The Couple Next Door (30 page)

‘You’re a liar!’ Marco says in desperation. ‘You know where Cora is. Give her back! Look at your daughter! Look at her! Give her back her baby!’

Anne has lifted her head and is now looking from her husband to her father. Her face is anguished.

‘Shall we call the police, then?’ Richard challenges. ‘Let them sort it all out?’

Marco thinks rapidly. If Anne won’t admit she knows Derek was an associate of her father’s, or if she’s not sure, Marco doesn’t have a leg to stand on. The police already see him as their prime suspect. Richard, the respected, successful
businessman, can hand him over on a silver platter. Anne and her father both know that Marco took Cora from her crib and gave her to Derek. Marco still believes Richard is behind all this. But he has nothing on Richard.

Marco is fucked.

And they still don’t have Cora.

Marco believes that Richard will keep Cora hidden forever if necessary, just so that he can win.

How can Marco make Richard
think
he’s won, so that he’ll give Cora back?

Should Marco confess to the police? Is that what Richard wants? Perhaps once he’s arrested, the ‘kidnappers’ will miraculously get back in touch with Richard and return the baby unharmed. Because despite what Richard says in front of Anne, Marco knows Richard wants him hung out to dry for this. He wants Marco to go to jail but doesn’t want to look like he’s the one who turned him in.

‘Fine, call the police,’ Marco says.

Anne starts to cry. Her mother rubs her back.

Richard reaches for his cell phone. ‘It’s late, but I’m sure Detective Rasbach won’t mind coming out,’ he says.

Marco knows he is about to be arrested. He needs a lawyer. A good one. There’s still some equity in the house, if Anne will agree to let him mortgage it further. But why would any woman agree to mortgage her house to defend her husband on charges of kidnapping their own child? Even if she
were
willing, her father would dissuade her.

As if reading Marco’s mind, Richard says, ‘I need hardly tell you that we won’t be paying for your defense.’

They wait in tense silence for the detective to arrive. Alice, who would normally busy herself making tea for everyone, doesn’t even budge from the sofa.

Marco is desolate. Richard has won, the manipulative bastard. Anne has fallen into the family fold one last time, and forever. As long as she stands by her parents, everything will work out for her. Richard will find a way to return her baby to her. He will be a hero. They’ll take care of her and the baby financially while Marco rots in prison. All she has to do is sacrifice him. She has made her choice. He doesn’t blame her.

At last the doorbell rings. Everyone jumps. Richard gets up to answer the door, while the others remain sitting stone-faced in the living room.

Marco decides that he will confess everything. Then, after Cora’s safe return, he’ll tell the police about Richard’s role in all of this. They may not believe him, but surely they can investigate him. Maybe they can find a connection between Richard and Derek Honig. But Marco is pretty sure that Richard will have covered his tracks.

Richard ushers Detective Rasbach into the living room. The detective seems to take in the situation at a glance: he looks at Anne weeping in her mother’s arms at one end of the large sofa, Marco sitting at the other end. Marco knows how he must look to the detective – pale and sweating, he must look like an absolute wreck.

Richard offers the detective a chair and says, ‘I’m sorry, I know you don’t like it when we deal with the kidnappers and don’t tell you until after the fact, but we were afraid to do anything else.’

Rasbach looks grim. ‘You say they phoned you?’

‘Yes, yesterday. I made arrangements to meet them with the additional money earlier this evening, but they didn’t show.’

Marco watches Richard. Wonders what the hell he’s doing.
Phoned him?
Either Richard is lying to the police or he’s lying
to Marco and Anne. When is he going to tell the detective that Marco was the one who took Cora from the house?

Rasbach reaches into his jacket and takes out his notebook. He carefully writes down everything Richard tells him. Richard says nothing about Marco. He doesn’t even look at Marco. Is this all for Anne? Marco wonders. Is he showing her that he’s deliberately protecting Marco, even though they know what he did?
What is Richard’s game here?
Maybe Richard never had any intention of telling the police what Marco did – he just wanted to watch him twist in the wind. The absolute bastard.

Or is he waiting for Marco to throw himself on his sword? To see if he’s got the guts to do it? Is this a test, one he must pass in order to get Cora back?

‘Is that everything?’ Rasbach says finally, standing up, flipping his notebook closed.

