He takes me for a sundae at his favorite ice cream parlor, and we have the place to ourselves in the morning, the air all sticky with sweets. He kisses me and says this place is where he stuttered and suffered through so many dates, and he wishes he could have told his high school self that he would be back here with the girl of his dreams someday. We eat ice cream until we have to roll home and get under the covers. His hand on my belly, an accidental nap.
The neurotic in me, of course, is asking: Where’s the catch? Nick’s turnaround is so sudden and so grandiose, it feels like … it feels like he must want something. Or he’s already done something and he is being preemptively sweet for when I find out. I worry. I caught him last week shuffling through my thick file box marked THE DUNNES! (written in my best cursive in happier days), a box filled with all the strange paperwork that makes up a marriage, a combined life. I worry that he is going to ask me for a second mortgage on The Bar, or to borrow against our life insurance, or to sell off some not-to-be-touched-for-thirty-years stock. He said he just wanted to make sure everything was in order, but he said it in a fluster. My heart would break, it really would, if, midbite of bubblegum ice cream, he turned to me and said: You know, the interesting thing about a second mortgage is …
I had to write that, I had to let that out. And just seeing it, I know it sounds crazy. Neurotic and insecure and suspicious.
I will not let my worst self ruin my marriage. My husband loves me. He loves me and he has come back to me and that is why he is treating me so nice. That is the only reason.
Just like that: Here is my life. It’s finally returned.
NICK DUNNE
FIVE DAYS GONE
I sat in the billowing heat of my car outside Desi’s house, the windows rolled down, and checked my phone. A message from Gilpin: “Hi, Nick. We need to touch base today, update you on a few things, go over a few questions. Meet us at four at your house, okay? Uh … thanks.”
It was the first time I’d been ordered. Not Could we, we’d love to, if you don’t mind. But We need to. Meet us …
I glanced at my watch. Three o’clock. Best not be late.
The summer air show—a parade of jets and prop planes spinning loops up and down the Mississippi, buzzing the tourist steamboats, rattling teeth—was three days off, and the practice runs were in high gear by the time Gilpin and Rhonda arrived. We were all back in my living room for the first time since The Day Of.
My home was right on a flight path; the noise was somewhere between jackhammer and avalanche. My cop buddies and I tried to jam a conversation in the spaces between the blasts. Rhonda looked more birdlike than usual—favoring one leg, then another, her head moving all around the room as her gaze alighted on different objects, angles—a magpie looking to line her nest. Gilpin hovered next to her, chewing his lip, tapping a foot. Even the room felt restive: The afternoon sun lit up an atomic flurry of dust motes. A jet shot over the house, that awful sky-rip noise.
“Okay, couple of things here,” Rhonda said when the silence returned. She and Gilpin sat down as if they both had suddenly decided to stay awhile. “Some stuff to get clear on, some stuff to tell you. All very routine. And as always, if you want a lawyer—”
But I knew from my TV shows, my movies, that only guilty guys lawyered up. Real, grieving, worried, innocent husbands did not.
“I don’t, thanks,” I said. “I actually have some information to share with you. About Amy’s former stalker, the guy she dated back in high school.”
“Desi—uh, Collins,” began Gilpin.
“Collings. I know you all talked to him, I know you for some reason aren’t that interested in him, so I went to visit him myself today. To make sure he seemed … okay. And I don’t think he is okay. I think he’s someone you all should look into. Really look into. I mean, he moves to St. Louis—”
“He was living in St. Louis three years before you all moved back,” Gilpin said.
“Fine, but he’s in St. Louis. Easy drive. Amy bought a gun because she was afraid—”
“Desi’s okay, Nick. Nice guy,” Rhonda said. “Don’t you think? He reminds me of you, actually. Real golden boy, baby of the family.”
“I’m a twin. Not the baby. I’m actually three minutes older.”
Rhonda was clearly trying to nip at me, see if she could get a rise, but even knowing this didn’t prevent the angry blood flush to my stomach every time she accused me of being a baby.
