Gone Girl: A Novel (39 page)

“Show me,” Tanner said before I could greet him. “Point me toward the shed—do not come with me, and do not go near it again. Then you’ll tell me everything.”

We settled down at the kitchen table—me, Tanner, and a just-woken Go, huddling over her first cup of coffee. I spread out all of Amy’s clues like some awful tarot-card reader.

Tanner leaned toward me, his neck muscles tense. “Okay, Nick, make your case,” he said. “Your wife orchestrated this whole thing. Make the case!” He jabbed his index finger on the table. “Because I’m not moving forward with my dick in one hand and a wild story about a frame-up in the other. Unless you convince me. Unless it works.”

I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. I was always better at writing than talking. “Before we start,” I said, “you have to understand one very key thing about Amy: She is fucking brilliant. Her brain is so busy, it never works on just one level. She’s like this endless archaeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break
through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits.”

“Fine,” Tanner said. “So …”

“The second thing you need to know about Amy is, she is righteous. She is one of those people who is never wrong, and she loves to teach lessons, dole out punishment.”

“Right, fine, so …”

“Let me tell you a story, one quick story. About three years ago, we were driving up to Massachusetts. It was awful, road-rage traffic, and this trucker flipped Amy off—she wouldn’t let him in—and then he zoomed up and cut her off. Nothing dangerous, but really scary for a second. You know those signs on the back of trucks:
How Am I Driving?
She had me call and give them the license plate. I thought that was the end of it. Two months later—two
months
later—I walked into our bedroom, and Amy was on the phone, repeating that license plate. She had a whole story: She was traveling with her two-year-old, and the driver had nearly run her off the road. She said it was her fourth call. She said she’d even researched the company’s routes so she could pick the correct highways for her fake near-accidents. She thought of everything. She was really proud. She was going to get that guy fired.”

“Jesus, Nick,” Go muttered.

“That’s a very … enlightening story, Nick,” Tanner said.

“It’s just an example.”

“So, now, help me put this all together,” he said. “Amy finds out you’re cheating. She fakes her death. She makes the supposed crime scene look just fishy enough to raise eyebrows. She’s screwed you over with the credit cards and the life insurance and your little man-cave situation out back …”

“She picks an argument with me the night before she goes missing, and she does it standing near an open window so our neighbor will hear.”

“What was the argument?”

“I am a selfish asshole. Basically, the same one we always have. What our neighbor doesn’t hear is Amy apologizing later—because Amy doesn’t want her to hear that. I mean, I remember being astonished, because it was the quickest makeup we’ve ever had. By the morning she was freakin’ making me crepes, for crying out loud.”

I saw her again at the stove, licking powdered sugar off her thumb, humming to herself, and I pictured me, walking over to her and shaking her until—

“Okay, and the treasure hunt?” Tanner said. “What’s the theory there?”

Each clue was unfolded on the table. Tanner picked up a few and let them drop.

“Those are all just bonus fuck-yous,” I said. “I know my wife, believe me. She knew she had to do a treasure hunt or it would look fishy. So she does it, and of course it has eighteen different meanings. Look at the first clue.”

“It’s pure Amy. I read this, I think:
Hey, my wife is flirting with me
. No. She’s actually referring to my … infidelity with Andie. Fuck-you number one. So I go there, to my office, with Gilpin, and what’s waiting for me? A pair of women’s underwear. Not even close to Amy’s size—the cops kept asking everyone what size Amy wore, I couldn’t figure out why.”

“But Amy had no way of knowing Gilpin would be with you.” Tanner frowned.

“It’s a damn good bet,” Go interrupted. “Clue One was part of the
actual crime scene
—so the cops would know about it—and she has the words
office hours
right in it. It’s logical they’d go there, with or without Nick.”

“So whose panties are they?” Tanner asked. Go squinched her nose at the word
panties
.

