SIX

Anne stirs when the dogs come in, shrugs out from underneath her mother’s arm, and stands up unsteadily. She watches the handler go upstairs with the two dogs without a word.

She feels Marco come up beside her. “They’ve brought in tracking dogs,” she says. “Thank God. Now maybe we’ll get somewhere.” She feels him reach for her arm, but she shrugs him off, too. “I want to see.”

Detective Rasbach holds up a hand in front of her. “Better that you stay down here and let the dogs do their work,” he tells her gently.

“Do you want me to get some of her clothing?” Anne asks. “Something that she wore recently, that hasn’t been washed yet? I can get something out of the laundry downstairs.”

“They’re not tracking dogs,” Marco says.

“What?” Anne says, turning to Marco.

“They’re not tracking dogs. They’re cadaver dogs,” Marco says.

And then she gets it. She turns back to the detective, her face white. “You think we killed her!”

Her outburst stuns everyone. They are all frozen in shock. Anne sees her mother put her hand to her mouth. Her father’s face looks stormy.

“That’s preposterous,” Richard Dries blurts out, his face a rough brick red. “You can’t honestly suspect my daughter would harm her own child!”

The detective says nothing.

Anne looks back at her father. He has always stood up for her, for as long as she can remember. But there isn’t much he can do to help her now. Someone has taken Cora. It is the first time in her life, Anne realizes, looking at him, that she has ever seen her father afraid. Is he afraid for Cora? Or is he afraid for her? Do the police really think she killed her own child? She does not dare look at her mother.

“You need to do your job and find my granddaughter!” her father says to the detective, his belligerence a transparent attempt to mask his fear.

For a long moment, no one says anything. The moment is so strange that no one can think of anything to say. They listen to the sound of the dogs’ toenails clicking on the hardwood floor as they move around overhead.

Rasbach says, “We are doing everything in our power to find your granddaughter.”

Anne is unbearably tense. She wants her baby back. She wants Cora back unharmed. She can’t bear the thought of her baby suffering, being hurt. Anne feels she might faint and sinks down again into the sofa. Immediately her mother puts a protective arm around her. Anne’s mother refuses to look at the detective anymore.

The dogs come scampering down the stairs. Anne looks up and turns her head to watch them descend. The handler shakes his head. The dogs move into the living room, and Anne, Marco, and Richard and Alice Dries all hold perfectly still, as if not to draw their attention. Anne sits petrified on the sofa while the two dogs, noses testing the air and running along the area carpets, investigate the living room. Then they approach and sniff her. There is a police officer standing behind her to see what the dogs will do, perhaps waiting to arrest her and Marco on the spot. What if the dogs start to bark? Anne thinks, dizzy with fear.

Everything is tilting sideways. Anne knows that she and Marco did not kill their baby. But she is powerless and afraid, and she knows that dogs can smell fear.

She remembers that now, as she looks into their almost-human eyes. The dogs sniff her and her clothes—she can feel their panting breath on her, warm and rank, and recoils. She tries not to breathe. Then they leave her and go to her parents, and then to Marco, who is standing by himself, near the fireplace. Anne shrinks back into the sofa, relieved when the dogs seem to draw a blank in the living room and dining room and then move toward the kitchen. She can hear their claws scuttling across the kitchen tile, and then they are loping down the back stairs and into the basement. Rasbach leaves the room to follow them.

The family sits in the living room waiting for this part to be over. Anne doesn’t want to look at anyone, so she stares at the clock on the mantelpiece. With every minute that goes by, she feels more hopeless. She feels her baby moving farther and farther away from her.

Anne hears the back door in the kitchen open. She imagines the dogs going through the backyard, the garden, the garage, and the lane. Her eyes are staring at the clock on the mantelpiece; what she sees is the dogs in the garage, rooting around the broken clay pots and rusted rakes. She sits rigid, waiting, listening for barking. She waits and worries. She thinks about the disabled motion detector.

Finally Rasbach returns. “The dogs drew a blank,” he says. “That’s good news.”

Anne can sense her mother’s relief beside her.

“So can we now get serious about finding her?” Richard Dries says.

The detective says, “We are serious about finding her, believe me.”

“So,” Marco says, with a touch of bitterness, “what happens next? What can we do?”

