The Couple Next Door

Detective Rasbach observes Anne carefully. She is clearly agitated, wringing her hands. Her pupils look dilated, her face pale. He is unsure whether to proceed. She has waived her right to counsel, on videotape, but he is not confident of her mental state, whether she is capable of properly making that decision. Still, he wants to hear what she has to say. They can always disallow the confession anyway—they probably will—but he has to hear it. He wants to know.

  “I killed her,” Anne says. She is distressed, but she seems rational, not out of her mind. She knows who she is, where she is, and what she’s doing.

  “Tell me what happened, Anne,” he says, sitting across from her at the table.

  “I went over to check on her at eleven,” Anne says. “I tried to feed her with the bottle, because I’d been drinking. But she was very fussy, she wanted the breast. She wouldn’t take the bottle.” She stops talking, stares at the wall over Rasbach’s shoulder, as if seeing it all again as a film played on a screen behind him.

  “Go on,” the detective says.

  “So I thought fuck it, and I put her on my breast. I felt bad about it, but she wouldn’t take the bottle and she was hungry. She was crying and crying and wouldn’t stop. She’s never had trouble taking the bottle before—she’s never refused it. How was I to know she would refuse the bottle the one night I have a few glasses of wine?”

  Rasbach waits for her to continue. He doesn’t want to speak and interrupt the flow of her thoughts. She seems to be almost in a kind of trance, still staring at the wall behind him.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. So I nursed her.” She drags her eyes from the wall and looks at him. “I lied before, when I said that I remembered changing her out of the pink onesie. I don’t remember. I just told you that because I assumed that’s what I did, but I don’t actually remember any of it.”

  “What do you remember?” Rasbach says.

  “I remember nursing her, and she suckled for a bit, but she didn’t have a good feed, and then she started fussing again.” Anne’s eyes slide to that imaginary screen again. “I held her and walked around with her a bit, singing to her, but she just cried louder. I was crying, too.” She looks at him. “I slapped her.” Now Anne bursts into tears. “After that I don’t remember. She was wearing the pink onesie when I slapped her, I remember that, but I don’t remember anything after that. I must have changed her and changed her outfit. Maybe I dropped her or shook her, I don’t know. Maybe I held a pillow over her face, to stop her from crying, like you said, but she must have died somehow.” She begins sobbing hysterically. “And when I went over at midnight, she was in her crib, but I didn’t pick her up. I don’t know if she was breathing then.”

  Rasbach lets her cry. Finally he says, “Anne, if you don’t remember, why do you think you killed Cora?”

  “Because she’s gone! Because I don’t remember. Sometimes, when I’m under stress, my mind splits off, disconnects from reality. Then I realize that I’m missing some time, that I’ve done something I don’t remember. It’s happened before.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You know all about it. You spoke to Janice Foegle.”

  “I want to hear your version. Tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t want to.” She takes several tissues from the box and wipes her eyes.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  Rasbach leans back in his chair and says, “Anne, I don’t think you killed Cora.”

  “Yes you do. You said so before.” She is twisting the tissues in her hands.

  “I don’t think so anymore. If I put this idea in your head, I’m truly sorry.”

  “I must have killed her. And Marco had someone take her away to protect me. So I wouldn’t know what I’d done.”

  “Then where is she now?”

  “I don’t know! Marco won’t tell me! I’ve begged him, but he won’t tell me. He denies it. He doesn’t want me to know that I killed my own baby. He’s protecting me. It must be so hard for him. I thought if I came and told you what happened, he wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, and he could tell us where he put her, and I would know, and it would all be over.” She slumps in her chair, her head down.

  It’s true that in the beginning Rasbach suspected that something like this might have happened. That the mother might have snapped, killed the baby, and she and the husband covered it up. It could have happened. But not the way she tells it. Because if she’d killed the baby at eleven o’clock, or even at midnight, and Marco wasn’t aware of it until twelve thirty, how could Derek Honig already have been waiting with a car in the lane to take the body away? No, she didn’t kill the baby. It just didn’t add up.

  “Anne, are you sure that it was at eleven o’clock when you fed her and she was crying? Could it have been earlier? At ten, for instance?” If that were the case, Marco might have known earlier—when he checked her at ten thirty.

  “No, it was eleven. I always do her final feeding at eleven, and then she usually sleeps through till about five in the morning. That was the only time I was away from the party for more than five minutes. You can ask the others.”

  “Yes, Marco and Cynthia agree that you were gone a long time around eleven—that you didn’t get back until eleven thirty or thereabouts—and you checked on her again at midnight,” Rasbach says. “Did you tell Marco you thought you might have hurt her, when you got back to the party?”

  “No, I . . . I just realized last night that I must have done it!”

  “But you see, Anne, that it’s impossible, what you describe,” Rasbach tells her gently. “How could Marco have gone over at twelve thirty not knowing the baby was dead and have someone in a car in the garage waiting to take her a couple of minutes later?”

  Anne goes completely still. Her hands stop moving. She looks confused.

