‘No good ones.’
‘She was taken … from the home. Is that correct?’
‘From our home, yes.’
Then I knew who he was: He was the guy who’d shown up alone the first day of searches, the guy who kept sneaking looks at Amy’s photo.
‘You were at the volunteer center, weren’t you? The first day.’
‘I was,’ Desi said, reasonable. ‘I was about to say that. I wish I’d been able to meet you that day, express my condolences.’
‘Long way to come.’
‘I could say the same to you.’ He smiled. ‘Look, I’m really fond of Amy. Hearing what had happened, well, I had to do something. I just—It’s terrible to say this, Nick, but when I saw it on the news, I just thought, Of course.’
‘Of course?’
‘Of course someone would … want her,’ he said. He had a deep voice, a fireside voice. ‘You know, she always had that way. Of making people want her. Always. You know that old cliche´: Men want her, and women want to be her. With Amy, that was true.’
Desi folded large hands across his trousers. Not pants, trousers. I couldn’t decide if he was fucking with me. I told myself to tread lightly. It’s the rule of all potentially prickly interviews: Don’t go on the offense until you have to, first see if they’ll hang themselves all on their own.
‘You had a very intense relationship with Amy, right?’ I asked.
‘It wasn’t only her looks,’ Desi said. He leaned on a knee, his eyes distant. ‘I’ve thought about this a lot, of course. First love. I’ve definitely thought about it. The navel-gazer in me. Too much philosophy.’ He cracked a self-effacing grin. The dimples popped. ‘See, when Amy likes you, when she’s interested in you, her attention is so warm and reassuring and entirely enveloping. Like a warm bath.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘You feel good about yourself. Completely good, for maybe the first time. And then she sees your flaws, she realizes you’re just another regular person she has to deal with – you are in actuality Able Andy, and in real life, Able Andy would never make it with Amazing Amy. So her interest fades, and you stop feeling good, you can feel that old coldness again, like you’re naked on the bathroom floor, and all you want is to get back in the bath.’
I knew that feeling – I’d been on the bathroom floor for about three years – and I felt a rush of disgust for sharing this emotion with this other man.
‘I’m sure you know what I mean,’ Desi said, and smiled winkily at me.
What an odd man, I thought. Who compares another man’s wife to a bath he wants to sink into? Another man’s missing wife?
Behind Desi was a long, polished end table bearing several silver-framed photos. In the center was an oversize one of Desi and Amy back in high school, in tennis whites – the two so preposterously stylish, so monied-lush they could have been a frame from a Hitchcock movie. I pictured Desi, teenage Desi, slipping into Amy’s dorm room, dropping his clothes to the floor, settling onto the cold sheets, swallowing plastic-coated pills. Waiting to be found. It was a form of punishment, of rage, but not the kind that occurred in my house. I could see why the police weren’t that interested. Desi trailed my glance.
‘Oh, well, you can’t blame me for that.’ He smiled. ‘I mean, would you throw away a photo that perfect?’
‘Of a girl I hadn’t known for twenty years?’ I said before I could stop. I realized my tone sounded more aggressive than was wise.
‘I know Amy,’ Desi snapped. He took a breath. ‘I knew her. I knew her very well. There aren’t any leads? I have to ask … Her father, is he … there?’
‘Of course he is.’
‘I don’t suppose … He was definitely in New York when it happened?’
‘He was in New York. Why?’
Desi shrugged: Just curious, no reason. We sat in silence for a half minute, playing a game of eye-contact chicken. Neither of us blinked.
‘I actually came here, Desi, to see what you could tell me.’
I tried again to picture Desi making off with Amy. Did he have a lake house somewhere nearby? All these types did. Would it be believable, this refined, sophisticated man keeping Amy in some preppy basement rec room, Amy pacing the carpet, sleeping on a dusty sofa in some bright, clubby ’60s color, lemon yellow or coral. I wished Boney and Gilpin were here, had witnessed the proprietary tone of Desi’s voice: I know Amy.
