The Couple Next Door

Marco, his voice breaking, has given the police a quick description of the baby—six months old, blond, blue eyes, about sixteen pounds, wearing a disposable diaper and a plain, pale pink onesie. A light summer baby blanket, solid white, is also missing from the crib.

The house is swarming with uniformed police officers. They fan out and methodically begin to search the house. Some of them wear latex gloves and carry evidence kits. Anne and Marco’s fast, frantic race through the house in the short minutes before the police arrived had turned up nothing. The forensic team is moving slowly. Clearly they are not looking for Cora; they are looking for evidence. The baby is already gone.

Marco sits down on the sofa next to Anne and puts his arm around her, holds her close. She wants to pull away, but she doesn’t. She lets his arm stay there. How would it look if she pulled away? She can smell that he’s been drinking.

Anne now blames herself. It’s her fault. She wants to blame Marco, but she agreed to leave the baby alone. She should have stayed home. No—she should have brought Cora with them next door, to hell with Cynthia. She doubts Cynthia would have actually thrown them out and had no party for Graham at all. This realization comes too late.

They will be judged, by the police and by everybody else. Serves them right, leaving their baby alone. She would think that, too, if it had happened to someone else. She knows how judgmental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else. She thinks of her own mothers’ group, meeting with their babies once a week in one another’s homes for coffee and gossip, what they will say about her.

Someone else has arrived—a composed man in a well-cut dark suit. The uniformed officers treat him with deference. Anne looks up, meets his piercing blue eyes, and wonders who he is.

He approaches and sits down in one of the armchairs across from Anne and Marco and introduces himself as Detective Rasbach. Then he leans forward. “Tell me what happened.”

Anne immediately forgets the detective’s name, or rather it hasn’t registered at all. She only catches “Detective.” She looks at him, encouraged by the frank intelligence behind his eyes. He will help them. He will help them get Cora back. She tries to think. But she can’t think. She is frantic and numb at the same time. She simply stares into the detective’s sharp eyes and lets Marco do the talking.

“We were next door,” Marco begins, clearly agitated. “At the neighbors’.” Then he stops.

“Yes?” the detective says.

Marco hesitates.

“Where was the baby?” the detective asks.

Marco doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to say.

Anne, pulling herself together, answers for him, the tears spilling down her face. “We left her here, in her crib, with the monitor on.” She watches the detective for his reaction—What awful parents—but he betrays nothing. “We had the monitor on over there, and we checked on her constantly. Every half hour.” She glances at Marco. “We never thought . . .” but she can’t finish. Her hand goes to her mouth, her fingers press against her lips.

“When was the last time you checked on her?” the detective asks, taking a small notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“I checked on her at midnight,” Anne says. “I remember the time. We were checking on her every half hour, and it was my turn. She was fine. She was sleeping.”

“I checked on her again at twelve thirty,” Marco says.

“You’re absolutely certain of the time?” the detective asks. Marco nods; he is staring at his feet. “And that was the last time anyone checked on her, before you came home?”

“Yes,” Marco says, looking up at the detective, running a nervous hand through his dark hair. “I went to check on her at twelve thirty. It was my turn. We were keeping to a schedule.”

Anne nods.

“How much have you had to drink tonight?” the detective asks Marco.

Marco flushes. “They were having a small dinner party, next door. I had a few,” he admits.

The detective turns to Anne. “Have you had anything to drink tonight, Mrs. Conti?”

Her face burns. Nursing mothers aren’t supposed to drink. She wants to lie. “I had some wine, with dinner. I don’t know how much exactly,” she says. “It was a dinner party.” She wonders how drunk she looks, what this detective must think of her. She feels like he can see right through her. She remembers the vomit upstairs in the baby’s room. Can he smell drink on her the way she can smell it on Marco? She remembers the shattered mirror in the upstairs bathroom, her bloodied hand, now wrapped in a clean dish towel. She’s ashamed of how they must look to him, drunken parents who abandoned their six-month-old daughter. She wonders if they will be charged with anything.

“How is that even relevant?” Marco says to the detective.

“It might affect the reliability of your observations,” the detective says evenly. He is not judgmental. He is merely after the facts, it seems. “What time did you leave the party?” he asks.

“It was almost one thirty,” Anne answers. “I kept checking the time on my cell. I wanted to go. I . . . I should have checked on her at one—it was my turn—but I thought we’d be leaving any minute, and I was trying to get Marco to hurry up.” She feels agonizingly guilty. If she had checked on her daughter at one o’clock, would she be gone now? But then there were so many ways this could have been prevented.

“You placed the call to 911 at one twenty-seven,” the detective says.

“The front door was open,” Anne says, remembering.

“The front door was open?” the detective repeats.

“It was open three or four inches. I’m sure I locked it behind me when I checked on her at midnight,” Anne says.

“How sure?”

Anne thinks about it. Was she sure? She had been positive, when she saw the open front door, that she’d locked it. But now, with what had happened, how can she be sure of anything? She turns to her husband. “Are you sure you didn’t leave the door open?”

“I’m sure,” he says curtly. “I never used the front door. I was going through the back to check on her, remember?”

“You used the back door,” the detective repeats.

“I may not have locked it every time,” Marco admits, and covers his face with his hands.

? ? ?

Detective Rasbach observes the couple closely. A baby is missing. Taken from her crib—if the parents, Marco and Anne Conti, are to be believed—between approximately 12:30 a.m. and 1:27 a.m., by a person or persons unknown, while the parents were at a party next door. The front door had been found partly open. The back door might have been left unlocked by the father—it had in fact been found closed but unlocked when the police arrived. There is no denying the distress of the mother. And of the father, who looks badly shaken. But the whole situation doesn’t feel right. Rasbach wonders what is really going on.

Detective Jennings waves him over silently. “Excuse me,” Detective Rasbach says, and leaves the stricken parents for a moment.

“What is it?” Rasbach asks quietly.

Jennings holds up a small vial of pills. “Found these in the bathroom cabinet,” he says.

Rasbach takes the clear plastic container from Jennings and studies the label: ANNE CONTI, SERTRALINE, 50 MG. Sertraline, Rasbach knows, is a powerful antidepressant.

“The bathroom mirror upstairs is smashed,” Jennings tells him.

Rasbach nods. He hasn’t been upstairs yet. “Anything else?”

Jennings shakes his head. “Nothing so far. House looks clean. Nothing else taken, apparently. We’ll know more from forensics in a few hours.”

“Okay,” Rasbach says, handing the vial of pills back to Jennings.

He returns to the couple on the sofa and resumes his questioning. He looks at the husband. “Marco—is it okay if I call you Marco?—what did you do after you checked on the baby at twelve thirty?”

“I went back to the party,” Marco says. “I had a cigarette in the neighbors’ backyard.”

“Were you alone when you had your cigarette?”