“You have to be extremely careful with your wording, and we will tell Sharon that you won’t answer certain questions. She’ll ask you anyway, but we’ll teach you how to say, Because of certain prejudicial actions by the police involved in this case, I really, unfortunately, can’t answer that right now, as much as I’d like to—and say it convincingly.”
“Like a talking dog.”
“Sure, like a talking dog who doesn’t want to go to prison. We get Sharon Schieber to take you on as a cause, Nick, and we are golden. This is all incredibly unorthodox, but that’s me,” Tanner said again. He liked the line; it was his theme music. He paused and furrowed his brow, doing his pretend-thinking gesture. He was going to add something I wouldn’t like.
“What?” I asked.
“You need to tell Sharon Schieber about Andie—because it’s going to come out, the affair, it just will.”
“Right when people are finally starting to like me. You want me to undo that?”
“I swear to you, Nick—how many cases have I handled? It always—somehow, some way—always comes out. This way we have control. You tell her about Andie and you apologize. Apologize literally as if your life depends on it. You had an affair, you are a man, a weak, stupid man. But you love your wife, and you will make it up to her. You do the interview, it’ll air the next night. All content is embargoed—so the network can’t tease the Andie affair in their ads. They can just use the word bombshell.”
“So you already told them about Andie?”
“Good God, no,” he said. “I told them: We have a nice bombshell for you. So you do the interview, and we have about twenty-four hours. Just before it hits TV, we tell Boney and Gilpin about Andie and about our discovery in the woodshed. Oh my gosh, we’ve put it all together for you: Amy is alive and she’s framing Nick! She’s crazy, jealous, and she is framing Nick! Oh, the humanity!”
“Why not tell Sharon Schieber, then? About Amy framing me?”
“Reason one. You come clean about Andie, you beg forgiveness, the nation is primed to forgive you, they’ll feel sorry for you—Americans love to see sinners apologize. But you can reveal nothing to make your wife look bad; no one wants to see the cheating husband blame the wife for anything. Let someone else do it sometime the next day: Sources close to the police reveal that Nick’s wife—the one he swore he loved with all his heart—is framing him! It’s great TV.”
“What’s reason two?”
“It’s too complicated to explain exactly how Amy is framing you. You can’t do it in a sound bite. It’s bad TV.”
“I feel sick,” I said.
“Nick, it’s—” Go started.
“I know, I know, it has to be done. But can you imagine, your biggest secret and you have to tell the world about it? I know I have to do it. And it works for us, ultimately, I think. It’s the only way Amy might come back,” I said. “She wants me to be publicly humiliated—”
“Chastened,” Tanner interrupted. “Humiliated makes it sound like you feel sorry for yourself.”
“—and to publicly apologize,” I continued. “But it’s going to be fucking awful.”
“Before we go forward, I want to be honest here,” Tanner said. “Telling the police the whole story—Amy’s framing Nick—it is a risk. Most cops, they decide on a suspect and they don’t want to veer at all. They’re not open to any other options. So there’s the risk that we tell them and they laugh us out of the station and they arrest you—and then theoretically we’ve just given them a preview of our defense. So they can plan exactly how to destroy it at trial.”
“Okay, wait, that sounds really, really bad, Tanner,” Go said. “Like, bad, inadvisable bad.”
“Let me finish,” Tanner said. “One, I think you’re right, Nick. I think Boney isn’t convinced you’re a killer. I think she would be open to an alternate theory. She has a good reputation as a cop who’s actually fair. As a cop who has good instincts. I talked with her. I got a good vibe. I think the evidence is leading her in your direction, but I think her gut is telling her something’s off. More important, if we do go to trial, I wouldn’t use the Amy frame-up as your defense, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said, it’s too complicated, a jury wouldn’t be able to follow. If it’s not good TV, believe me, it’s not for a jury. We’d go with more of an O.J. thing. A simple story line: The cops are incompetent and out to get you, it’s all circumstantial, if the glove doesn’t fit, blah blah, blah.”
“Blah blah blah, that gives me a lot of confidence,” I said.
