Gone Girl(143)

“Jesus Christ, Nick, aren’t you tired of all this?” Gilpin said. “We have it in your wife’s own words: I think he may kill me.”

Someone had told them at some point: Use the suspect’s name a lot, it will make him feel comfortable, known. Same idea as in sales.

“You been in your dad’s house lately, Nick?” Boney asked. “Like on July ninth?”

Fuck. That’s why Amy changed the alarm code. I battled a new wave of disgust at myself: that my wife played me twice. Not only did she dupe me into believing she still loved me, she actually forced me to implicate myself. Wicked, wicked girl. I almost laughed. Good Lord, I hated her, but you had to admire the bitch.

Tanner began: “Amy used her clues to force my client to go to these various venues, where she’d left evidence—Hannibal, his father’s house—so he’d incriminate himself. My client and I have brought these clues with us. As a courtesy.”

He pulled out the clues and the love notes, fanned them in front of the cops like a card trick. I sweated while they read them, willing them to look up and tell me all was clear now.

“Okay. You say Amy hated you so much that she spent months framing you for her murder?” Boney asked in the quiet, measured voice of a disappointed parent.

I gave her a blank face.

“This does not sound like an angry woman, Nick,” she said.

“She’s falling all over herself to apologize to you, to suggest that you both start again, to let you know how much she loves you: You are warm—you are my sun. You are brilliant, you are witty.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Once again, Nick, an incredibly strange reaction for an innocent man,” Boney said. “Here we are, reading sweet words, maybe your wife’s last words to you, and you actually look angry. I still remember that very first night: Amy’s missing, you come in here, we park you in this very room for forty-five minutes, and you look bored. We watched you on surveillance, you practically fell asleep.”

“That has nothing to do with anything—” Tanner started.

“I was trying to stay calm.”

“You looked very, very calm,” Boney said. “All along, you’ve acted … inappropriately. Unemotional, flippant.”

“That’s just how I am, don’t you see? I’m stoic. To a fault. Amy knows this … She complained about it all the time. That I wasn’t sympathetic enough, that I retreated into myself, that I couldn’t handle difficult emotions—sadness, guilt. She knew I’d look suspicious as hell. Jesus fucking Christ! Talk to Hilary Handy, will you? Talk to Tommy O’Hara. I talked to them! They’ll tell you what she’s like.”

“We have talked to them,” Gilpin said.

“And?”

“Hilary Handy has made two suicide attempts in the years since high school. Tommy O’Hara has been in rehab twice.”

“Probably because of Amy.”

“Or because they’re deeply unstable, guilt-ridden human beings,” Boney said. “Let’s go back to the treasure hunt.”

Gilpin read aloud Clue 2 in a deliberate monotone.

You took me here so I could hear you chat

About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat

Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched

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



“You say this was written to force you to go to Hannibal?” Boney said.

I nodded.

“It doesn’t say Hannibal anywhere here,” she said. “It doesn’t even imply it.”

“The visor hat, that’s an old inside joke between us about—”

“Oh, an inside joke,” Gilpin said.

“What about the next clue, the little brown house?” Boney asked.

“To go to my dad’s,” I said.

Boney’s face grew stern again. “Nick, your dad’s house is blue.” She turned to Tanner with rolling eyes: This is what you’re giving me?

“It sounds to me like you’re making up ‘inside jokes’ in these clues,” Boney said. “I mean, you want to talk about convenient: We find out you’ve been to Hannibal, whaddaya know, this clue secretly means go to Hannibal.”

“The final present here,” Tanner said, pulling the box onto the table, “is a not-so-subtle hint. Punch and Judy dolls. As you know, I’m sure, Punch kills Judy and her baby. This was discovered by my client. We wanted to make sure you have it.”

Boney pulled the box over, put on latex gloves, and lifted the puppets out. “Heavy,” she said, “solid.” She examined the lace of the woman’s dress, the male’s motley. She picked up the male, examined the thick wooden handle with the finger grooves.