Gone Girl: A Novel (42 page)

With one quick Jack Russell headshake, he turned and followed his wife to the car.

Instead of feeling sad, I felt alarmed. Before the Elliotts were even out of my driveway, I was thinking:
We need to go to the cops quickly, soon
. Before the Elliotts started discussing their loss of faith in public. I needed to prove my wife was not who she pretended to be.
Not Amazing Amy: Avenging Amy
. I flashed to Tommy O’Hara—the guy who called the tip line three times, the guy Amy had accused of raping her. Tanner had gotten some background on him: He wasn’t the macho Irishman I’d pictured from his name, not a firefighter or cop. He wrote for a humor website based in Brooklyn, a decent one, and his contributor photo revealed him to be a scrawny guy with dark-framed glasses and an uncomfortable amount of thick black hair, wearing a wry grin and a T-shirt for a band called the Bingos.

He picked up on the first ring. “Yeah?”

“This is Nick Dunne. You called me about my wife. Amy Dunne. Amy Elliott. I have to talk with you.”

I heard a pause, waited for him to hang up on me like Hilary Handy.

“Call me back in ten minutes.”

I did. The background was a bar, I knew the sound well enough: the murmur of drinkers, the clatter of ice cubes, the strange pops of
noise as people called for drinks or hailed friends. I had a burst of homesickness for my own place.

“Okay, thanks,” he said. “Had to get to a bar. Seemed like a Scotch conversation.” His voice got progressively closer, thicker: I could picture him huddling protectively over a drink, cupping his mouth to the phone.

“So,” I began, “I got your messages.”

“Right. She’s still missing, right? Amy?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you what you think has happened?” he said. “To Amy?”

Fuck it, I wanted a drink. I went into my kitchen—next best thing to my bar—and poured myself one. I’d been trying to be more careful about the booze, but it felt so good: the tang of a Scotch, a dark room with the blinding sun right outside.

“Can I ask you why you called?” I replied.

“I’ve been watching the coverage,” he said. “You’re fucked.”

“I am. I wanted to talk to you because I thought it was … interesting that you’d try to get in touch. Considering. The rape charge.”

“Ah, you know about that,” he said.

“I know there was a rape charge, but I don’t necessarily believe you’re a rapist. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

“Yeah.” I heard him take a gulp of his Scotch, kill it, shake the ice cubes around. “I caught the story on the news one night. Your story. Amy’s. I was in bed, eating Thai. Minding my own business. Totally fucked me in the head.
Her
after all these years.” He called to the bartender for another. “So my lawyer said no way I should talk to you, but … what can I say? I’m too fucking nice. I can’t let you twist. God, I wish you could still smoke in bars. This is a Scotch
and
cigarette conversation.”

“Tell me,” I said. “About the assault charge. The rape.”

“Like I said, man, I’ve seen the coverage, the media is shitting all over you. I mean, you’re
the guy
. So I should leave well enough alone—I don’t need that girl back in my life. Even, like, tangentially. But shit. I wish someone had done me the favor.”

“So do me the favor,” I said.

“First of all, she dropped the charges—you know that, right?”

“I know. Did you do it?”

“Fuck you. Of course I didn’t do it. Did
you
do it?”

“No.”

“Well.”

Tommy called again for his Scotch. “Let me ask: Your marriage was good? Amy was happy?”

I stayed silent.

“You don’t have to answer, but I’m going to guess no. Amy was not happy. For whatever reason. I’m not even going to ask. I can guess, but I’m not going to ask. But I know you must know this: Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.”

“Meaning?”

“She doles out punishment,” Tommy said. “Hard.” He laughed into the phone. “I mean, you should see me,” he said. “I do not look like some alpha-male rapist. I look like a twerp. I am a twerp. My go-to karaoke song is ‘Sister Christian,’ for crying out loud. I weep during
Godfather II
. Every time.” He coughed after a swallow. Seemed like a moment to loosen him up.

“Fredo?” I asked.

“Fredo, man, yeah. Poor Fredo.”

