The Couple Next Door

by Shari Lapena

  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.

  The man she married.

  And then he sat there, in their kitchen, and told her that the dead man looked familiar.

  She’s suddenly afraid of her own husband. She doesn’t know who he is or what he is. She is starting to understand what he’s capable of.

  Had he ever loved her, or had he only married her for her money?

  What does she do now? Does she go to the police with what she knows? What might happen to Cora if she did?

  After a long time, Anne pulls herself up off the floor. She forces herself to walk quickly upstairs to the bedroom. Trembling, she pulls out an overnight bag and starts packing.

  • • •

  Anne
gets out of the cab at the foot of her parents’ circular gravel drive. This is the house she grew up in. It is very grand. The large stone house with its lush, professionally tended gardens backs onto a wooded ravine. She pays the cabdriver and stands there for a minute with her overnight bag at her feet, looking at the house. The homes are set far apart here. Nobody will see her, unless her mother is home and happens to look out the window. She remembers vividly the day she stepped out of this house and climbed onto the back of Marco’s motorcycle and decided that she was in love.

  So much has happened. So much has changed.

  She hates to go back to her parents. It’s an admission that they were right about Marco all along. She doesn’t want to believe it, but she’s seen the evidence with her own eyes. She’d gone against their wishes when she’d married Marco—she’d known her own mind then, and her own heart.

  Now she doesn’t know anything.

  There at the end of her parents’ drive, from out of nowhere, Anne suddenly remembers where she saw the dead man. She trembles like a leaf in the wind, trying to make sense of this new information. Then she takes out her cell phone and calls another cab.

  • • •

  Marco tries Richard again, leaves another terse message on his voice mail. Richard is punishing him, keeping him out of the loop. He’s going to handle it himself and not let Marco know until it’s all over, when Cora is back safe and sound. If she does come back.

  Even Marco admits to himself that maybe it’s better this way. If anyone can pull this off, it’s Richard. Richard with his bags of money and nerves of steel. Marco is exhausted, physically and emotionally. He wants nothing more than to lie down on his office couch, sleep for a few hours, and wake up to a phone call that Cora is home again, safe. But then—what happens after that?

  He remembers there’s an open bottle of scotch in the back of one of his filing-cabinet drawers. He stops pacing, moves over to the filing cabinet, and pulls open the drawer. The bottle is half empty. He grabs a glass, also hidden in the filing cabinet, and pours himself a stiff one. Then he resumes his pacing.

  Marco can’t face the possibility of never seeing Cora again. He is also terrified of being arrested and going to prison. He’s sure that if he is arrested, the lawyer most likely to be able to get him acquitted, Aubrey West, will no longer be acting for him. Because Anne’s parents won’t pay, and Marco doesn’t have the money to pay for a top-notch lawyer himself.

  He refills his glass from the bottle, which is now sitting open on the blotter on his expensive desk, and realizes that he’s already thinking about what to do after he’s arrested. Arrest now seems inevitable. Anne won’t stand by him, not once she hears the truth from her own father. Why would she? She’ll hate him. If she had done this to him, he would never forgive her.

  Then there’s Cynthia and the video.

  His nose deep into his third drink, Marco for the first time considers telling the police the truth. What if he simply told Rasbach that yes, he met with Bruce—who turned out to be Derek Honig. Yes, he had business troubles. Yes, his father-in-law refused to help him out. Yes, he planned to take and hide his own baby for a couple of days to get the ransom money out of his wife’s parents.

  But it wasn’t actually his idea. It was Derek Honig’s idea.

  Derek Honig was the one who suggested it. He planned it. In Marco’s mind it was just a way to get a bit of an advance on his wife’s inheritance. No one was supposed to die. Not his accomplice. Certainly not his baby.

  Marco is a victim in this, too. Not blameless, but still a victim. He was desperate, and he fell in with someone who gave him a false name, who manipulated him into the kidnapping for his own gain. A good lawyer like Aubrey West could spin it.

  Marco could come clean with Detective Rasbach. Tell him everything.

  Once Cora is back home.

  He would go to prison. But Cora, if she survives this, would be with her mother. Richard would no longer have anything to hold over him. And Cynthia would be shit out of luck. Maybe he could even make sure she went to jail for attempted blackmail. For a minute he imagines Cynthia in a shapeless orange jumpsuit, with unwashed hair.

  He looks up from his pacing, catches his reflection in the large mirror hanging on the wall across from the window, and barely recognizes himself.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Marco finally returns home, once it’s dark. He’s had too much to drink, so he leaves the car behind and takes a cab. He arrives home disheveled, his eyes bloodshot, his body racked with tension, even with all the alcohol in it.

  He lets himself in the front door. “Anne?” he calls, wondering where she is. The house is dark and feels empty. It’s very quiet. He stands still, listening to the silence. Maybe she isn’t here. “Anne?” His voice is louder now, worried. He walks farther into the living room.

