The Couple Next Door

“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.