The Couple Next Door

by Shari Lapena

  One thing at a time. He must get rid of the cell phone.

  He grabs the keys to the car from the bowl by the front door. He considers leaving a note for Anne but figures he’ll be home before she wakes, so he doesn’t bother. He slips quietly out the back door and walks across the yard and into the garage and gets into the Audi.

  It’s chilly, just before dawn. He hasn’t made a conscious decision about what to do with the phone, but now he finds himself driving to the lake. It’s still dark. While he drives, alone on the empty highway, he thinks about Cynthia. It takes a certain kind of person to blackmail another. He wonders what else she’s done. He wonders if he can get something on her that’s as damning as what she has on him. Balance the scales. If he can’t find something useful on her, maybe he can frame her in some way. He would need help with that. He recoils inwardly. Crime has not worked for him, and yet he seems to be digging himself in deeper and deeper.

  He holds on to the idea that he may be able to get some semblance of his life back—if Cora is returned to them unharmed, if Richard keeps his secret, if he can get something on Cynthia, one way or another, to make her back off. There’s no way he can pay her and keep on paying her. He can’t be in her power.

  But even if he can do all these things, he will never, ever have any peace of mind. He knows that. He will live for Cora, and for Anne. He will make sure he gives them as happy a life as possible. He owes them that. It doesn’t matter whether he is happy or not; he has forfeited any right to happiness.

  He parks the car in his favorite spot under the tree, facing the lake. He sits there for a few minutes inside the car, remembering the last time he was here. So much has happened since then. The last time he was here, just a few days ago, he was so sure he was going to get Cora back. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, he’d have his baby back now, and the money, and nobody would have known a thing.

  What a fucking mess things have turned out to be.

  Finally he gets out of the car. It’s cool in the early morning by the lake. The sky is beginning to brighten. The cell phone is in his pocket. He starts walking down to the beach. He’s going to walk to the end of the dock and throw the cell phone into the lake where no one will ever find it. That will be one thing off his plate.

  He stands at the end of the dock for some time, full of regret. Then he takes the cell phone out of his pocket. He wipes the whole thing down for fingerprints with the edge of his jacket, just in case. He was a good ballplayer as a teenager. He hurls the phone as hard as he can into the lake. It lands with a loud plop. Ever-growing circles radiate outward from where it landed in the water. It reminds him of when he used to throw rocks in the lake as a kid. How far away that seems now.

  Marco feels relieved to be rid of the phone. He turns and heads back to his car. It is quite light out now. With a start, he notices that there is another car in the lot, a car that wasn’t there before. He doesn’t know how long it has been there. How did he not notice the lights when it came in? Maybe the car just arrived and didn’t have its headlights on.

  It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, although his skin crawls. It doesn’t matter if someone saw him throwing something into the lake in the early morning. He’s too far away to be recognized.

  But his car is right there, with the license number in plain view. Marco is nervous now. As he gets closer, he gets a better look at the other car. It’s a police car, an unmarked police car. You can always tell them by the grille on the front. Marco feels sick. Why is there a police car here, now? Was he followed? Did the police see him throw something into the lake? Marco is sweating in the cold and can feel his heart beating in his ears. He tries to walk normally to his car, keeping as far away from the police car as possible without looking like he’s trying to avoid it. The window rolls down. Fuck.

  “Everything all right?” the officer asks, his head outside the window, getting a good look.

  Marco stops, frozen in place. He doesn’t recognize the officer’s face—it’s not Rasbach or one of his men. For one surreal moment, Marco had expected it to be Rasbach who popped his head out the open window. “Yeah, sure. Couldn’t sleep,” Marco says.

  The officer nods, rolls up his window, and drives off.

  Marco gets into the car, shaking uncontrollably. It’s a few minutes before he’s able to drive.

  • • •

  At breakfast Anne and Marco don’t talk much. He is pale and distant after his experience at the lake. She is fragile, missing her baby, thinking about the day before. She still doesn’t believe Marco about Cynthia. Why was he coming out of her house yesterday? If he lied about this, what else has he lied about? She doesn’t trust him. But they have reached an uneasy truce. They need each other. Maybe they even still care for each other, in spite of everything.

  “I need to go back to the office this morning,” Marco tells her, his voice a little unsteady. He clears his throat loudly.

  “It’s Sunday,” she says.

  “I know, but I should probably go in, get caught up on some projects that are overdue.” He takes another gulp of coffee.

  She nods. She thinks it will do him good—he looks awful. It will take his mind off what they’re dealing with, even if only for a short time. She is jealous. She doesn’t have the luxury of throwing herself into work to forget, even for a moment. Everything in the house reminds her of Cora, of what they’ve lost. The high chair, sitting empty in the kitchen. The colorful plastic toys in the bin in the living room. The play mat she used to put Cora down on with its dangling overhead toys that the baby loved to reach for, cooing and giggling. It doesn’t matter where she goes in the house, Cora is everywhere. There is no escape, no matter how temporary, for her.

