I have dark skin, my mouse-colored helmet cut, the smart-girl glasses. I gained twelve pounds in the months before my disappearance—carefully hidden in roomy sundresses, not that my inattentive husband would notice—and already another two pounds since. I was careful to have no photos taken of me in the months before I disappeared, so the public will know only pale, thin Amy. I am definitely not that anymore. I can feel my bottom move sometimes, on its own, when I walk. A wiggle and a jiggle, wasn’t that some old saying? I never had either before. My body was a beautiful, perfect economy, every feature calibrated, everything in balance. I don’t miss it. I don’t miss men looking at me. It’s a relief to walk into a convenience store and walk right back out without some hangabout in sleeveless flannel leering as I leave, some muttered bit of misogyny slipping from him like a nacho-cheese burp. Now no one is rude to me, but no one is nice to me either. No one goes out of their way, not overly, not really, not the way they used to.
I am the opposite of Amy.
NICK DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
As the sun came up, I held an ice cube to my cheek. Hours later, and I could still feel the bite: two little staple-shaped creases. I couldn’t go after Andie—a worse risk than her wrath—so I finally phoned her. Voice mail.
Contain, this must be contained.
“Andie, I am so sorry, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what’s going on. Please forgive me. Please.”
I shouldn’t have left a voice mail, but then I thought: She may have hundreds of my voice mails saved, for all I know. Good God, if she played a hit list of the raunchiest, nastiest, smittenist … any woman on any jury would send me away just for that. It’s one thing to know I’m a cheat and another to hear my heavy teacher voice telling a young co-ed about my giant, hard—
I blushed in the dawn light. The ice cube melted.
I sat on Go’s front steps, began phoning Andie every ten minutes, got nothing. I was sleepless, my nerves barbwired, when Boney pulled into the driveway at 6:12 A.M. I said nothing as she walked toward me, bearing two Styrofoam cups.
“Hey, Nick, I brought you some coffee. Just came over to check on you.”
“I bet.”
“I know you’re probably reeling. From the news about the pregnancy. She made an elaborate show of pouring two creamers into my coffee, the way I like it, and handed it to me. “What’s that?” she said, pointing to my cheek.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Nick, what is wrong with your face? There’s a giant pink …” She leaned in closer, grabbed my chin. “It’s like a bite mark.”
“It must be hives. I get hives when I’m stressed.”
“Mm-hmmm.” She stirred her coffee. “You do know I’m on your side, right, Nick?”
“Right.”
“I am. Truly. I wish you’d trust me. I just—I’m getting to the point where I won’t be able to help you if you don’t trust me. I know that sounds like a cop line, but it’s the truth.”
We sat in a strange semi-companionable silence, sipping coffee.
“Hey, so I wanted you to know before you hear it anywhere,” she said brightly. “We found Amy’s purse.”
“What?”
“Yep, no cash left, but her ID, cell phone. In Hannibal, of all places. On the banks of the river, south of the steamboat landing. Our guess: Someone wanted to make it look like it’d been tossed in the river by the perp on the way out of town, heading over the bridge into Illinois.”
“Make it look like?”
“It had never been fully submerged. There are fingerprints still at the top, near the zipper. Now sometimes fingerprints can hold on even in water, but … I’ll spare you the science, I’ll just say, the theory is, this purse was kinda settled on the banks to make sure it was found.”
“Sounds like you’re telling me this for a reason,” I said.
“The fingerprints we found were yours, Nick. Which isn’t that crazy—men get into their wives’ purses all the time. But still—” She laughed as if she got a great idea. “I gotta ask: You haven’t been to Hannibal recently, have you?”
She said it with such casual confidence, I had a flash: a police tracker hidden somewhere in the undercarriage of my car, released to me the morning I went to Hannibal.
“Why, exactly, would I go to Hannibal to get rid of my wife’s purse?”
“Say you’d killed your wife and staged the crime scene in your home, trying to get us to think she was attacked by an outsider. But then you realized we were beginning to suspect you, so you wanted to plant something to get us to look outside again. That’s the theory. But at this point, some of my guys are so sure you did it, they’d find any theory that fit. So let me help you: You in Hannibal lately?”