The Couple Next Door (23 page)

He thinks,
This is all
my
fault.

AFTER ANNE FINALLY
falls into a restless sleep, Marco lies awake in bed beside her for a long time, trying to figure it all out. He wishes he could discuss the entire mess with her. He misses how they used to talk, about everything, all their plans. But he can’t talk to her about anything now. When he does sleep, his dreams are terrifying; he wakes at four in the morning with a start, his heart pounding and sweating all over, the sheets soaked.

This is what he knows: Richard is negotiating with the kidnappers. He and Alice are going to pay whatever it takes to get Cora back. Marco has to hope and pray that Richard will be successful where he was not. Richard has Derek’s cell phone, and he was
expecting
it to be Marco on the other end. Richard – and Alice – know Marco was colluding with Derek, that he kidnapped his own child for money. Marco’s first thought, that Richard had killed Derek and taken his phone, now seems absurd. How could Richard possibly have known about Derek? Was Richard capable of bashing in another man’s head? Marco doesn’t think so, even though he hates the bastard.

If it’s true that the kidnappers sent Richard the phone,
that’s good. That means the police don’t know about it – not yet anyway. But Richard threatened him. What had he said, exactly? Marco can’t remember. He must talk to Richard and persuade him not to tell the police – or Anne – about Marco’s role in the kidnapping. How will he manage that? He’ll have to convince them that Anne couldn’t withstand the shock, that exposing Marco as being involved in Cora’s disappearance would utterly destroy her.

Anne’s parents would hold it against him forever, but at least maybe he and Anne and Cora could be a family again. If they got their baby back, Anne would be happy. He could start over, work his ass off to provide for them. Maybe Richard doesn’t actually want to expose him. It would embarrass them socially, hurt his reputation in the business community. Maybe all Richard wants is to have dirty secrets to hold over Marco for the rest of his life. That would be just like Richard. Marco starts to breathe a little easier.

He has to get rid of the phone. What if Anne hits redial and gets her father? Then he remembers she doesn’t know the pattern to open it. Still, he must get rid of it. It ties him to Cora’s disappearance. He can’t have the police getting their hands on it.

There’s still the problem of Cynthia and her video. He has no idea what to do about that. She’ll keep quiet in the short term, as long as he can convince her he’ll be able to get her the money she wants.

Jesus, what a mess.

Marco gets up in the dark and moves quietly around the carpeted bedroom, careful not to wake his wife. He dresses quickly, pulling on the same jeans and T-shirt he wore the day before. He then goes down the hall to the office and removes the phone from the desk drawer where he put it last night. He
turns it on and checks it one final time. Nothing. There’s no need to keep the phone. If he needs to talk to Richard, he’ll do it directly. The phone is the only physical evidence, besides Cynthia’s video, that there is against him.

One thing at a time. He must get rid of the cell phone.

He grabs the keys to the car from the bowl by the front door. He considers leaving a note for Anne but figures he’ll be home before she wakes, so he doesn’t bother. He slips quietly out the back door and walks across the yard and into the garage and gets into the Audi.

It’s chilly, just before dawn. He hasn’t made a conscious decision about what to do with the phone, but now he finds himself driving to the lake. It’s still dark. While he drives, alone on the empty highway, he thinks about Cynthia. It takes a certain kind of person to blackmail another. He wonders what else she’s done. He wonders if he can get something on her that’s as damning as what she has on him. Balance the scales. If he can’t find something useful on her, maybe he can frame her in some way. He would need help with that. He recoils inwardly. Crime has not worked for him, and yet he seems to be digging himself in deeper and deeper.

He holds on to the idea that he may be able to get some semblance of his life back – if Cora is returned to them unharmed, if Richard keeps his secret, if he can get something on Cynthia, one way or another, to make her back off. There’s no way he can pay her and keep on paying her. He can’t be in her power.

But even if he can do all these things, he will never, ever have any peace of mind. He knows that. He will live for Cora, and for Anne. He will make sure he gives them as happy a life as possible. He owes them that. It doesn’t matter whether he is happy or not; he has forfeited any right to happiness.

