The Couple Next Door (13 page)

‘I’ll get it,’ Jennings offers, and he leaves the room, soon returning with a bottle of water that he places on the table in front of Anne.

Gratefully, she twists off the cap and takes a drink.

Rasbach resumes his questioning. ‘You said you’d had some wine. You’re also on antidepressant medication, the effects of
which are increased with the use of alcohol. Do you think your memories of what happened that night are reliable?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice is firm. The water seems to have revived her.

‘You are certain of your version of events?’ Rasbach asks.

‘I’m certain,’ she says.

‘How do you explain the pink onesie that was found underneath the pad on the changing table?’ Rasbach’s voice is not so gentle now.

Anne feels her composure deserting her. ‘I . . . I thought I put it in the hamper, but I was very tired. It must have gotten shoved under there somehow.’

‘But you can’t explain how?’

Anne knows what he’s driving at. How much can he trust her version of events when she can’t explain something as simple as how the onesie, which she said she remembered putting into the laundry hamper, was underneath the pad on the changing table?

‘No. I don’t know.’ She begins to wring her hands in her lap beneath the table.

‘Is there any possibility that you might have dropped the baby?’

‘What?’ Her eyes snap up to meet the detective’s. His eyes are unnerving; she feels they can see right through her.

‘Is there any possibility that you might have accidentally dropped the baby, that she was harmed in some way?’

‘No. Absolutely not. I would remember that.’

Rasbach is not so friendly now. He leans back in his chair and cocks his head at her, as if he doesn’t believe her. ‘Perhaps you dropped her earlier in the evening and she hit her head, or perhaps you shook her and when you came back to see her, she wasn’t breathing?’

‘No! That didn’t happen,’ Anne says desperately. ‘She was fine when I left her at midnight. She was fine when Marco checked her at twelve thirty.’

‘You don’t actually know if she was fine when Marco checked on her at twelve thirty. You weren’t there, in the baby’s room. You only have your husband’s word for it,’ Rasbach points out.

‘He wouldn’t lie,’ Anne says anxiously, continuing to wring her hands.

Rasbach lets silence fill the room. Then, leaning forward, he says, ‘How much do you trust your husband, Mrs Conti?’

‘I trust him. He wouldn’t lie about that.’

‘No? What if he went to check on the baby and found she wasn’t breathing? What if he thought you had harmed her – hurt her by accident or held a pillow over her face? And he arranged for someone to take the body away because he was trying to protect you?’

‘No! What are you saying? That I killed her? Is that what you really think?’ She looks from Rasbach to Jennings to the woman officer at the door, then back at the detective.

‘Your neighbor, Cynthia, says that when you returned to the party after you fed the baby at eleven, you looked like you’d been crying and that you’d washed your face.’

Anne colors. This is a detail she’d forgotten. She
had
cried. She’d fed Cora in her chair in the dark at eleven with tears running down her face. Because she was depressed, because she was fat and unattractive, because Cynthia was tempting her husband in a way that she could no longer tempt him, and she felt useless and hopeless and overwhelmed. Trust Cynthia to notice – and to tell the police.

‘You are under the care of a psychiatrist, you said. A Dr Lumsden?’ Rasbach sits up straight now and picks up a file from the table. Opens it and looks inside.

‘I already told you about Dr Lumsden,’ Anne says, wondering what he’s looking at. ‘I am seeing her for mild postpartum depression, as you know. She prescribed an antidepressant that’s safe while breast-feeding. I have never thought about harming my child. I didn’t shake her or smother her or hurt her in any way. I didn’t drop her by accident either. I wasn’t that drunk. I was crying when I fed her because I was sad about being fat and unattractive, and Cynthia – who is supposed to be a friend – had been flirting with my husband all evening.’ Anne draws strength from the anger she feels, remembering this. She sits up straighter and looks the detective in the eye. ‘Maybe you should become a little better informed about postpartum depression, Detective. Postpartum depression is not the same thing as postpartum psychosis. I am clearly not psychotic, Detective.’

‘Fair enough,’ Rasbach says. He pauses, puts down the file and asks, ‘Would you describe your marriage as a happy one?’

‘Yes,’ Anne says. ‘We have some issues, like most couples, but we work them out.’

