THIRTY-ONE

Cynthia settles comfortably in her chair and says, “I could take this to the police, or maybe you’d prefer that I don’t. You’re from money, aren’t you?”

Anne bolts. She pulls open the sliding door and flees, leaving Cynthia sitting alone at the table with the laptop. The image of Marco carrying Cora to their garage at 12:33 in the morning has been seared into Anne’s retinas and deep into her brain. She will never get that image out of her head. Marco took their baby. He’s been lying to her, all this time.

She doesn’t know who she married.

She runs to her own house and in through the back door. She can hardly breathe. She sinks to the floor in the kitchen, leaning against the bottom cupboards, sobbing and shaking. She cries and gasps for breath and sees the same images in her head over and over again.

This changes everything. Marco took their baby. But why? Why did he do it? It can’t be that Cora was already dead and he did it to protect her. Detective Rasbach has already explained to her how that simply wasn’t possible. If she’d killed Cora and Marco had discovered it at twelve thirty, he could not have had an accomplice there by 12:35. And she now knows that he took Cora out of the house at exactly 12:33. He must have arranged for someone, for the dead man, to be waiting in his car in the garage at twelve thirty, when Marco knew he would be checking on Cora. So he planned this. He planned it. With this man who is now dead. The man she thinks she’s seen before. Where has she seen him?

Marco was behind the whole thing all along, and she knew nothing about it.

Marco abducted their baby, with this other man, who is now dead. Where is her baby now? Who took her from the man in the cabin? What the hell happened? How could he?

Anne sits on the kitchen floor hugging her knees, trying to figure it out. She thinks about going back to the police station and telling Detective Rasbach what she’s seen. He could get the video from Cynthia. She can guess why Cynthia hadn’t taken it to the police in the first place—she must be holding it over Marco. She wants to have him in her power. That’s the kind of woman Cynthia is.

Why would Marco kidnap Cora? If he didn’t do it to protect Anne, he did it for his own selfish reasons. The only possible reason is money. He wanted the ransom money. Her parents’ money. It is an appalling realization. She knows now that the business isn’t doing well. She remembers that Marco had her sign mortgage papers on the house a few months ago—to get liquid capital for further expansion plans. She thought the business was growing faster than expected, that everything was fine. But maybe he’d been lying then, too. It’s all fitting together. The business going belly-up, mortgaging the house, and finally, arranging the kidnapping—of his own child—from her parents.

Why didn’t Marco just tell her about his business troubles? They could have gone to her parents, asked for more money. Why did he do such a stupid thing? Why would he take their precious baby and hand her over to that man who was beaten to death with a shovel?

Did Marco go up to that cabin after the ransom money was taken, confront the man, and kill him in a rage? Was Marco a murderer, too? Would he have had time to get all the way out to the cabin and back without her noticing? She tries to remember what day it is, tries to review every single day that’s passed since the kidnapping, but it’s all a hopeless jumble in her head.

Was the cell phone part of this? She realizes that she has been wrong from the start. This is not about affairs, with Cynthia or anyone else. This is about the kidnapping. Marco kidnapped their daughter.

The man she married.

And then he sat there, in their kitchen, and told her that the dead man looked familiar.

She’s suddenly afraid of her own husband. She doesn’t know who he is or what he is. She is starting to understand what he’s capable of.

Had he ever loved her, or had he only married her for her money?

What does she do now? Does she go to the police with what she knows? What might happen to Cora if she did?

After a long time, Anne pulls herself up off the floor. She forces herself to walk quickly upstairs to the bedroom. Trembling, she pulls out an overnight bag and starts packing.

 • • • 

Anne gets out of the cab at the foot of her parents’ circular gravel drive. This is the house she grew up in. It is very grand. The large stone house with its lush, professionally tended gardens backs onto a wooded ravine. She pays the cabdriver and stands there for a minute with her overnight bag at her feet, looking at the house. The homes are set far apart here. Nobody will see her, unless her mother is home and happens to look out the window. She remembers vividly the day she stepped out of this house and climbed onto the back of Marco’s motorcycle and decided that she was in love.

So much has happened. So much has changed.

She hates to go back to her parents. It’s an admission that they were right about Marco all along. She doesn’t want to believe it, but she’s seen the evidence with her own eyes. She’d gone against their wishes when she’d married Marco—she’d known her own mind then, and her own heart.

Now she doesn’t know anything.

There at the end of her parents’ drive, from out of nowhere, Anne suddenly remembers where she saw the dead man. She trembles like a leaf in the wind, trying to make sense of this new information. Then she takes out her cell phone and calls another cab.

 • • • 

Marco tries Richard again, leaves another terse message on his voice mail. Richard is punishing him, keeping him out of the loop. He’s going to handle it himself and not let Marco know until it’s all over, when Cora is back safe and sound. If she does come back.

Even Marco admits to himself that maybe it’s better this way. If anyone can pull this off, it’s Richard. Richard with his bags of money and nerves of steel. Marco is exhausted, physically and emotionally. He wants nothing more than to lie down on his office couch, sleep for a few hours, and wake up to a phone call that Cora is home again, safe. But then—what happens after that?

He remembers there’s an open bottle of scotch in the back of one of his filing-cabinet drawers. He stops pacing, moves over to the filing cabinet, and pulls open the drawer. The bottle is half empty. He grabs a glass, also hidden in the filing cabinet, and pours himself a stiff one. Then he resumes his pacing.

Marco can’t face the possibility of never seeing Cora again. He is also terrified of being arrested and going to prison. He’s sure that if he is arrested, the lawyer most likely to be able to get him acquitted, Aubrey West, will no longer be acting for him. Because Anne’s parents won’t pay, and Marco doesn’t have the money to pay for a top-notch lawyer himself.

He refills his glass from the bottle, which is now sitting open on the blotter on his expensive desk, and realizes that he’s already thinking about what to do after he’s arrested. Arrest now seems inevitable. Anne won’t stand by him, not once she hears the truth from her own father. Why would she? She’ll hate him. If she had done this to him, he would never forgive her.

Then there’s Cynthia and the video.

His nose deep into his third drink, Marco for the first time considers telling the police the truth. What if he simply told Rasbach that yes, he met with Bruce—who turned out to be Derek Honig. Yes, he had business troubles. Yes, his father-in-law refused to help him out. Yes, he planned to take and hide his own baby for a couple of days to get the ransom money out of his wife’s parents.

But it wasn’t actually his idea. It was Derek Honig’s idea.

Derek Honig was the one who suggested it. He planned it. In Marco’s mind it was just a way to get a bit of an advance on his wife’s inheritance. No one was supposed to die. Not his accomplice. Certainly not his baby.

Marco is a victim in this, too. Not blameless, but still a victim. He was desperate, and he fell in with someone who gave him a false name, who manipulated him into the kidnapping for his own gain. A good lawyer like Aubrey West could spin it.

Marco could come clean with Detective Rasbach. Tell him everything.

Once Cora is back home.

He would go to prison. But Cora, if she survives this, would be with her mother. Richard would no longer have anything to hold over him. And Cynthia would be shit out of luck. Maybe he could even make sure she went to jail for attempted blackmail. For a minute he imagines Cynthia in a shapeless orange jumpsuit, with unwashed hair.

He looks up from his pacing, catches his reflection in the large mirror hanging on the wall across from the window, and barely recognizes himself.