Gone Girl: A Novel (17 page)

“She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.”

“Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.”

I turned away before they noticed me.

A former teacher of mine, Mr. Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying,
“My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …” We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.

My cell rang, the disposable—I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.

“How many hours from here is Memphis?” she asked.

“Little under five hours, driving. What’s in Memphis?”

“Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy’s
stalker
from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?”

I didn’t know what to say: none?

“Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too.
We can’t authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago
. Asshole. Guy always treats me like I’m on the verge of hysteria; he’ll talk to Rand when I’m right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me.
Ass
hole.”

“The city’s broke,” I said. “I’m sure they really don’t have the budget, Marybeth.”

“Well, we do. I’m serious, Nick, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.”

“She never told me that.”

“What’s it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you’d go. Please? I won’t be able to stop thinking until I know someone’s talked to her.”

I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn’t cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.

I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife’s fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.

“Of course I’ll go. And I’ll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the way. Consider it done.” I turned around, started my
dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.

“Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,” he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke:
Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you …

“Yeah. Nothing.”

“Yester
day
. They went yester
day
, the jackasses.” He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they’d overheard him. He leaned closer to me. “You go at night, that’s when they’re there. Daytime, they’re down by the river, or out flying a flag.”

“Flying a flag?”

“You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs:
Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money
, whatever,” he said, scanning the room. “Flying a flag, man.”

“Okay.”

“At night they’re at the mall,” he said.

“Then let’s go tonight,” I said. “You and me and whoever.”

“Joe and Mikey Hillsam,” Stucks said. “They’d be up for it.” The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.

“Good,” I said. “Tonight we go.”

My disposable rang in my pocket. The thing didn’t turn off right. It rang again.

“You gonna get that?” Stucks asked.

“Nah.”

“You should answer every call, man. You really should.”

There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.

“Anyone hear from the detectives?” Rand asked.

“Nothing,” Marybeth and I both answered.

“That may be good, right?” Rand asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.

“When are you leaving for Memphis?” she asked me.

“Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don’t think it was done right yesterday.”

“Excellent,” Marybeth said. “That’s the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn’t done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just—I’m just not that impressed with what’s been done so far.”

Rand put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.

“I’d like to come with you, Nick,” he said. “Tonight. I’d like to come.” Rand was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine
—hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours?
—and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.

“Of course, Rand. Of course.”

I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me—having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume—so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling grandmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.

“I’m just driving Mr. Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,” she said to one of her friends. “No more than half an hour.”

Gilpin had not taken Amy’s second note into evidence; he’d been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife’s second clue:

It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say:
Oh yeah, me too
.

The “visor hat” comment was a little inside joke: When I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, “Oh, I meant a straw hat!” As if those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, anytime we watched tennis, we always complimented the players’ sporty straw hats.

Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, “That’s interesting,” while the other one agreed, “That is.” I’d been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up—because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.

It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.

I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses—ruined community banks and defunct movie houses—toward the river. I
parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the
Mark Twain
riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores—quilts and antiques and taffy—I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house was closed for renovations, to be paid for with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.

I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant. Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan.
Amazing Amy
was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.

The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too.
You are BRILLIANT
. In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.

I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn house but didn’t bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain—white hair, white suit—got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that had been the courtroom of Samuel Clemens’s dad. The sign out front read:
J. M. Clemens, Justice of the Peace
.

Let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched
.

You’re making these so nice and easy, Amy. As if you actually
want me to find them, to feel good about myself. Keep this up and I’ll break my record
.

No one was inside. I got down on my knees on the dusty floorboards and peered under the first bench. If Amy left a clue in a public place, she always taped it to the underside of things, in between the wadded gum and the dust, and she was always vindicated, because no one likes to look at the underside of things. There was nothing under the first bench, but there was a flap of paper hanging down from the bench behind. I climbed over and tugged down the Amy-blue envelope, a piece of tape winging off it.