‘What kinds of issues?’

‘Is this really relevant? How is this helping to find Cora?’ She moves restlessly in her chair.

Detective Rasbach says, ‘We have every available person working on finding Cora. We are doing everything we can to find her.’ Then he adds, ‘Maybe you can help us.’

She slumps, discouraged. ‘I don’t see how.’

‘What sorts of issues come up in your marriage? Money? That’s a big one for most couples.’

‘No,’ Anne says tiredly. ‘We don’t fight about money. The only thing we ever fight about is my parents.’

‘Your parents?’

‘They don’t like one another, my parents and Marco. My
parents never approved of him. They think he’s not good enough for me. But he is. He’s perfect for me. They can’t see any good in him because they don’t want to. That’s just the way they are. They never liked anyone I dated. No one was ever good enough. But they hate him because I fell in love with him and married him.’

‘Surely they don’t hate him,’ Rasbach says.

‘It seems that way sometimes,’ Anne says. She looks down at the table. ‘My mother doesn’t think he’s good enough for me, basically because he’s not from a wealthy family, but my father really seems to hate him. He baits him all the time. I can’t understand why.’

‘They have no particular reason to dislike him?’

‘No, not at all. Marco’s never done anything wrong.’ She sighs unhappily. ‘My parents are very hard to please, and they’re very controlling. They gave us money when we were starting out, and now they think they own us.’

‘They gave you money?’

‘For the house.’ She flushes.

‘You mean, as a gift?’

She nods. ‘Yes, it was a wedding gift, so we could buy a house. We couldn’t afford one on our own, without help. Houses are so expensive, at least nice ones in good neighborhoods are.’

‘I see.’

‘I love the house,’ Anne admits. ‘But Marco hates feeling beholden to them. He didn’t want to accept the wedding gift. He would rather have made it all on his own – he’s proud that way. He let them help us for me. He knew I wanted the house. He would have been happy to start out in a crappy little apartment. Sometimes I think I made a mistake.’ She’s wringing her hands in her lap. ‘Maybe we should have refused their
wedding gift, started out in some shabby place, like most couples. We might still be there, but we might be happier.’ She starts to cry. ‘And now they think it’s his fault that Cora’s gone, because it was his idea to leave her at home alone. They won’t stop reminding me about it.’

Rasbach slides the tissue box on the table to within Anne’s reach. Anne takes a tissue and dabs her eyes. ‘And really, what can I say? I try to defend him to them, but it
was
his idea to leave her at home. I didn’t like it. I still can’t believe I agreed to it. I’ll never forgive myself.’

‘What do
you
suspect happened to Cora, Anne?’ Detective Rasbach asks.

She looks away from him and stares at the wall, unseeing. ‘I don’t know. I keep thinking about it and thinking about it. I was hoping that someone took her for ransom, because my parents are rich, but no one has been in touch with us, so . . . I don’t know, it’s hard to stay positive. That’s what Marco thought at first. But he’s losing hope, too.’ She looks back at Rasbach, her face bleak. ‘What if she’s dead? What if our baby is already dead?’ She breaks down and sobs. ‘What if we never find her?’

RASBACH HAD GONE
through Marco’s office computer. No wonder Marco was worried about that. While it was understandable that a man in Marco’s position might Google postpartum depression, his browser history showed that he’d strayed quite far into postpartum psychosis. He’d read about the woman found guilty of drowning her five children in a bathtub in Texas. He’d read about the mother who’d killed her children by driving her car into a lake, the woman in England who had strangled her two young children in a closet. He’d read about other women who had drowned, stabbed, smothered, and throttled their own children. Which meant, to the detective’s mind, that either Marco was afraid his wife might become psychotic or he was interested in that information for some other reason. It occurs to Rasbach that Marco may be setting his wife up to take a big fall. The baby might just be collateral damage. Does he simply want out?

But this isn’t his favorite theory. As Anne pointed out, she is not psychotic. These women who killed their babies were clearly in the throes of psychosis. If she killed the baby, it was probably accidentally.

No, his favorite theory is that Marco arranged the kidnapping to get the badly needed ransom money – despite what Marco said about things turning around, his business is clearly in serious trouble.