‘I think so,’ Richard says. He plays the part of the concerned parent and grandparent perfectly. Smooth as glass. A practiced liar.

Richard sees the detective to the door while Marco slumps back in the sofa, exhausted and confused. If this was a test, he has just failed it.

Anne meets his eyes, for only a moment, then looks away.

Richard returns to the living room. ‘There, now do you believe me?’ he says to Marco. ‘I destroyed the note to protect you. I just lied to the police. I told him the kidnappers called me – to protect you. I didn’t tell them about the note and the cell phone sent to me. Both of which incriminated you. I’m not the bad guy here, Marco. You are.’

Anne pulls away from her mother’s embrace and stares at Marco.

‘Although I don’t know why I do it,’ Richard adds. ‘I don’t know why you married this guy, Anne.’

Marco needs to get out of here, so he can think. He doesn’t know what Richard is up to. ‘Come on, Anne, let’s go home,’ he says.

Anne has turned away again and doesn’t look at him.

‘Anne?’

‘I don’t think she’s going anywhere,’ Richard says.

Marco’s heart sinks at the thought of going home without Anne. Evidently Richard
doesn’t
want him to go to jail. Perhaps Richard doesn’t want the public humiliation of having a convicted criminal for a son-in-law. Maybe the whole time all he wanted was for Anne to know what kind of man Marco was, to separate them. It looks as though he’s succeeded.

They all look at him, as if waiting for him to leave. Marco senses the hostility and reaches for his cell to call a cab. When his cab arrives, he is surprised when the three of them follow him outside, perhaps to make sure he leaves. They stand in the drive, watching him go.

Marco looks back at his wife, her father and mother on either side of her. He cannot read her expression.

Marco thinks,
She will never come home to me again. I’m all alone.

Rasbach is uneasy on the drive back from the Drieses’ mansion. He has a lot of unanswered questions. The most important one being this: Where is the missing baby? He seems no closer to a solution.

He thinks about Marco. The haunted look on his face. Marco was exhausted, spent. Not that Rasbach feels any particular sympathy for him. But he knows there’s more to this than meets the eye. And he wants to find out what it is.

Rasbach has been suspicious of Richard Dries almost from the start. To his mind – perhaps it’s a prejudice, stemming
from Rasbach’s own working-class background – nobody makes that much money without taking advantage of somebody. It’s much easier to make money if you don’t care who you hurt. If you have scruples, it’s much harder to get rich.

As far as Rasbach’s concerned, Marco doesn’t fit the profile of a kidnapper. To Rasbach, Marco has always seemed like a desperate man thrown up against the wall. Someone who might do the wrong thing if pushed to it. Richard Dries, however, is a savvy businessman, a man of considerable wealth, which, rightly or wrongly, raises all sorts of red flags for Rasbach. Sometimes these people have a kind of arrogance that makes them think they’re above the law.

Richard Dries is a man who bears watching.

Which is why Rasbach has put a wiretap on his phones.

He knows that the kidnappers have not phoned him. Richard is lying.

He decides to have a couple of officers quietly watch the house.

IN HER OWN
bedroom – she and Richard have had separate bedrooms for years now – Alice paces back and forth on the plush carpet. She has been married to Richard for a very long time. She wouldn’t have believed this of him only a couple of years ago. But now he is a man with all kinds of secrets. Horrible, unforgivable secrets, if what she’s just heard is true.

She has known for some time that Richard has been seeing another woman. It wasn’t the first time he’d cheated on her. But this time she knew it was different. She felt him slipping away from her, as if he already had one foot out the door. As if he were coming up with an exit plan. She’d never thought before that he would actually leave her; she didn’t think he had the guts.

Because he knew that if he left her, he wouldn’t get a cent. That was the beauty of the prenup. If he left her, he wouldn’t get half her fortune – he wouldn’t get anything. And he needed her money, because he didn’t have much left of his own. Like Marco’s, Richard’s business had not been doing well in recent years. He kept the unprofitable business going
so people wouldn’t know that he’d failed, so he could pretend to be the big businessman. She’d been pouring her own money into the company just to help him save face. She hadn’t minded at first, because she loved him.

She doesn’t love him anymore. Not after this.

She’s known for months that this affair was more serious than the others. In the beginning she’d turned a blind eye, waiting for it to end, as the others had. After all, the physical part of their marriage had been over long ago. But as the affair continued, she became obsessed with finding out who this other woman was.