He parks the car in his favorite spot under the tree, facing the lake. He sits there for a few minutes inside the car, remembering the last time he was here. So much has happened since then. The last time he was here, just a few days ago, he was so sure he was going to get Cora back. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, he’d have his baby back now, and the money, and nobody would have known a thing.

What a fucking mess things have turned out to be.

Finally he gets out of the car. It’s cool in the early morning by the lake. The sky is beginning to brighten. The cell phone is in his pocket. He starts walking down to the beach. He’s going to walk to the end of the dock and throw the cell phone into the lake where no one will ever find it. That will be one thing off his plate.

He stands at the end of the dock for some time, full of regret. Then he takes the cell phone out of his pocket. He wipes the whole thing down for fingerprints with the edge of his jacket, just in case. He was a good ballplayer as a teenager. He hurls the phone as hard as he can into the lake. It lands with a loud
plop.
Ever-growing circles radiate outward from where it landed in the water. It reminds him of when he used to throw rocks in the lake as a kid. How far away that seems now.

Marco feels relieved to be rid of the phone. He turns and heads back to his car. It is quite light out now. With a start, he notices that there is another car in the lot, a car that wasn’t there before. He doesn’t know how long it has been there. How did he not notice the lights when it came in? Maybe the car just arrived and didn’t have its headlights on.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself, although his skin crawls. It doesn’t matter if someone saw him throwing something into the lake in the early morning. He’s too far away to be recognized.

But his car is right there, with the license number in plain view. Marco is nervous now. As he gets closer, he gets a better look at the other car. It’s a police car, an unmarked police car. You can always tell them by the grille on the front. Marco feels sick. Why is there a police car here, now? Was he followed? Did the police see him throw something into the lake? Marco is sweating in the cold and can feel his heart beating in his ears. He tries to walk normally to his car, keeping as far away from the police car as possible without looking like he’s trying to avoid it. The window rolls down. Fuck.

‘Everything all right?’ the officer asks, his head outside the window, getting a good look.

Marco stops, frozen in place. He doesn’t recognize the officer’s face – it’s not Rasbach or one of his men. For one surreal moment, Marco had expected it to be Rasbach who popped his head out the open window. ‘Yeah, sure. Couldn’t sleep,’ Marco says.

The officer nods, rolls up his window, and drives off.

Marco gets into the car, shaking uncontrollably. It’s a few minutes before he’s able to drive.

At breakfast Anne and Marco don’t talk much. He is pale and distant after his experience at the lake. She is fragile, missing her baby, thinking about the day before. She still doesn’t believe Marco about Cynthia. Why was he coming out of her house yesterday? If he lied about this, what else has he lied about? She doesn’t trust him. But they have reached an uneasy truce. They need each other. Maybe they even still care for each other, in spite of everything.

‘I need to go back to the office this morning,’ Marco tells her, his voice a little unsteady. He clears his throat loudly.

‘It’s Sunday,’ she says.

‘I know, but I should probably go in, get caught up on some projects that are overdue.’ He takes another gulp of coffee.

She nods. She thinks it will do him good – he looks awful. It will take his mind off what they’re dealing with, even if only for a short time. She is jealous. She doesn’t have the luxury of throwing herself into work to forget, even for a moment. Everything in the house reminds her of Cora, of what they’ve lost. The high chair, sitting empty in the kitchen. The colorful plastic toys in the bin in the living room. The play mat she used to put Cora down on with its dangling overhead toys that the baby loved to reach for, cooing and giggling. It doesn’t matter where she goes in the house, Cora is everywhere. There is no escape, no matter how temporary, for her.

Marco is worried about her, she can tell. ‘What will you do when I’m gone?’ he asks.

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe you should leave a message with that other doctor, the one who’s filling in for Dr Lumsden. Try to make an appointment for early in the week,’ Marco suggests.

‘Okay,’ Anne says listlessly.

But when Marco leaves, she doesn’t call the doctor’s office. She wanders around the house thinking about Cora. She imagines her dead, in a Dumpster somewhere, crawling with maggots. She imagines her in a shallow grave in the woods, dug up and gnawed on by animals. She thinks of newspaper stories she’s read about lost children. She can’t get the horror out of her head. She feels queasy and panicky. She looks at herself in the mirror, and her eyes are huge.

