited about her future. She was preparing to move in with her boyfriend Robbie Delgado and had just learned she was expecting a child.
But sometime that morning, she disappeared. There was no note, no trace, and no answers.
Her sister Irene, who also worked part-time with USPS, was left behind to pick up the pieces. The two sisters had shared everything — their parents’ modest house after a tragic accident, their bicycles, their dreams for a better future.
When Colby vanished, Irene’s life collapsed. She dropped out of school, took on a full-time mail route, and carried the weight of questions that no investigation ever answered.
For seven years, the case went cold. Flyers curled on telephone poles, detectives moved on, and the community whispered theories that only deepened the family’s pain.
Then one morning, everything changed.
City workers draining the North Canal for long-overdue maintenance spotted something blue lodged in the silt near a support pillar. When they pulled it free, the mud gave way to a USPS bicycle.
The call reached Irene through her supervisor. By the time she arrived, yellow tape surrounded the canal and Detective Ray Ooa — the same officer who had worked Colby’s case — was waiting.
The bike was battered, stripped by time and water, but unmistakable. Forensic teams couldn’t recover fingerprints or DNA, but to Irene, it was personal. It looked like her sister’s.
Robbie soon arrived at the scene, still in his autoshop coveralls. Seven years had changed him, but when his eyes fell on the bike, his face went pale. “Seven years underwater,” he whispered. “Jesus.”
The discovery sparked a review of Colby’s file, a search for old surveillance tapes, and the faint hope that maybe — finally — there would be answers.
But the canal wasn’t the only place secrets surfaced.
Later that day, Irene went to Robbie’s house to collect boxes of Colby’s belongings he had been holding onto. The living room was crowded with taped cartons labeled in her sister’s handwriting — nursing books, winter clothes, baby things.
The grief was suffocating, but so was the realization that Robbie had moved on. A new woman, Josephine, greeted her with a protective hand on her belly. She was pregnant.
The tension was heavy, but Irene stayed calm. Then came the box.
Josephine had brought her own belongings in a pickup truck. Irene, out of habit, offered to help carry them inside.
But when she reached for one particular box, Josephine reacted sharply, insisting she take another.
Robbie intervened, suggesting Irene could ship it through USPS to Josephine’s family in Colorado. Reluctantly, Josephine agreed.
Now, in Irene’s car sat two collections of boxes: her sister’s memories — and one package Josephine seemed desperate to keep hidden.
Before she could dwell on it, Detective Ooa called. The police had recovered archived surveillance footage from 1997. He wanted her at the station immediately.
As Irene drove, her mind spun. For seven years, there had been nothing but silence.
Suddenly, there was a bicycle, a secretive box, and a videotape waiting at the police station that might reveal her sister’s final moments.
The questions were overwhelming. Was Colby the victim of a crime, or did she disappear willingly?
Was the canal discovery a genuine lead, or a distraction from something far closer to home? And what, if anything, was hidden inside Josephine’s package?
What began as the resurfacing of a bicycle had reopened a mystery that was supposed to be buried. For Irene, the truth — whatever it was — had to come out.
Because seven years was too long to wait.