  There’s something else he needs to tell her. “It looks like the man who was murdered at the cabin—Derek Honig—is the one whose car was in your garage and who took Cora away. The tire treads are the right type, and we’ll know soon if they’re a match with the tracks left in your garage. We think Cora was taken to his cabin in the Catskills. Sometime later Honig was beaten to death with a spade.”

  Anne looks as if she’s unable to take in this information.

  Rasbach is worried about her. “Can I call someone to drive you home? Where’s Marco?”

  “He’s at work.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Can I call your mother? A friend?”

  “No! I’m fine. I’ll get home on my own. Really, I’m fine,” Anne says. She stands up abruptly. “Please don’t tell anyone I was here today,” she says.

  “At least let me get you a cab,” he insists.

  Just before the cab arrives, she turns to him abruptly and says, “But . . . there would have been time, between twelve thirty and when we got home. If I’d killed her and he found her at twelve thirty and called someone. We didn’t get home till almost one thirty—he didn’t want to leave. You don’t know for sure that the car going down the lane at twelve thirty-five was the one that had Cora in it. It could have been later.”

  Rasbach says, “But Marco couldn’t have called anyone without our knowing about it. We have all your phone records. He didn’t call anyone. If Marco had anyone take the baby away, it had to have been prearranged—planned. Which means you didn’t kill her.”

  Anne gives him a startled look, seems as if she’s about to speak, but then the cab arrives and she says nothing.

  Rasbach watches her go, pitying her from the bottom of his heart.

  • • •

  Anne returns to an empty house. She lies down on the sofa in the living room, utterly exhausted, and reviews what happened at the police station.

  Rasbach had almost had her convinced that she couldn’t
have killed Cora. But he didn’t know about the cell phone hidden in the wall. Marco could have called someone, at twelve thirty. She doesn’t know now why she didn’t say anything about the cell phone. Maybe she didn’t want Rasbach to know about Marco’s affair. She was too ashamed.

  Either that or that man with the cabin took her away, alive, sometime after Marco checked on her at twelve thirty. She doesn’t know why Detective Rasbach is so convinced that the car going down the lane at twelve thirty-five had anything to do with it.

  She remembers how she used to lie here with Cora on her chest. It seems very long ago now. She would get so tired she’d need to lie down for a minute with the baby. They would snuggle together on the sofa, in the quiet part of the day, like now, and sometimes they would fall asleep together. Tears slide down her cheeks.

  She hears sounds coming from the other side of the wall. Cynthia is home, moving around in her living room, playing music. Anne despises Cynthia. She hates everything about her—her childlessness, her air of superiority and power, her figure, her seductive clothing. She hates her for toying with her husband, for trying to destroy their life together. She doesn’t know if she can ever forgive Cynthia for what she’s done. She hates Cynthia all the more because they used to be such good friends.

  Anne hates it that Cynthia lives on the other side of the wall. She suddenly realizes that they can move. They can put the house up for sale. She and Marco are infamous here anyway—the mail still piles up each day—and the house that she loved so much is now like a crypt. She feels buried alive.

  They can’t live here much longer, with Cynthia on the other side of the wall, within beckoning distance of Marco.

  What was Marco doing coming out of Cynthia’s backyard yesterday anyway, looking so guilty? He vehemently denies having an affair with her, but Anne isn’t stupid. She can’t get the truth out of him, and she’s tired of all the lies.

  She will confront Cynthia herself. Get the truth out of her. But with Cynthia, too, how could she know what was the truth and what was a lie?

  Instead she gets up and goes out the back door to the yard. She goes into the garage to get her gardening gloves. In the garage she stops and lets her eyes adjust to the light. She can smell the familiar garage smell of oil, old wood, and musty rags. She stands there and imagines what must have happened. She is so confused, by everything. If she didn’t kill Cora and Marco didn’t have someone take her away, then somebody, probably the man who’s now dead, stole her baby from her crib and put her in his car sometime after twelve thirty while she—and Marco and Cynthia and Graham—were oblivious next door.

  She’s glad he’s dead. She hopes he suffered.

  She goes outside again and starts viciously wrenching weeds out of the lawn until her hands are blistered and her back aches.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Marco sits at his desk, staring out the window, seeing nothing. The door is closed. He glances down at the surface of the expensive mahogany desk, the one he chose with such care when he expanded his business and took the lease on this office.

  When he looks back now on the innocence and optimism of those days, he feels sickened. He gazes with bitter eyes around his office, which so perfectly conveys the image of a successful entrepreneur. The impressive desk, the view of the city and the river out the window across from it, the high-end leather chairs—the modern art. Anne helped him decorate it; she has a good eye.

  He remembers the fun they had doing it—shopping for the pieces, arranging everything. When they were done, he’d locked the door, popped open a bottle of champagne, and made love to his giggling wife on the floor.

  There was pressure on him then; he had to live up to everyone’s greater expectations—Anne’s, her parents’, his own. Perhaps if he’d married someone else, he would have been content to work his way up, building his business more slowly with grit and talent and long hours. But he had the opportunity to make things happen faster, and he took it. He was ambitious. He had that money handed to him on a silver platter, and of course he was expected to make a success of it right away. How could he not succeed, as the recipient of such a magnificent handout? There was a lot of pressure. Richard especially took a greater interest in how the business was doing, since he’d bankrolled it.

