The Couple Next Door(18)

“We have to think, Marco! Who would take her?”

“I have no idea,” Marco says helplessly.

She gets up and starts pacing back and forth in the living room. “I don’t understand why they haven’t found any evidence of an intruder. It doesn’t make sense. Does that make sense to you?” She stops pacing and adds, “Except for the loosened lightbulb in the motion detector. That’s obviously evidence that there was an intruder.”

Marco looks up at her. “They think we loosened the lightbulb ourselves.”

She stares at him. “That’s ridiculous!” There is a note of hysteria in her voice.

“It wasn’t us. We know that,” Marco says fiercely. He runs his hands nervously up and down his thighs on his jeans, a new habit. “The detective is right about one thing—it looks planned. Somebody didn’t just walk by, see the door open, and go in and take her. But if she was taken for ransom, why wouldn’t the kidnapper have left a note? Shouldn’t we have heard from them by now?” He checks his watch. “It’s almost three o’clock! She’s been gone over twelve hours already,” he says, his voice breaking.

That’s what Anne thinks, too. Surely they should have heard from someone by now. What was normal in cases of kidnapping? When she’d asked Detective Rasbach, he’d said, “There is no normal in a kidnapping. They’re all unique. If ransom is demanded, it can be within hours—or days. But generally kidnappers don’t want to be holding on to the victim for any longer than they have to. The risks go up over time.”

The police have put a wiretap on their phone to record any potential conversations with the kidnapper. But so far no one claiming to have Cora has called.

“What if it’s someone who knows your parents?” Marco suggests. “Maybe one of your parents’ acquaintances?”

“You’d like to blame this on them, wouldn’t you?” Anne snaps, walking back and forth in front of him with her arms crossed.

“Hang on,” Marco says. “I’m not blaming this on them, but think about it for a minute! The only ones with real money around here are your parents. So it has to be somebody who knows them and knows they’ve got money. We don’t have the kind of money a kidnapper would be after, obviously.”

“Maybe they should be monitoring my parents’ calls,” Anne says.

Marco looks up at her and says, “Maybe we need to be more creative with the reward.”

“What do you mean? We already offered a reward. Fifty thousand dollars.”

“Yes, but fifty thousand dollars for information leading to our getting Cora back—how much is that going to help if nobody saw anything? If anybody actually saw something, don’t you think they would have told the police by now?” He waits while Anne considers this. “We have to get things moving,” Marco says urgently. “The longer they have Cora, the greater the chance they’ll harm her.”

“They think I did it,” Anne says suddenly. “They think I killed her.” Her eyes are wild. “I can tell from the way that detective looks at me that he’s already made his mind up about me. He’s probably just trying to decide how much you had to do with it!”

Marco jumps up off the sofa and tries to embrace her. “Shhhh,” he says. “They don’t think that.” But he’s worried that that is exactly what they think. The postpartum depression, the antidepressants, the psychiatrist. He doesn’t know what to say to her to soothe her. He can feel her agitation building and wants to prevent a crisis.

“What if they go see Dr. Lumsden?” Anne says.

Of course they’ll go see Dr. Lumsden, Marco thinks. How could she imagine for a moment that they wouldn’t visit her psychiatrist?

“They probably will,” Marco says, his voice deliberately calm, even matter-of-fact. “But so what? Because you had nothing to do with Cora’s disappearance, and we both know it.”

“But she’ll tell them things,” Anne says, clearly frightened.

“No she won’t,” Marco says. “She’s a doctor. She can’t tell them anything you told her. Doctor-patient privilege. There’s no way they can get your doctor to tell them anything you talked to her about.”

Anne starts to pace up and down the living room again, wringing her hands. Then she stops and says, “Right. You’re right.” She takes some deep breaths. And then she remembers. “Dr. Lumsden’s away. She’s gone to Europe for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s right,” Marco says. “You told me.”

He places his hands on both her shoulders and presses down on her firmly, anchors her with his eyes. “Anne, I don’t want you to worry about that,” he says resolutely. “You have nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to hide. So they find out you’ve had some problems with depression—even before the baby—so what? Half the people out there are probably depressed. That fucking detective is probably depressed himself.”

He fixes her with his eyes until her breathing returns to normal and she nods.

Marco drops his arms. “We need to focus on getting Cora back.” He flops down on the sofa, exhausted.

“But how?” Anne says. She is wringing her hands again.

Marco says, “What I was starting to say before, about the reward. Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe we should try to deal directly with whoever has her—maybe we offer a lot of money for her and see if he calls us.”