The Couple Next Door

At last the doorbell rings. Everyone jumps. Richard gets up to answer the door, while the others remain sitting stone-faced in the living room.

Marco decides that he will confess everything. Then, after Cora’s safe return, he’ll tell the police about Richard’s role in all of this. They may not believe him, but surely they can investigate him. Maybe they can find a connection between Richard and Derek Honig. But Marco is pretty sure that Richard will have covered his tracks.

Richard ushers Detective Rasbach into the living room. The detective seems to take in the situation at a glance: he looks at Anne weeping in her mother’s arms at one end of the large sofa, Marco sitting at the other end. Marco knows how he must look to the detective—pale and sweating, he must look like an absolute wreck.

Richard offers the detective a chair and says, “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like it when we deal with the kidnappers and don’t tell you until after the fact, but we were afraid to do anything else.”

Rasbach looks grim. “You say they phoned you?”

“Yes, yesterday. I made arrangements to meet them with the additional money earlier this evening, but they didn’t show.”

Marco watches Richard. Wonders what the hell he’s doing. Phoned him? Either Richard is lying to the police or he’s lying to Marco and Anne. When is he going to tell the detective that Marco was the one who took Cora from the house?

Rasbach reaches into his jacket and takes out his notebook. He carefully writes down everything Richard tells him. Richard says nothing about Marco. He doesn’t even look at Marco. Is this all for Anne? Marco wonders. Is he showing her that he’s deliberately protecting Marco, even though they know what he did? What is Richard’s game here? Maybe Richard never had any intention of telling the police what Marco did—he just wanted to watch him twist in the wind. The absolute bastard.

Or is he waiting for Marco to throw himself on his sword? To see if he’s got the guts to do it? Is this a test, one he must pass in order to get Cora back?

“Is that everything?” Rasbach says finally, standing up, flipping his notebook closed.

“I think so,” Richard says. He plays the part of the concerned parent and grandparent perfectly. Smooth as glass. A practiced liar.

Richard sees the detective to the door while Marco slumps back in the sofa, exhausted and confused. If this was a test, he has just failed it.

Anne meets his eyes, for only a moment, then looks away.

Richard returns to the living room. “There, now do you believe me?” he says to Marco. “I destroyed the note to protect you. I just lied to the police. I told him the kidnappers called me—to protect you. I didn’t tell them about the note and the cell phone sent to me. Both of which incriminated you. I’m not the bad guy here, Marco. You are.”

Anne pulls away from her mother’s embrace and stares at Marco.

“Although I don’t know why I do it,” Richard adds. “I don’t know why you married this guy, Anne.”

Marco needs to get out of here, so he can think. He doesn’t know what Richard is up to. “Come on, Anne, let’s go home,” he says.

Anne has turned away again and doesn’t look at him.

“Anne?”

“I don’t think she’s going anywhere,” Richard says.

Marco’s heart sinks at the thought of going home without Anne. Evidently Richard doesn’t want him to go to jail. Perhaps Richard doesn’t want the public humiliation of having a convicted criminal for a son-in-law. Maybe the whole time all he wanted was for Anne to know what kind of man Marco was, to separate them. It looks as though he’s succeeded.

They all look at him, as if waiting for him to leave. Marco senses the hostility and reaches for his cell to call a cab. When his cab arrives, he is surprised when the three of them follow him outside, perhaps to make sure he leaves. They stand in the drive, watching him go.

Marco looks back at his wife, her father and mother on either side of her. He cannot read her expression.

Marco thinks, She will never come home to me again. I’m all alone.

? ? ?

Rasbach is uneasy on the drive back from the Drieses’ mansion. He has a lot of unanswered questions. The most important one being this: Where is the missing baby? He seems no closer to a solution.

He thinks about Marco. The haunted look on his face. Marco was exhausted, spent. Not that Rasbach feels any particular sympathy for him. But he knows there’s more to this than meets the eye. And he wants to find out what it is.

Rasbach has been suspicious of Richard Dries almost from the start. To his mind—perhaps it’s a prejudice, stemming from Rasbach’s own working-class background—nobody makes that much money without taking advantage of somebody. It’s much easier to make money if you don’t care who you hurt. If you have scruples, it’s much harder to get rich.

As far as Rasbach’s concerned, Marco doesn’t fit the profile of a kidnapper. To Rasbach, Marco has always seemed like a desperate man thrown up against the wall. Someone who might do the wrong thing if pushed to it. Richard Dries, however, is a savvy businessman, a man of considerable wealth, which, rightly or wrongly, raises all sorts of red flags for Rasbach. Sometimes these people have a kind of arrogance that makes them think they’re above the law.

Richard Dries is a man who bears watching.

Which is why Rasbach has put a wiretap on his phones.

He knows that the kidnappers have not phoned him. Richard is lying.

He decides to also have a couple of officers quietly watch the house.

THIRTY-FIVE

In her own bedroom—she and Richard have had separate bedrooms for years now—Alice paces back and forth on the plush carpet. She has been married to Richard for a very long time. She wouldn’t have believed this of him only a couple of years ago. But now he is a man with all kinds of secrets. Horrible, unforgivable secrets, if what she’s just heard is true.

She has known for some time that Richard has been seeing another woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d cheated on her. But this time she knew it was different. She felt him slipping away from her, as if he already had one foot out the door. As if he were coming up with an exit plan. She’d never thought before that he would actually leave her; she didn’t think he had the guts.

Because he knew that if he left her, he wouldn’t get a cent. That was the beauty of the prenup. If he left her, he wouldn’t get half her fortune—he wouldn’t get anything. And he needed her money, because he didn’t have much left of his own. Like Marco’s, Richard’s business had not been doing well in recent years. He kept the unprofitable business going so people wouldn’t know that he’d failed, so he could pretend to be the big businessman. She’d been pouring her own money into the company just to help him save face. She hadn’t minded at first, because she loved him.

She doesn’t love him anymore. Not after this.

She’s known for months that this affair was more serious than the others. In the beginning she’d turned a blind eye, waiting for it to end, as the others had. After all, the physical part of their marriage had been over long ago. But as the affair continued, she became obsessed with finding out who this other woman was.

Richard was good at hiding his tracks. She couldn’t trip him up. Finally she’d overcome her distaste and hired a private detective. She’d hired the most expensive one she could find, assuming, rightly, that he would be the most discreet. They met on a Friday afternoon to go over his report. She thought she’d been prepared, but what the detective had found shocked her.

The woman her husband was seeing was that woman living next door to her daughter—Cynthia Stillwell. A woman almost half his age. A friend of his daughter’s. A woman he’d met at a party at his daughter’s house. It was disgraceful.