Gone Girl(124)

She motioned to a nearby booth where we’d be tucked out of view of any gawkers. I nodded and we resettled, that little red light aimed at me the whole time.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“Tell me about the treasure hunt. It sounds romantic. Like, quirky, awesome, romantic.”

Take control of the story, Nick. For both the capital-P public and the capital-C wife. Right now, I thought, I am a man who loves his wife and will find her. I am a man who loves his wife, and I am the good guy. I am the one to root for. I am a man who isn’t perfect, but my wife is, and I will be very, very obedient from now on.

I could do this more easily than feign sadness. Like I said, I can operate in sunlight. Still, I felt my throat tighten as I got ready to say the words.

“My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met. How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.”

Youfuckingbitchyoufuckingbitchyoufuckingbitch. Come home so I can kill you.





AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

NINE DAYS GONE


I wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. I cannot be found here, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words, like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast enough, and my money situation is just the opposite, and Jeff’s and Greta’s greedy antennae are up. And I smell like fish.

There was something about Jeff and that race to the shoreline, toward my bundled dress and my money belt. Something about the way Greta keeps alighting on Ellen Abbott. It makes me nervous. Or am I being paranoid? I sound like Diary Amy: Is my husband going to kill me or am I imagining!?!? For the first time I actually feel sorry for her.

I make two calls to the Amy Dunne tip line, and speak to two different people, and offer two different tips. It’s hard to tell how quickly they’ll reach the police—the volunteers seem utterly disinterested. I drive to the library in a dark mood. I need to pack up and leave. Clean my cabin with bleach, wipe my fingerprints off everything, vacuum for any hairs. Erase Amy (and Lydia and Nancy) and go. If I go, I’ll be safe. Even if Greta and Jeff do suspect who I am, as long as I’m not caught in the flesh, I’m okay. Amy Elliott Dunne is like a yeti—coveted and folkloric—and they are two Ozarks grifters whose blurry story will be immediately debunked. I will leave today. That’s what I decide when I walk with my head bowed into the chilly, mostly uninhabited library with its three vacant computers and I go online to catch up on Nick.

Since the vigil, the news about Nick has been on repeat—the same facts on a circuit, over and over, getting louder and louder, but with no new information. But today something is different. I type Nick’s name into the search engine, and the blogs are going nuts, because my husband has gotten drunk and done an insane interview, in a bar, with a random girl wielding a Flip camera. God, the idiot never learns.

NICK DUNNE’S VIDEO CONFESSION!!!

NICK DUNNE, DRUNKEN DECLARATIONS!!!

My heart jumps so high, my uvula begins pulsing. My husband has fucked himself again.

The video loads, and there is Nick. He has the sleepy eyes he gets when he’s drunk, the heavy lids, and he’s got his sideways grin, and he’s talking about me, and he looks like a human being. He looks happy. “My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met,” he says. “How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.”

My stomach flutters delicately. I was not expecting this. I almost smile.

“What’s so cool about her?” the girl asks off-screen. Her voice is high, sorority-cheery.

Nick launches into the treasure hunt, how it was our tradition, how I always remembered hilarious inside jokes, and right now this was all he had left of me, so he had to complete the treasure hunt. It was his mission.

“I just reached the end this morning,” he says. His voice is husky. He has been talking over the crowd. He’ll go home and gargle with warm salt water, like his mother always made him do. If I were at home with him, he’d ask me to heat the water and make it for him, because he never got the right amount of salt. “And it made me … realize a lot. She is the only person in the world who has the power to surprise me, you know? Everyone else, I always know what they’re going to say, because everyone says the same thing. We all watch the same shows, we read the same stuff, we recycle everything. But Amy, she is her own perfect person. She just has this power over me.”

“Where do you think she is now, Nick?”

My husband looks down at his wedding band and twirls it twice.

“Are you okay, Nick?”

“The truth? No. I failed my wife so entirely. I have been so wrong. I just hope it’s not too late. For me. For us.”