The Couple Next Door

“So don’t lie to me and tell me you haven’t seen him! And I know about the cell phone.”

“What cell phone?” One of Cynthia’s perfectly shaped eyebrows has gone up.

“Never mind,” Anne says, wishing she could take this last bit back. She remembers that the cell phone might have been for someone else. It’s so confusing, everything that’s been happening. She can hardly keep things straight anymore. She feels as if her mind is breaking down. She was always sensitive before, but now—now her baby is gone, her husband is cheating on her, lying to her—who wouldn’t lose her mind in this situation? No one could blame her. No one could blame her if she did something crazy.

Now Cynthia’s expression changes. The false concern vanishes, and she regards Anne coldly. “You want to know what’s going on, Anne? Are you sure you really want to know?”

Anne looks back at her, confused by her change of tone. Anne can imagine Cynthia as a schoolyard bully—the tall, beautiful girl who taunted short, plump, underconfident girls like her.

“Yes, I want to know.”

“Are you sure? Because once I tell you, I’m not going to be able to take it back.” Cynthia puts her cup down on the table.

“I’m stronger than you think,” Anne says. There’s an edge to her voice. She puts her cup down, too, leans forward over the table, and says, “I’ve lost my baby. What could possibly hurt me now?”

Cynthia smiles, but it’s a cold, calculating smile. She sits back in her chair and looks at Anne as if she is trying to make a decision. “I don’t think you have any idea what’s really going on,” she says.

“Then why don’t you tell me?” Anne snaps.

Cynthia stands up, pushes back her chair with a scrape on the kitchen floor. “All right. Stay here. I’ll only be gone for a minute.”

Cynthia leaves the kitchen and goes upstairs. Anne wonders what Cynthia can possibly have to show her. She considers making a run for it. How much reality can she stand? Maybe there are pictures. Pictures of her and Marco together. Cynthia is a photographer. And Cynthia is the kind of woman to have pictures taken of herself, because she is so gorgeous and so vain. Maybe she’s going to show Anne pictures of herself in bed with Marco. And the expression on Marco’s face will be entirely different from the expression on his face when he’s making love to Anne. She stands up. She’s about to let herself out the sliding glass door when Cynthia appears in the kitchen holding a laptop.

“Losing your nerve?” she asks.

“No, I just wanted some air,” Anne lies, sliding the door closed again, and turning back to the table.

Cynthia puts the laptop on the table and opens it up. They sit down and wait a couple of minutes until it boots up.

Cynthia says to her, “I’m really sorry about this, Anne, I really am.”

Anne glares at her, not believing her for a second, then turns her reluctant attention to the screen. It isn’t what she expected. It’s a black-and-white video of Cynthia’s backyard and, beyond that, Anne’s own backyard. She notes the date-and-time stamp on the bottom. She goes utterly cold.

“Wait for it,” Cynthia says.

She’s going to see that dead man taking her child. Cynthia is that cruel. And Cynthia has had a video of it the whole time. “Why didn’t you show this to the police?” Anne demands, her eyes locked on the video, waiting.

In disbelief, Anne sees Marco appear at their back door at 12:31 and twist the lightbulb on the motion detector; the light goes out. Anne feels all the blood leaving her extremities. She sees Marco go into the house. Two minutes pass. Then the back door opens. Marco is coming out of the house with Cora in his arms, wrapped in her white blanket. He glances around as if to see whether he’s being observed, looks right into the camera, and then he walks quickly to the garage and lets himself in through the door. Anne’s heart is banging wildly against her ribs. A minute later she sees Marco come out of the garage without the baby. It is 12:34. He walks across the lawn toward the house, where his image disappears from view briefly and then reappears on the Stillwells’ back patio.

“So you see, Anne,” Cynthia says into the shocked silence, “it’s not about Marco and me having an affair. Marco kidnapped your baby.”

Anne is stunned, horrified, and cannot answer.

Cynthia says, “You might want to ask him where she is.”

THIRTY-ONE

Cynthia settles comfortably in her chair and says, “I could take this to the police, or maybe you’d prefer that I don’t. You’re from money, aren’t you?”

Anne bolts. She pulls open the sliding door and flees, leaving Cynthia sitting alone at the table with the laptop. The image of Marco carrying Cora to their garage at 12:33 in the morning has been seared into Anne’s retinas and deep into her brain. She will never get that image out of her head. Marco took their baby. He’s been lying to her, all this time.

She doesn’t know who she married.

She runs to her own house and in through the back door. She can hardly breathe. She sinks to the floor in the kitchen, leaning against the bottom cupboards, sobbing and shaking. She cries and gasps for breath and sees the same images in her head over and over again.

This changes everything. Marco took their baby. But why? Why did he do it? It can’t be that Cora was already dead and he did it to protect her. Detective Rasbach has already explained to her how that simply wasn’t possible. If she’d killed Cora and Marco had discovered it at twelve thirty, he could not have had an accomplice there by 12:35. And she now knows that he took Cora out of the house at exactly 12:33. He must have arranged for someone, for the dead man, to be waiting in his car in the garage at twelve thirty, when Marco knew he would be checking on Cora. So he planned this. He planned it. With this man who is now dead. The man she thinks she’s seen before. Where has she seen him?

Marco was behind the whole thing all along, and she knew nothing about it.

Marco abducted their baby, with this other man, who is now dead. Where is her baby now? Who took her from the man in the cabin? What the hell happened? How could he?

Anne sits on the kitchen floor hugging her knees, trying to figure it out. She thinks about going back to the police station and telling Detective Rasbach what she’s seen. He could get the video from Cynthia. She can guess why Cynthia hadn’t taken it to the police in the first place—she must be holding it over Marco. She wants to have him in her power. That’s the kind of woman Cynthia is.

Why would Marco kidnap Cora? If he didn’t do it to protect Anne, he did it for his own selfish reasons. The only possible reason is money. He wanted the ransom money. Her parents’ money. It is an appalling realization. She knows now that the business isn’t doing well. She remembers that Marco had her sign mortgage papers on the house a few months ago—to get liquid capital for further expansion plans. She thought the business was growing faster than expected, that everything was fine. But maybe he’d been lying then, too. It’s all fitting together. The business going belly-up, mortgaging the house, and finally, arranging the kidnapping—of his own child—from her parents.

Why didn’t Marco just tell her about his business troubles? They could have gone to her parents, asked for more money. Why did he do such a stupid thing? Why would he take their precious baby and hand her over to that man who was beaten to death with a shovel?

Did Marco go up to that cabin after the ransom money was taken, confront the man, and kill him in a rage? Was Marco a murderer, too? Would he have had time to get all the way out to the cabin and back without her noticing? She tries to remember what day it is, tries to review every single day that’s passed since the kidnapping, but it’s all a hopeless jumble in her head.

Was the cell phone part of this? She realizes that she has been wrong from the start. This is not about affairs, with Cynthia or anyone else. This is about the kidnapping. Marco kidnapped their daughter.