Rasbach says, “We will have to ask you both a lot of questions. You may know something you don’t realize you know, something that will be helpful.”

Anne looks doubtfully at Marco. What can they know?

Rasbach adds, “And we need you to talk to the media. Someone might have seen something, or someone might see something tomorrow or the next day, and unless this is in front of them, they won’t put it together.”

“Fine,” Anne says tersely. She will do anything to get her baby back, even though she is terrified of meeting with the media. Marco also nods but looks nervous. Anne thinks briefly of her stringy hair, her face bloated from crying. Marco reaches for her hand and clasps it, hard.

“What about a reward?” Anne’s father suggests. “We could offer a reward for information. I’ll put up the funds. If somebody saw something and doesn’t want to come forward, they might think twice about not speaking up if the money’s right.”

“Thank you,” Marco says.

Anne merely nods.

Rasbach’s cell phone rings. It is Detective Jennings, who has been going door-to-door in the neighborhood. “We might have something,” he says.

Rasbach feels a familiar tension in his gut—they are desperate for a lead. He walks briskly from the Contis’ home and within minutes arrives at a house on the street behind them, on the other side of the lane.

Jennings is waiting for him on the front step. Jennings taps the front door again, and it is immediately opened by a woman who looks to be in her fifties. She has obviously been roused from her bed. She is wearing a bathrobe, and her hair is held back with bobby pins. Jennings introduces her as Paula Dempsey.

“I’m Detective Rasbach,” the detective says, showing the woman his badge. She invites them into the living room, where her now wide-awake husband is sitting in an armchair, wearing pajama bottoms, his hair mussed.

“Mrs. Dempsey saw something that might be important,” Jennings says. When they are seated, he says, “Tell Detective Rasbach what you told me. What you saw.”

“Right,” she says. She licks her lips. “I was in the upstairs bathroom. I got up to take an aspirin, because my legs were aching from gardening earlier in the day.”

Rasbach nods encouragingly.

“It’s such a hot night, so we had the bathroom window all the way up to let the breeze in. The window looks out over the back lane. The Contis’ house is behind this one, a couple houses over.”

Rasbach nods again; he’s noted the placement of her house in relation to the Contis’. He listens carefully.

“I happened to look out the window. I have a good view of the lane from the window. I could see pretty well, because I hadn’t turned the bathroom light on.”

“And what did you see?” Rasbach asks.

“A car. I saw a car coming down the lane.”

“Where was the car, exactly? What direction was it going?”

“It was coming down the lane toward my house, after the Contis’ house. It might have been coming from their garage, or from any of the houses farther down.”

“What kind of car was it?” Rasbach asked, taking out his notebook.

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about cars. I wish my husband had seen it—he would have been more help.” She glances toward her husband, who shrugs helplessly. “But of course I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“Can you describe it?”

“It was smallish, and I think a dark color. But it didn’t have its headlights on—that’s why I noticed it. I thought it was odd that the headlights weren’t on.”

“Could you see the driver?”

“No.”

“Could you tell if there was anyone in the passenger seat?”

“I don’t think there was anyone in the passenger seat, but I can’t be sure. I couldn’t see much. I think it might have been an electric car, or a hybrid, because it was very quiet.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. But sound carries up from the lane, and the car was very quiet, although maybe that’s because it was just creeping along.”

“And what time was this, do you know?”

“I looked at the time when I got up. I have a digital alarm clock on my bedside table. It was twelve thirty-five a.m.”

“Are you absolutely sure of the time?”

“Yes.” She adds, “I’m positive.”

“Can you remember any more detail about the car, anything at all?” Rasbach asks. “Was it a two-door? Or a four-door?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t remember. I didn’t notice. It was small, though.”

“I’d like to take a look from the bathroom window, if you don’t mind,” Rasbach says.

“Of course.”

She leads them up the stairs to the bathroom at the back of the house. Rasbach looks out the open window. The view is good—he can see clearly into the lane. He can see the Contis’ garage to the left, the yellow police tape surrounding it. He can tell that the garage door is still open. How unfortunate that she was not just a couple of minutes earlier. She might have seen the car without headlights coming out of the Contis’ garage, if in fact it had. If only he had a witness who could put a car in the Contis’ garage, or coming out of their garage, at 12:35 a.m. But this car might have been coming from anywhere farther down the lane.

