two-man table as if we were going to play chess. This is a conversation for us partners, Bolt said without having to say it. We’ll sit at our little war-room table and get down to it.
‘My retainer, Mr Dunne, is a hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money, obviously. So I want to be clear on what I offer and on what I will expect of you, okay?’
He aimed unblinking eyes at me, a sympathetic smile, and waited for me to nod. Only Tanner Bolt could get away with making me, a client, fly to him, then tell me what kind of dance I’d need to do in order to give him my money.
‘I win, Mr Dunne. I win unwinnable cases, and the case that I think you may soon face is – I don’t want to patronize you – it’s a tough one. Money troubles, bumpy marriage, pregnant wife. The media has turned on you, the public has turned on you.’
He twisted a signet ring on his right hand and waited for me to show him I was listening. I’d always heard the phrase: At forty, a man wears the face he’s earned. Bolt’s fortyish face was well tended, almost wrinkle-free, pleasantly plump with ego. Here was a confident man, the best in his field, a man who liked his life.
‘There will be no more police interviews without my presence,’ Bolt was saying. ‘That’s something I seriously regret you did. But before we even get to the legal portion, we need to start dealing with public opinion, because the way it’s going, we have to assume everything is going to get leaked: your credit cards, the life insurance, the supposedly staged crime scene, the mopped-up blood. It looks very bad, my friend. And so it’s a vicious cycle: The cops think you did it, they let the public know. The public is outraged, they demand an arrest. So, one: We’ve got to find an alternative suspect. Two: We’ve got to keep the support of Amy’s parents, I cannot emphasize that piece enough. And three: We’ve got to fix your image, because should this go to trial, it will influence the juror pool. Change of venue doesn’t mean anything anymore – twenty-four-hour cable, Internet, the whole world is your venue. So I cannot tell you how key it is to start turning this whole thing around.’
‘I’d like that too, believe me.’
‘How are things with Amy’s parents? Can we get them to make a statement of support?’
‘I haven’t spoken with them since it was confirmed that Amy was pregnant.’
‘Is pregnant.’ Tanner frowned at me. ‘Is. She is pregnant. Never, ever mention your wife in the past tense.’
‘Fuck.’ I put my face in my palm for a second. I hadn’t even noticed what I’d said.
‘Don’t worry about it with me,’ Bolt said, waving the air magnanimously. ‘But everywhere else, worry. Worry hard. From now on, I don’t want you to open your mouth if you haven’t thought it through. So you haven’t spoken to Amy’s parents. I don’t like that. You’ve tried to get in touch, I assume?’
‘I’ve left a few messages.’
Bolt scrawled something on a yellow legal pad. ‘Okay, we have to assume this is bad news for us. But you need to track them down. Nowhere public, where some asshole with a cameraphone can film you – we can’t have another Shawna Kelly moment. Or send your sister in, a recon mission, see what’s going on. Actually, do that, that’s better.’
‘Okay.’
‘I need you to make a list for me, Nick. Of all the nice things you’ve done for Amy over the years. Romantic things, especially in this past year. You cooked her chicken soup when she was sick, or you sent her love letters while you were on a business trip. Nothing too flashy. I don’t care about jewelry unless you guys picked it out on vacation or something. We need real personal stuff here, romantic-movie stuff.’
‘What if I’m not a romantic-movie kind of guy?’
Tanner tightened his lips, then blew them back out. ‘Come up with something, okay, Nick? You seem like a good guy. I’m sure you did something thoughtful this past year.’
I couldn’t think of a decent thing I’d done in the past two years. In New York, those first few years of marriage, I’d been desperate to please my wife, to return to those loose-limbed days when she’d run across a drugstore parking lot and leap into my arms, a spontaneous celebration of her hair-spray purchase. Her face pressed up against mine all the time, her bright blue eyes wide and her yellow lashes catching on mine, the heat of her breath just under my nose, the silliness of it. For two years I tried as my old wife slipped away, and I tried so hard – no anger, no arguments, the constant kowtowing, the capitulation, the sitcom-husband version of me: Yes, dear. Of course, sweetheart. The fucking energy leached from my body as my frantic-rabbit thoughts tried to figure out how to make her happy, and each action, each attempt, was met with a rolled eye or a sad little sigh. A you just don’t get it sigh.
