Gone Girl: A Novel

by Gillian Flynn

Me, not so much. The media was already turning up items of concern. Not only the stuff that had been leaked—my lack of alibi, the possibly “staged” crime scene—but actual personality traits. They reported that back in high school, I’d never dated one girl longer than a few months and thus was clearly a ladies’ man. They found out we had my father in Comfort Hill and that I rarely visited, and thus I was an ingrate dad-abandoner. “It’s a problem—they don’t like you,” Go said after every bit of news coverage. “It’s a real, real problem, Lance.” The media had resurrected my first name, which I’d hated since grade school, stifled at the start of every school year when the teacher called roll: “It’s Nick, I go by Nick!” Every September, an opening-day rite: “Nick-I-go-by-Nick!” Always some smart-ass kid would spend recess parading around like a mincing gallant: “Hi, I’m Laaaance,” in a flowy-shirted voice. Then it would be forgotten again until the following year.

  But not now. Now it was all over the news, the dreaded three-name judgment reserved for serial killers and assassins—Lance Nicholas Dunne—and there was no one I could interrupt.

  Rand and Marybeth Elliott, Go, and I carpooled to the vigil together. It was unclear how much information the Elliotts were receiving, how many damning updates about their son-in-law. I knew they were aware of the “staged” scene: “I’m going to get some of my own people in there, and they’ll tell us just the opposite—that it clearly was the scene of a struggle,” Rand said confidently. “The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert.”

  Rand didn’t know about the other stuff, the credit cards and the life insurance and the blood and Noelle, my wife’s bitter best friend with the damning claims: abuse, greed, fear. She was booked on Ellen Abbott tonight, post-vigil. Noelle and Ellen could be mutually disgusted by me for the viewing audience.

  Not everyone was repulsed by me. In the past week, The Bar’s business was booming: Hundreds of customers packed in to sip beers and nibble popcorn at the place owned by Lance Nicholas Dunne, the maybe-killer. Go had to hire four new kids to tend The Bar; she’d dropped by once and said she couldn’t go again, couldn’t stand seeing how packed it was, fucking gawkers, ghouls, all drinking our booze and swapping stories about me. It was disgusting. Still, Go reasoned, the money would be helpful if …

  If. Amy gone six days, and we were all thinking in ifs.

  We approached the park in a car gone silent except for Marybeth’s constant nail drumming on the window.

  “Feels almost like a double date.” Rand laughed, the laughter curving toward the hysterical: high-pitched and squeaky. Rand Elliott, genius psychologist, best-selling author, friend to all, was unraveling.

  Marybeth had taken to self-medication: shots of clear liquor administered with absolute precision, enough to take the edge off but stay sharp. Rand, on the other hand, was literally losing his head; I half expected to see it shoot off his shoulders on a jack-in-the-box spring—cuckoooooo! Rand’s schmoozy nature had turned manic: He got desperately chummy with everyone he met, wrapping his arms around cops, reporters, volunteers. He was particularly tight with our Days Inn “liaison,” a gawky, shy kid named Donnie whom Rand liked to razz and inform he was doing so. “Ah, I’m just razzing you, Donnie,” he’d say, and Donnie would break into a joyous grin.

  “Can’t that kid go get validation somewhere else?” I groused to Go the other night. She said I was just jealous that my father figure liked someone better. I was.

  Marybeth patted Rand’s back as we walked toward the park, and I thought about how much I wanted someone to do that, just a quick touch, and I suddenly let out a gasp-sob, one quick teary moan. I wanted someone, but I wasn’t sure if it was Andie or Amy.

  “Nick?” Go said. She raised a hand toward my shoulder, but I shrugged her off.

  “Sorry. Wow, sorry for that,” I said. “Weird outburst, very un-Dunne-y.”

  “No problem. We’re both coming undone-y,” Go said, and looked away. Since discovering my situation—which is what we’d taken to calling my infidelity—she’d gotten a bit removed, her eyes distant, her face a constant mull. I was trying very hard not to resent it.