“Who knows?” I said. “I’d assumed they were Andie’s, but … Amy probably just bought them. The main point is they’re not Amy’s size. They lead anyone to believe something inappropriate happened in my office with someone who is not my wife. Fuck-you number two.”

“And if the cops weren’t with you when you went to the office?” Tanner asked. “Or no one noticed the panties?”

“She doesn’t
care
, Tanner! This treasure hunt, it’s as much for her amusement as anything. She doesn’t need it. She’s overdone it all just to make sure there are a million damning little clues in circulation. Again, you’ve got to know my wife: She’s a belt-and-suspenders type.”

“Okay. Clue Two,” Tanner said.

“This is Hannibal,” I said. “Amy and I visited there once, so that’s how I read it, but it’s also another place where I had … relations with Andie.”

“And you didn’t get a red flag?” Tanner said.

“No, not yet, I was too moony about the notes Amy had written me. God, the girl knows me cold. She knows exactly what I want to hear. You are
brilliant
. You are
witty
. And how fun for her to know that she could fuck with my head like that
still
. Long-distance, even. I mean, I was … Christ, I was practically falling in love with her again.”

My throat hitched for a moment. The goofy story about her friend Insley’s half-dressed, disgusting baby. Amy knew that was what I had loved most about us back when I loved us: not the big moments, not the Romantic with capital-R moments, but our secret inside jokes. And now she was using them all against me.

“And guess what?” I said. “They just found Amy’s purse in Hannibal. I’m sure as hell someone can place me there. Hell, I paid for my tour ticket with my credit card. So again, here is this piece of evidence, and Amy making sure I can be linked to it.”

“What if no one found the purse?” Tanner asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Go said. “She’s keeping Nick running in circles, she’s amusing herself. I’m sure she was happy just knowing what a guilt trip it must be for Nick to be reading all these sweet notes when he knows he’s a cheat and she’s gone missing.”

I tried not to wince at her disgusted tone:
cheat
.

“What if Gilpin were still with Nick when he went to Hannibal?” Tanner persisted. “What if Gilpin were with Nick the whole time, so he knew that Nick didn’t plant the purse then?”

“Amy knows me well enough to know I’d ditch Gilpin. She knows I wouldn’t want a stranger watching me read this stuff, gauging my reactions.”

“Really? How do you know that?”

“I just do.” I shrugged. I knew, I just knew.

“Clue Three,” I said, and pushed it into Tanner’s hand.

“See, I misread this, thinking that
bringing me here
meant Carthage, but again, she’s referring to my father’s house, and—”

“It’s yet another place where you fucked this Andie girl,” Tanner said. He turned to my sister. “Pardon the vulgarity.”

Go gave a no-problem flick of her hand.

Tanner continued: “So, Nick. There are incriminating women’s panties in your office, where you fucked Andie, and there is Amy’s incriminating purse in Hannibal, where you fucked Andie, and there is an incriminating treasure trove of secret credit-card purchases in the woodshed, where you fucked Andie.”

“Uh, yeah. Yes, that’s right.”

“So what’s at your dad’s house?”

I
’m pregnant! Thank you, Noelle Hawthorne, the world knows it now, you little idiot. In the day since she pulled her stunt at my vigil (I do wish she hadn’t upstaged my vigil, though—ugly girls can be such thunder stealers), the hatred against Nick has ballooned. I wonder if he can breathe with all that fury building around him.

I knew the key to big-time coverage, round-the-clock, frantic, bloodlust never-ending
Ellen Abbott
coverage, would be the pregnancy. Amazing Amy is tempting as is. Amazing Amy knocked up is irresistible. Americans like what is easy, and it’s easy to like pregnant women—they’re like ducklings or bunnies or dogs. Still, it baffles me that these self-righteous, self-enthralled waddlers get such special treatment. As if it’s so hard to spread your legs and let a man ejaculate between them.

You know what
is
hard? Faking a pregnancy.

