The Couple Next Door

In the two days immediately following the kidnapping, Lapena aligns the reader with the detective working to solve the mystery. In the opening chapters, evidence had to be gathered, possible scenarios tested, and theories formulated under the broadest possible search for a suspect. In these chapters, however, the novel uses its shifting point of view device to reveal information to the reader not available to Rasbach, with his careful following of police procedurals. In these chapters, for instance, the reader learns about Anne’s troubling history of blacking out during violent episodes and we learn about the Stillwells’ video recording, which clearly shows Marco delivering the baby to somebody waiting in his garage. Eventually, Detective Rasbach will find his way to both critical pieces of evidence. Here the novel introduces dramatic irony, in which the reader understands something that the characters do not.

No character suffers more from the lack of critical information than Anne, who emerges in these chapters as the most likely suspect. Her performance during the interview appears to signal her deep-seated guilt. Unlike the guileless Marco, who easily deflects the detective’s probing questions about the health of his business and his need for money, Anne is nervous. She fidgets. She feels nauseous. She appears calculating, thinking about what to say and how to say it: “She considers telling them that she wants to speak to a lawyer but fears that will make her look guilty” (110). When the detective probes Anne’s postpartum depression, the questions appear less investigative and more accusative, as if that condition could completely explain a mother’s irrational decision to kill their child. As the interview rushes toward its disastrous conclusion, Anne admits to the detective that she fears Cora will never come home. “What if [you] never find her?” (118), a curious question in Rasbach’s experience, entirely out of line with a mother who should be clinging to any hope.

Detective Rasbach’s scenario, after interviewing Anne, seems to fit the evidence: Anne, under the influence of too much wine, vents her postpartum depression on Cora when she would not stop crying. The telltale onesie, hidden under the changing table pad, implicates Anne and appears to confirm the theory. Marco, in this incorrect narrative, came in, found the baby dead, and made a phone call to arrange for some unnamed associate to come to the house and take the baby’s corpse away. When Detective Rasbach visits Anne’s prep school and gradually unearths the truth about the episode in the girls’ bathroom, the pattern seems to fit the missing baby. The school never made the incident public; Anne was remediated to private counseling and went on to complete her education without ever facing criminal accountability.

In these chapters, then, Anne emerges as a dark and troubled figure. All signs point to her and the likelihood that she may have harmed the baby during one of her episodes. Anne even begins to buy into the premise. Only when the onesie arrives with the demand for $5 million does Anne dare to think perhaps that Cora is not dead. However, she is conflicted with her own deepest fears—as is the reader, when the videotape recording from the couple next door appears to implicate Marco, a critical piece of evidence neither Rasbach nor Anne know about.

Lapena disturbs the neat scenario of a troubled mother struggling with postpartum depression, medicated and drunk, harming her own child by portraying the odd negotiation with the kidnappers. Both Marco and Richard appear eager not just to negotiate, but also to set the price for the baby’s safe return themselves. The price is a staggering figure, and despite their supposed business savvy, they show no interest in allowing the kidnappers to set the ransom price. As Rasbach himself sees over the next several chapters, Richard is curiously confident that the kidnappers will accept his offer despite the strangely specific sum of $5 million. However, after the interrogation of Marco by Rasbach, which dwells almost exclusively on his financial straits, the odd non-negotiation with the kidnappers implicates Marco, not Richard. Even as Marco seems a bit too interested in the money, Richard, by contrast, seems emotionally driven. “You know,” Anne’s mother reassures her, “your father is very protective of you.” (123). Marco appears to let his guard down in these chapters, to reveal a more mercenary interest in the kidnapping. Marco sets this tone by first suggesting the family reach out to the kidnappers through the press. Marco also seems overly interested in his interview to point to Anne’s emotional unsteadiness, telling Rasbach “She was sad, crying a lot, listless. She seemed overwhelmed at times. She was not getting enough sleep” (108).

As these chapters close, then, Anne clarifies herself into the most likely suspect—depressed, overmedicated, careless, carrying on a convincing act as worried mother—with her husband appearing to be solicitous and caring and, if involved, involved only in protecting his wife. Thus, Lapena misdirects the reader’s suspicion through Marco’s efforts to cover his own trail.