The Couple Next Door(65)

She’s glad he’s dead. She hopes he suffered.

She goes outside again and starts viciously wrenching weeds out of the lawn until her hands are blistered and her back aches.





TWENTY-NINE


Marco sits at his desk, staring out the window, seeing nothing. The door is closed. He glances down at the surface of the expensive mahogany desk, the one he chose with such care when he expanded his business and took the lease on this office.

When he looks back now on the innocence and optimism of those days, he feels sickened. He gazes with bitter eyes around his office, which so perfectly conveys the image of a successful entrepreneur. The impressive desk, the view of the city and the river out the window across from it, the high-end leather chairs—the modern art. Anne helped him decorate it; she has a good eye.

He remembers the fun they had doing it—shopping for the pieces, arranging everything. When they were done, he’d locked the door, popped open a bottle of champagne, and made love to his giggling wife on the floor.

There was pressure on him then; he had to live up to everyone’s greater expectations—Anne’s, her parents’, his own. Perhaps if he’d married someone else, he would have been content to work his way up, building his business more slowly with grit and talent and long hours. But he had the opportunity to make things happen faster, and he took it. He was ambitious. He had that money handed to him on a silver platter, and of course he was expected to make a success of it right away. How could he not succeed, as the recipient of such a magnificent handout? There was a lot of pressure. Richard especially took a greater interest in how the business was doing, since he’d bankrolled it.

It had seemed too good to be true, and it was.

He’d gone after the big clients before he was ready. He’d made the classic rookie mistake of growing too fast. If he hadn’t married Anne—no, if he hadn’t accepted the wedding gift of the house and, years later, the loan of her parents’ money—they might be renting an apartment somewhere, he’d have an ugly office farther away from downtown, he wouldn’t be driving an Audi—but he’d be working hard and building success on his own terms. He and Anne would be happy.

Cora would be at home.

But look at how it has all turned out. He is the owner of an overextended business teetering on the edge of ruin. He is a kidnapper. A criminal. A liar. Suspected by the police. In the power of an egomaniac father-in-law who knows what he’s done, and a coldhearted blackmailer who will never stop demanding money. The business is almost bankrupt, even though he’s been given so much—money for the business, connections through Richard’s friends at the country club.

Alice and Richard’s investment in Marco’s business is lost. Like the five million dollars they’d paid for Cora. And now Richard is negotiating with the kidnappers—they’ll pay even more to get Cora back. Marco has no idea how much more.

How Anne’s parents must hate him. For the first time, Marco thinks about it from their point of view. He can understand their disappointment. Marco has let them all down. In the end his business has failed, spectacularly, even with all that help. Marco still believes that if he’d done it his own way, he would have been very successful—gradually. But Richard pushed him to accept contracts he couldn’t deliver on. And then Marco became desperate.

When things started to go wrong, really wrong, a couple of months ago, Marco had taken to having a drink at the bar on the corner before going home to Anne, where he would feel helpless in the face of her mounting depression. It was usually fairly quiet at five o’clock, when he arrived. He’d sit at the bar, having his one drink, brooding into the amber liquid, wondering what the hell to do.

Then he’d leave and go for a walk down by the river, not wanting to head home yet. He’d sit down on a bench and stare out at the water.

One day an older man came and sat down beside him. Annoyed, Marco was about to get up, feeling that his space had been invaded. But before he could leave, the man spoke to him, in a friendly way.

“You look a bit down,” he said sympathetically.

Marco was abrupt. “You could say that.”

“Lose a girlfriend?” the man asked.

“I wish it were that simple,” Marco had said.

“Ah, must be business troubles, then,” the man said, and smiled. “They’re much worse.” He held out his hand. “Bruce Neeland,” he offered.

Marco took his hand. “Marco Conti.”

Marco began to look forward to running into Bruce. He found it a relief to have someone—someone who didn’t really know him, who wouldn’t judge him—to tell his troubles to. He couldn’t tell Anne what was really going on, with her depression and her expectation of success. He hadn’t told her that things were going south, and once he’d started not telling her things were going badly, he couldn’t suddenly tell her just how badly things were going.

Bruce seemed to understand. He was easy to like, with a warm, open manner. He was a broker. He’d had good years, bad years. You had to be tough, ride out the bad times. “It’s not always easy,” Bruce said, sitting beside him in his expensive, well-cut suit.

“That’s for sure,” Marco agreed.

One day Marco had a little too much to drink at the bar. Later, down by the river, he told Bruce more than he meant to. It just slipped out, the problem with his in-laws. Bruce was a good listener.