Gone Girl (38 page)

The screen cuts to another photo of me juxtaposed with
Amazing Amy
.

Greta turns to me. ‘You remember those books?’

‘Of course!’

‘You
like
those books?’

‘Everyone likes those books, they’re so cute,’ I say.

Greta snorts. ‘They’re so fake.’

Close-up of me.

I wait for her to say how beautiful I am.

‘She’s not bad, huh, for, like, her age,’ she says. ‘I hope I look that good when I’m forty.’

Ellen is filling the audience in on my story; my photo lingers on the screen.

‘Sounds to me like she was a spoiled rich girl,’ Greta says. ‘High-maintenance. Bitchy.’

That is simply unfair. I’d left no evidence for anyone to conclude that. Since I’d moved to Missouri – well, since I’d come up with my plan – I’d been careful to be low-maintenance, easygoing, cheerful, all those things people want women to be. I waved to neighbors, I ran errands for Mo’s friends, I once brought cola to the ever-soiled Stucks Buckley. I visited Nick’s dad so that all the nurses could testify to how nice I was, so I could whisper over and over into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain:
I love you, come live with us, I love you, come live with us
. Just to see if it would catch. Nick’s dad is what the people of Comfort Hill call a roamer – he is always wandering
off. I love the idea of Bill Dunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could become, the object of Nick’s most profound despair, showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.

‘How does she seem bitchy?’ I ask.

She shrugs. The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray air freshener for.

Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.

‘You can just tell,’ Greta says. ‘She just sounds like a rich, bored bitch. Like those rich bitches who use their husbands’ money to start, like,
cupcake
companies and
card shops
and shit.
Boutiques
.’

In New York, I had friends with all those kinds of businesses – they liked to be able to say they worked, even though they only did the little stuff that was fun: Name the cupcake, order the stationery, wear the adorable dress that was from
their very own
store.

‘She’s definitely one of those,’ Greta said. ‘Rich bitch putting on airs.’

Greta leaves to go to the bathroom, and I tiptoe into her kitchen, go into her fridge, and spit in her milk, her orange juice, and a container of potato salad, then tiptoe back to the bed.

Flush. Greta returns. ‘I mean, all that doesn’t mean it’s okay that he
killed
her. She’s just another woman, made a very bad choice in her man.’

She is looking right at me, and I wait for her to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute …’

But she turns back to the TV, rearranges herself so she is lying on her stomach like a child, her chin in her hands, her face directed at my image on the screen.

‘Oh, shit, here it goes,’ Greta says. ‘People are hatin’ on this guy.’

The show gets underway, and I feel a bit better. It is the apotheosis of Amy.

Campbell MacIntosh, childhood friend: ‘Amy is just a nurturing, motherly type of woman. She loved being a wife. And I know she would have been a great mother. But Nick – you just knew Nick was wrong somehow. Cold and aloof and really calculating – you got the feeling that he was definitely aware of how much money Amy had.’

(Campbell is lying: She got all googly around Nick, she absolutely adored him. But I’m sure she liked the idea that he only married me for my money.)

Shawna Kelly North, Carthage resident: ‘I found it really, really strange how totally unconcerned he was at the search for his wife. He was just, you know, chatting, passing the time. Flirting around with me, who he didn’t know from Adam. I’d try to turn the conversation to Amy, and he would just – just no interest.’

(I’m sure this desperate old slut absolutely did not try to turn the conversation toward me.)

Steven ‘Stucks’ Buckley, longtime friend of Nick Dunne: ‘She was a sweetheart. Sweet. Heart. And Nick? He just didn’t seem that worried about Amy being gone. The guy was always like that: self-centered. Stuck up a little. Like he’d made it all big in New York and we should all bow down.’

(I despise Stucks Buckley, and what the fuck kind of name is that?)

Noelle Hawthorne, looking like she just got new highlights: ‘I think he killed her. No one will say it, but I will. He abused her, and he bullied her, and he finally killed her.’

(Good dog.)

Greta glances sideways at me, her cheeks smushed up under her hands, her face flickering in the TV glow.

‘I hope that’s not true,’ she says. ‘That he killed her. It’d be nice to think that maybe she just got away, just ran away from him, and she’s hiding out all safe and sound.’

