The Couple Next Door(4)

Anne now blames herself. It’s her fault. She wants to blame Marco, but she agreed to leave the baby alone. She should have stayed home. No—she should have brought Cora with them next door, to hell with Cynthia. She doubts Cynthia would have actually thrown them out and had no party for Graham at all. This realization comes too late.

They will be judged, by the police and by everybody else. Serves them right, leaving their baby alone. She would think that, too, if it had happened to someone else. She knows how judgmental mothers are, how good it feels to sit in judgment of someone else. She thinks of her own mothers’ group, meeting with their babies once a week in one another’s homes for coffee and gossip, what they will say about her.

Someone else has arrived—a composed man in a well-cut dark suit. The uniformed officers treat him with deference. Anne looks up, meets his piercing blue eyes, and wonders who he is.

He approaches and sits down in one of the armchairs across from Anne and Marco and introduces himself as Detective Rasbach. Then he leans forward. “Tell me what happened.”

Anne immediately forgets the detective’s name, or rather it hasn’t registered at all. She only catches “Detective.” She looks at him, encouraged by the frank intelligence behind his eyes. He will help them. He will help them get Cora back. She tries to think. But she can’t think. She is frantic and numb at the same time. She simply stares into the detective’s sharp eyes and lets Marco do the talking.

“We were next door,” Marco begins, clearly agitated. “At the neighbors’.” Then he stops.

“Yes?” the detective says.

Marco hesitates.

“Where was the baby?” the detective asks.

Marco doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to say.

Anne, pulling herself together, answers for him, the tears spilling down her face. “We left her here, in her crib, with the monitor on.” She watches the detective for his reaction—What awful parents—but he betrays nothing. “We had the monitor on over there, and we checked on her constantly. Every half hour.” She glances at Marco. “We never thought . . .” but she can’t finish. Her hand goes to her mouth, her fingers press against her lips.

“When was the last time you checked on her?” the detective asks, taking a small notebook from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“I checked on her at midnight,” Anne says. “I remember the time. We were checking on her every half hour, and it was my turn. She was fine. She was sleeping.”

“I checked on her again at twelve thirty,” Marco says.

“You’re absolutely certain of the time?” the detective asks. Marco nods; he is staring at his feet. “And that was the last time anyone checked on her, before you came home?”

“Yes,” Marco says, looking up at the detective, running a nervous hand through his dark hair. “I went to check on her at twelve thirty. It was my turn. We were keeping to a schedule.”

Anne nods.

“How much have you had to drink tonight?” the detective asks Marco.

Marco flushes. “They were having a small dinner party, next door. I had a few,” he admits.

The detective turns to Anne. “Have you had anything to drink tonight, Mrs. Conti?”

Her face burns. Nursing mothers aren’t supposed to drink. She wants to lie. “I had some wine, with dinner. I don’t know how much exactly,” she says. “It was a dinner party.” She wonders how drunk she looks, what this detective must think of her. She feels like he can see right through her. She remembers the vomit upstairs in the baby’s room. Can he smell drink on her the way she can smell it on Marco? She remembers the shattered mirror in the upstairs bathroom, her bloodied hand, now wrapped in a clean dish towel. She’s ashamed of how they must look to him, drunken parents who abandoned their six-month-old daughter. She wonders if they will be charged with anything.

“How is that even relevant?” Marco says to the detective.

“It might affect the reliability of your observations,” the detective says evenly. He is not judgmental. He is merely after the facts, it seems. “What time did you leave the party?” he asks.

“It was almost one thirty,” Anne answers. “I kept checking the time on my cell. I wanted to go. I . . . I should have checked on her at one—it was my turn—but I thought we’d be leaving any minute, and I was trying to get Marco to hurry up.” She feels agonizingly guilty. If she had checked on her daughter at one o’clock, would she be gone now? But then there were so many ways this could have been prevented.

“You placed the call to 911 at one twenty-seven,” the detective says.

“The front door was open,” Anne says, remembering.

“The front door was open?” the detective repeats.

“It was open three or four inches. I’m sure I locked it behind me when I checked on her at midnight,” Anne says.

“How sure?”

Anne thinks about it. Was she sure? She had been positive, when she saw the open front door, that she’d locked it. But now, with what had happened, how can she be sure of anything? She turns to her husband. “Are you sure you didn’t leave the door open?”

“I’m sure,” he says curtly. “I never used the front door. I was going through the back to check on her, remember?”