B: The Punch and Judy puppets, they seem a little ominous for an anniversary present.
A: I know! Now I know. I didn’t remember the whole backstory of Punch and Judy. I was just seeing a husband and wife and a baby, and they were made of wood, and I was pregnant. I scanned the Internet and saw Punch’s line: That’s the way to do it! And I thought it was cute—I didn’t know what it meant.
B: So you were hog-tied. How did Desi get you to the car?
A: He pulled the car into the garage and lowered the garage door, dragged me in, threw me in the trunk, and drove away.
B: And did you yell then?
A: Yes, I fucking yelled. And if I’d known that, every night for the next month, Desi was going to rape me, then snuggle in next to me with a martini and a sleeping pill so he wouldn’t be awakened by my sobbing, and that the police were going to actually interview him and still not have a clue, still sit around with their thumbs up their asses, I might have yelled harder. Yes, I might have.
B: Again, my apologies. Can we get Ms. Dunne some tissues, please? And where’s her coff—Thank you. Okay, where did you go from there, Amy?
A: We drove toward St. Louis, and I remember on the way there he stopped at Hannibal—I heard the steamboat whistle. I guess that’s when he threw my purse out. It was the one other thing he did so it would look like foul play.
B: This is so interesting. There seem to be so many strange coincidences in this case. Like, that Desi would happen to toss out the purse right at Hannibal, where your clue would make Nick go—and we in turn would believe that Nick tossed the purse there. Or how you decided to hide a present in the very place where Nick was hiding goods he’d bought on secret credit cards.
A: Really? I have to tell you, none of this sounds like coincidence to me. It sounds like a bunch of cops who got hung up on my husband being guilty, and now that I am alive and he’s clearly not guilty, they look like giant idiots, and they’re scrambling to cover their asses. Instead of accepting responsibility for the fact that, if this case had been left in your extremely fucking incompetent hands, Nick would be on death row and I’d be chained to a bed, being raped every day from now until I died.
B: I’m sorry, it’s—
A: I saved myself, which saved Nick, which saved your sorry fucking asses.
B: That is an incredibly good point, Amy. I’m sorry, we’re so … We’ve spent so long on this case, we want to figure out every detail that we missed so we don’t repeat our mistakes. But you’re absolutely right, we’re missing the big picture, which is: You are a hero. You are an absolute hero.
A: Thank you. I appreciate you saying that.
NICK DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF THE RETURN
I went to the station to fetch my wife and was greeted by the press like a rock star–landslide president–first moonwalker all in one. I had to resist raising clasped hands above my head in the universal victory shake. I see, I thought, we’re all pretending to be friends now.
I entered a scene that felt like a holiday party gone awry—a few bottles of champagne rested on one desk, surrounded by tiny paper cups. Backslapping and cheers for all the cops, and then more cheers for me, as if these people hadn’t been my persecutors a day before. But I had to play along. Present the back for slapping. Oh yes, we’re all buddies now.
All that matters is that Amy is safe. I’d been practicing that line over and over. I had to look like the relieved, doting husband until I knew which way things were going to go. Until I was sure the police had sawed through all her sticky cobwebby lies. Until she is arrested— I’d get that far, until she is arrested, and then I could feel my brain expand and deflate simultaneously—my own cerebral Hitchcock zoom—and I’d think: My wife murdered a man.
“Stabbed him,” said the young police officer assigned as the family liaison. (I hoped never to be liaisoned again, with anyone, for any reason.) He was the same kid who’d yammered on to Go about his horse and torn labrum and peanut allergy. “Cut him right through the jugular. Cut like that, he bleeds out in, like, sixty seconds.”
Sixty seconds is a long time to know you are dying. I could picture Desi wrapping his hands around his neck, the feel of his own blood spurting between his fingers with each pulse, and Desi getting more frightened and the pulsing only quickening … and then slowing, and Desi knowing the slowing was worse. And all the time Amy standing just out of reach, studying him with the blameful, disgusted look of a high school biology student confronted with a dripping pig fetus. Her little scalpel still in hand.
“Cut him with a big ole butcher knife,” the kid was saying. “Guy used to sit right next to her on the bed, cut up her meat for her, and feed her.” He sounded more disgusted by this than by the stabbing. “One day the knife slips off the plate, he never notices—”