“Anyway,” Gilpin interrupted. “Both he and his mother deny that he ever stalked Amy, or that he even had much contact with her these past years except the occasional note.”
“My wife would tell you differently. He wrote Amy for years—years—and then he shows up here for the search, Rhonda. Did you know that? He was here that first day. You talked about keeping an eye out for men inserting themselves into the investigation—”
“Desi Collings is not a suspect,” she interrupted, one hand up.
“But—”
“Desi Collings is not a suspect,” she repeated.
The news stung. I wanted to accuse her of being swayed by Ellen Abbott, but Ellen Abbott was probably best left unmentioned.
“Okay, well what about all these, these guys who’ve clogged up our tip line?” I walked over and grabbed the sheet of names and numbers that I’d carelessly tossed on the dining room table. I began reading names. “Inserting themselves into the investigation: David Samson, Murphy Clark—those are old boyfriends—Tommy O’Hara, Tommy O’Hara, Tommy O’Hara, that’s three calls, Tito Puente—that’s just a dumb joke.”
“Have you phoned any of them back?” Boney asked.
“No. Isn’t that your job? I don’t know which are worthwhile and which are crazies. I don’t have time to call some jackass pretending to be Tito Puente.”
“I wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the tip line, Nick,” Rhonda said. “It’s kind of a woodwork situation. I mean, we’ve fielded a lot of phone calls from your old girlfriends. Just want to say hi. See how you are. People are strange.”
“Maybe we should get started on our questions,” Gilpin nudged.
“Right. Well, I guess we should begin with where you were the morning your wife went missing,” Boney said, suddenly apologetic, deferential. She was playing good cop, and we both knew she was playing good cop. Unless she was actually on my side. It seemed possible that sometimes a cop was just on your side. Right?
“When I was at the beach.”
“And you still can’t recall anyone seeing you there?” Boney asked. “It’d help us so much if we could just cross this little thing off our list.” She allowed a sympathetic silence. Rhonda could not only keep quiet, she could infuse the room with a mood of her choosing, like an octopus and its ink.
“Believe me, I’d like that as much as you. But no. I don’t remember anyone.”
Boney smiled a worried smile. “It’s strange, we’ve mentioned—just in passing—your being at the beach to a few people, and they all said … They were all surprised, let’s put it that way. Said that didn’t sound like you. You aren’t a beach guy.”
I shrugged. “I mean, do I go to the beach and lay out all day? No. But to sip my coffee in the morning? Sure.”
“Hey, this might help,” Boney said brightly. “Where’d you buy your coffee that morning?” She turned to Gilpin as if to seek approval. “Could tighten the time frame at least, right?”
“I made it here,” I said.
“Oh.” She frowned. “That’s weird, because you don’t have any coffee here. Nowhere in the house. I remember thinking it was odd. A caffeine addict notices these things.”
Right, just something you happened to notice, I thought. I knew a cop named Bony Moronie … Her traps are so obvious, they’re clearly phony …
“I had a leftover cup in the fridge I heated up.” I shrugged again: No big deal.
“Huh. Must have been there a long time—I noticed there’s no coffee container in the trash.”
“Few
days. Still tastes good.”
We both smiled at each other: I know and you know. Game on. I actually thought those idiotic words: Game on. Yet I was pleased in a way: The next part was starting.
Boney turned to Gilpin, hands on knees, and gave a little nod. Gilpin chewed his lip some more, then finally pointed: toward the ottoman, the end table, the living room now righted. “See, here’s our problem, Nick,” he started. “We’ve seen dozens of home invasions—”
“Dozens upon dozens upon dozens,” Boney interrupted.
“Many home invasions. This—all this area right there, in the living room—remember it? The upturned ottoman, the overturned table, the vase on the floor”—he slapped down a photo of the scene in front of me—“this whole area, it was supposed to look like a struggle, right?”
