Gone Girl(70)

“Amy.” The woman smiled again. She had a bottom-of-a-well voice, deep and strangely resonant. “We’ve been quite interested in that story around here. Yes, very interested.” She turned coldly to her son. “We can never stop thinking about the superb Amy Elliott, can we?”

“Amy Dunne now,” I said.

“Of course,” Jacqueline agreed. “I’m so sorry, Nick, for what you’re going through.” She stared at me a moment. “I’m sorry, I must … I didn’t picture Amy with such an … American boy.” She seemed to be speaking neither to me nor to Desi. “Good God, he even has a cleft chin.”

“I came over to see if your son had any information,” I said. “I know he’s written my wife a lot of letters over the years.”

“Oh, the letters!” Jacqueline smiled angrily. “Such an interesting way to spend one’s time, don’t you think?”

“Amy shared them with you?” Desi asked. “I’m surprised.”

“No,” I said, turning to him. “She threw them away unopened, always.”

“All of them? Always? You know that?” Desi said, still smiling.

“Once I went through the trash to read one.” I turned back to Jacqueline. “Just to see what exactly was going on.”

“Good for you,” Jacqueline said, purring at me. “I’d expect nothing less of my husband.”

“Amy and I always wrote each other letters,” Desi said. He had his mother’s cadence, the delivery that indicated everything he said was something you’d want to hear. “It was our thing. I find e-mail so … cheap. And no one saves them. No one saves an e-mail, because it’s so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters—from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia—I don’t know, I always think about what will be lost—”

“Have you kept all my letters?” Jacqueline asked. She was standing at the fireplace, looking down on us, one long sinewy arm trailing along the mantelpiece.

“Of course.”

She turned to me with an elegant shrug. “Just curious.”

I shivered, was about to reach out toward the fireplace for warmth, but remembered that it was July. “It seems to me a rather strange devotion to keep up all these years,” I said. “I mean, she didn’t write you back.”

That lit up Desi’s eyes. “Oh” was all he said, the sound of someone who spied a surprise firework.

“It strikes me as odd, Nick, that you’d come here and ask Desi about his relationship—or lack thereof—with your wife,” Jacqueline Collings said. “Are you and Amy not close? I can guarantee you: Desi has had no genuine contact with Amy in decades. Decades.”

“I’m just checking in, Jacqueline. Sometimes you have to see something for yourself.”

Jacqueline started walking toward the door; she turned and gave me a single twist of her head to assure me that it was time to go.

“How very intrepid of you, Nick. Very do-it-yourself. Do you build your own decks too?” She laughed at the word and opened the door for me. I stared at the hollow of her neck and wondered why she wasn’t wearing a noose of pearls. Women like this always have thick strands of pearls to click and clack. I could smell her, though, a female scent, vaginal and strangely lewd.

“It was interesting to meet you, Nick,” she said. “Let’s all hope Amy gets home safely. Until then, the next time you want to get in touch with Desi?”

She pressed a thick, creamy card into my hands. “Call our lawyer, please.”





AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

AUGUST 17, 2011


DIARY ENTRY

I know this sounds the stuff of moony teenage girls, but I’ve been tracking Nick’s moods. Toward me. Just to make sure I’m not crazy. I’ve got a calendar, and I put hearts on any day Nick seems to love me again, and black squares when he doesn’t. The past year was all black squares, pretty much.

But now? Nine days of hearts. In a row. Maybe all he needed to know was how much I loved him and how unhappy I’d become. Maybe he had a change of heart. I’ve never loved a phrase more.

Quiz: After over a year of coldness, your husband suddenly seems to love you again. You:

a) Go on and on about how much he’s hurt you so he can apologize some more.

b) Give him the cold shoulder for a while longer—so he learns his lesson!

c) Don’t press him about his new attitude—know that he will confide in you when the time comes, and in the meantime, shower him with affection so he feels secure and loved, because that’s how this marriage thing works.