‘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 seat. 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 pregnant, 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 me 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.’
‘Well, I can’t explain everything Amy ever did, Go. I don’t know why, a fucking year ago, she cried like that. Okay?’
Go sat quietly, the orange of the streetlight creating a rock-star halo around her profile. ‘This is going to be a real test for you, Nick,’ she murmured, not looking at me. ‘You’ve always had trouble with the truth – you always do the little fib if you think it will avoid a real argument. You’ve always gone the easy way. Tell Mom you went to baseball practice when you really quit the team; tell Mom you went to church when you were at a movie. It’s some weird compulsion.’
‘This is very different from baseball, Go.’
‘It’s a lot different. But you’re still fibbing like a little boy. You’re still desperate to have everyone think you’re perfect. You never want to be the bad guy. So you tell Amy’s parents she didn’t want kids. You don’t tell me you’re cheating on your wife. You swear the credit cards in your name aren’t yours, you swear you were hanging out at a beach when you hate the beach, you swear your marriage was happy. I just don’t know what to believe right now.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Since Amy has disappeared, all you’ve done is lie. It makes me worry. About what’s going on.’
Complete silence for a moment.
‘Go, are you saying what I think you’re saying? Because if you are, something has fucking died between us.’
‘Remember that game you always played with Mom when we were little: Would you still love me if? Would you still love me if I smacked Go? Would you still love me if I robbed a bank? Would you still love me if I killed someone?’
I said nothing. My breath was coming too fast.
‘I would still love you,’ Go said.
‘Go, do you really need me to say it?’
She stayed silent.
‘I did not kill Amy.’
She stayed silent.
‘Do you believe me?’ I asked.
‘I love you.’
She put her hand on my shoulder and went to her bedroom, shut the door. I waited to see the light go on in the room, but it stayed dark.
Two seconds later, my cell phone rang. This time, it was the disposable cell that I needed to get rid of and couldn’t because I always, always, always had to pick up for Andie. Once a day, Nick. We need to talk once a day.
I realized I was grinding my teeth.
I took a breath.
Far out on the edge of town were the remains of an Old West fort that was now yet another park that no one ever went to. All that was left was the two-story wooden watchtower, surrounded by rusted swing sets and teeter-totters. Andie and I had met there once, groping each other inside the shade of the watchtower.
I did three long loops around town in my mom’s old car to be sure I was not tracked. It was madness to go – it wasn’t yet ten o’clock – but I had no say in our rendezvous anymore. I need to see you, Nick, tonight, right now, or I swear to you, I will lose it. As I pulled up to the fort, I was hit by the remoteness of it and what it meant: Andie was still willing to meet me in a lonely, unlit place, me the pregnant wife killer. As I walked toward the tower through the thick, scratchy grass, I could just see her outline in the tiny window of the wooden watchtower.
She is going to undo you, Nick. I quick-stepped the rest of the way.
An hour later I was huddled in the paparazzi-infested house, waiting. Rand said they’d know before midnight whether my wife was pregnant. When the phone rang, I grabbed it immediately only to find it was goddamn Comfort Hill. My father was gone again. The cops had been notified. As always, they made it sound as if I were the jackass. If this happens again, we are going to have to terminate your father’s stay with us. I had a sickening chill: My dad moving in with me – two pathetic, angry bastards – it would surely make for the worst buddy comedy in the world. The ending would be a murder-suicide. Ba-dum-dum! Cue the laff track.
I was getting off the phone, peering out the back window at the river – stay calm, Nick – when I saw a huddled figure down by the boathouse. I thought it must be a stray reporter, but then I recognized something in those balled fists and tight shoulders. Comfort Hill was about a thirty-minute walk straight down River Road. He somehow remembered our house when he couldn’t remember me.
I went outside into the darkness to see him dangling a foot over the bank, staring into the river. Less bedraggled than before, although he smelled tangy with sweat.
‘Dad? What are you doing here? Everyone’s worried.’