Maybe it’s better that she not know what happened to her baby. But she
needs
to know. For the rest of her life, her tortured mind will supply hideous ideas that may be worse than
the truth. Maybe Cora’s death was quick. Anne prays that it was. But she’ll probably never know for sure.

From the moment her daughter was born, Anne knew where Cora was every minute of her short life, and now she has no idea where she is. Because she is a bad mother. She is a bad, broken mother who didn’t love her daughter enough. She left her alone in the house. She hit her. No wonder her daughter is gone. There is a reason for everything, and the reason her baby is gone is that Anne does not deserve her.

Now Anne is not just wandering around the house, she is moving faster and faster. Her mind is racing, thoughts stumbling over one another. She feels intense guilt about her daughter. She doesn’t know whether to believe Marco when he tells her that Cora was alive at twelve thirty. She can’t believe anything he says – he’s a liar. She must have hurt Cora. She must have killed her own baby. There is no other possibility that makes sense.

It’s a terrible possibility, a terrible burden. She must tell someone. She tried to tell Marco what she did, but he wouldn’t listen. He wants to pretend it didn’t happen; he wants to pretend that she’s not capable of harming her own baby. She remembers the way he looked at her when she told him she hit Cora, the disbelief.

He might feel differently if he’d seen her slap Cora.

He might feel different if he knew her history.

But he doesn’t know, because she has never told him.

There was the incident at St Mildred’s – the one she has no memory of. She remembers only the aftermath – being in the girls’ bathroom, the blood on the wall, Susan slumped on the floor as if she were dead, and everyone – Janice, Debbie, the science teacher, and the headmistress – all looking at her in horror. She’d had no idea what happened.

After that, her mother had taken her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed a dissociative disorder. Anne remembers being in his office, frozen in her seat, her mother sitting anxiously by her side. Anne was terrified by the diagnosis, terrified and ashamed.

‘I don’t understand,’ her mother said to the doctor. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I know,’ the psychiatrist said gently, ‘that it seems frightening, but it’s not as unusual as you might think. Think of it as a coping mechanism – an imperfect one. The person disconnects from reality for a brief time.’ He turned to Anne; she refused to look at him. ‘You might feel detached from yourself, as if things are happening to someone else. You might perceive things as distorted or unreal. Or you might experience a fugue state, as you did – a brief period of amnesia.’

‘Is this going to happen again?’ Alice asked the doctor.

‘I don’t know. Has it happened before?’

It had happened before, but never so shockingly.

‘There have been times,’ Alice admitted tentatively, ‘ever since she was a little girl, when she seemed to do things and not remember doing them. I . . . I thought at first she was just saying that so she wouldn’t get in trouble. But then I realized she couldn’t control it.’ She paused. ‘But there’s never been anything like this.’

The doctor clasped his hands and gazed at Anne intently, asking her mother, ‘Has there been any trauma in her life?’

‘Trauma?’ Alice echoed. ‘Of course not.’

The doctor surveyed her skeptically. ‘Dissociative disorder is usually the result of some sort of repressed trauma.’

‘Oh, God,’ Alice said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows at her and waited.

‘Her father,’ Alice said suddenly.

‘Her father?’

‘She watched her father die. It was horrible. She adored him.’

Anne’s eyes were fixed firmly on the wall in front of her; she was perfectly still.

‘How did he die?’ the doctor asked.

‘I was out shopping. He was in the house, playing with her. He had a massive heart attack. He must have died almost instantly. She saw it. By the time I got home, it was too late. Anne was crying and pressing numbers on the phone, but she didn’t know what numbers to press. Anyway, it didn’t matter – no one could have saved him. She was only four years old.’

The doctor nodded sympathetically. ‘I see,’ he said. He sat quietly for a moment.

Alice said, ‘She had nightmares for a long time. I didn’t let her talk about it – maybe that was wrong, but she would get so upset and I was trying to help. Whenever she brought it up, I tried to take her mind off it.’ She added, ‘She seemed to blame herself, for not knowing what to do. But it wasn’t her fault. She was so young. And we were told that nothing could have saved him, even if the ambulance had been right there.’