The Couple Next Door (14 page)

Her mother says, ‘Your father is still very upset about the police taking you in for questioning yesterday.’

‘I know, you told me that yesterday,’ Anne says wearily.

‘I know, but he won’t stop talking about it. He says they should be focusing on finding Cora, not harassing you.’

‘They say they’re just doing their job.’

‘I don’t like that detective,’ her mother says uneasily. Anne sinks into one of the kitchen chairs. Her mother says, ‘I think I should come over and you and I should have some tea and a private talk. Just the two of us, without your father. Is Marco home?’

‘No, Mom,’ Anne says. Anxiety rises in her throat. ‘I can’t today. I’m too tired.’

Her mother sighs. ‘You know your father is very protective of you,’ she says. She pauses, then adds tentatively, ‘Sometimes I wonder if it was right for us to keep things from him when you were younger.’

Anne freezes. Then she says, ‘I have to go,’ and hangs up the phone.

She stands by the window looking out at the backyard, trembling, for a long time.

Detectives Rasbach and Jennings are in a police cruiser, Jennings behind the wheel. It is hot in the cruiser, and Rasbach adjusts the air-conditioning. They soon arrive at St Mildred’s School, an exclusive private school in the northwest part of the city for girls from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Anne Conti spent her entire academic life here before college, so they ought to know something about her.

Unfortunately for the detectives, it is the middle of the summer holidays, but Rasbach called beforehand and made an appointment with a Ms Beck, the headmistress, who apparently has plenty of work to do, even in the summer.

Jennings parks in the empty lot. The school is a lovely old
stone building that looks a bit like a castle, surrounded by greenery. The place oozes money. Rasbach imagines all the luxury cars driving up and disgorging privileged girls in uniform at the front doors. But at the moment it is dead quiet, except for the sound of a man on a riding mower cutting the grass.

Rasbach and Jennings walk up the shallow stone steps and press the buzzer to get in. The glass door opens with a loud click, and the two detectives enter and follow the signs down a wide hall to the main office, their shoes squeaking on the glossy floors. Rasbach can smell wax and polish.

‘I don’t miss school, do you?’ Jennings says.

‘Not a bit.’

They arrive at the office, where Ms Beck greets them. Rasbach is immediately disappointed to see that she is relatively young, in her early forties. The chances of her having been at St Mildred’s during Anne Conti’s years there are remote. But Rasbach is hoping there might still be some staff around who’d remember her.

‘How can I help you, Detectives?’ Ms Beck asks as she conducts them into her spacious inner office.

Rasbach and Jennings sit in the comfortable chairs in front of her desk as she positions herself behind it.

‘We’re interested in one of your former students,’ Rasbach says.

‘Who is that?’ she asks.

‘Anne Conti. But when she was a student here, her name would have been Anne Dries.’

Ms Beck pauses, then gives a small nod. ‘I see.’

‘I imagine you weren’t here yourself when she was a student,’ Rasbach says.

‘No, that would have been before my time, I’m afraid. The poor woman. I saw her on TV. How old is she?’

‘Thirty-two,’ Rasbach says. ‘She was at St Mildred’s from kindergarten to twelfth grade, apparently.’

Ms Beck smiles. ‘Many of our girls start here in kindergarten and don’t leave until they attend a good college. We have an excellent retention rate.’

Rasbach smiles back at her. ‘We’d like to look through her file, ideally speak to some people who knew her while she was here.’

‘Let me see what I can do,’ Ms Beck says, and exits the room.

She returns a few minutes later holding a buff-colored file. ‘She was here, as you say, from K to twelve. She was an excellent student. Went on to Cornell.’

Most of the woman’s job is PR, Rasbach imagines as he reaches for the file. Jennings leans in to look at it with him. Rasbach is sure that she wishes the now possibly notorious Anne Conti had never graced the halls of St Mildred’s.

He and Jennings review the file silently while Ms Beck fidgets at her desk. There is not much there except solidly excellent report cards. Certainly nothing leaps out at them.

‘Do any of her former teachers still teach here?’ Rasbach asks.

Ms Beck considers. Finally she says, ‘Most of them have moved on, but Ms Bleeker just retired last year. I saw in the file that she was Anne’s English teacher for several years in the later grades. You could talk to her. She lives not too far from here.’ She writes down the name and address on a piece of paper.

Rasbach takes the paper and says, ‘Thank you for your time.’