  Marco is worried about her, she can tell. “What will you do when I’m gone?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should leave a message with that other doctor, the one who’s filling in for Dr. Lumsden. Try to make an appointment for early in the week,” Marco suggests.

  “Okay,” Anne says listlessly.

  But when Marco leaves, she doesn’t call the doctor’s office. She wanders around the house thinking about Cora. She imagines her dead, in a Dumpster somewhere, crawling with maggots. She imagines her in a shallow grave in the woods, dug up and gnawed on by animals. She thinks of newspaper stories she’s read about lost children. She can’t get the horror out of her head. She feels queasy and panicky. She looks at herself in the mirror, and her eyes are huge.

  Maybe it’s better that she not know what happened to her baby. But she needs to know. For the rest of her life, her tortured mind will supply hideous ideas that may be worse than the truth. Maybe Cora’s death was quick. Anne prays that it was. But she’ll probably never know for sure.

  From the moment her daughter was born, Anne knew where Cora was every minute of her short life, and now she has no idea where she is. Because she is a bad mother. She is a bad, broken mother who didn’t love her daughter enough. She left her alone in the house. She hit her. No wonder her daughter is gone. There is a reason for everything, and the reason her baby is gone is that Anne does not deserve her.

  Now Anne is not just wandering around the house, she is moving faster and faster. Her mind is racing, thoughts stumbling over one another. She feels intense guilt about her daughter. She doesn’t know whether to believe Marco when he tells her that Cora was alive at twelve thirty. She can’t believe anything he says—he’s a liar. She must have hurt Cora. She must have killed her own baby. There is no other possibility that makes sense.

  It’s a terrible possibility, a terrible burden. She must tell someone. She tried to tell Marco what she did, but he wouldn’t listen. He wants to pretend it didn’t happen; he wants to pretend that she’s not capable of harming her own baby. She remembers the way he looked at her when she told him she hit Cora, the disbelief.

 
He might feel different if he’d seen her slap Cora.

  He might feel different if he knew her history.

  But he doesn’t know, because she has never told him.

  There was the incident at St. Mildred’s—the one she has no memory of. She remembers only the aftermath—being in the girls’ bathroom, the blood on the wall, Susan slumped on the floor as if she were dead, and everyone—Janice, Debbie, the science teacher, and the headmistress—all looking at her in horror. She’d had no idea what happened.

  After that, her mother had taken her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed a dissociative disorder. Anne remembers being in his office, frozen in her seat, her mother sitting anxiously by her side. Anne was terrified by the diagnosis, terrified and ashamed.

  “I don’t understand,” her mother said to the doctor. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I know,” the psychiatrist said gently, “that it seems frightening, but it’s not as unusual as you might think. Think of it as a coping mechanism—an imperfect one. The person disconnects from reality for a brief time.” He turned to Anne; she refused to look at him. “You might feel detached from yourself, as if things are happening to someone else. You might perceive things as distorted or unreal. Or you might experience a fugue state, as you did—a brief period of amnesia.”

  “Is this going to happen again?” Alice asked the doctor.

  “I don’t know. Has it happened before?”

  It had happened before, but never so shockingly.

  “There have been times,” Alice admitted tentatively, “ever since she was a little girl, when she seemed to do things and not remember doing them. I . . . I thought at first she was just saying that so she wouldn’t get in trouble. But then I realized she couldn’t control it.” She paused. “But there’s never been anything like this.”

  The doctor clasped his hands and gazed at Anne intently, asking her mother, “Has there been any trauma in her life?”

  “Trauma?” Alice echoed. “Of course not.”

  The doctor surveyed her skeptically. “Dissociative disorder is usually the result of some sort of repressed trauma.”

  “Oh, God,” Alice said.

  The doctor raised his eyebrows at her and waited.

  “Her father,” Alice said suddenly.

  “Her father?”

  “She watched her father die. It was horrible. She adored him.”

  Anne’s eyes were fixed firmly on the wall in front of her; she was perfectly still.

  “How did he die?” the doctor asked.

  “I was out shopping. He was in the house, playing with her. He had a massive heart attack. He must have died almost instantly. She saw it. By the time I got home, it was too late. Anne was crying and pressing numbers in the phone, but she didn’t know what numbers to press. Anyway, it didn’t matter—no one could have saved him. She was only four years old.”

  The doctor nodded sympathetically. “I see,” he said. He sat quietly for a moment.

  Alice said, “She had nightmares for a long time. I didn’t let her talk about it—maybe that was wrong, but she would get so upset and I was trying to help. Whenever she brought it up, I tried to take her mind off it.” She added, “She seemed to blame herself, for not knowing what to do. But it wasn’t her fault. She was so young. And we were told that nothing could have saved him, even if the ambulance had been right there.”