My head expanded and snapped back into place. Stay calm. “Supposed to?”
“It looked wrong,” Gilpin continued. “From the second we saw it. To be honest, the whole thing looked staged. First of all, there’s the fact that it was all centered in this one spot. Why wasn’t anything messed up anywhere but this room? It’s odd.” He proffered another photo, a close-up. “And look here, at this pile of books. They should be in front of the end table—the end table is where they were stacked, right?”
I nodded.
“So when the end table was knocked over, they should have spilled mostly in front of it, following the trajectory of the falling table. Instead, they’re back behind it, as if someone swept them off before knocking over the table.”
I stared dumbly at the photo.
“And watch this. This is very curious to me,” Gilpin continued. He pointed at three slender antique frames on the mantelpiece. He stomped heavily, and they all flopped facedown immediately. “But somehow they stayed upright through everything else.”
He showed a photo of the frames upright. I had been hoping—even after they caught my Houston’s dinner slipup—that they were dumb cops, cops from the movies, local rubes aiming to please, trusting the local guy: Whatever you say, buddy. I didn’t get dumb cops.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I mumbled. “It’s totally— I just don’t know what to think about this. I just want to find my wife.”
“So do we, Nick, so do we,” Rhonda said. “But here’s another thing. The ottoman—remember how it was flipped upside down?” She patted the squatty ottoman, pointed at its four peg legs, each only an inch high. “See, this thing is bottom-heavy because of those tiny legs. The cushion practically sits on the floor. Try to push it over.” I hesitated. “Go on, try it,” Boney urged.
I gave it a push, but it slid across the carpet instead of turning over. I nodded. I agreed. It was bottom-heavy.
“Seriously, get down there if you need to, and knock that thing upside down,” Boney ordered.
I knelt down, pushed from lower and lower angles, finally put a hand underneath the ottoman, and flipped it. Even then it lifted up, one side hovering, and fell back into place; I finally had to pick it up and turn it over manually.
“Weird, huh?” Boney said, not sounding all that puzzled.
“Nick, you do any housecleaning the day your wife went missing?” Gilpin asked.
“No.”
“Okay, because the tech did a Luminol sweep, and I’m sorry to tell you, the kitchen floor lit up. A good amount of blood was spilled there.”
“Amy’s type—B positive.” Boney interrupted, “And I’m not talking a little cut, I’m talking blood.”
“Oh my God.” A clot of heat appeared in the middle of my chest. “But—”
“Yes, so your wife made it out of this room,” Gilpin said. “Somehow, in theory, she made it into the kitchen—without disturbing any of those gewgaws on that table just outside the kitchen—and then she collapsed in the kitchen, where she lost a lot of blood.”
“And then someone carefully mopped it up,” Rhonda said, watching me.
“Wait. Wait. Why would someone try to hide blood but then mess up the living room—”
“We’ll figure that out, don’t worry, Nick,” Rhonda said quietly.
“I don’t get it, I just don’t—”
“Let’s sit down,” Boney said. She pointed me toward a dining room chair. “You eat anything yet? Want a sandwich, something?”
I shook my head. Boney was taking turns playing different female characters: powerful woman, doting caregiver, to see what got the best results.
“How’s your marriage, Nick?” Rhonda asked. “I mean, five years, that’s not far from the seven-year itch.”
“The marriage was fine,” I repeated. “It’s fine. Not perfect, but good, good.”
She wrinkled her nose: You lie.
“You think she might have run off?” I asked, too hopefully. “Made this look like a crime scene and took off? Runaway-wife thing?”
Boney began ticking off reasons no: “She hasn’t used her cell, she hasn’t used her credit cards, ATM cards. She made no major cash withdrawals in the weeks before.”
“And there’s the blood,” Gilpin added. “I mean, again, I don’t want to sound harsh, but the amount of blood spilled? That would take some serious … I mean, I couldn’t have done it to myself. I’m talking some deep wounds there. Your wife got nerves of steel?”