He and Jennings get back into the sweltering car. Rasbach says, ‘Let’s go see Bleeker. We’ll grab a sandwich on the way.’

‘What do you expect to find out?’ Jennings asks.

‘Never expect, Jennings.’

WHEN THEY ARRIVE
at the retired teacher’s house, they are met by a woman with a straight back and sharp eyes. She looks just the way a retired English teacher from a private girls’ school would look, Rasbach thinks.

Ms Bleeker studies their badges closely and then sizes up the two detectives themselves before she opens her door. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ she says.

Jennings gives Rasbach a look as she leads them down a narrow hall and into her front room. ‘Please be seated,’ she says.

Rasbach and Jennings promptly take seats in two upholstered armchairs. She settles down slowly on the couch opposite. There’s a thick novel – a Penguin Classics edition of Trollope’s
Barchester Towers
– on the coffee table and an iPad beside it.

‘What can I do for you gentlemen?’ she asks, and then adds, ‘Although I think I can guess why you’re here.’

Rasbach gives her his most disarming smile. ‘Why do you think we’re here, Ms Bleeker?’

‘You want to talk about Anne. I recognized her. She’s all over
the news.’ Rasbach and Jennings exchange a quick glance. ‘She was Anne Dries when I taught her.’

‘Yes,’ Rasbach says, ‘we want to talk to you about Anne.’

‘It’s a terrible thing. I was very sad when I saw it on TV.’ She sighs deeply. ‘I don’t know what I can tell you about what happened back then, because I don’t know anything. I tried to find out, but nobody would tell me anything.’

Rasbach feels excitement prickle at his neck. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ he says patiently.

She nods. ‘I liked Anne. She was a good English student. Not inspired, but hardworking. Serious. She was pretty quiet. It was difficult to know what was going on in her head. She liked to draw. I knew that the other girls were picking on her. I tried to put a stop to it.’

‘Picking on her how?’

‘The usual spoiled-rich-girl stuff. Kids with more money than brains. They told her she was fat. She wasn’t, of course. The other girls were rail thin. Unhealthy.’

‘When was this?’

‘Probably when she was in about tenth or eleventh grade. There were three girls – thought they were God’s gift. The three prettiest girls in school found one another and formed a private club that no one else could join.’

‘Do you remember their names?’

‘Of course. Debbie Renzetti, Janice Foegle, and Susan Givens.’ Jennings writes the names in his notebook. ‘I won’t forget those three.’

‘And what happened?’

‘I don’t know. One day the three pretty girls were hassling Anne, as usual, and the next thing you know, one was in the hospital and the other two were giving Anne a very wide berth.
Susan missed school for a couple of weeks. The story was that she fell off her bike and got a concussion.’

Rasbach leans forward slightly. ‘But you don’t believe the story, do you? What do you think actually happened?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. There were some closed-door meetings with the parents. It was all hushed up. But I’m betting Anne had had enough.’

Back at the station, Rasbach and Jennings do some digging and learn that two of the girls mentioned by the retired English teacher, Debbie Renzetti and Susan Givens, had moved away with their families by the end of high school. Janice Foegle, as luck would have it, still lives in the city. When Rasbach calls her, his luck holds – she’s home and she’s willing to come in to the station and talk to them that afternoon.

Rasbach is called to the front desk when Janice Foegle arrives, right on time. He goes out to meet her. He knows what to expect, but still, she is a striking woman. What must it have been like, Rasbach wonders, to possess that kind of beauty in high school, when most of the other kids are struggling to come to terms with their own unsatisfactory appearance? He wonders how it has shaped her. He is reminded, fleetingly, of Cynthia Stillwell.

‘Ms Foegle,’ Rasbach says. ‘I’m Detective Rasbach. This is Detective Jennings. Thank you for coming in. We have a few questions for you, if you wouldn’t mind.’

She gives him a resigned frown. ‘To be honest, I’ve been expecting someone to call me,’ she says.

They take her to one of the interview rooms. She looks tense when they mention the video camera, but she doesn’t complain.

‘You knew Anne Conti in high school – she was Anne Dries then – when you were at St Mildred’s,’ Rasbach begins, once the preliminaries are out of the way.

‘Yes.’ Her voice is quiet.

‘What was she like?’

Janice pauses, as if unsure of what to say. ‘She was nice.’

‘Nice?’ Rasbach waits for more.

Suddenly her face crumples and she begins to cry. Rasbach gently pushes the tissue box within her reach and waits. ‘The truth is, she was a nice girl and I was a total bitch. Me and Susan and Debbie, we were awful girls. I’m ashamed of it now. I look back at what I was like and I just can’t believe it. We were so mean to her, for no reason.’

‘Mean to her how?’

Janice looks away and blows her nose delicately. Then she looks up at the ceiling and tries to compose herself. ‘We teased her. About her looks, about her clothes. We thought we were above her – above everyone, really.’ She gives him a wry look. ‘We were fifteen. Not that that excuses anything.’

‘So what happened?’

‘This went on for months, and she just took it. She was always nice back to us and pretended it didn’t bother her, but we thought she was just pathetic. Actually, I thought it was a kind of strength, being able to pretend you’re not bothered, day after day, when she obviously was, but I kept that to myself.’

Rasbach nods, encouraging her to continue.

She looks down at the tissue in her hands, sighs heavily, and looks back up at Rasbach. ‘One day she just lost it. The three of us – Debbie, Susan, and I – we’d stayed late after school for some reason. We were in the girls’ bathroom, and Anne walked in. She saw us and froze. Then she said hi and gave a little wave and
went into one of the stalls to pee. That took a certain amount of guts, I have to admit.’ She pauses, then continues. ‘Anyway, we started saying some things.’ She stops.

‘What kinds of things?’ Rasbach asks.

‘I’m ashamed to say. Things like “How is your diet coming along? Because you look like you’ve gained weight” – things like that. We were pretty awful to her. She came out of the stall and went right for Susan. None of us were expecting it. Anne grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the wall. It was one of those cement walls, painted a glossy cream, and Susan hit it hard with her head. She just kind of slid down. There was a big smear of blood all down the wall.’ Janice’s face twists, as if she is back in that school bathroom seeing her friend crumpled on the floor, the blood smeared on the wall. ‘I thought Anne had killed her.’

‘Go on,’ Rasbach encourages.

‘Debbie and I were screaming, but Anne was completely silent. Debbie was closer to the door, so she ran for help. I was terrified to be left alone with Anne, but she was between me and the door and I was too scared to move. Anne looked at me, but her eyes were blank. Like she wasn’t really there. I didn’t know if she was even seeing me. It was creepy. Finally one of the teachers came, and then the headmistress. They called an ambulance.’ Janice falls silent.

‘Did anyone call the police?’

‘Are you kidding?’ She looks at him in surprise. ‘That’s not the way things are done in private schools. The headmistress was all damage control. I know they worked something out. Anne’s mother came in, and our parents, and it was all just
. . . handled.
You see, we had it coming, and everybody knew it.’

Rasbach says gently, ‘What happened after they called the ambulance?’

‘When it arrived, they put Susan on a stretcher and took her down to the ambulance. Debbie and I and the other teacher followed Susan. Debbie and I were crying, hysterical. The headmistress took Anne to her office to wait for her mother. The ambulance took Susan away, and Debbie and I waited in the parking lot with the other teacher for our parents to come.’

‘Do you remember anything else?’ Rasbach asks.

She nods. ‘Before the headmistress took Anne away, Anne looked at me, like she was completely normal, and said, ‘What happened?’

Rasbach says, ‘What did you think when she said that?’

‘I thought she was crazy.’

The mailman is outside the front door trying to push the volumes of mail through the slot in the door. Anne stands in the kitchen and watches. She could open the door and take it from him, to make his job easier, but she doesn’t want to. She knows all that hate mail is for her. He looks up then, through the window, and sees her. Their eyes meet for just a second, and then he looks down and works on pushing more envelopes through the slot. She and this same mailman used to exchange pleasantries, less than a week ago. But everything is different now. The letters have dropped onto the floor by the door in a jumbled pile. He’s struggling to push a large, thick envelope through the slot, but it won’t go. He pushes it halfway in and then turns and goes back down the walk and on to the next house.

Anne stands staring at the pile on the floor, at the package stuffed in the slot. The package is holding the slot open. She goes to the door and tries to pull it through. It’s one of those bubble envelopes. It’s stuck, and she can’t unwedge it.
She will have to open the door and grab it from the outside. She peers through the window to see if anyone is out there. The reporters who were there earlier in the morning while the police were packing up have cleared off. Anne opens the door and yanks the package out of the slot, quickly slips back inside, closes the door, and relocks it.