They haven’t been able to account for the car. No one has come forward to acknowledge driving down the lane at 12:35 on the night of the kidnapping. The police have sought the public’s help in the matter of the mystery car. If anyone in the area had been driving innocently down the lane at the relevant time, given all the newspaper and TV coverage, that person would in all likelihood have come forward. But no one has come forward – probably because whoever it was was an accomplice to the crime. Detective Rasbach believes that the person in that car took the baby away.

Rasbach thinks the child was either killed accidentally by the parents and the body taken away by an accomplice or that this is a staged kidnapping and the baby was handed off by Marco to someone who has lost his nerve and hasn’t made the expected arrangements to receive the ransom money and return the baby. If so, the wife may or may not be in on it; Rasbach needs to look closely at her. If what Rasbach suspects is true, Marco must be going out of his mind.

But the babysitter is troubling him. Would Marco have staged a kidnapping if there was going to be a babysitter in the house?

Rasbach sees no point in having a police officer sitting around the Contis’ house waiting for a ransom call that will probably never come. He makes a strategic decision. They will retreat; he will get the police out of the house and see what happens when the two of them are alone. If he is right, and something has gone wrong, if he is to find out what it is, he must take a step back and give Marco enough rope to hang himself.

And the baby? Rasbach wonders if even Marco knows whether the missing child is still alive. Rasbach remembers the famous Lindbergh kidnapping case, where it looked as if the baby died accidentally, either during or soon after the kidnapping. Maybe that’s what happened here. He can almost feel sorry for Marco. Almost.

It is Tuesday morning, the fourth day since Cora went missing. Now the last police officer is leaving. Anne can’t believe that they are to be left all alone. ‘But what if the kidnapper calls?’ she protests to Rasbach in disbelief.

Marco says nothing. It seems obvious to him that the kidnapper is not going to call. It seems equally obvious to him that the police don’t believe there
is
a kidnapper.

Rasbach says, ‘You’ll be fine. Marco can handle it.’ She gives him a doubtful look. ‘Maybe our being here is scaring him off – maybe if we leave, he’ll call.’ He turns to Marco. ‘If anyone claiming to have Cora calls, remain calm, try to get instructions, and keep him talking as much as possible. The more you can get him to reveal, the better. We still have the wiretap on, so it will be taped. But it is very unlikely that we would be able to trace the call. Everyone these days uses untraceable prepaid cell phones. Makes our job much harder.’

Then Rasbach leaves. Marco, for one, is glad to see him go.

Now Anne and Marco are alone in the house. The number of reporters outside on the street has dwindled as well. With no developments the media has little to report – they are losing enthusiasm. The pile of wilted flowers and teddy bears is not growing any larger.

‘They think I killed her,’ Anne says, ‘and that you covered it up.’

‘They can’t think that,’ Marco says, trying to reassure her. But there isn’t much else he can say. What’s he going to tell her?
Either that or they think I took her and faked the kidnapping for the ransom money.
But he doesn’t want her to know how bad their financial situation really is.

Marco goes upstairs to lie down. He is exhausted. His grief and distress are such that he can hardly bear to look at his wife.

Anne putters around the house, somewhat relieved to be rid of the police after all, tidying up. She moves in a sleep-deprived fog, putting things away, washing coffee cups. The kitchen phone rings, and she stops. She looks at the caller ID. It’s her mother. Anne hesitates, not sure she wants to speak to her. Finally, on the third ring, she picks up the phone.

‘Anne,’ her mother says. Anne immediately feels her heart sink. Why did she answer? She can’t deal with her mother right now. She sees Marco coming quickly down the stairs, his eyes alert. She mouths
My mother
at him and waves him away. He turns and goes back upstairs.

‘Hi, Mother.’

‘I’m so worried about you, Anne. How are you doing?’

‘How do you think?’ Anne holds the phone to her ear, walks to the rear of the kitchen, and looks out the window to the backyard.

Her mother is quiet for a moment. ‘I just want to help.’

‘I know, Mom.’

‘I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Your father and I are hurting, too, but it must be nothing compared to what you’re feeling.’

Anne starts to cry, the tears rolling silently down her cheeks.