Sounds like a vacation. She put the trash bin by the road early so the trash guys could get it while she was gone. To me that indicates that she was thinking ahead and not planning to be there on trash day. She left the porch light on so if someone came snooping the neighbors might see them.
In our neighborhood, not only do we get the mail, we usually pay any bills so their utilities won’t get cutoff.
I think Fred next door did my taxes one year when I was on vaca (thanks Fred, but I’m still pissed you missed my charitable donations).
I’ve even gone so far as to go to my neighbors doctor appointment that they couldn’t get back in time for.
You went to their doctor’s appointment? I hope you guys had the same ailment!
I heard he got 2 fillings and a crown that he will have to give his neighbor when he returns!
Did you take his medicine for him, too? 
Back in the day, I used to look in on my neighbor’s wife while he was on business trips. Just one of those neighborly things you do without being asked and without even mentioning it after.
This is what I was thinking. If something was wrong the people she actually knows and associates with would be checking up on her.
Now I’m going to spend all weekend worrying about this woman, and the lost kitten from the other thread!
I know that Dopers aren’t representative of any particular society, but I find the amount of indifference to your neighbours or even active shunning of contact to be disturbing. In our street we have a neighbourhood support group. If someone is going to be away for more than 2-3 days, they’ll let their neighbours know so we can keep an eye out for things, and possibly collect mail and clean out the piles of junk mail* that build up in the mailbox.
OP, have you even been to her front door and knocked?
*pamphlets and flyers from supermarkets and other retailers. And it’s not really mail as it is delivered by youngsters or oldsters for about 0.5c per item.
I do that whether they’re on business trips or not. They never seem to realize I’m only doing it because I care. All that screaming and calling the police is really hampering my ability to keep them safe
Wifesitting is just part of being a good neighbor.
Are you sure you weren’t a little more than neighbors about 9 months later lol.
I don’t think that has anything to do with being a Doper, but rather what type of neighborhood you live in. Where I grew up, I didn’t know a single one of my neighbors, one of them could have been gone for months and no one would any wiser. My house was on the main commercial avenue through the town, perhaps if we were back in the development it may have been different.
You fools! Can’t you see what the OP did? He killed her, chopped her up, stuffed in the freezer and then came here to post that to use it as an alibi when the cops finally find her in a few months.
Have you learned nothing from TV?
Umm… One of these things is not like the others???
Or did you have a different TV show in mind?
Thank you to the majority of you who have provided relevant, helpful advice. Not really much of an update here - the porch light is still on, and the trash bin is still sitting outside the garage door.
Unfortunately, all the garage doors around here have no windows, so I’m unable to “peek in” and see if her car is there (which would probably solve this once and for all).
I did open and close her mailbox, and it doesn’t look like it’s been emptied in about a week.
I tried knocking on the door this evening after work, and to no surprise I didn’t get an answer.
Since the time frame has technically been less than a week - she (or someone she knows) rolled the trash-bin out on Thursday night for Friday pick-up - I’ll let it go another couple of days.
Maybe try one more knock on the door tomorrow, and if that fails (which I’m not optimistic), maybe then start considering the “non-emergency welfare-check” option.
Though I thought it was a great point that “someone she works with is probably already ‘on the case’ if she’s just up and missing”.
And finally, to appease the “omfg, someone still subscribes to the newspaper?” contingent, this is exactly the situation:
It’s a small-town community newspaper, that they just seem hell-bent on throwing in everyone’s driveway, no matter how many times you call and ask them to stop.
Sue Charlton: “People go to a psychiatrist to talk about their problems. She just needed to unload them. You know, bring them out in the open.”
Crocodile Dundee: “Hasn’t she got any mates?”
Sue Charlton: “You’re right. I guess we could all use more mates. I suppose you don’t have any shrinks at Walkabout Creek.”
Crocodile Dundee: “No, back there if you got a problem you tell Wally. And he tells everyone in town, brings it out in the open, no more problem.”
If she got her hand caught somehow, it only takes 127 hours to get free, so I doubt it’s that.
One of the concerns that some people seem to have regarding “reporting” someone out of concern is that local officials in some areas supposedly get carried away sometimes and try to impose unneeded “services”. There are horror stories floating out there about how one person thought it would be reasonable and helpful to report that the kid next door seems to get bruised more often than they think is normal, and local government goes gung-ho with police and Child Protective Services and the dogs and the bees and the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you and the kid’s parents go through a living hell being accused of child abuse and spend thousands trying to clear their names and get the kid out of foster care and the kid’s doctor is swearing up and down that the kid gets bruised so often because they have hyperhydronic neotriangular ketanosis of the lower arteries, not because of abuse, and that kids with this condition do bruise more easily but the bruises don’t need to be treated and the kid can live normally unless <some complication that the kid didn’t have>, but the crusading local social worker is paid based on the number of kids they refer to foster care and they got their position based on their “tough on abusers” stand and hell if they’re going to let their guard down this time.
I’ve been “advised” by a friend of mine who is a local government official who seems to follow local politics and programs a lot that I should be more scrupulous to promptly throw away packaging after opening something I’ve just bought - if I microwave an instant lunch and eat it while unpacking my new microwave and then get called in to work on short notice and leave the used plastic bowl and the appliance’s foam padding on the table, then the “Hoarding Task Force” will pound on me so fast with referrals for counseling and I will end up spending the weekend with a social worker going through my closet saying, “These two things don’t fit or suit me I know, but they are grandma’s old high school dresses and I want my daughter to get them when she’s big enough, and that not 1980’s e-waste, it’s a genuine IBM Model M keyboard and these sell for up to $100 on ebay, not trash, no I don’t want to see a counselor already.”
Saint! That’s what you are!