  As we entered the park, the camera crews were everywhere, not just local anymore but network. The Dunnes and the Elliotts walked along the perimeter of the crowd, Rand smiling and nodding like a visiting dignitary. Boney and Gilpin appeared almost immediately, took to our heels like friendly pointer dogs; they were becoming familiar, furniture, which was clearly the idea. Boney was wearing the same clothes she wore to any public event: a sensible black skirt, a gray-striped blouse, barrettes clipping either side of her limp hair. I got a girl named Bony Moronie … The night was steamy; under each of Boney’s armpits was a dark smiley face of perspiration. She actually grinned at me as if yesterday, the accusations—they were accusations, weren’t they?—hadn’t happened.

  The Elliotts and I filed up the steps to a rickety makeshift stage. I looked back toward my twin and she nodded at me and pantomimed a big breath, and I remembered to breathe. Hundreds of faces were turned toward us, along with clicking, flashing cameras. Don’t smile, I told myself. Do not smile.

  From the front of dozens of Find Amy T-shirts, my wife studied me.

  Go had said I needed to make a speech (“You need some humanizing, fast”) so I did, I walked up to the microphone. It was too low, mid-belly, and I wrestled with it a few seconds, and it raised only an inch, the kind of malfunction that would normally infuriate me, but I could no longer be infuriated in public, so I took a breath and leaned down and read the words that my sister had written for me: “My wife, Amy Dunne, has been missing for almost a week. I cannot possibly convey the anguish our family feels, the deep hole in our lives left by Amy’s disappearance. Amy is the love of my life, she is the heart of her family. For those who have yet to meet her, she is funny, and charming, and kind. She is wise and warm. She is my helpmate and partner in every way.”

  I looked up into the crowd and, like magic, spotted Andie, a disgusted look on her face, and I quickly glanced back at my notes.

  “Amy is the woman I want to grow old with, and I know this will happen.”

  PAUSE. BREATHE. NO SMILE. Go had actually written the words on my index card. Happen happen happen. My voice echoed out through the speakers, rolling toward the river.

  “We ask you to contact us with any information. We light candles tonight in the hope she comes home soon and safely. I love you, Amy.”

  I kept my eyes moving anywhere but Andie. The park sparkled with candles. A moment of silence was supposed to be observed, but babies were crying, and one stumbling homeless man kept asking loudly, “Hey, what is this about? What’s it for?,” and someone would whisper Amy’s name, and the guy would say louder, “What? It’s for what?”

  From the middle of the crowd, Noelle Hawthorne began moving forward, her triplets affixed, one on a hip, the other two clinging to her skirt, all looking ludicrously tiny to a man who spent no time around children. Noelle forced the crowd to part for her and the children, marching right to the edge of the podium, where she looked up at me. I glared at her—the woman had maligned me—and then I noticed for the first time the swell in her belly and realized she was pregnant again. For one second, my mouth dropped—four kids under four, sweet Jesus!—and later, that look would be analyzed and debated, most people believing it was a one-two punch of anger and fear.

  “Hey, Nick.” Her voice caught in the half-raised microphone and boomed out to the audience.

  I started to fumble with the mike, but couldn’t find the off switch.

  “I just wanted to see your face,” she said, and burst into tears. A wet sob rolled out over the audience, everyone rapt. “Where is she? What have you done with Amy? What have you done with your wife!”

  Wife, wife, her voice echoed. Two of her alarmed children began to wail.

  Noelle couldn’t talk for a second, she was crying so hard, she was wild, furious, and she grabbed the microphone stand and yanked the whole
thing down to her level. I debated grabbing it back but knew I could do nothing toward this woman in the maternity dress with the three toddlers. I scanned the crowd for Mike Hawthorne—control your wife—but he was nowhere. Noelle turned to address the crowd.

  “I am Amy’s best friend!” Friend friend friend. The words boomed out all over the park along with her children’s keening. “Despite my best efforts, the police don’t seem to be taking me seriously. So I’m taking our cause to this town, this town that Amy loved, that loved her back! This man, Nick Dunne, needs to answer some questions. He needs to tell us what he did to his wife!”

  Boney darted from the side of the stage to reach her, and Noelle turned, and the two locked eyes. Boney made a frantic chopping motion at her throat: Stop talking!

  “His pregnant wife!”

