The Couple Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

Chapter Five
    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 asuspect. 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