The Couple Next Door (4 page)

They both stare at him; such an idea is preposterous. And yet here they are.

‘Have you noticed anyone hanging around lately, anyone showing interest in your baby?’

They both shake their heads.

‘Do you have any idea, any idea at all, who might want to do you harm?’ He looks from Anne to Marco.

The two parents shake their heads again, equally at a loss.

‘Please, give it some thought,’ Rasbach says. ‘Take your time. There has to be a reason. There’s always a reason – we just have to find out what it is.’

Marco looks like he’s about to speak, then thinks better of it.

‘What is it?’ Rasbach asks. ‘This is no time to hold back.’

‘Your parents,’ Marco says finally, turning to his wife.

‘What about my parents?’ she says, clearly surprised.

‘They have money.’

‘So?’ She doesn’t seem to understand what he’s getting at.

‘They have a
lot
of money,’ Marco says.

Here we go
, Rasbach thinks.

Anne looks at her husband as if dumbfounded. She is, possibly, an excellent actress. ‘What do you mean?’ she says. ‘You don’t think someone took her for . . .’ Rasbach watches the two of them carefully. The expression on her face changes. ‘That would be good,’ she says, looking up at him, ‘wouldn’t it? If all they want is money, I could get my baby back? They won’t hurt her?’

The hope in her voice is heartbreaking. Rasbach is almost convinced that she has nothing to do with this.

‘She must be so scared,’ she says, and then she falls completely apart, sobbing uncontrollably.

Rasbach wants to ask her about her parents. Time is of the essence in kidnapping cases. Instead he turns to Marco. ‘Who are her parents?’ Rasbach asks.

‘Alice and Richard Dries,’ Marco tells him. ‘Richard is her stepfather.’

Rasbach writes it down in his notebook.

Anne regains control over herself and says again, ‘My parents have a lot of money.’

‘How much money?’ Rasbach asks.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ Anne says. ‘Millions.’

‘Can you be a little more precise?’ Rasbach asks.

‘I think they’re worth somewhere around fifteen million,’ Anne says. ‘But it’s not like anybody knows that.’

Rasbach looks at Marco. His face is completely blank.

‘I want to call my mother,’ Anne says. She glances at the clock on the mantelpiece, and Rasbach follows her gaze. It’s two fifteen in the morning.

Anne has a complicated relationship with her parents. When Marco and Anne are having issues with them, which is frequently the case, Marco tells her that her relationship with them is fucked up. Maybe it is, but they are the only parents she has. She needs them. She makes things work the best she can, but it isn’t easy.

Marco comes from an entirely different kind of background. His family is large and squabbling. They yell good-naturedly when they see one another, which isn’t often. His parents emigrated from Italy to New York before Marco was born and own a dry-cleaning and tailoring business. They have no money to speak of, but they get by. They are not overly involved in Marco’s life, as Anne’s wealthy parents are in hers. Marco and his four siblings have had to fend for themselves from a young age, pushed out of the nest. Marco has been living his life on his own – and on his own terms – since he was eighteen. He put himself through school. He sees his parents occasionally, but they are not a big part of his life. He isn’t exactly from the wrong side of the tracks in anybody’s books, except for Anne’s parents’ and their well-heeled friends at the Grandview Golf and Country Club. Marco comes from a middle-class, law-abiding family of hardworking people, who have done well enough but no better than that. None of Anne’s friends from college or from her job at the art gallery think Marco is from the wrong side of the tracks.

It is only old money that would see him that way. And Anne’s mother is from old money. Anne’s father, Richard Dries – actually her stepfather; her own father died tragically
when she was four years old – is a successful businessman, but her mother, Alice, has millions.

Her wealthy parents enjoy their money, their rich friends. The house in one of the finest parts of the city, the membership at the Grandview Golf and Country Club, the luxury cars and five-star vacations. Sending Anne to a private girls’ school, then to a good university. The older her father gets, the more he likes to pretend that he’s earned all that money, but it isn’t true. It’s gone to his head. He’s become quite full of himself.