“Stepped over.”

Most men have sports as the lingua-franca of dudes. This was the film-geek equivalent to discussing some great play in a famous football game. We both knew the line, and the fact that we both knew it eliminated a good day’s worth of
are we copacetic
small talk.

He took another drink. “It was so fucking absurd.”

“Tell me.”

“You’re not taping this or anything, right? No one’s listening in? Because I don’t want that.”

“Just us. I’m on your side.”

“So I meet Amy at a party—this is, like, seven years ago now—and she’s so damn cool. Just hilarious and weird and … cool. We just clicked, you know, and I don’t click with a lot of girls, at least not girls who look like Amy. So I’m thinking … well, first I’m thinking I’m being punked. Where’s the catch, you know? But we start dating, and we date a few months, two, three months, and then I find out the catch: She’s not the girl I thought I was dating. She can
quote
funny things, but she doesn’t actually like funny things. She’d rather not laugh, anyway. In fact, she’d rather that I not laugh either, or be funny, which is awkward since it’s my job, but to her, it’s all a waste of time. I mean, I can’t even figure out why she started dating me in
the first place, because it seems pretty clear that she doesn’t even like me. Does that make sense?”

I nodded, swallowed a gulp of Scotch. “Yeah. It does.”

“So, I start making excuses not to hang out so much. I don’t call it off, because I’m an idiot, and she’s gorgeous. I’m hoping it might turn around. But you know, I’m making excuses fairly regularly: I’m stuck at work, I’m on deadline, I have a friend in town, my monkey is sick, whatever. And I start seeing this other girl, kinda sorta seeing her, very casual, no big deal. Or so I
think
. But Amy finds out—how, I still don’t know, for all I know, she was staking out my apartment. But … 
shit
 …”

“Take a drink.”

We both took a swallow.

“Amy comes over to my place one night—I’d been seeing this other girl like a month—and Amy comes over, and she’s all back like she used to be. She’s got some bootleg DVD of a comic I like, an underground performance in Durham, and she’s got a sack of burgers, and we watch the DVD, and she’s got her leg flopped over mine, and then she’s nestling into me, and … sorry. She’s your wife. My main point is: The girl knew how to work me. And we end up …”

“You had sex.”

“
Consensual
sex, yes. And she leaves and everything is fine. Kiss goodbye at the door, the whole shebang.”

“Then what?”

“The next thing I know, two cops are at my door, and they’ve done a rape kit on Amy, and she has ‘wounds consistent with forcible rape.’ And she has ligature marks on her wrists, and when they search my apartment, there on the headboard of my bed are two ties—like, neckties—tucked down near the mattress, and the ties are, quote, ‘consistent with the ligature marks.’ ”

“Had you tied her up?”

“No, the sex wasn’t even that … 
that
, you know? I was totally caught off guard. She must have tied them there when I got up to take a piss or whatever. I mean, I was in some serious shit. It was looking very bad. And then suddenly she dropped the charges. Couple of weeks later, I got a note, anonymous, typed, says:
Maybe next time you’ll think twice
.”

“And you never heard from her again?”

“Never heard from her again.”

“And you didn’t try to press charges against her or anything?”

“Uh, no. Fuck no. I was just glad she went away. Then last week, I’m eating my Thai food, sitting in my bed, watching the news report. On Amy. On you. Perfect wife, anniversary, no body, real shitstorm. I swear, I broke out in a sweat. I thought:
That’s Amy, she’s graduated to murder. Holy shit
. I’m serious, man, I bet whatever she’s got cooked up for you, it’s drum-fucking-tight. You should be fucking scared.”

I
am wet from the bumper boats; we got more than five dollars’ worth of time because the two sun-stunned teenage girls would rather flip through gossip magazines and smoke cigarettes than try to herd us off the water. So we spent a good thirty minutes on our lawn-mower-motor-propelled ships, ramming each other and turning wild twists, and then we got bored and left of our own accord.