‘Me?’ Desi laughed. He laughed richly. The perfect phrase to describe the sound. ‘I can’t tell you anything. Like you said, I don’t know her.’
‘But you just said you did.’
‘I certainly don’t know her like you know her.’
‘You stalked her in high school.’
‘I stalked her? Nick. She was my girlfriend.’
‘Until she wasn’t,’ I said. ‘And you wouldn’t go away.’
‘Oh, I probably did pine for her. But nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘You call trying to kill yourself in her dorm room ordinary?’
He jerked his head, squinted his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, then stared down at his hands. ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Nick,’ he finally said.
‘I’m talking about you stalking my wife. In high school. Now.’
‘That’s really what this is about?’ He laughed again. ‘Good God, I thought you were raising money for a reward fund or something. Which I’m happy to cover, by the way. Like I said, I’ve never stopped wanting the best for Amy. Do I love her? No. I don’t know her anymore, not really. We exchange the occasional letter. But it is interesting, you coming here. You confusing the issue. Because I have to tell you, Nick, on TV, hell, here, now, you don’t seem to be a grieving, worried husband. You seem … smug. The police, by the way, already talked with me, thanks, I guess to you. Or Amy’s parents. Strange you didn’t know – you’d think they’d tell the husband everything if he were in the clear.’
My stomach clenched. ‘I’m here because I wanted to see for myself your face when you talked about Amy,’ I said. ‘I gotta tell you, it worries me. You get a little … moony.’
‘One of us has to,’ Desi said, again reasonably.
‘Sweetheart?’ A voice came from the back of the house, and another set of expensive shoes clattered toward the living room. ‘What was the name of that book—’
The woman was a blurry vision of Amy, Amy in a steam-fogged mirror – exact coloring, extremely similar features, but a quarter century older, the flesh, the features, all let out a bit like a fine fabric. She was still gorgeous, a woman who chose to age gracefully. She was shaped like some sort of origami creation: elbows in extreme points, a clothes-hanger collarbone. She wore a china-blue sheath dress and had the same pull Amy did: When she was in a room, you kept turning your head back her way. She gave me a rather predatory smile.
‘Hello, I’m Jacqueline Collings.’
‘Mother, this is Amy’s husband, Nick,’ Desi said.
‘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, alw
ays.’
‘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 these 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.
d) Demand to know what went wrong; make him talk and talk about it in order to calm your own neuroses.
Answer: C
It’s August, so sumptuous that I couldn’t bear any more black squares, but no, it’s been nothing but hearts, Nick acting like my husband, sweet and loving and goofy. He orders me chocolates from my favorite shop in New York for a treat, and he writes me a silly poem to go with them. A limerick, actually:
There once was a girl from Manhattan
Who slept only on sheets made of satin
Her husband slipped and he slided
And their bodies collided
So they did something dirty in Latin.
It would be funnier if our sex life were as carefree as the rhyme would suggest. But last week we did … fuck? Do it? Something more romantic that have sex but less cheesy than make love. He came home from work and kissed me full on the lips, and he touched me as if I were really there. I almost cried, I’d been so lonely. To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most decadent thing.
What else? He takes me swimming in the same pond he’s gone to since he was a child. I can picture little Nick flapping around manically, face and shoulders sunburned red because (just like now) he refuses to wear sunscreen, forcing Mama Mo to chase after him with lotion that she swipes on whenever she can reach him.
He’s been taking me on a full tour of his boyhood haunts, like I asked him to for ages. He walks me to the edge of the river, and he kisses me as the wind whips my hair (‘My two favorite things to look at in the world,’ he whispers in my ear). He kisses me in a funny little playground fort that he once considered his own clubhouse (‘I always wanted to bring a girl here, a perfect girl, and look at me now,’ he whispers in my ear). Two days before the mall closes for good, we ride carousel bunnies side by side, our laughter echoing through the empty miles.
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 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 mor
e 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 Collins 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.
Gone Girl Page 16