The Couple Next Door

“Why would she lie?” Rasbach asks simply.

Why would she lie? Marco is asking himself the same question. Why would Cynthia screw him over like this? Was she pissed that he told her no? “Maybe she’s mad because I turned her down.”

The detective purses his lips as he looks at Marco.

Desperately, Marco says, “She’s lying.”

“Well, one of you is lying,” Rasbach says.

“Why would I lie about something like that?” Marco says stupidly. “You can’t arrest me for kissing another woman.”

“No,” the detective says. He waits a moment or two and says, “Tell me the truth, Marco. Are you and Cynthia having an affair?”

“No! Absolutely not. I love my wife. I wouldn’t do that, I swear.” Marco glares at the detective. “Is that what Cynthia says? Did she tell you we’re having an affair? That’s absolute bullshit.”

“No, she didn’t say that.”

? ? ?

Anne, sitting in the dark at the top of the stairs, hears it all. She goes cold all over. She now knows that last night, when their baby was being taken, her husband was kissing and fondling Cynthia next door. She doesn’t know who started it—from what she’d observed the night before, it could have been either one of them. They were both guilty. She feels sick to her stomach, betrayed.

“Are we done here?” Marco says.

“Yeah, sure,” the detective answers.

Anne scrambles quickly to her feet at the top of the stairs and, barefoot, pads quickly back to their bedroom. She’s shaking. She climbs into the bed under the duvet and pretends to sleep but fears that her ragged breathing will give her away.

Marco comes into the bedroom, his footsteps heavy. He sits down on the edge of the bed, facing away from her, looks at the wall. She opens her eyes slightly and stares at his back. She pictures him making out with Cynthia on the patio chair while she was bored out of her mind with Graham in the dining room. And while he had his hand in Cynthia’s panties and Anne was pretending to listen to Graham, someone was taking Cora.

She will never be able to trust him again. Never. She turns over and pulls the covers higher, while silent tears roll down her face and pool around her neck.

? ? ?

Cynthia and Graham are in their bedroom next door, having a heated argument. Even so, they are careful to keep their voices quiet. They don’t want to be overheard. There is a laptop open on their queen-size bed.

“No,” Graham says. “We should just go to the police.”

“And say what?” Cynthia asks. “A little late for that, don’t you think? They were already over here, questioning me, while you were out.”

“It’s not that late,” Graham counters. “We tell them we had a camera on the backyard. We don’t have to say any more than that. They don’t have to know why we put it up there.”

“Right. And how do we explain, exactly, why we haven’t mentioned it up till this point?”

“We can say we forgot about it.” Graham is leaning up against the headboard, looking worried.

Cynthia laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Really. The police were swarming all over the place because a baby has been kidnapped, and we forgot that we have a pinhole camera trained on our backyard.” She gets up and starts taking off her earrings. “They’re never going to believe that.”

“Why not? We can say that we never check it, or that we thought it was broken, or that the battery was dead. We can say we thought it didn’t work and it was just for show.”

“Just for show—to scare thieves away. When it’s so well hidden that the police didn’t even see it.” She drops an earring into a mirrored jewelry box on her dressing table. She shoots him an annoyed look and mutters, “You and your fucking cameras.”

“You enjoy watching the films, too,” Graham says.

Cynthia doesn’t correct him. Yes, she enjoys watching the films, too. She enjoys watching herself having sex with other men. She likes the way it turns her husband on to see her with them. But what she enjoys even more is that it gives her permission to flirt with and have sex with other men. Men more attractive and more exciting than her husband, who has proved to be a bit of a disappointment lately. But she didn’t get very far with Marco. Graham had hoped she would be able to give Marco a proper blow job, or that he would lift up her skirt and fuck her from behind. Cynthia knew exactly how the camera was positioned to get the best angle.

Graham’s job was to keep the wife occupied. That was always his job. It was tedious for him, but it was worth it.

Except now they have a problem.

TWELVE

It is Sunday afternoon. There have been no new leads. No one has called claiming to have Cora. The case appears to be at an impasse, but Cora is still out there somewhere. Where is she?

Anne walks over to the living-room window. The curtains are drawn shut for privacy, filtering the room’s light. She stands to the side and holds the curtain open a little to peek out. There are a lot of reporters on the sidewalk, spilling over onto the street.

She is living in a fishbowl, everyone tapping on the glass.

Already there are indications that the Contis aren’t turning out to be the media darlings the press had hoped for. Anne and Marco haven’t welcomed the media; they clearly see the reporters as an intrusion, a necessary evil. They are not particularly photogenic either, even though Marco is handsome and Anne was pretty enough, before. But it’s not enough to be handsome—one should preferably have charisma, or at least warmth. There is nothing charismatic about Marco now. He looks like a shattered ghost. They both look guilty, beaten down by shame. Marco has been cold in his interactions with the media; Anne has said nothing at all. They have not been warm to the press, and so the press has not warmed to them. This is, Anne realizes, probably a tactical mistake, one they may live to regret.

The problem is that they had not been home. It has come out that they were next door when Cora was taken from her crib. Anne was horrified when she saw that morning’s headlines: COUPLE NOT HOME WHEN BABY TAKEN, STOLEN BABY WAS LEFT ALONE. If they’d been sound asleep in their own house while their child was kidnapped from her room, there would have been a much greater outpouring of sympathy, from the press and from the public. The fact that they were attending a party next door has scalded them. And of course the postpartum depression has also been made public. Anne doesn’t know how these things happen. She certainly didn’t tell the press. She suspects Cynthia might have been the source of the leak about their leaving the baby alone in the house, but she doesn’t know how the media found out about her depression. Surely the police would not have leaked her private medical information. She has even asked them, and they say it didn’t come from them. But Anne doesn’t trust the police. Whoever is responsible for the leaks, they have only damaged Anne further in the eyes of everyone—the public, the press, her parents, her friends, everyone. She has been publicly shamed.

Anne turns to look at the steadily increasing pile of toys and other colorful debris collecting on the sidewalk at the bottom of their front steps. There are bouquets of wilted flowers, stuffed animals of all colors and sizes—she can see teddy bears, even an outsize giraffe—with notes and cards stuck on them. A mountain of cliché. Such an outpouring of sympathy. And of hate.