She kicks her legs back and forth like a lazy swimmer. I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me.

NICK DUNNE

EIGHT DAYS GONE

W
e searched every cranny of my father’s house, which didn’t take long, since it’s so pathetically empty. The cabinets, the closets. I yanked at the corners of rugs to see if they came up. I peeked into his washer and dryer, stuck a hand up his chimney. I even looked behind the toilet tanks.

‘Very
Godfather
of you,’ Go said.

‘If it were very
Godfather
, I’d have found what we were looking for and come out shooting.’

Tanner stood in the center of my dad’s living room and tugged at the end of his lime tie. Go and I were smeared with dust and grime, but somehow Tanner’s white button-down positively glowed, as if it retained some of the strobe-light glamour of New York. He was staring at the corner of a cabinet, chewing on his lip, tugging at the tie,
thinking
. The man had probably spent years perfecting this look: the
Shut up, client, I’m thinking
look.

‘I don’t like this,’ he finally said. ‘We have a lot of uncontained issues here, and I won’t go to the cops until we’re very, very contained. My first instinct is to get ahead of the situation – report that stuff in the shed before we get busted with it. But if we don’t know what Amy wants us to find here, and we don’t know Andie’s mind-set … Nick, do you have a
guess
about what Andie’s mind-set is?’

I shrugged. ‘Pissed.’

‘I mean, that makes me very, very nervous. We’re in a very prickly situation, basically. We need to tell the cops about the woodshed. We have to be on the front end of that discovery. But I want to lay out for you what will happen when we do. And what will happen is: They will go after Go. It’ll be one of two options. One: Go is your accomplice, she was helping you hide this stuff on her property, and in all likelihood, she knows you killed Amy.’

‘Come on, you can’t be serious,’ I said.

‘Nick, we’d be lucky with that version,’ Tanner said. ‘They can
interpret this however they want. How about this one: It was Go who stole your identity, who got those credit cards. She bought all that crap in there. Amy found out, there was a confrontation, Go killed Amy.’

‘Then we get way, way ahead of all this,’ I said. ‘We tell them about the woodshed, and we tell them Amy is framing me.’

‘I think that is a bad idea in general, and right now it’s a really bad idea if we don’t have Andie on our side, because we’d have to tell them about Andie.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if we go to the cops with your story, that Amy framed you—’

‘Why do you keep saying
my story
, like it’s something I made up?’

‘Ha. Good point. If we explain to the cops how Amy is framing you, we have to explain
why
she is framing you. Why: because she found out you have a very pretty, very young girlfriend on the side.’

‘Do we really have to tell them that?’ I asked.

‘Amy framed you for her murder because … she was … what, bored?’

I swallowed my lips.

‘We have to give them Amy’s motive, it doesn’t work otherwise. But the problem is, if we set Andie, gift-wrapped, on their doorstep, and they don’t buy the frame-up theory, then we’ve given them your motive for murder. Money problems, check. Pregnant wife, check. Girlfriend, check. It’s a murderer’s triumvirate. You’ll go down. Women will line up to tear you apart with their fingernails.’ He began pacing. ‘But if we don’t do anything, and Andie goes to them on her own …’

‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘I think the cops will laugh us out of the station if we say right now that Amy framed you. It’s too flimsy. I believe you, but it’s flimsy.’

‘But the treasure hunt clues—’ I started.

‘Nick, even I don’t understand those clues,’ Go said. ‘They’re all inside baseball between you and Amy. There’s only your word that they’re leading you into … incriminating situations. I mean, seriously: crummy jeans and visor equals Hannibal?’

‘Little brown house equals your dad’s house, which is
blue
,’ Tanner added.

I could feel Tanner’s doubt. I needed to really show him Amy’s character. Her lies, her vindictiveness, her score-settling. I needed
other people to back me up – that my wife wasn’t Amazing Amy but
Avenging
Amy.

‘Lets see if we can reach out to Andie today,’ Tanner finally said.

‘Isn’t it a risk to wait?’ Go asked.

Tanner nodded. ‘It’s a risk. We have to move fast. If another bit of evidence pops up, if the police get a search warrant for the woodshed, if Andie goes to the cops—’

‘She won’t,’ I said.