  It had seemed too good to be true, and it was.

  He’d gone after the big clients before he was ready. He’d made the classic rookie mistake of growing too fast. If he hadn’t married Anne—no, if he hadn’t accepted the wedding gift of the house and, years later, the loan of her parents’ money—they might be renting an apartment somewhere, he’d have an ugly office farther away from downtown, he wouldn’t be driving an Audi—but he’d be working hard and building success on his own terms. He and Anne would be happy.

  Cora would be at home.

  But look at how it has all turned out. He is the owner of an overextended business teetering on the edge of ruin. He is a kidnapper. A criminal. A liar. Suspected by the police. In the power of an egomaniac father-in-law who knows what he’s done, and a coldhearted blackmailer who will never stop demanding money. The business is almost bankrupt, even though he’s been given so much—money for the business, connections through Richard’s friends at the country club.

  Alice and Richard’s investment in Marco’s business is lost. Like the five million dollars they’d paid for Cora. And now Richard is negotiating with the kidnappers—they’ll pay even more to get Cora back. Marco has no idea how much more.

  How Anne’s parents must hate him. For the first time, Marco thinks about it from their point of view. He can understand their disappointment. Marco has let them all down. In the end his business has failed, spectacularly, even with all that help. Marco still believes that if he’d done it his own way, he would have been very successful—gradually. But Richard pushed him to accept contracts he couldn’t deliver on. And then Marco became desperate.

  When things started to go wrong, really wrong, a couple of months ago, Marco had taken to having a drink at the bar on the corner before going home to Anne, where he would feel helpless in the face of her mounting depression. It was usually fairly quiet at five o’clock, when he arrived. He’d sit at the bar, having his one drink, brooding into the amber liquid, wondering what the hell to do.

  Then he’d leave and go for a walk down by the river, not wanting to head home yet. He’d sit down on a bench and stare out at the water.

  One day an older man came and sat down beside him. Annoyed, Marco was about to get up, feeling that his space had been invaded. But before he could leave, the man spoke to him, in a friendly way.

  “You look a bit down,” he said sympathetically.

  Marco was abrupt. “You could say that.”

  “Lose a girlfriend?” the man asked.

  “I wish it were that simple,” Marco had said.

  “Ah, must be business troubles, then,” the man said, and smiled. “They’re much worse.” He held out his hand. “Bruce Neeland,” he offered.

  Marco took his hand. “Marco Conti.”

  Marco began to look forward to running into Bruce. He found it a relief to have someone—someone who didn’t really know him, who wouldn’t judge him—to tell his troubles to. He couldn’t tell Anne what was really going on, with her depression and her expectation of success. He hadn’t told her that things were going south, and once he’d started not telling her things were going badly, he couldn’t suddenly tell her just how badly things were going.

  Bruce seemed to understand. He was easy to like, with a warm, open manner. He was a broker. He’d had good years, bad years. You had to be tough, ride out the bad times. “It’s not always easy,” Bruce said, sitting beside him in his expensive, well-cut suit.

  “That’s for sure,” Marco agreed.

  One day Marco had a little too much to drink at the bar. Later, down by the river, he told Bruce more than he meant to. It just s
lipped out, the problem with his in-laws. Bruce was a good listener.

  “I owe them a lot of money,” Marco confessed.

  “They’re your in-laws. They’re not going to feed you to the fishes if you can’t pay,” Bruce said, looking out at the river.

  “Maybe that would be better,” Marco said sourly. Marco explained the hold his wife’s parents had over him—the business, the house, even trying to turn his wife against him.

  “I’d say they’ve got you by the short and curlies,” Bruce said, pursing his lips.

  “Yup.” Marco took off his jacket, slung it over the back of the bench. It was summer, and the evenings were warm.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could ask them for another loan, tide you over till business improves,” Bruce suggested. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Bruce looked him in the eye. “Why not? Don’t be an ass. Just ask. Get yourself out of the hole. Live to fight another day. They’ll want to protect their investment anyway. At least give them the option.”

  Marco considered. As much as he hated the idea, it made sense to come clean to Richard, to tell him the business was in trouble. He could ask him to keep it between them, not to bother Anne and Alice with it. After all, businesses failed every day. It was the economy. Things were much tougher now than when Richard started out. Of course, Richard would never see it that way. At least he would never admit it.

  “Ask your father-in-law,” Bruce advised. “Don’t go to the bank.”

  Marco didn’t tell Bruce, but he’d already been to the bank. He’d put a mortgage on the house a few months earlier. He’d told Anne it was to help the business expand further in a high-growth time, and she hadn’t questioned it. He’d made her promise not to tell her parents. He said they had their noses in too much of Marco and Anne’s business already.

  “Maybe,” Marco said.

  He thought about it for two days. He slept poorly. Finally he decided to approach his father-in-law. It was always Richard he dealt with when it came to financial matters involving Anne’s parents. Richard liked it that way. Marco screwed up his courage and called Richard and asked if they could meet for a drink. Richard seemed surprised, but he suggested the bar at the country club. Of course. He always had to be on his own fucking turf.