When Anne ‘took up’ with Marco, her parents acted as if the world were coming to an end. Marco looked like the quintessential bad boy. He was dangerously attractive – fair-skinned for an Italian – with dark hair, brooding eyes, and a bit of a rebellious look, especially when he hadn’t shaved. But his eyes lit up warmly when he saw Anne, and he had that million-dollar smile. And the way he called her ‘baby’ – she couldn’t resist him. The first time he showed up at her parents’ house, to pick her up for a date, was one of the defining moments of Anne’s young adulthood. She was twenty-two. Her mother had been telling her about a nice young man, a lawyer, the son of a friend, who was interested in meeting her. Anne had explained, impatiently, that she was already seeing Marco.

‘Yes, but . . .’ her mother said.

‘But what?’ Anne said, folding her arms across her chest.

‘You can’t be serious about him,’ her mother said.

Anne can still remember the expression on her mother’s face. Dismay, embarrassment. She was thinking about how it would look. Thinking about how she would explain to her friends that her daughter was dating a young man who came from nothing, who worked as a bartender in the Italian part
of the city, and rode a motorcycle. Her mother would forget about the business degree Marco had earned at the same university that was considered good enough for their daughter. They wouldn’t see how his working his way through school at night was admirable. Maybe nobody would ever be good enough for her parents’ little girl.

And then – it was perfect – Marco had roared up on his Ducati, and Anne had flown out of her parents’ house and straight into Marco’s arms, her mother watching from behind the curtains. He kissed her hard, still straddling the bike, and handed her his spare helmet. She climbed on, and they roared away, manicured gravel spitting up in their wake. That was the moment she’d decided she was in love.

But you aren’t twenty-two forever. You grow up. Things change.

‘I want to call my mother,’ Anne repeats now. So much has happened – has it been less than an hour since they returned home to an empty crib?

Marco grabs the phone and hands it to her, then sits back down on the sofa with his arms crossed in front of him, looking tense.

Anne clutches the phone. She starts to cry again before she’s even finished dialing the number. The phone rings, and her mother answers.

‘Mom,’ Anne says, dissolving into incoherent sobbing.

‘Anne? What’s wrong?’

Anne finally gets the words out. ‘Someone has taken Cora.’

‘Oh my God,’ her mother says.

‘The police are here,’ Anne tells her. ‘Can you come?’

‘We’ll be right there, Anne,’ her mother says. ‘You hold on. Your father and I are coming.’

Anne hangs up the phone and cries. Her parents will come. They have always helped her, even when they’re angry at her. They will be angry now, at her and Marco, but especially at Marco. They love Cora, their only grandchild. What will they think when they hear what she and Marco have done?

‘They’re on their way,’ Anne says to Marco and the detective. She looks at Marco, then looks away.

MARCO FEELS LIKE
an outcast; it’s a feeling he often gets when Anne’s parents are in the room. Even now, with Cora missing, he is ignored, while the three of them – his distraught wife, her always-composed mother, and her overbearing father – slip into their familiar three-person alliance. Sometimes their exclusion of him is subtle, sometimes not. But then again, he knew what he was getting into when he married her. He thought it was a deal he could live with.

He stands at the side of the living room, useless, and watches Anne. She’s seated in the middle of the sofa, her mother at her side, pulling Anne into her for comfort. Her father is more aloof, sitting up straight, patting his daughter on the shoulder. No one looks at Marco. No one offers
him
comfort. Marco feels out of place in his own home.

But worse than that, he feels sick, horrified. All he wants is his little Cora back in her crib; he wants all of this never to have happened.

He feels the detective’s eyes on him. He alone is paying attention to Marco. Marco deliberately ignores him, even though he knows he probably shouldn’t. Marco knows he is a
suspect. The detective has been insinuating as much ever since he got here. Marco has overheard the officers in the house whispering about bringing in the cadaver dogs. He isn’t stupid. They would only do that if they thought Cora was dead before she left the house. The police obviously think he and Anne killed their own baby.