  And no one could see the candles anymore, because the flashbulbs were going berserk. Next to me, Rand made a noise like a balloon squeak. Down below me, Boney put her fingers between her eyebrows as if stanching a headache. I was seeing everyone in frantic strobe shots that matched my pulse.

  I looked out into the crowd for Andie, saw her staring at me, her face pink and twisted, her cheeks damp, and as we caught each other’s eyes, she mouthed “Asshole!” and stumbled back away through the crowd.

  “We should go.” My sister, suddenly beside me, whispering in my ear, tugging at my arm. The cameras flashing at me as I stood like some Frankenstein’s monster, fearful and agitated by the villager torches. Flash, flash. We started moving, breaking into two parts: my sister and I fleeing toward Go’s car, the Elliotts standing with jaws agape, on the platform, left behind, save yourselves. The reporters pelted the question over and over at me. Nick, was Amy pregnant? Nick, were you upset Amy was pregnant? Me, streaking out of the park, ducking like I was caught in hail: Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, the word pulsing in the summer night in time to the cicadas.

  AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

  FEBRUARY 15, 2012

  DIARY ENTRY

  What a strange time this is. I have to think that way, try to examine it from a distance: Ha-ha, what an odd period this will be to look back on, won’t I be amused when I’m eighty, dressed in faded lavender, a wise, amused figure swilling martinis, and won’t this make a story? A strange, awful story of something I survived.

  Because something is horribly wrong with my husband, of that I am sure now. Yes, he’s mourning his mother, but this is something more. It feels directed at me, not a sadness but … I can feel him watching me sometimes, and I look up and see his face twisted in disgust, like he’s walked in on me doing something awful, instead of just eating cereal in the morning or combing my hair at night. He’s so angry, so unstable, I’ve been wondering if his moods are linked to something physical—one of those wheat allergies that turn people mad, or a colony of mold spores that has clogged his brain.

  I came downstairs the other night and found him at the dining room table, his head in his hands, looking at a pile of credit-card bills. I watched my husband, all alone, under the spotlight of a chandelier. I wanted to go to him, to sit down with him and figure it out like partners. But I didn’t, I knew that would piss him off. I sometimes wonder if that is at the root of his distaste for me: He’s let me see his shortcomings, and he hates me for knowing them.

  He shoved me. Hard. Two days ago, he shoved me, and I fell and banged my head against the kitchen island and I couldn’t see for three seconds. I don’t really know what to say about it. It was more shocking than painful. I was telling him I could get a job, something freelance, so we could start a family, have a real life …

  “What do you call this?” he said.

  Purgatory, I thought. I stayed silent.

  “What do you call this, Amy? Huh? What do you call this? This isn’t life, according to Miss Amazing?”

  “It’s not my idea of life,” I said, and he took three big steps toward me, and I thought: He looks like he’s going to … And then he was slamming against me and I was falling.

  We both gasped. He held his fist in the other hand and looked like he might cry. He was beyond sorry, he was aghast. But here’s the thing I want to be clear on: I knew what I was doing, I was punching every button on him. I was watching him coil tighter and tighter—I wanted him to finally say something, do something. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s the worst, do something, Nick. Don’t leave me here like a ghost.

  I just didn’t realize he was going to do that.

  I’ve never considered what I would do if my husband attacked me, because I haven’t exactly run in the wife-beating crowd. (I know, Lifetime movie, I know: Violence crosses all socioeconomic barriers. But still: Nick?) I sound glib. It just seems so incredibly ludicrous: I am a battered wife. Amazing Amy and the Domestic Abuser.

  He did apologize profusely. (Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess.) He’s agreed to consider counseling, which was something I never thought could happen. Which is good. He’s such a good man, at his core, that I am willing to write it off, to believe it truly was a sick anomaly, brought on by the strain we’re both under. I forget sometimes, that as much stress as I feel, Nick feels it too: He bears the burden of having brought me here, he feels the strain of wanting mopey me to be content, and for a man like Nick—who believes strongly in an up-by-the-bootstraps sort of happiness—that can be infuriating.

  So the hard shove, so quick, then done, it didn’t scare me in itself. What scared me was the look on his face as I lay on the floor blinking, my head ringing. It was the look on his face as he restrained himself from taking another jab. How much he wanted to shove me again. How hard it was not to. How he’s been looking at me since: guilt, and disgust at the guilt. Absolute disgust.