By the time we left for Missouri, I was just pissed. I was ashamed of the memory of me – the scuttling, scraping, hunchbacked toadie of a man I’d turned into. So I wasn’t romantic; I wasn’t even nice.
‘Also, I need a list of people who may have harmed Amy, who may have had something against her.’
‘I should tell you, it seems Amy tried to buy a gun earlier this year.’
‘The cops know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know?’
‘Not until the guy she tried to buy from told me.’
He took exactly two seconds to think. ‘Then I bet their theory is she wanted a gun to protect herself from you,’ he said. ‘She was isolated, she was scared. She wanted to believe in you, yet she could feel something was very wrong, so she wanted a gun in case her worst fear was correct.’
‘Wow, you’re good.’
‘My dad was a cop,’ he said. ‘But I do like the gun idea – now we just need someone to match it to besides you. Nothing is too far out. If she argued with a neighbor constantly over a barking dog, if she was forced to rebuff a flirty guy, whatever you got, I need. What do you know about Tommy O’Hara?’
‘Right! I know he called the tip line a few times.’
‘He was accused of date-raping Amy in 2005.’
I felt my mouth open, but I said nothing.
‘She was dating him casually. There was a dinner date at his place, things got out of hand, and he raped her, according to my sources.’
‘When in 2005?’
‘May.’
It was during the eight months when I’d lost Amy – the time between our New Year’s meeting and my finding her again on Seventh Avenue.
Tanner tightened his tie, twisted a diamond-studded wedding band, assessing me. ‘She never told you.’
‘I haven’t heard a single thing about this,’ I said. ‘From anyone. But especially not from Amy.’
‘You’d be surprised, the number of women who still find it a stigma. Ashamed.’
‘I can’t believe I—’
‘I try never to show up to one of these meetings without new information for my client,’ he said. ‘I want to show you how serious I am about your case. And how much you need me.’
‘This guy could be a suspect?’
‘Sure, why not,’ Tanner said too breezily. ‘He has a violent history with your wife.’
‘Did he go to prison?’
‘She dropped the charges. Didn’t want to testify, I assume. If you and I decide to work together, I’ll have him checked out. In the meantime, think of anyone who took an interest in your wife. Better if it’s someone in Carthage, though. More believable. Now—’ Tanner crossed a leg, exposed his bottom row of teeth, uncomfortably bunched and stained in comparison with his perfect picket-fence top row. He held his crooked teeth against his upper lip for a moment. ‘Now comes the harder part, Nick,’ he said. ‘I need total honesty from you, it won’t work any other way. So tell me everything about your marriage, tell me the worst. Because if I know the worst, then I can plan for it. But if I’m surprised, we’re fucked. And if we’re fucked, you’re fucked. Because I get to fly away in my G4.’
I took a breath. Looked him in the eyes. ‘I cheated on Amy. I’ve been cheating on Amy.’
‘Okay.
With multiple women or just one?’
‘No, not multiple. I’ve never cheated before.’
‘So, with one woman?’ Bolt asked, and looked away, his eyes resting on a watercolor of a sailboat as he twirled his wedding band. I could picture him phoning his wife later, saying, Just once, just once, I want a guy who’s not an asshole.
‘Yes, just one girl, she’s very—’
‘Don’t say girl, don’t ever say girl,’ Bolt said. ‘Woman. One woman who is very special to you. Is that what you were going to say?’
Of course it was.
‘You do know, Nick, special is actually worse than – okay. How long?’
‘A little over a year.’
‘Have you spoken to her since Amy went missing?’
‘Yes, on a disposable cell phone. And in person once. Twice. But—’
‘In person.’
‘No one has seen us. I can swear to that. Just my sister.’
He took a breath, looked at the sailboat again. ‘And what does this—What’s her name?’
‘Andie.’
‘What is her attitude about all this?’
‘She’s been great – until the pregnancy … announcement. Now I think she’s a little … on edge. Very on edge. Very, uh … needy is the wrong word …’
‘Say what you need to say, Nick. If she’s needy, then—’
‘She’s needy. Clingy. Needs lots of reassurance. She’s a really sweet girl, but she’s young, and it’s, it’s been hard, obviously.’
Tanner Bolt went to his minibar and pulled out a Clamato. The entire fridge was filled with Clamato. He opened the bottle and drank it in three swallows, then dabbed his lips with a cloth napkin. ‘You will need to cut off, completely and forever, all contact with Andie,’ he said. I began to speak, and he aimed a palm at me. ‘Immediately.’