‘She bit you, Nick.’

‘She won’t. She’s pissed off right now, but she’s … I can’t believe she’d do that to me. She knows I’m innocent.’

‘Nick, you said you were with Andie for about an hour the morning Amy disappeared, yes?’

‘Yes. From about ten-thirty to right before twelve.’

‘So where were you between seven-thirty and ten?’ Tanner asked. ‘You said you left the house at seven-thirty, right? Where did you go?’

I chewed on my cheek.

‘Where did you go, Nick – I need to know.’

‘It’s not relevant.’

‘
Nick!
’ Go snapped.

‘I just did what I do some mornings. I pretended to leave, then I drove to the most deserted part of our complex, and I … one of the houses there has an unlocked garage.’

‘And?’ Tanner said.

‘And I read magazines.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I read back issues of my old magazine.’

I still missed my magazine – I hid copies like porn and read them in secret, because I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.

I looked up, and both Tanner and Go felt very, very sorry for me.

I drove back to my house just after noon, was greeted by a street full of news vans, reporters camped out on my lawn. I couldn’t get into my driveway, was forced to park in front of the house. I took a breath, then flung myself out of the car. They set on me like starving birds, pecking and fluttering, breaking formation and gathering again.
Nick, did you know Amy was pregnant? Nick, what is your alibi? Nick, did you kill Amy?

I made it inside, locked myself in. On each side of the door were windows, so I braved it and quickly pulled down the shades, all the
while cameras clicking at me, questions called.
Nick, did you kill Amy?
Once the shades were pulled, it was like covering a canary for the night: The noise out front stopped.

I went upstairs and satisfied my shower craving. I closed my eyes and let the spray dissolve the dirt from my dad’s house. When I opened them back up, the first thing I saw was Amy’s pink razor on the soap dish. It felt ominous, malevolent. My wife was crazy. I was married to a crazy woman. It’s every asshole’s mantra:
I married a psycho bitch
. But I got a small, nasty bite of gratification: I really did marry a genuine, bona fide psycho bitch.
Nick, meet your wife: the world’s foremost mindfucker
. I was not as big an asshole as I’d thought. An asshole, yes, but not on a grandiose scale. The cheating, that had been preemptive, a subconscious reaction to five years yoked to a madwoman: Of course I’d find myself attracted to an uncomplicated, good-natured hometown girl. It’s like when people with iron deficiencies crave red meat.

I was toweling off when the doorbell rang. I leaned out the bathroom door and heard the reporters’ voices geared up again:
Do you believe your son-in-law, Marybeth? What does it feel like to know you’ll be a grandpa, Rand? Do you think Nick killed your daughter, Marybeth?

They stood side by side on my front step, grim-faced, their backs rigid. There were about a dozen journalists, paparazzi, but they made the noise of twice that many.
Do you believe your son-in-law, Marybeth? What does it feel like to know you’ll be a grandpa, Rand?
The Elliotts entered with mumbled hellos and downcast eyes, and I slammed the door shut on the cameras. Rand put a hand on my arm and immediately removed it under Marybeth’s gaze.

‘Sorry, I was in the shower.’ My hair was still dripping, wetting the shoulders of my T-shirt. Marybeth’s hair was greasy, her clothes wilted. She looked at me like I was insane.

‘Tanner Bolt? Are you serious?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, Nick: Tanner Bolt, are you serious. He only represents guilty people.’ She leaned in closer, grabbed my chin. ‘What’s on your cheek?’

‘Hives. Stress.’ I turned away from her. ‘That’s not true about Tanner, Marybeth. It’s not. He’s the best in the business. I need him right now. The police – all they’re doing is looking at me.’

‘That certainly seems to be the case,’ she said. ‘It looks like a bite mark.’

‘It’s hives.’

Marybeth released an aggravated sigh, turned the corner into the living room. ‘This is where it happened?’ she asked. Her face had collapsed into a series of fleshy ridges – eye bags and saggy cheeks, her lips downcast.

‘We think. Some sort of … altercation, confrontation, also happened in the kitchen.’

‘Because of the blood.’ Marybeth touched the ottoman, tested it, lifted it a few inches, and let it drop. ‘I wish you hadn’t fixed everything. You made it look like nothing ever happened.’