Let them bring in the dogs – he’s not afraid. Maybe this is the kind of thing the police deal with on a regular basis, parents who kill their children, but he could
never
hurt his baby. Cora means everything to him. She has been the one bright light in his life, the one reliable, constant source of joy, especially these last few months as things have fallen steadily apart and as Anne has become increasingly lost and depressed. He hardly knows his wife anymore. What happened to the beautiful, engaging woman he married? Everything has been going to shit. But he and Cora have had a happy little bond of their own, the two of them, waiting it out, waiting for Mommy to return to normal.

Anne’s parents will hold him in more contempt than ever now. They will forgive Anne quickly. They will forgive her almost anything – even abandoning their baby to a predator, even this. But they will never forgive him. They will be stoic in the face of this adversity; they are always stoic, unlike their emotional daughter. Perhaps they will even rescue Anne and Marco from their own mistakes. That is what they like to do best. Even now he can see Anne’s father looking off over the heads of Anne and her mother, his brow furrowed, concentrating on the problem – the problem Marco created – and on how he might solve it. Thinking about how he can rise to this challenge and come out triumphant. Maybe he can show Marco up, one more time, when it really counts.

Marco despises his father-in-law. It’s mutual.

But the important thing now is to get Cora back. That’s all that matters. They’re a complicated, screwed-up family in Marco’s view, but they all love Cora. He blinks back a fresh surge of tears.

Detective Rasbach notes the coolness between Anne’s parents and their son-in-law. In most cases a crisis like this dissolves such barriers, if only for a short time. But this is not an ordinary crisis. This is a situation where the parents ostensibly left their baby alone in the house and she was taken. Watching the family huddled on the sofa, he can see at once that the adored daughter will be absolved from any blame by her parents. The husband is a handy scapegoat – he alone will be blamed, whether it’s fair or not. And it looks as if he knows it.

Anne’s father gets up from the sofa and approaches Rasbach. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with short, steel-gray hair. There is a confidence about him that is almost aggressive.

‘Detective?’

‘Detective Rasbach,’ he supplies.

‘Richard Dries,’ the other man says, offering his hand. ‘Tell me what you’re doing to find my granddaughter.’ The man speaks in a low voice but with authority; he is used to being in charge.

Rasbach tells him. ‘We have officers searching the area, interviewing everyone, looking for witnesses. We have a forensics team going through the house and the surrounding area. We have the baby’s description out locally and nationally. The public will soon be informed by the media coverage. We may get lucky and catch something on CCTV cameras somewhere.’ He pauses. ‘We hope to get some leads quickly.’
We are doing everything we can. But it probably won’t be enough to save your granddaughter
, Rasbach thinks. He
knows from experience that investigations generally move slowly, unless there is an early, significant break. The little girl doesn’t have much time, if she’s even still alive.

Dries moves closer to him, close enough that Rasbach can smell his aftershave. Dries glances over his shoulder at his daughter and says more quietly, ‘You checking out all the perverts?’

Rasbach regards the larger man. He is the only one who has put the unthinkable into words. ‘We are checking out all the ones we know about, but there are always those we don’t know about.’

‘This is going to kill my daughter,’ Richard Dries says to the detective under his breath, looking at her.

Rasbach wonders how much the father knows about his daughter’s postpartum depression. Perhaps this is not the time to ask. Instead he waits a moment and then says, ‘Your daughter has mentioned that you have considerable wealth. Is that right?’

Dries nods. ‘You could say that.’ He looks over at Marco, who is not looking his way but staring at Anne.

Rasbach asks, ‘Do you think this could be a financially motivated crime?’

The man seems surprised but then considers it. ‘I don’t know. Do
you
think that’s what it is?’

Rasbach gives a slight shake of his head. ‘We don’t know yet. It’s certainly possible.’ He lets Dries ponder that for a minute. ‘Is there anyone you can think of, in your business dealings perhaps, who might have a grudge against you?’

‘You’re suggesting that someone took my granddaughter to settle a grudge against me?’ The man is clearly shocked.

‘I’m just asking.’

Richard Dries doesn’t dismiss the idea at once. Either his
ego is large enough, Rasbach thinks, or he’s made sufficient enemies over the years that he considers that it might just be possible. Finally Dries shakes his head. ‘No, I can’t think of anybody who would do that. I don’t have any enemies – that I know of.’