‘I can’t cut it off with her just like that. Out of nowhere.’
‘This isn’t something to debate. Nick. I mean, come on, buddy, I really got to say this? You cannot date around while your pregnant wife is missing. You will go to fucking prison. Now, the issue is to do it without turning her against us. Without leaving her with a vendetta, an urge to go public, anything but fond memories. Make her believe that this was the decent thing, make her want to keep you safe. How are you at breakups?’
I opened my mouth, but he didn’t wait.
‘We’ll prep you for the conversation the same way we’d prep you for a cross-exam, okay? Now, if you want me, I’ll fly to Missouri, I’ll set up camp, and we can really get to work on this. I can be with you as soon as tomorrow if you want me for your lawyer. Do you?’
‘I do.’
I was back in Carthage before dinnertime. It was strange, once Tanner swept Andie from the picture – once it became clear that she simply couldn’t stay – how quickly I accepted it, how little I mourned her. On that single, two-hour flight, I transitioned from in love with Andie to not in love with Andie. Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past. How odd, that I ruined my marriage over that little girl with whom I had nothing in common except that we both liked a good laugh and a cold beer after sex.
Of course you’re fine with ending it, Go would say. It got hard.
But there was a better reason: Amy was blooming large in my mind. She was gone, and yet she was more present than anyone else. I’d fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working – I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I’d spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake Poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn’t handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. I had pretended to be one kind of man and revealed myself to be quite another. Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making. I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate.
On the flight home, I’d looked at Clue 4 for so long, I’d memorized it. I wanted to torture myself. No wonder her notes were so different this time: My wife was pregnant, she wanted to start over, return us to our dazzling, happy aliveness. I could picture her running around town to hide those sweet notes, eager as a schoolgirl for me to get to the end – the announcement that she was pregnant with my child. Wood. It had to be an old-fashioned cradle. I knew my wife: It had to be an antique cradle. Although the clue wasn’t quite in an expectant-mother tone.
Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad
I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had
It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five
Pardon me if this is getting contrived!
A good time was had right here at sunny midday
Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.
So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,
And open the door for your big surprise.
I was almost home when I figured it out. Store goodies for anniversary five: Goodies would be something made of wood. To punish is to take someone to the woodshed. It was the woodshed behind my sister’s house – a place to stow lawn-mower parts and rusty tools – a decrepit old outbuilding, like something from a slasher movie where campers are slowly killed off. Go never went back there; she’d often joked of burning it down since she moved into the house. Instead, she’d let it get even more overgrown and cobwebbed. We’d always joked that it would be a good place to bury a body.
It couldn’t be.
I drove across town, my face numb, my hands cold. Go’s car was in the driveway, but I slipped past the glowing living room window and down the steep downhill slope, and I was soon out of her sight range, out of sight of anyone. Very private.
Back to the far back of the yard, on the edge of the tree line, there was the shed.
I opened the door.
Nonononono.
PART TWO
BOY MEETS GIRL
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I’m so much happier now that I’m dead.
Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead. But as shorthand, we’ll say dead. It’s been only a matter of hours, but I feel better already: loose joints, wavy muscles. At one point this morning, I realized my face felt strange, different. I looked in the rearview mirror – dread Carthage forty-three miles behind me, my smug husband lounging around his sticky bar as mayhem dangled on a thin piano wire just above his shitty, oblivious head – and I realized I was smiling. Ha! That’s new.
My checklist for today – one of many checklists I’ve made over the past year – sits beside me in the passenger seat, a spot of blood right next to Item 22: Cut myself. But Amy is afraid of blood, the diary readers will say. (The diary, yes! We’ll get to my brilliant diary.) No, I’m not, not a bit, but for the past year I’ve been saying I am. I told Nick probably half a dozen times how afraid I am of blood, and when he said, ‘I don’t remember you being so afraid of blood,’ I replied, ‘I’ve told you, I’ve told you so many times!’ Nick has such a careless memory for other people’s problems, he just assumed it was true. Swooning at the plasma center, that was a nice touch. I really did that, I didn’t just write that I did. (Don’t fret, we’ll sort this out: the true and the not true and the might as well be true.)
