The Couple Next Door(52)

Anne knows Cynthia is at home. She can hear her occasionally on the other side of their shared wall. Anne knows Graham is away again—she saw him getting into a black airport limo with his bags earlier that morning, from her bedroom window. She could go over there, tell Cynthia off, and tell her to keep away from her husband. Anne stops her pacing and stares at the shared wall of the living room, trying to decide what to do. Cynthia is just on the other side of that wall.

But Anne doesn’t have the nerve. She is too distraught. She’s told the detective what she overheard, but she hasn’t yet confronted Marco about it. And Marco hasn’t said anything about it to her. They seem to have a new pattern of not speaking about difficult things. They used to share everything—well, almost everything. But since the baby, things have been different.

Her depression made her lose interest in everything. At first Marco brought her flowers, chocolates, did little things to lift her mood, but none of it worked, not really. He stopped telling her about his day, about how his business was doing. She couldn’t talk about her own work, because she didn’t work anymore. They didn’t have much to talk about at all, except the baby. Maybe Marco was right. Maybe she should have gone back to work.

She must talk to him, must make him promise that he’ll have nothing more to do with Cynthia. She is not to be trusted. Their friendship with the Stillwells is over. If Anne confronts Marco with what she knows, tells him what she overheard from the top of the stairs, he will feel terrible. He already feels terrible. She has no doubt he’ll stay away from Cynthia now. There’s nothing to worry about on that score.

If they survive this, she will have to talk to Marco about Cynthia, and she will have to talk to him about the business. They will have to start being more honest with each other again.

Anne needs to clean something, but the house is already spotless. It’s odd, the energy she feels now, in the middle of the day, fueled by anxiety. When she still had Cora, she would drag herself through the day. Right about now she’d be praying for Cora to go down for a nap. A sob escapes from her.

She has to keep busy. She starts in the front entryway, cleaning the antique grate that covers the air duct. The scrolled ironwork is covered in dust and has to be scrubbed by hand. She gets a bucket of warm water and a cloth and sits down on the floor by the front door, begins to clean it, getting deep into the grooves. It calms her.

As she sits there, the mail arrives, cascading through the slot in the door, landing on the floor beside her, startling her. She looks at the pile of envelopes on the floor and freezes. Probably more hate mail. She can’t stand it. But what if there’s something else? She puts down her wet cloth, wipes her hands dry on her jeans, and sorts through the pile. There is nothing with a typewritten address label on it like the one on the package that contained the green onesie. Anne realizes she’s been holding her breath and lets herself exhale.

She doesn’t open any of the letters. She would like to throw them all out, but Marco has made her promise to keep everything. He goes through all of it, every day, in case the kidnappers try again to get in touch. He doesn’t share the contents with her.

Anne takes her bucket and cloth and goes upstairs to clean the grates up there. She starts in the office at the end of the hall. When she pulls off the original decorative grate to clean it more easily, she sees something small and dark inside the air duct. Startled, she looks more closely, fearing a dead mouse—or perhaps even a rat. But it’s not a rat. It’s a cell phone.

Anne puts her head between her knees and concentrates on not fainting. It feels like a panic attack, as if all the blood is leaving her body. There are black spots before her eyes. After a few moments, the fainting feeling dissipates and she raises her head. She looks at the cell phone inside the duct. Part of her wants to put the cover back on, go downstairs for a cup of coffee, and pretend she never saw it. But she reaches in to grab it. The phone is stuck to the side of the air duct. She tugs, firmly, and it comes away in her hand. It has been fixed to the inside wall with silver duct tape.

She stares at the cell phone. She has never seen it before. It isn’t Marco’s. She knows his phone. He carries it with him always. But she can’t lie to herself. Someone hid this phone in their house, and it wasn’t her.

Marco has a secret cell phone. Why?

Her first thought is Cynthia. Are they having an affair? Or is it someone else? He sometimes works long hours. She has been fat and unhappy. But until the night with Cynthia, she never thought he might actually be unfaithful. Maybe she’s been completely oblivious. Maybe she’s a complete fool. The wife is always the last to know, right?

The phone looks new. She turns it on. It lights up. So he’s kept it charged. But now she has to draw a pattern to unlock the phone. She has no idea what it is. She doesn’t even know how to unlock Marco’s regular cell phone. She makes a few attempts, and it freezes her out after too many tries.

Think, she tells herself, but she can’t. She sits numbly holding the phone, frozen in place.

? ? ?

There’s a lot running through Detective Rasbach’s mind on the drive to the crime scene in the Catskills. He thinks about the interview earlier that day with Marco and Anne Conti.

He suspects that this is Marco’s way of telling him that this dead man was his accomplice—and that Marco is asking him to help him get his baby back. They both know it may be a little late for that. Marco knows that Rasbach believes he abducted Cora and that he’s been outwitted. Clearly this dead man had something to do with it. He must be the mystery man who drove the car down the lane at 12:35 a.m. And what better place to hide the baby than in a remote cabin?