“Yes. She does.” She also had a deep phobia of blood, but I’d wait and let the brilliant detectives figure that out.
“It seems extremely unlikely,” Gilpin said. “If she were to wound herself that seriously, why would she mop it up?”
“So really, let’s be honest, Nick,” Boney said, leaning over on her knees so she could make eye contact with me as I stared at the floor. “How was your marriage currently? We’re on your side, but we need the truth. The only thing that makes you look bad is you holding out on us.”
“We’ve had bumps.” I saw Amy in the bedroom that last night, her face mottled with the red hivey splotches she got when she was angry. She was spitting out the words—mean, wild words—and I was listening to her, trying to accept the words because they were true, they were technically true, everything she said.
“Describe the bumps for us,” Boney said.
“Nothing specific, just disagreements. I mean, Amy is a blow-stack. She bottles up a bunch of little stuff and—whoom!—but then it’s over. We never went to bed angry.”
“Not Wednesday night?” Boney asked.
“Never,” I lied.
“Is it money, what you mostly argue about?”
“I can’t even think what we’d argue about. Just stuff.”
“What stuff was it the night she went missing?” Gilpin said it with a sideways grin, like he’d uttered the most unbelievable gotcha.
“Like I told you, there was the lobster.”
“What else? I’m sure you didn’t scream about the lobster for a whole hour.”
At that point Bleecker waddled partway down the stairs and peered through the railings.
“Other household stuff too. Married-couple stuff. The cat box,” I said. “Who would clean the cat box.”
“You were in a screaming argument about a cat box,” Boney said.
“You know, the principle of the thing. I work a lot of hours, and Amy doesn’t, and I think it would be good for her if she did some basic home maintenance. Just basic upkeep.”
Gilpin jolted like an invalid woken from an afternoon nap. “You’re an old-fashioned guy, right? I’m the same way. I tell my wife all the time, ‘I don’t know how to iron, I don’t know how to do the dishes. I can’t cook. So, sweetheart, I’ll catch the bad guys, that I can do, and you throw some clothes in the washer now and then.’ Rhonda, you were married, did you do the domestic stuff at home?”
Boney looked believably annoyed. “I catch bad guys too, idiot.”
Gilpin rolled his eyes toward me; I almost expected him to make a joke—sounds like someone’s on the rag—the guy was laying it on so thick.
Gilpin rubbed his vulpine jaw. “So you just
wanted a housewife,” he said to me, making the proposition seem reasonable.
“I wanted—I wanted whatever Amy wanted. I really didn’t care.” I appealed to Boney now, Detective Rhonda Boney with the sympathetic air that seemed at least partly authentic. (It’s not, I reminded myself.) “Amy couldn’t decide what to do here. She couldn’t find a job, and she wasn’t interested in The Bar. Which is fine, if you want to stay home, that’s fine, I said. But when she stayed home, she was unhappy too. And she’d wait for me to fix it. It was like I was in charge of her happiness.”
Boney said nothing, gave me a face expressionless as water.
“And, I mean, it’s fun to be hero for a while, be the white knight, but it doesn’t really work for long. I couldn’t make her be happy. She didn’t want to be happy. So I thought if she started taking charge of a few practical things—”
“Like the cat box,” said Boney.
“Yeah, clean the cat box, get some groceries, call a plumber to fix the drip that drove her crazy.”
“Wow, that sounds like a real happiness plan there. Lotta yuks.”
“But my point was, do something. Whatever it is, do something. Make the most of the situation. Don’t sit and wait for me to fix everything for you.” I was speaking loudly, I realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous, but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger, someone who won’t call bullshit, someone forced to listen to your side. (Someone pretending to listen to your side, I corrected.)
“So the move back to Missouri?” Boney said. “You moved Amy here against her wishes?”
“Against her wishes? No. We did what we had to do. I had no job, Amy had no job, my mom was sick. I’d do the same for Amy.”
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