Item 22: Cut myself has been on the list a long time. Now it’s
real, and my arm hurts. A lot. It takes a very special discipline to slice oneself past the paper-cut layer, down to the muscle. You want a lot of blood, but not so much that you pass out, get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of red with a lot of explaining to do. I held a box cutter to my wrist first, but looking at that crisscross of veins, I felt like a bomb technician in an action movie: Snip the wrong line and you die. I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm, gnawing on a rag so I wouldn’t scream. One long, deep good one. I sat cross-legged on my kitchen floor for ten minutes, letting the blood drizzle steadily until I’d made a nice thick puddle. Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done after he bashed my head in. I want the house to tell a story of conflict between true and false. The living room looks staged, yet the blood has been cleaned up: It can’t be Amy!
So the self-mutilation was worth it. Still, hours later, the slice burns under my sleeves, under the tourniquet. (Item 30: Carefully dress wound, ensuring no blood has dripped where it shouldn’t be present. Wrap box cutter and tuck away in pocket for later disposal.)
Item 18: Stage the living room. Tip ottoman. Check.
Item 12: Wrap the First Clue in its box and tuck it just out of the way so the police will find it before dazed husband thinks to look for it. It has to be part of the police record. I want him to be forced to start the treasure hunt (his ego will make him finish it). Check.
Item 32: Change into generic clothes, tuck hair in hat, climb down the banks of the river, and scuttle along the edge, the water lapping inches below, until you reach the edge of the complex. Do this even though you know the Teverers, the only neighbors with a view of the river, will be at church. Do this because you never know. You always take the extra step that others don’t, that’s who you are.
Item 29: Say goodbye to Bleecker. Smell his little stinky cat breath one last time. Fill his kibble dish in case people forget to feed him once everything starts.
Item 33: Get the fuck out of Dodge.
Check, check, check.
I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I’d like you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy. What kind of woman would do such a thing? Let me tell you a story, a true story, so you can begin to understand.
To start: I should never have been born.
My mother had five miscarriages and two stillbirths before me. One a year, in the fall, as if it were a seasonal duty, like crop rotation. They were all girls; they were all named Hope. I’m sure it was my father’s suggestion – his optimistic impulse, his tie-dyed earnestness: We can’t give up hope, Marybeth. But give up Hope is exactly what they did, over and over again.
The doctors ordered my parents to stop trying; they refused. They are not quitters. They tried and tried, and finally came me. My mother didn’t count on my being alive, couldn’t bear to think of me as an actual baby, a living child, a girl who would get to come home. I would have been Hope 8, if things had gone badly. But I entered the world hollering – an electric, neon pink. My parents were so surprised, they realized they’d never discussed a name, not a real one, for a real child. For my first two days in the hospital, they didn’t name me. Each morning my mother would hear the door to her room open and feel the nurse lingering in the doorway (I always pictured her vintage, with swaying white skirts and one of those folded caps like a Chinese take-out box). The nurse would linger, and my mother would ask without even looking up, ‘Is she still alive?’
When I remained alive, they named me Amy, because it was a regular girl’s name, a popular girl’s name, a name a thousand other baby girls were given that year, so maybe the Gods wouldn’t notice this little baby nestled among the others. Marybeth said if she were to do it again, she’d name me Lydia.
I grew up feeling special, proud. I was the girl who battled oblivion and won. The chances were about 1 percent, but I did it. I ruined my mother’s womb in the process – my own prenatal Sherman’s March. Marybeth would never have another baby. As a child, I got a vibrant pleasure out of this: just me, just me, only me.
My mother would sip hot tea on the days of the Hopes’ birth-deaths, sit in a rocker with a blanket, and say she was just ‘taking a little time for myself.’ Nothing dramatic, my mother is too sensible to sing dirges, but she would get pensive, she would remove herself, and I would have none of it, needful thing that I was. I would clamber onto my mother’s lap, or thrust a crayoned drawing in her face, or remember a permission slip that needed prompt attention. My father would try to distract me, try to take me to a movie or bribe me with sweets. No matter the ruse, it didn’t work. I wouldn’t give my mother those few minutes.
I’ve always been better than the Hopes, I was the one who made it. But I’ve always been jealous too, always – seven dead dancing princesses. They get to be perfect without even trying, without even facing one moment of existence, while I am stuck here on earth, and every day I must try, and every day is a chance to be less than perfect.
It’s an exhausting way to live. I lived that way until I was thirty-one.
And then, for about two years, everything was okay. Because of Nick.
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