Tanner flashed a smile. “Juries love me, Nick. I’m one of them.”
“You’re the opposite of one of them, Tanner.”
“Reverse that: They’d like to think they’re one of me.”
Everything we did now, we did in front of small brambles of flashing paparazzi, so Go, Tanner, and I left the house under pops of light and pings of noise. (“Don’t look down,” Tanner advised, “don’t smile, but don’t look ashamed. Don’t rush either, just walk, let them take their shots, and shut the door before you call them names. Then you can call them whatever you want.”) We were headed down to St. Louis, where the interview would take place, so I could prep with Tanner’s wife, Betsy, a former TV news anchor turned lawyer. She was the other Bolt in Bolt & Bolt.
It was a creepy tailgate party: Tanner and I, followed by Go, followed by a half-dozen news vans, but by the time the Arch crept over the skyline, I was no longer thinking of the paparazzi.
By the time we reached Tanner’s penthouse hotel suite, I was ready to do the work I needed to nail the interview. Again I longed for my own theme music: the montage of me getting ready for the big fight. What’s the mental equivalent of a speed bag?
A gorgeous six-foot-tall black woman answered the door.
“Hi, Nick, I’m Betsy Bolt.”
In my mind Betsy Bolt was a diminutive blond Southern-belle white girl.
“Don’t worry, everyone is surprised when they meet me.” Betsy laughed, catching my look, shaking my hand. “Tanner and Betsy, we sound like we should be on the cover of The Official Preppy Guide, right?”
“Preppy Handbook,” Tanner corrected as he kissed her on the cheek.
“See? He actually knows,” she said.
She ushered us into an impressive penthouse suite—a living room sunlit by wall-to-wall windows, with bedrooms shooting off each side. Tanner had sworn he couldn’t stay in Carthage, at the Days Inn, out of respect for Amy’s parents, but Go and I both suspected he couldn’t stay in Carthage because the closest five-star hotel was in St. Louis.
We engaged in the preliminaries: small talk about Betsy’s family, college, career (all stellar, A-list, awesome), and drinks dispersed for everyone (soda pops and Clamato, which Go and I had come to believe was an affectation of Tanner’s, a quirk he thought would give him character, like my wearing fake glasses in college). Then Go and I sank down into the leather sofa, Betsy sitting across from us, her legs pressed together to one side, like a slash mark. Pretty/professional. Tanner paced behind us, listening.
“Okay. So, Nick,” Betsy said. “I’ll be frank, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You and TV. Aside from your bar-blog thingie, the Whodunnit.com thingie last night, you’re awful.”
“There was a reason I went to print journalism,” I said. “I see a camera, and my face freezes.”
“Exactly,” Betsy said. “You look like a mortician, so stiff. I got a trick to fix that, though.”
“Booze?” I asked. “That worked for me on the blog thingie.”
“That won’t work here,” Betsy said. She began setting up a video camera. “Thought we’d do a dry run first. I’ll be Sharon. I’ll ask the questions she’ll probably ask, and you answer the way you normally would. That way we can know how far off the mark you are.” She laughed again. “Hold on.” She was wearing a blue sheath dress, and from an oversize leather purse she pulled a string of pearls. The Shar
on Schieber uniform. “Tanner?”
Her husband fastened the pearls for her, and when they were in place, Betsy grinned. “I aim for absolute authenticity. Aside from my Georgia accent. And being black.”
“I see only Sharon Schieber before me,” I said.
She turned the camera on, sat down across from me, let out a breath, looked down, and then looked up. “Nick, there have been many discrepancies in this case,” Betsy said in Sharon’s plummy broadcast voice. “To begin with, can you walk our audience through the day your wife went missing?”
“Here, Nick, you only discuss the anniversary breakfast you two had,” Tanner interrupted. “Since that is already out there. But you don’t give time lines, you don’t discuss before and after breakfast. You are emphasizing only this wonderful last breakfast you had. Okay, go.”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. The camera was blinking red; Betsy had her quizzical-journalist expression on. “Uh, as you know, it was our five-year anniversary, and Amy got up early and was making crepes—”
Betsy’s arm shot out, and my cheek suddenly stung.