Greta, Jeff, and I, an odd crew in a strange place. Greta and Jeff have become good friends in just a day, which is how people do it here, where there’s nothing else to do. I think Greta is deciding whether she’ll make Jeff another of her disastrous mating choices. Jeff would like it. He prefers her. She is much prettier than I am, right now, in this place. Cheap pretty. She is wearing a bikini top and jean shorts, with a spare shirt tucked into the back pocket for when she wants to enter a store (T-shirts, wood carvings, decorative rocks) or restaurant (burger, barbecue, taffy). She wants us to get Old West photos taken, but that’s not going to happen for reasons aside from the fact that I don’t want redneck-lake-person lice.

We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit miniature golf course. The fake grass is torn off in patches, the alligators and windmills that once moved mechanically are still. Jeff does the honors instead, twirling the windmill, snapping open and shut the gator jaws. Some holes are simply unplayable—the grass rolled up like carpeting, the farmhouse with its beckoning mousehole collapsed in on
itself. So we roam between courses in no particular order. No one is even keeping score.

This would have annoyed Old Amy to no end: the haphazardness of it all, the pointlessness. But I’m learning to drift, and I do it quite well. I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one. I catch Jeff (cuckolded, divorced, complicated custody arrangement) furrowing his brow as we pass a Love Tester: Squeeze the metal grip and watch the temperature rise from “just a fling” to “soul mate.” The odd equation—a crushing clutch means true love—reminds me of poor smacked-around Greta, who often places her thumb over the bruise on her chest like it’s a button she can push.

“You’re up,” Greta says to me. She’s drying her ball off on her shorts—twice she’s gone into the cesspool of dirty water.

I get in position, wiggle once or twice, and putt my bright red ball straight into the birdhouse opening. It disappears for a second, then reappears out a chute and into the hole. Disappear, reappear. I feel a wave of anxiety—everything reappears at some point, even me. I am anxious because I think my plans have changed.

I have changed plans only twice so far. The first was the gun. I was going to get a gun and then, on the morning I disappeared, I was going to shoot myself. Nowhere dangerous: through a calf or a wrist. I would leave behind a bullet with my flesh and blood on it. A struggle occurred! Amy was shot! But then I realized this was a little too macho even for me. It would hurt for weeks, and I don’t love pain (my sliced arm feels better now, thank you very much). But I still liked the idea of a gun. It made for a nice MacGuffin. Not
Amy was shot
but
Amy was scared
. So I dolled myself up and went to the mall on Valentine’s Day, so I’d be remembered. I couldn’t get one, but it’s not a big deal as far as changed plans go.

The other one is considerably more extreme. I have decided I’m not going to die.

I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the injustice. It’s not fair that I have to die. Not
really
die. I don’t want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.

The problem now though is money. It’s so ludicrous, that of all things it’s money that should be an issue for me. But I have only a
finite amount—$9,132 at this point. I will need more. This morning I went to chat with Dorothy, as always holding a handkerchief so as not to leave fingerprints (I told her it was my grandmother’s—I try to give her a vague impression of Southern wealth gone to squander, very Blanche DuBois). I leaned against her desk as she told me, in great bureaucratic detail, about a blood thinner she can’t afford—the woman is an encyclopedia of denied pharmaceuticals—and then I said, just to test the situation: “I know what you mean. I’m not sure where I’m going to get rent for my cabin after another week or two.”

She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV set, a game show where people screamed and cried a lot. She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let me stay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no harm.

“You better get a job, then,” Dorothy said, not turning away from the TV. A contestant made a bad choice, the prize was lost, a wuh-waaahhh sound effect voiced her pain.

“A job like what? What kind of job can I get around here?”

“Cleaning, babysitting.”

Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay. Irony enough for a million
Hang in There
posters.

It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t ever have to actually budget. I couldn’t go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and so they left me unprepared for the real world. For instance, when Greta complained that the convenience store at the marina charged five dollars for a gallon of milk, I winced because the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d thought that seemed like a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number to see if I’d pay.