  “That would be very difficult for any child to deal with,” the doctor said. He turned to Anne, who continued to ignore him. “Stress can temporarily worsen symptoms of this disorder. I suggest you see me regularly, to try to deal with some of the anxiety you’re feeling.”

  Anne cried in the car all the way home. When they got there, before they went into the house, her mother hugged her and said, “It’s going to be all right, Anne.” Anne didn’t believe her. “We’ll tell your father that you’re seeing someone for anxiety. He doesn’t need to know about this other thing. He wouldn’t understand.”

  They didn’t tell him about the incident at school. Anne’s mother handled the meetings with the parents of the other three girls from St. Mildred’s herself.

  Since then there had been other “episodes,” mostly harmless, where Anne would lose time—minutes or sometimes hours—when she wouldn’t know what had happened while she was “gone.” They were brought on by stress. She would find herself somewhere unexpected, have no idea how she got there, and call her mother, who would come get her. But she’d had no episodes since her first year of college. It had all happened such a long time ago; she’d thought she’d put it behind her.

  But, of course, she had immediately remembered it all after the kidnapping: What if the police found out? What if Marco found out and looked at her differently? But then the onesie had arrived—and her mother no longer looked at her as if she were afraid that Anne might have killed her own child and that Marco had helped to cover it up.

  Now the police know that she attacked Susan. They think she is violent. All along, Anne has been afraid that the police would believe she was guilty, whether she was or not. But there are worse things than being wrongly accused.

  Anne’s greatest fear now is that she is guilty.

  Those first few days after Cora had been taken, when Anne was so sure that she’d been taken by some stranger—those had been difficult days, having to withstand the suspicion of the police, the public, and her own mother. She and Marco had borne it, because they knew they were innocent. They’d made one mistake—they’d left their baby unattended. But not abandoned.

  But now, because of what happened the other night before she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, she had confused the search for signs of Marco’s unfaithfulness with the search for Cora. Reality had become distorted. She remembers thinking that Cynthia had stolen her child from her.

  The illness was back. When, exactly, had it returned?

  She thinks she knows. It came back the night of the kidnapping, after she slapped Cora. She lost time. She doesn’t know what happened.

  It’s almost a relief now, realizing that she did it. Better that Cora be killed quickly by her own mother, in her own bedroom, with the familiar lambs looking on, than that she be taken by some monster and molested, tortured, terrified.

  Anne should call her own mother. Her mother would know what to do. But Anne doesn’t want to call her mother. Her mother will try to cover it up, pretend it never happened. Like Marco. They’re all trying to cover up what she’s done.

  She doesn’t want that anymore. She must tell the police. And she must do it now, before anyone tries to stop her. She wants everything out in the open. She can’t stand a minute more of the secrecy, the lies. She needs to know where her baby is, her final resting place. She needs to hold her one last time.

  She glances out her bedroom window at the street. She doesn’t see any reporters out there now. She dresses quickly and calls a cab to bring her to the police station.

  It seems to take a long time, but finally the cab arrives. She gets into the cab quickly and settles herself in the backseat, feeling strange but determined. She needs this to end. She will tell them what happened. She killed Cora. Marco must have arranged to have her taken away and then urged them to offer ransom money afterward, to mislead the police. But now Marco will have to stop protecting her. He will have to stop lying to her. He will have to tell them where he put Cora’s body, and then she will know. She must know where her baby is. She can’t stand not knowing.

  She can’t trust anyone to tell the truth unless she goes first.

  When she arrives at the police station, the officer behind the front desk looks at her with obvious concern.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” Anne says quickly. “I want to see Detective Rasbach.” Her voice sounds strange to her own ears.

  “He’s not here. It�
��s Sunday,” the officer says. “I’ll see if I can get him on the phone.” She has a brief conversation on the phone, puts it down, and says, “He’s on his way. He’ll be here in about half an hour.”

  Anne waits impatiently, her mind in turmoil.

  When Rasbach appears less than half an hour later, he is casually dressed, in khaki trousers and a summer shirt. He looks very different; Anne is used to him in a suit. She finds it disorienting.

  “Anne,” he says, looking at her closely with those eyes that miss nothing. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need to talk to you,” Anne says quickly.

  “Where is your lawyer?” Rasbach asks. “I was informed that you would no longer talk to us without your lawyer present.”

  “I don’t want my lawyer,” Anne insists.

  “Are you sure? Maybe you should call him. I can wait.”

  Her lawyer will just stop her from saying what she needs to say. “No! I’m sure. I don’t need a lawyer. I don’t want one—and don’t call my husband.”

  “All right, then,” Rasbach says, and turns to lead her down the long hall.

  Anne follows him to one of the interview rooms. She starts to talk before he’s even sat down. He tells her to wait.

  “For the record,” Rasbach says to her, “please state your name, the date, and the fact that you’ve been advised to call your lawyer but have declined.”

  When Anne has done so, they begin.

  “Why are you here today?” the detective asks her.

  “I have come to confess.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT