The Couple Next Door (2 page)

‘What?’ Marco says, coming up behind her, his voice tense.

Anne is staring. The front door is ajar; it is open about three inches.

‘I know I locked it!’ Anne says, her voice shrill.

Marco says tersely, ‘Maybe you forgot. You’ve had a lot to drink.’

But Anne isn’t listening. She’s inside and running up the staircase and down the hall to the baby’s room, with Marco right at her heels.

When she gets to the baby’s room and sees the empty crib, she screams.

ANNE FEELS HER
scream inside her own head and reverberating off the walls – her scream is everywhere. Then she falls silent and stands in front of the empty crib, rigid, her hand to her mouth. Marco fumbles with the light switch. They both stare at the empty crib where their baby should be. It is impossible that she not be there. There is no way Cora could have gotten out of the crib by herself. She is barely six months old.

‘Call the police,’ Anne whispers, then throws up, the vomit cascading over her fingers and onto the hardwood floor as she bends over. The baby’s room, painted a soft butter yellow with stencils of baby lambs frolicking on the walls, immediately fills with the smell of bile and panic.

Marco doesn’t move. Anne looks up at him. He is paralyzed, in shock, staring at the empty crib, as if he can’t believe it. Anne sees the fear and guilt in his eyes and starts to wail – a horrible keening sound, like an animal in pain.

Marco still doesn’t budge. Anne bolts across the hall to their bedroom, grabs the phone off the bedside table, and dials 911, her hands shaking, getting vomit all over the phone. Marco finally snaps out of it. She can hear him walking
rapidly around the second floor of the house while she stares across the hall at the empty crib. He checks the bathroom, at the top of the stairs, then passes quickly by her on his way to search the spare bedroom and then the last room down the hall, the one they have turned into an office. But even as he does, Anne wonders in a detached way why he is looking there. It’s as if part of her mind has split off and is thinking logically. It’s not like their baby is mobile on her own. She is not in the bathroom, or the spare bedroom, or the office.

Someone has taken her.

When the emergency operator answers, Anne cries, ‘Someone has taken our baby!’ She is barely able to calm herself enough to answer the operator’s questions.

‘I understand, ma’am. Try to stay calm. The police are on their way,’ the operator assures her.

Anne hangs up the phone. Her whole body is trembling. She feels like she is going to be sick again. It occurs to her how it will look. They’d left the baby alone in the house. Was that illegal? It must be. How will they explain it?

Marco appears at the bedroom door, pale and sick-looking.

‘This is your fault!’ Anne screams, wild-eyed, and pushes past him. She rushes into the bathroom at the top of the stairs and throws up again, this time into the pedestal sink, then washes the mess from her shaking hands and rinses her mouth. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Marco is standing right behind her. Their eyes meet in the mirror.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.’

And he is sorry, she can tell. Even so, Anne brings her hand up and smashes at the reflection of his face in the mirror. The mirror shatters, and she breaks down, sobbing. He tries to take her in his arms, but she pushes him away and runs
downstairs. Her hand is bleeding, leaving a trail of blood along the banister.

An air of unreality permeates everything that happens next. Anne and Marco’s comfortable home immediately becomes a crime scene.

Anne is sitting on the sofa in the living room. Someone has placed a blanket around her shoulders, but she’s still trembling. She is in shock. Police cars are parked on the street outside the house, their red lights flashing, pulsing through the front window and circling the pale walls. Anne sits immobile on the sofa and stares ahead as if hypnotized by them.

Marco, his voice breaking, has given the police a quick description of the baby – six months old, blond, blue eyes, about sixteen pounds, wearing a disposable diaper and a plain, pale-pink onesie. A light summer baby blanket, solid white, is also missing from the crib.

The house is swarming with uniformed police officers. They fan out and methodically begin to search the house. Some of them wear latex gloves and carry evidence kits. Anne and Marco’s fast, frantic race through the house in the short minutes before the police arrived had turned up nothing. The forensic team is moving slowly. Clearly they are not looking for Cora; they are looking for evidence. The baby is already gone.

Marco sits down on the sofa next to Anne and puts his arm around her, holds her close. She wants to pull away, but she doesn’t. She lets his arm stay there. How would it look if she pulled away? She can smell that he’s been drinking.

Anne now blames herself. It’s her fault. She wants to blame Marco, but she agreed to leave the baby alone. She should have stayed home. No – she should have brought Cora with them next door, to hell with Cynthia. She doubts Cynthia
would have actually thrown them out and had no party for Graham at all. This realization comes too late.

They will be judged, by the police and by everybody else. Serves them right, leaving their baby alone. She would think that, too, if it had happened to someone else. She knows how judgmental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else. She thinks of her own mothers’ group, meeting with their babies once a week in one another’s homes for coffee and gossip, what they will say about her.

Someone else has arrived – a composed man in a well-cut dark suit. The uniformed officers treat him with deference. Anne looks up, meets his piercing blue eyes, and wonders who he is.

He approaches and sits down in one of the armchairs across from Anne and Marco and introduces himself as Detective Rasbach. Then he leans forward. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Anne immediately forgets the detective’s name, or rather it hasn’t registered at all. She only catches ‘Detective’. She looks at him, encouraged by the frank intelligence behind his eyes. He will help them. He will help them get Cora back. She tries to think. But she can’t think. She is frantic and numb at the same time. She simply stares into the detective’s sharp eyes and lets Marco do the talking.

‘We were next door,’ Marco begins, clearly agitated. ‘At the neighbors’.’ Then he stops.

‘Yes?’ the detective says.

Marco hesitates.

‘Where was the baby?’ the detective asks.

Marco doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to say.

Anne, pulling herself together, answers for him, the tears spilling down her face. ‘We left her here, in her crib, with the monitor on.’ She watches the detective for his reaction –
What
awful parents
– but he betrays nothing. ‘We had the monitor on over there, and we checked on her constantly. Every half hour.’ She glances at Marco. ‘We never thought . . .’ but she can’t finish. Her hand goes to her mouth, her fingers press against her lips.

‘When was the last time you checked on her?’ the detective asks, taking a small notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

‘I checked on her at midnight,’ Anne says. ‘I remember the time. We were checking on her every half hour, and it was my turn. She was fine. She was sleeping.’

‘I checked on her again at twelve thirty,’ Marco says.

‘You’re absolutely certain of the time?’ the detective asks. Marco nods; he is staring at his feet. ‘And that was the last time anyone checked on her, before you came home?’

‘Yes,’ Marco says, looking up at the detective, running a nervous hand through his dark hair. ‘I went to check on her at twelve thirty. It was my turn. We were keeping to a schedule.’

Anne nods.

‘How much have you had to drink tonight?’ the detective asks Marco.

Marco flushes. ‘They were having a small dinner party, next door. I had a few,’ he admits.

The detective turns to Anne. ‘Have you had anything to drink tonight, Mrs Conti?’

Her face burns. Nursing mothers aren’t supposed to drink. She wants to lie. ‘I had some wine, with dinner. I don’t know how much exactly,’ she says. ‘It was a dinner party.’ She wonders how drunk she looks, what this detective must think of her. She feels like he can see right through her. She remembers the vomit upstairs in the baby’s room. Can he smell drink on her the way she can smell it on Marco? She remembers the
shattered mirror in the upstairs bathroom, her bloodied hand, now wrapped in a clean dish towel. She’s ashamed of how they must look to him, drunken parents who abandoned their six-month-old daughter. She wonders if they will be charged with anything.

‘How is that even relevant?’ Marco says to the detective.

‘It might affect the reliability of your observations,’ the detective says evenly. He is not judgmental. He is merely after the facts, it seems. ‘What time did you leave the party?’ he asks.

‘It was almost one thirty,’ Anne answers. ‘I kept checking the time on my cell. I wanted to go. I . . . I should have checked on her at one – it was my turn – but I thought we’d be leaving any minute, and I was trying to get Marco to hurry up.’ She feels agonizingly guilty. If she had checked on her daughter at one o’clock, would she be gone now? But then there were so many ways this could have been prevented.

‘You placed the call to 911 at one twenty-seven,’ the detective says.

‘The front door was open,’ Anne says, remembering.

‘The front door was open?’ the detective repeats.

‘It was open three or four inches. I’m sure I locked it behind me when I checked on her at midnight,’ Anne says.

‘How sure?’

Anne thinks about it.
Was
she sure? She had been positive, when she saw the open front door, that she’d locked it. But now, with what has happened, how can she be sure of anything? She turns to her husband. ‘Are you sure you didn’t leave the door open?’

‘I’m sure,’ he says curtly. ‘I never used the front door. I was going through the back to check on her, remember?’

‘You used the back door,’ the detective repeats.

‘I may not have locked it every time,’ Marco admits, and covers his face with his hands.

Detective Rasbach observes the couple closely. A baby is missing. Taken from her crib – if the parents, Marco and Anne Conti, are to be believed – between approximately 12:30 a.m. and 1:27 a.m., by a person or persons unknown, while the parents were at a party next door. The front door had been found partly open. The back door might have been left unlocked by the father – it had in fact been found closed but unlocked when the police arrived. There is no denying the distress of the mother. And of the father, who looks badly shaken. But the whole situation doesn’t feel right. Rasbach wonders what is really going on.

Detective Jennings waves him over silently. ‘Excuse me,’ Detective Rasbach says, and leaves the stricken parents for a moment.

‘What is it?’ Rasbach asks quietly.

Jennings holds up a small vial of pills. ‘Found these in the bathroom cabinet,’ he says.

Rasbach takes the clear plastic container from Jennings and studies the label:
ANNE CONTI, SERTRALINE, 50 MG
. Sertraline, Rasbach knows, is a powerful antidepressant.

‘The bathroom mirror upstairs is smashed,’ Jennings tells him.

Rasbach nods. He hasn’t been upstairs yet. ‘Anything else?’

Jennings shakes his head. ‘Nothing so far. House looks clean. Nothing else taken, apparently. We’ll know more from forensics in a few hours.’

‘Okay,’ Rasbach says, handing the vial of pills back to Jennings.

He returns to the couple on the sofa and resumes his
questioning. He looks at the husband. ‘Marco – is it okay if I call you Marco? – what did you do after you checked on the baby at twelve thirty?’

‘I went back to the party,’ Marco says. ‘I had a cigarette in the neighbors’ backyard.’

‘Were you alone when you had your cigarette?’

‘No. Cynthia came out with me.’ Marco flushes; Rasbach notices. ‘She’s the neighbor who had us over for dinner.’

Rasbach turns his attention to the wife. She’s an attractive woman, with fine features and glossy brown hair, but right now she looks colorless. ‘You don’t smoke, Mrs Conti?’

‘No, I don’t. But Cynthia does,’ Anne says. ‘I was sitting at the dining-room table with Graham, her husband. He hates cigarette smoke, and it was his birthday, and I thought it would be rude to leave him alone inside.’ And then, inexplicably, she volunteers, ‘Cynthia had been flirting with Marco all evening, and I felt bad for Graham.’

‘I see,’ Rasbach says. He studies the husband, who looks utterly miserable. He also looks nervous and guilty. Rasbach turns to him. ‘So you were outside in the backyard next door shortly after twelve thirty. Any idea how long you were out there?’

Marco shakes his head helplessly. ‘Maybe fifteen minutes, give or take?’

‘Did you see anything or hear anything?’

‘What do you mean?’ The husband seems to be in some kind of shock. He is slurring his words slightly. Rasbach wonders just how much alcohol he’s had.

Rasbach spells it out for him. ‘Someone apparently took your baby sometime between twelve thirty and one twenty-seven. You were outside in the backyard next door for a few minutes shortly after twelve thirty.’ He watches the husband,
waits for him to put it together. ‘To my mind it’s unlikely that anyone would carry a baby out your front door in the middle of the night.’

‘But the front door was open,’ Anne says.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ Marco says.

‘There’s a lane running behind the houses on this side of the street,’ Detective Rasbach says. Marco nods. ‘Did you notice anyone using the lane at that time? Did you hear anything, a car?’

‘I . . . I don’t think so,’ Marco says. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see or hear anything.’ He covers his face with his hands again. ‘I wasn’t paying attention.’

Detective Rasbach had already checked out the area quickly before coming inside and interviewing the parents. He thinks it unlikely – but not impossible – that a stranger would carry a sleeping child out the front door of a house on a street like this one and risk being seen. The houses are attached row houses set close to the sidewalk. The street is well lit, and there is a fair bit of vehicular and foot traffic, even late at night. So it is odd – perhaps he’s being deliberately misled? – that the front door was open. The forensics team is dusting it for fingerprints now, but somehow Rasbach doesn’t think they’ll find anything.