  He stops when he sees her. Anne is sitting on the sofa in the dark, utterly still. There is a large knife in her hands; Marco recognizes it as the carving knife from the wooden block on their kitchen counter. The blood drops from his heart and pools in his feet. He takes a cautious step forward and tries to see her more closely. What is she doing sitting in the dark with a knife?

  “Anne?” Marco says, more quietly. She appears to be in some kind of trance. She’s scaring him. “Anne, what happened?” He speaks to her the way someone might try to talk to a dangerous animal. When she doesn’t answer him, he asks, in the same gentle voice, “What are you doing with the knife?”

  He needs to turn on the light. He moves slowly toward the lamp on the side table.

  “Don’t come near me!” She holds up the knife.

  Marco stops in his tracks, staring at her, at the way she’s holding the knife, as if she means to use it.

  “I know what you did,” she says in a low, desperate voice.

  Marco thinks quickly. Anne must have been talking to her father. Things must have gone horribly wrong. Marco is flooded with despair. He realizes how much he was relying on his father-in-law to save the day, to get Cora back for them. But clearly everything has fallen apart. Their baby is gone forever. And Anne’s father has told her the truth.

  And now this last part, this final piece—his wife has lost her mind.

  “What’s with the knife, Anne?” Marco asks, forcing his voice to stay calm.

  “It’s for protection.”

  “Protection from who?”

  “From you.”

  “You don’t need protection from me,” Marco says to her in the dark. What has her father been telling her? What lies? He would never intentionally harm his wife or child. It’s all been a terrible mistake. She has no reason to be afraid of him. You’re dangerous, Marco, with your plans and schemes. “Have you seen your father?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve talked to him.”

  “No.”

  Marco doesn’t understand. “Who have you been talking to?”

  “No one.”

  “Why are you sitting here in the dark with a knife?” He wants to turn on the light but doesn’t want to startle her.

  “That’s not true,” Anne says, as if remembering. “I did see Cynthia.”

  Marco is silent. Terrified.

  “She showed me the video.” The look she gives him is terrible. All her pain and rage shows on her face. Her hatred.

  Marco sags; he feels like his knees will give way. It’s all over now. Maybe Anne wants to kill him for stealing their baby. He can’t blame her. He wants to grab the knife and do it himself.

  Suddenly he goes cold. He needs to see the knife. He needs to know if she’s used it. But it’s too dark. He can’t see her well enough to see if there’s blood on her or on the knife. He takes another step toward her and stops. Her eyes terrify him.

  She says, “You kidnapped Cora. I saw it with my own eyes. You carried her out of the house wrapped in her blan
ket and took her to the garage. That man took her away. You planned the whole thing. You lied to me. And you kept on lying to me, all this time.” Her voice is disbelieving. “And then, when he double-crossed you, you went to that cabin and beat him to death with a shovel.” She’s more animated now.

  Marco is horrified. “No, Anne—I didn’t!”

  “And then you sat at the kitchen table with me and said he looked familiar.”

  Marco feels sick. He thinks of how it must seem to her. How twisted everything has become.

  Anne leans forward; she is holding the large knife tightly with both hands. “I’ve been living with you in this house, this whole time since Cora was taken, and all along you’ve been lying to me. Lying about everything.” She stares at him and whispers, “I don’t know who you are.”

  Marco keeps his eyes on the knife and says, desperately, “I did take her. I did take her, Anne. But it’s not what you think! I don’t know what Cynthia told you—she doesn’t know anything about it. She’s blackmailing me. She’s trying to use the video to get money out of me.”

  Anne stares at him, her eyes huge in the dark.

  “I can explain, Anne! It’s not how it looks. Listen to me. I got into financial trouble. The business wasn’t going well. I had some reversals. And then I met this man, this . . . Derek Honig.” Marco falters. “He told me his name was Bruce Neeland. He seemed like a nice guy—we became friends. He suggested the kidnapping. It was all his idea. I needed the money. He said it would be fast and easy, that no one would get hurt. He planned the whole thing.” Marco pauses for breath. She is staring at him, her eyes grim. Even so, it is a relief to confess, to tell her the truth.

  “I took Cora out to him in the garage. He was supposed to call us within twelve hours, and we were supposed to get her back in two or three days at most. It was supposed to be so fast and easy,” Marco says bitterly. “But then we didn’t hear from him. I didn’t know what was happening. I tried to call him with that cell phone you found—that’s what it was for—but he didn’t answer my calls. I didn’t know what to do. I had no other way to reach him. I thought that maybe he’d lost the cell phone. Or that he’d gotten cold feet, that maybe he’d killed her and left the country.” His voice has become a sob. He pauses to regain control. “I was panicking. It’s been absolute hell for me, too, Anne—you’ve no idea.”