“What the hell?” I said, trying to figure out what had happened. A cherry-red jellybean was in my lap. I held it up.
“Every time you tense up, every time you turn that handsome face into an undertaker’s mask, I am going to hit you with a jellybean,” Betsy explained, as if the whole thing were quite reasonable.
“And that’s supposed to make me less tense?”
“It works,” Tanner said. “It’s how she taught me. I think she used rocks with me, though.” They exchanged oh, you! married smiles. I could tell already: They were one of those couples who always seemed to be starring in their own morning talk show.
“Now start again, but linger over the crepes,” Betsy said. “Were they your favorites? Or hers? And what were you doing that morning for your wife while she was making crepes for you?”
“I was sleeping.”
“What had you bought her for a gift?”
“I hadn’t yet.”
“Oh, boy.” She rolled her eyes over to her husband. “Then be really, really, really complimentary about those crepes, okay? And about what you were going to get her that day for a present. Because I know you were not coming back to that house without a present.”
We started again, and I described our crepe tradition that wasn’t really, and I described how careful and wonderful Amy was with picking out gifts (here another jellybean smacked just right of my nose, and I immediately loosened my jaw) and how I, dumb guy (“Definitely play up the doofus-husband stuff,” Betsy advised), was still trying to come up with something dazzling.
“It wasn’t like she even liked expensive or fancy presents,” I began, and was hit with a paper ball from Tanner.
“What?”
“Past tense. Stop using fucking past tense about your wife.”
“I understand you and your wife had some bumps,” Betsy continued.
“It had been a rough few years. We’d both lost our jobs.”
“Good, yes!” Tanner called. “You both had.”
“We’d moved back here to help care for my dad, who has Alzheimer’s, and my late mother, who had cancer, and on top of that I was working very hard at my new job.”
“Good, Nick, good,” Tanner said.
“Be sure to mention how close you were with your mom,” Betsy said, even though I’d never mentioned my mom to her. “No one will pop up to deny that, right? No Mommy Dearest or Sonny Dearest stories out there?”
“No, my mom and I were very close.”
“Good,” said Betsy. “Mention her a lot, then. And that you own the bar with your sister—always mention your sister when you mention the bar. If you own a bar on your own, you’re a player; if you own it with your beloved twin sister, you’re—”
“Irish.”
“Go on.”
“And so it all built up—” I started.
“No,” Tanner said. “Implies building up to an explosion.”
“So we had gotten off track a little, but I was considering our five-year anniversary as a time to revive our relationship—”
“Recommit to our relationship,” Tanner called. “Revive means something was dead.”
“Recommit to our relationship—”
“And so how does fucking a twenty-three-year-old figure in to this rejuvenative picture?” Betsy asked.
Tanner lobbed a jellybean her way. “A little out of character, Bets.”
“I’m sorry, guys, but I’m a woman, and that smells like bullshit, like mile-away bullshit. Recommit to the relationship, please. That girl was still in the picture when Amy went missing. Women are going to hate you, Nick, unless you suck it up. Be up-front, don’t stall. You can add it on: We lost our jobs, we moved, my parents were dying. Then I fucked up. I fucked up huge. I lost track of who I was, and unfortunately, it took losing Amy to realize it. You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.”
“So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” I said.
Betsy flung an annoyed look at the ceiling. “And that’s an attitude, Nick, you should be real careful on.”
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
NINE DAYS GONE
I am penniless and on the run. How fucking noir. Except that I am sitting in my Festiva at the far end of the parking lot of a vast fast-food complex on the banks of the Mississippi River, the smell of salt and factory-farm meat floating on the warm breezes. It is evening now—I’ve wasted hours—but I can’t move. I don’t know where to move to. The car gets smaller by the hour—I am forced to curl up like a fetus or my legs fall asleep. I certainly won’t sleep tonight. The door is locked, but I still await the tap on the window, and I know I will peek up and see either a crooked-toothed, sweet-talking serial killer (wouldn’t that be ironic, for me to actually be murdered?) or a stern, ID-demanding cop (wouldn’t that be worse, for me to be discovered in a parking lot looking like a hobo?). The glowing restaurant signs never go off here; the parking lot is lit like a football field—I think of suicide again, how a prisoner on suicide watch spends twenty-four hours a day under lights, an awful thought. My gas tank is below the quarter mark, an even more awful thought: I can drive only about an hour in any direction, so I must choose the direction carefully. South is Arkansas, north is Iowa, west is back to the Ozarks. Or I could go east, cross the river into Illinois. Everywhere I go is the river. I’m following it or it’s following me.
I know, suddenly, what I must do.
NICK DUNNE
TEN DAYS GONE
We spent the day of the interview huddled in the spare bedroom of Tanner’s suite, prepping my lines, fixing my look. Betsy fussed over my clothes, then Go trimmed the hair above my ears with nail scissors while Betsy tried to talk me into using makeup—powder—to cut down on shine. We all spoke in low voices because Sharon’s crew was setting up outside; the interview would be in the suite’s living room, overlooking the St. Louis Arch. Gateway to the West. I’m not sure what the point of the landmark was except to serve as a vague symbol of the middle of the country: You Are Here.
“You need at least a little powder, Nick,” Betsy finally said, coming at me with the puff. “Your nose sweats when you get nervous. Nixon lost an election on nose sweat.” Tanner oversaw it all like a conductor. “Not too much off that side, Go,” he’d call. “Bets, be very careful with that powder, better too little than too much.”
“We should have Botoxed him,” she said. Apparently, Botox fights sweat as well as wrinkles—some of their clients got a series of underarm shots before a trial, and they were already suggesting such a thing for me. Gently, subtly suggesting, should we go to trial.
“Yeah, I really need the press to get wind that I was having Botox treatments while my wife was missing,” I said. “Is missing.” I knew Amy wasn’t dead, but I also knew she was so far out of my reach that she might as well be. She was a wife in past tense.
“Good catch,” Tanner said.
“Next time do it before it comes out of your mouth.”
At five P.M., Tanner’s phone rang, and he looked at the display. “Boney.” He sent it to voice mail. “I’ll call her after.” He didn’t want any new bit of information, interrogation, gossip to force us to reformulate our message. I agreed: I didn’t want Boney in my head just then.
“You sure we shouldn’t see what she wants?” Go said.
“She wants to fuck with me some more,” I said. “We’ll call her. A few hours. She can wait.”
We all rearranged ourselves, a mass group reassurance that the call was nothing to worry about. The room stayed silent for half a minute.
“I have to say, I’m strangely excited to get to meet Sharon Schieber,” Go finally said. “Very classy lady. Not like that Connie Chung.”
I laughed, which was the intention. Our mother had loved Sharon Schieber and hated Connie Chung—she’d never forgiven her for embarrassing Newt Gingrich’s mother on TV, something about Newt calling Hillary Clinton a b-i-t-c-h. I don’t remember the actual interview, just our mom’s outrage over it.
At six P.M. we entered the room, where two chairs were set up facing each other, the Arch in the background, the timing picked precisely so the Arch would glow but there would be no sunset glare on the windows. One of the most important moments of my life, I thought, dictated by the angle of the sun. A producer whose name I wouldn’t remember clicked toward us on dangerously high heels and explained to me what I should expect. Questions could be asked several times, to make the interview seem as smooth as possible, and to allow for Sharon’s reaction shots. I could not speak to my lawyer before giving an answer. I could rephrase an answer but not change the substance of the answer. Here’s some water, let’s get you miked.
We started to move over to the chair, and Betsy nudged my arm. When I looked down, she showed me a pocket of jellybeans. “Remember …” she said, and tsked her finger at me.
Suddenly, the suite door swung wide and Sharon Schieber entered, as smooth as if she were being borne by a team of swans. She was a beautiful woman, a woman who had probably never looked girlish. A woman whose nose probably never sweat. She had thick dark hair and giant brown eyes that could look doelike or wicked.
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