Richard was good at hiding his tracks. She couldn’t trip him up. Finally she’d overcome her distaste and hired a private detective. She’d hired the most expensive one she could find, assuming, rightly, that he would be the most discreet. They met on a Friday afternoon to go over his report. She thought she’d been prepared, but what the detective had found shocked her.

The woman her husband was seeing was that woman living next door to her daughter – Cynthia Stillwell. A woman almost half his age. A friend of his daughter’s. A woman he’d met at a party at his daughter’s house. It was disgraceful.

Alice sat in Starbucks, staring at her veined hands clutching her purse, as the high-priced private detective with the Rolex reviewed his findings. She looked at the photos – and quickly looked away. He went over the timelines – places and dates. She paid him in cash. She felt ill.

Then she went home and decided to bide her time. She would wait for Richard to tell her he was leaving her. She didn’t know what he was going to do for money, and she didn’t care. She only knew that if he asked her for any, she would say no. She’d asked the private detective to keep an eye on her bank
accounts, to see if Richard was siphoning money off her. She’d decided to keep the detective on retainer. But they wouldn’t meet at the same Starbucks again; she’d find someplace more private. The whole experience had left her feeling dirty.

Then Cora had been taken that very night – the same day she’d met with the private investigator – and Richard’s sordid affair had been thrust aside by the horror of the kidnapping. Alice had feared at first that perhaps her daughter had harmed her baby, and that she and Marco might have hidden the body to keep from being discovered. Anne had that illness, after all, and she was struggling with motherhood. She was under a lot of stress, and Alice knew that stress was a trigger for someone like Anne. Then – it had been such a relief – the onesie and the note from the kidnappers had arrived.

What a roller coaster it’s been. Believing they would get Cora back that day, then losing her again. Through it all, the grief and fear for her baby granddaughter and the concern about her daughter’s fragile emotional state.

And then . . . tonight.

It wasn’t until tonight that she figured it all out. She’d been shocked to hear Marco admit that he’d taken Cora himself. More shocked still to hear Marco accuse her husband of setting him up. But then, as she sat there with her arms around her shattered daughter, it all started to make an awful sense.

Richard’s grand plan. The kidnapping. Setting Marco up to take the fall. Where was the five million? She was pretty sure Richard had it hidden somewhere. And then there’s the second two million, which has been sitting ready in the back of the closet in the front hall, in another gym bag, waiting for the next attempt. She’d never seen the note, or the cell phone. Richard told her he’d destroyed them.

Richard was going to relieve her of seven million dollars
under the guise of getting her only grandchild back from kidnappers. The son of a bitch.

So he could leave her for that appalling Cynthia.

Bad enough that he was unfaithful, that he was leaving her for a woman as young as her daughter. Bad enough that he was trying to take her money.
But how dare he hurt her daughter this way?

And where is her granddaughter?

She reaches for her own cell phone and calls Detective Rasbach. She has things to tell him now.

She would also like to see a photograph of this man Derek Honig.

Anne spends a restless night in her old room, in her old bed. She lies awake all night, listening and thinking. On top of the aching loss of her child, she feels betrayed by everyone. Betrayed by Marco for his part in the kidnapping. Betrayed by her father for his part, even more despicable if Marco is right about him. And she’s sure Marco is right, because her father denied knowing Derek Honig. If her father weren’t involved in Cora’s disappearance, he would have no reason to deny knowing Honig. She’d had her answer. So when he’d asked her, she’d pretended that she didn’t recognize Derek, that she’d never seen him before.

She wonders how much her mother knows – or suspects.

Anne almost ruined everything last night, at the beginning. But then she got hold of herself, remembered what she had to do. She feels bad for Marco – but not that bad, given what he’s done – for the way she didn’t speak up last night, but she wants her child back. She is certain she has seen the dead man before, several times, at this very house, years ago. He and her father used to talk out back near the trees, late at night
after she’d gone to bed. She would watch them from her window. She never saw Derek Honig with her father sitting around the pool having drinks, or with anyone else present, not even her mother. He would always arrive late, after dark, and then they’d go out back to talk, near the trees. She knew instinctively as a child not to ask her father about it, that what they were doing was secret. What sorts of things have they done together over the years, if they’ve kidnapped her child? What is her father capable of?