He looked at me with dark brown eyes, sharp eyes, not the glazed-milk color some elderly acquire. It would have been less disconcerting if they’d been milky.
‘She told me to come,’ he snapped. ‘She told me to come. This is my house, I can come whenever I want.’
‘You walked all the way here?’
‘I can come here anytime. You may hate me, but she loves me.’
I almost laughed. Even my father was reinventing a relationship with Amy.
A few photographers on my front lawn began shooting. I had to get my dad back to the home. I could picture the article they’d have to cook up to go along with this exclusive footage: What kind of father was Bill Dunne, what kind of man did he raise? Good God, if my dad started in on one of his harangues against the bitches … I dialed Comfort Hill, and after some finagling, they sent an orderly to retrieve him. I made a display of walking him gently to the sedan, murmuring reassuringly as the photographers got their shots.
My dad. I smiled as he left. I tried to make it seem very proud-son. The reporters asked me if I killed my wife. I was retreating to the house when a cop car pulled up.
It was Boney who came to my home, braving the paparazzi, to tell me. She did it kindly, in a gentle-fingertip voice.
Amy was pregnant.
My wife was gone with my baby inside her. Boney watched me, waiting for my reaction – make it part of the police report – so I told myself, Act correctly, don’t blow it, act the way a man acts when he hears this news. I ducked my head into my hands and muttered, Oh God, oh God, and while I was doing it, I saw my wife on the floor of our kitchen, her hands around her belly and her head bashed in.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
JUNE 26, 2012
– Diary entry –
I have never felt more alive in my life. It is a bright blue sky day, the birds are lunatic with the warmth, the river outside is gushing past, and I am utterly alive. Scared, thrilled, but alive.
This morning when I woke up, Nick was gone. I sat in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the sun golden it a foot at a time, the bluebirds singing right outside our window, and I wanted to vomit. My throat was clenching and unclenching like a heart. I told myself I would not throw up, then I ran to the bathroom and threw up: bile and warm water and one small bobbing pea. As my stomach was seizing and my eyes were tearing and I was gasping for breath, I started doing the only kind of math a woman does, huddled over a toilet. I’m on the pill, but I’d also forgotten a day or two – what does it matter, I’m thirty-eight, I’ve been on the pill for almost two decades. I’m not going to accidentally get pregnant.
I found the tests behind a locked sheet of glass. I had to track down a harried, mustached woman to unlock the case, and point out one I wanted while she waited impatiently. She handed it to me with a clinical stare and said, ‘Good luck.’
I didn’t know what would be good luck: plus sign or minus sign. I drove home and read the directions three times, and I held the stick at the right angle for the right number of seconds, and then I set it on the edge of the sink and ran away like it was a bomb. Three minutes, so I turned on the radio and of course it was a Tom Petty song – is there ever a time you turn on the radio and don’t hear a Tom Petty song? – so I sang every word to ‘American Girl’ and then I crept back into the bathroom like the test was something I had to sneak up on, my heart beating more frantically than it should, and I was pregnant.
I was suddenly running across the summer lawn and down the street, banging on Noelle’s door, and when she opened it, I burst into tears and showed her the stick and yelled, ‘I’m pregnant!’
And then someone else besides me knew, and so I was scared.
Once I got back home, I had two thoughts.
One: Our anniversary is coming next week. I will use the clues as love letters, a beautiful antique wooden cradle waiting at the end. I will convince him we belong together. As a family.
Two: I wish I’d been able to get that gun.
I get frightened now, sometimes, when my husband gets home. A few weeks ago, Nick asked me to go out on the raft with him, float along in the current under a blue sky. I actually wrapped my hands around our newel post when he asked me this, I clung to it. Because I had an image of him wobbling the raft – teasing at first, laughing at my panic, and then his face going tight, determined, and me falling into the water, that muddy brown water, scratchy with sticks and sand, and him on top of me, holding me under with one strong arm, until I stopped struggling.