Pay attention, because this is impressive. It started with my vacant-brained friend Noelle. The Midwest is full of these types of people: the nice-enoughs. Nice enough but with a soul made of plastic—easy to mold, easy to wipe down. The woman’s entire music collection is formed from Pottery Barn compilations. Her bookshelves are stocked with coffee-table crap:
The Irish in America. Mizzou Football: A History in Pictures. We Remember 9/11. Something Dumb with Kittens
. I knew I needed a pliant friend for my plan, someone I could load up with awful stories about Nick, someone who would become overly attached to me, someone who’d be easy
to manipulate, who wouldn’t think too hard about anything I said because she felt privileged to hear it. Noelle was the obvious choice, and when she told me she was pregnant again—triplets weren’t enough, apparently—I realized I could be pregnant too.

A search online: how to drain your toilet for repair.

Noelle invited for lemonade. Lots of lemonade.

Noelle peeing in my drained, unflushable toilet, each of us so terribly embarrassed!

Me, a small glass jar, the pee in my toilet going into the glass jar.

Me, a well-laid history of needle/blood phobia.

Me, the glass jar of pee hidden in my purse, a doctor’s appointment (oh, I can’t do a blood test, I have a total phobia of needles … urine test, that’ll do fine, thank you).

Me, a pregnancy on my medical record.

Me, running to Noelle with the good news.

Perfect. Nick gets another motive, I get to be sweet missing pregnant lady, my parents suffer even more,
Ellen Abbott
can’t resist. Honestly, it was thrilling to be selected finally, officially for
Ellen
among all the hundreds of other cases. It’s sort of like a talent competition: You do the best you can, and then it’s out of your hands, it’s up to the judges.

And, oh, does she hate Nick and
love
me. I wished my parents weren’t getting such special treatment, though. I watch them on the news coverage, my mom thin and reedy, the cords in her neck like spindly tree branches, always flexed. I see my dad grown ruddy with fear, the eyes a little too wide, the smile squared. He’s a handsome man, usually, but he’s beginning to look like a caricature, a possessed clown doll. I know I should feel sorry for them, but I don’t. I’ve never been more to them than a symbol anyway, the walking ideal. Amazing Amy in the flesh. Don’t screw up, you are Amazing Amy. Our only one. There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child—you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.

This morning I stroll over to Dorothy’s office to get a soda. It’s a tiny wood-paneled room. The desk seems to have no purpose other than holding Dorothy’s collection of snow globes from places that
seem unworthy of commemoration: Gulf Shores, Alabama. Hilo, Arkansas. When I see the snow globes, I don’t see paradise, I see overheated hillbillies with sunburns tugging along wailing, clumsy children, smacking them with one hand, with the other clutching giant nonbiodegradable Styrofoam cups of warm corn-syrupy drinks.

Dorothy has one of those ’70s kitten-in-a-tree posters—
Hang in There!
She posts her poster with all sincerity. I like to picture her running into some self-impressed Williamsburg bitch, all Bettie Page bangs and pointy glasses, who owns the same poster ironically. I’d like to listen to them try to negotiate each other. Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite. Dorothy has another gem taped to the wall by the soda machine, showing a toddler asleep on the toilet
—Too Tired to Tinkle
. I’ve been thinking about stealing this one, a fingernail under the old yellow tape, while I distract-chat with Dorothy. I bet I could get some decent cash for it on eBay—I’d like to keep some cash coming in—but I can’t do it, because that would create an
electronic trail
, and I’ve read plenty about those from my myriad true-crime books. Electronic trails are bad: Don’t use a cell phone that’s registered to you, because the cell towers can ping your location. Don’t use your ATM or credit card. Use only public computers, well trafficked. Beware of the number of cameras that can be on any given street, especially near a bank or a busy intersection or bodegas. Not that there are any bodegas down here. There are no cameras either, in our cabin complex. I know—I asked Dorothy, pretending it was a safety issue.