  Here’s the darkest part. I drove out to the mall yesterday, where about half the town buys drugs, and it’s as easy as picking up a prescription; I know because Noelle told me: Her husband goes there to purchase the occasional joint. I didn’t want a joint, though, I wanted a gun, just in case. In case things with Nick go really wrong. I didn’t realize until I was almost there that it was Valentine’s Day. It was Valentine’s Day and I was going to buy a gun and then cook my husband dinner. And I thought to myself: Nick’s dad was right about you. You are a dumb bitch. Because if you think your husband is going to hurt you, you leave. And yet you can’t leave your husband, who’s mourning his dead mother. You can’t. You’d have to be a biblically awful woman to do that, unless something were truly wrong. You’d have to really believe your husband was going to hurt you.

  But I don’t really think Nick would hurt me.

  I just would feel safer with a gun.

  NICK DUNNE

  SIX DAYS GONE

  Go pushed me into the car and peeled away from the park. We flew past Noelle, who was walking with Boney and Gilpin toward their cruiser, her carefully dressed triplets bumping along behind her like kite ribbons. We screeched past the mob: hundreds of faces, a fleshy pointillism of anger aimed right at me. We ran away, basically. Technically.

  “Wow, ambush,” Go muttered.

  “Ambush?” I repeated, brain-stunned.

  “You think that was an accident, Nick? Triplet Cunt already made her statement to the police. Nothing about the pregnancy.”

  “Or they’re doling out bombshells a little at a time.”

  Boney and Gilpin had already heard my wife was pregnant and decided to make it a strategy. They clearly really believed I killed her.

  “Noelle will be on every cable broadcast for the next week, talking about how you’re a murderer and she’s Amy’s best friend out for justice. Publicity whore. Publicity fucking whore.”

  I pressed my face against the window, slumped in my chair. Several news vans followed us. We drove silently, Go’s breath slowing down. I watched the river, a tree branch bobbing its way south.

  “Nick?” she finally said. “Is it—uh … Do you—”

  “I don’t know, Go. Amy didn’t say anything to me. If she was preg
nant, why would she tell Noelle and not tell me?”

  “Why would she try to get a gun and not tell you?” Go said. “None of this makes sense.”

  We retreated to Go’s—the camera crews would be swarming my house—and as soon as I walked in the door my cell phone rang, the real one. It was the Elliotts. I sucked in some air, ducked into my old bedroom, then answered.

  “I need to ask you this, Nick.” It was Rand, the TV burbling in the background. “I need you to tell me. Did you know Amy was pregnant?”

  I paused, trying to find the right way to phrase it, the unlikelihood of a pregnancy.

  “Answer me, goddammit!”

  Rand’s volume made me get quieter. I spoke in a soft, soothing voice, a voice wearing a cardigan. “Amy and I were not trying to get pregnant. She didn’t want to be pregnant, Rand, I don’t know if she ever was going to be. We weren’t even … we weren’t even having relations that often. I’d be … very surprised if she was pregnant.”

  “Noelle said Amy visited the doctor to confirm the pregnancy. The police already submitted a subpoena for the records. We’ll know tonight.”

  I found Go in the living room, sitting with a cup of cold coffee at my mother’s card table. She turned toward me just enough to show she knew I was there, but she didn’t let me see her face.

  “Why do you keep lying, Nick?” she asked. “The Elliotts are not your enemy. Shouldn’t you at least tell them that it was you who didn’t want kids? Why make Amy look like the bad guy?”

  I swallowed the rage again. My stomach was hot with it. “I’m exhausted, Go. Goddamn. We gotta do this now?”

  “We gonna find a time that’s better?”

  “I did want kids. We tried for a while, no luck. We even started looking into fertility treatments. But then Amy decided she didn’t want kids.”

  “You told me you didn’t.”

  “I was trying to put a good face on it.”

  “Oh, awesome, another lie,” Go said. “I didn’t realize you were such a … What you’re saying, Nick, it makes no sense. I was there, at the dinner to celebrate The Bar, and Mom misunderstood, she thought you guys were announcing that you were pregnant, and it made Amy cry.”