Rasbach thanks Paula and her husband, hands her his card, and then he and Jennings depart the house together. They stop on the sidewalk in front of the house. The sky is beginning to lighten.

“What do you make of that?” Jennings asks.

“Interesting,” Rasbach says. “The timing. And the fact that the car’s headlights were off.” The other detective nods. Marco had checked on the baby at twelve thirty. The car was driving away from the direction of the Contis’ garage at 12:35 a.m. with its headlights off. A possible accomplice.

The parents have just become his prime suspects.

“Get a couple of officers to talk to everybody who has garage access to that lane. I want to know who was driving a car down that lane at twelve thirty-five a.m.,” Rasbach says. “And have them go up and down both streets again and try to find out specifically if anybody else was looking out a window at the lane at that time and if they saw anything.”

Jennings nods. “Right.”

 • • • 

Anne holds Marco’s hand tightly. She is almost hyperventilating before meeting the press. She has had to sit down and put her head between her knees. It is seven in the morning, only a few hours since Cora was taken. A dozen journalists and photographers are out on the street waiting. Anne is a private person; this kind of media exposure is awful to her. She has never been one to seek attention. But Anne and Marco need the media to take an interest. They need Cora’s face plastered all over the newspapers, the TV, the Internet. You can’t just take a baby out of someone else’s house in the middle of the night and have no one notice. It’s a busy neighborhood. Surely someone will come forward with information. Anne and Marco must do this, even though they know that they’ll be the target of some nasty press once it all comes out. They are the parents who abandoned their baby, left her home alone, an infant. And now someone has her. They are a Movie of the Week.

They have agreed on a prepared statement, have crafted it at the coffee table with Detective Rasbach’s help. The statement does not mention the fact that the baby was alone in the house at the time of the kidnapping, but Anne has no doubt whatsoever that that fact will get out. She has the feeling that once the media invade their lives, there will be no end to it. Nothing will be private. She and Marco will be notorious, their own faces on the pages of supermarket tabloids. She is frightened and ashamed.

Anne and Marco walk out their front door and onto the front step. Detective Rasbach is at Anne’s side, and Detective Jennings stands beside Marco. Anne hangs on to her husband’s arm for support, as if she might fall. They have agreed that Marco is to read the statement—Anne is simply not up to it. She looks as though a stiff breeze will knock her over. Marco gazes into the crowd of reporters, seems to shrink, then lowers his eyes to the piece of paper shaking visibly in his hands. The cameras flash repeatedly.

Anne looks up, stunned. The street is full of reporters, vans, TV cameras, technicians, equipment and wires, people holding microphones to their heavily made-up faces. She has seen this on TV, has watched this very thing. But now she is front and center. It feels unreal, like it’s not actually happening to her but to someone else. She feels strange and disembodied, as if she is both standing on the front step looking out and also watching the scene from above and a little to the left.

Marco holds up a hand to indicate that he wishes to speak. The crowd quiets suddenly.

“I’d like to read a statement,” he mumbles.

“Louder!” someone shouts from the sidewalk.

“I’m going to read a statement,” Marco says, more loudly and clearly. Then he reads, his voice growing stronger. “Early this morning, sometime between twelve thirty and one thirty, our beautiful baby girl, Cora, was taken from her crib by a person or persons unknown.” He stops for a moment to collect himself. No one makes a sound. “She is six months old. She has blond hair and blue eyes and weighs about sixteen pounds. She was wearing a disposable diaper and a plain, pale pink onesie. There is a white blanket also missing from her crib.

“We love Cora more than anything. We want her back. We say to whoever has her, please, please bring her back to us, unharmed.” Marco looks up from the page. He is crying now and has to stop and wipe away the tears to continue reading. Anne sobs quietly at his side, looking out at the sea of faces.

“We have no idea who would steal our beautiful, innocent little girl. We are asking for your help. If you know anything, or saw anything, please call the police. We are able to offer a substantial reward for information leading to the recovery of our baby. Thank you.”

Marco turns to Anne, and they collapse in each other’s arms as more bulbs flash.

“How much of a reward?” someone calls out.