The Couple Next Door

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-29

Chapters 30-37

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

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Chapters 22-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 22-29 Summary

The next morning, Wednesday, Anne and Marco try to have a normal breakfast. Marco sees a newspaper article about a brutal murder in a cabin in the Catskills nearby. Marco is stunned—he recognizes the photo of the murdered man, identified as Derek Honig. Marco knows him as Bruce Neeland. Marco is uncertain what it means—did Neeland let someone else in on the kidnapping? Why did Bruce not use his real name? Where is Cora now? He decides to pretend that the photo triggered a memory, that he thinks he saw that man hanging around the house the day Cora went missing. He goes to the police with the story, and Rasbach reluctantly agrees to head to the Catskills to check out the cabin. Once there, Rasbach discovers from local detectives that Honig was hit from behind with a shovel. He finds no evidence that a baby had ever been there. Honig’s car, however, fits the description the neighbor gave of the car that drove past the Conti house the night of the kidnapping.

Marco tells Anne he needs to check in at his office. Left alone, Anne is restless, nervous. She sorts through the growing evidence that her husband and Cynthia were involved in Cora’s disappearance. To keep her mind occupied, she decides to deep clean the entryway and discovers a cell phone in the air duct. She cannot unlock the phone but is certain this confirms Marco’s affair.

Meanwhile Cynthia calls Marco and asks to see him. Once at her house, Cynthia tells Marco about the hidden camera by the deck. “It was recording the night you were here, that night Cora went missing…It was you” (196). She wants $200,000 to destroy the recording. Marco is angry and scared. The entire plan is falling apart. He says nothing, but exits their backyard gate just in time for a distraught Anne to see her husband leaving the neighbor’s house.

Anne shows Marco the cell phone she found. Marco says nothing. He actually bought the phone to communicate with the man who helped kidnap his daughter, the man “who is now dead” (201). Anne throws the phone at him in anger. Marco begins to clear the phone log when it rings. He is stunned to hear his father-in-law, Richard, on the other end. Richard claims the kidnappers mailed him a phone and that he now knows what Marco did and why. Richard plans to negotiate with the kidnappers himself (they want more money) and he will bring Cora home.

Anne wrestles with a fragmented memory of slapping a fussy Cora when she tried to change her messy diaper the night of the party, which accounts for the switch in onesies. Anne admits that she might have accidentally killed the baby in a rage she cannot remember now. Anne wonders, “Does she dare ask Marco?” if he helped her hide the body (206). Anne is haunted by the image of Cora, “dead, in a Dumpster somewhere, crawling with maggots” (218). She hates herself, an interior psychodrama she has played out since she was four. Left at home with her father, he suffered a heart attack and died in front of her while Anne was unable to do anything. After this, Anne was diagnosed with a form of dissociative disorder: when under intense emotional pressure, she lapses into a black out. Could that have happened the night of the kidnapping? She decides she has only one recourse: she goes to the police station and confesses to Rasbach. Rasbach, taking pity on the confused Anne, assures her that forensic evidence ruled her out as a murderer, and that too much evidence suggests a plan in place long before the night of the party.

Understanding the mess that he has created, Marco decides that as an elaborate act of contrition he will get the baby back, be honest with his wife, and live for his family from now on, as “Crime has not worked for him” (215). He heads out to his favorite spot by the lake and throws the cell phone as far as he can. As he drives back, he recalls meeting Bruce Neeland in the bar near his office, how approachable and sympathetic Neeland seemed, and how Marco drunkenly told this complete stranger about his business woes. Neeland suggested Marco ask his father-in-law for another loan. When Richard refused, Marco returned to the bar and found his new best friend, Bruce Neeland, waiting for him. Bruce then proposed the kidnapping scheme.

Chapters 22-29 Analysis

Lapena introduces a new plot twist to the novel with the newspaper photograph of the man found dead in the Catskills cabin. Suddenly, Marco senses how wrong his scheme has gone. The photo not only informs him that his co-conspirator is dead, but that Bruce is not even who he thought he was. The new complications upend Marco’s cool demeanor. There at the breakfast table, “Marco’s heart pounds as he tries to put it together. Bruce—whose real name is not Bruce at all—is dead…Who killed him? And where is Cora?” (181). The order of the questions reveals Marco’s priorities. His daughter is second in importance to the sustainability of his scheme to defraud his own in-laws.

This section of the novel pivots around the two scenes set at the police station and evince how Rasbach’s tenacity and quiet determination now direct the novel. Anne’s confession that she killed the child is at once poignant and deeply ironic. The reader already knows Anne is the only principal character in the novel not involved in the abduction scheme. The discovery of the cell phone, which would tie Marco directly to the kidnappers, becomes for Anne proof positive that he is conducting an affair with Cynthia. Through Anne, Lapena explores the paranoia and emotional difficulty of new parenthood, dramatizing typical experiences by revealing an even worse reality than the traumatized Anne imagines.

Anne’s acceptance of her own guilt can be traced to her to her episodes of dissociative disorder, triggered by the childhood trauma of watching her beloved father die. To Anne, the best explanation mirrors her childhood trauma: she accidentally killed her child, therefore seeing Cora die, but has no memory of the episode and Marco helped her dispose of the body. The sit-down with Rasbach is painfully brief because “She can’t trust anyone to tell the truth unless she goes first” (224). Even as Rasbach is taking his chair in the interrogation room, Anne confesses that she remembers being frustrated with Cora that night, that she slapped her daughter, and then she cannot remember anything else. Rasbach delivers Anne from her pain by explaining that forensic evidence suggests a far more elaborate plan, and most importantly that Marco’s phone records from that night do not indicate he phoned anyone to come take the body. This leaves Anne with the illusion of a safer scenario: she did not kill Cora, Marco was not involved, and the kidnapping was the work of a stranger, looking for money. That she decides this as she works the garden viciously pulling weeds until her “hands are blistered and her back aches” (232) suggests the tenuous nature of her conclusions—after all, weeds grow back.

While Anne’s encounter with Rasbach reveals truth, Marco’s scene with Rasbach reveals Marco’s guilt through new lies. Marco sees a simple way out. His co-conspirator dead, he can blame Bruce/Derek for the kidnapping. Rasbach rejects out of hand the story that Marco offers him; there is too much evidence that someone helped Derek Honig, someone who knew the family, their movements, and knew the house, someone in financial trouble—someone, Rasbach suspects, like Marco. Of course, for Marco that leaves only one piece of unfinished business: where is Cora?

When Marco gets a call from Richard on his clandestine cell phone, the novel’s axis of responsibility takes a sudden lurch. Richard says the kidnappers have sent him the phone and that he, Richard, will now take more money to the kidnappers and return with Cora. Marco at first is reassured. Richard will negotiate with whomever Bruce/Derek was in cahoots with and get Cora back. He assumes that Richard is savvy enough to realize that he, Marco, is somehow involved in the kidnapping due to his phone number being in the kidnapper’s cell phone, but that his father-in-law is willing to set aside that realization to save Cora. Without being able to connect the man he knew as Bruce Neeland to Richard, Marco decides to trust her father-in-law to do what he himself had failed to do and, in the process, end this whole sorry enterprise. However, as with Marco earlier, Richard’s confidence that he can resolve the issue signals his role as mastermind.