I can’t help it. Nick married me when I was a young, rich, beautiful woman, and now I am poor, jobless, closer to forty than thirty; I’m not just pretty anymore, I am pretty for my age. It is the truth: My value has decreased. I can tell by the way Nick looks at me. But it’s not the look of a guy who took a tumble on an honest bet. It’s the look of a man who feels swindled. Soon it may be the look of a man who is trapped. He might have been able to divorce me before the baby. But he would never do that now, not Good Guy Nick. He couldn’t bear to have everyone in this family-values town believe he’s the kind of guy who’d abandon his wife and child. He’d rather stay and suffer with me. Suffer and resent and rage.
I won’t have an abortion. The baby is six weeks in my belly today, the size of a lentil, and is growing eyes and lungs and ears. A few hours ago, I went into the kitchen and found a snap-top container of dried beans Maureen had given me for Nick’s favorite soup, and I pulled out a lentil and laid it on the counter. It was smaller than my pinkie nail, tiny. I couldn’t bear to leave it on the cold countertop, so I picked it up and held it in my palm and petted it with the tip-tip-tip of a finger. Now it’s in the pocket of my T-shirt, so I can keep it close.
I won’t get an abortion and I won’t divorce Nick, not yet, because I can still remember how he’d dive into the ocean on a summer day and stand on his hands, his legs flailing out of the water, and leap back up with the best seashell just for me, and I’d let my eyes get dazzled by the sun, and I’d shut them and see the colors blinking like raindrops on the inside of my eyelids as Nick kissed me with salty lips and I’d think, I am so lucky, this is my husband, this man will be the father of my children. We’ll all be so happy.
But I may be wrong, I may be very wrong. Because sometimes, the way he looks at me? That sweet boy from the beach, man of my dreams, father of my child? I catch him looking at me with those watchful eyes, the eyes of an insect, pure calculation, and I think: This man might kill me.
So if you find this and I’m dead, well …
Sorry, that’s not funny.
NICK DUNNE
SEVEN DAYS GONE
It was time. At exactly eight a.m. Central, nine a.m. New York time, I picked up my phone. My wife was definitely pregnant. I was definitely the prime – only – suspect. I was going to get a lawyer, today, and he was going to be the very lawyer I didn’t want and absolutely needed.
Tanner Bolt. A grim necessity. Flip around any of the legal networks, the true-crime shows, and Tanner Bolt’s spray-tanned face would pop up, indignant and concerned on behalf of whatever freak-show client he was representing. He became famous at thirty-four for representing Cody Olsen, a Chicago restaurateur accused of strangling his very pregnant wife and dumping her body in a landfill. Corpse dogs detected the scent of a dead body inside the trunk of Cody’s Mercedes; a search of his laptop revealed that someone had printed out a map to the nearest landfill the morning Cody’s wife went missing. A no-brainer. By the time Tanner Bolt was done, everyone – the police department, two West Side Chicago gang members, a disgruntled club bouncer – was implicated except Cody Olsen, who walked out of the courtroom and bought cocktails all around.
In the decade since, Tanner Bolt had become known as the Hubby Hawk – his specialty was swooping down in high-profile cases to represent men accused of murdering their wives. He was successful over half the time, which wasn’t bad, considering the cases were usually damning, the accused extremely unlikable – cheaters, narcissists, sociopaths. Tanner Bolt’s other nickname was Dickhead Defender.
I had a two p.m. appointment.
‘This is Marybeth Elliott. Please leave a message, and I will return promptly …’ she said in voice just like Amy’s. Amy, who would not return promptly.
I was speeding to the airport to fly to New York and meet with Tanner Bolt. When I’d asked Boney’s permission to leave town, she seemed amused: Cops don’t really do that. That’s just on TV.
‘Hi, Marybeth, it’s Nick again. I’m anxious to talk to you. I wanted to tell you … uh, I truly didn’t know about the pregnancy, I’m just as shocked as you must be … uh, also I’m hiring an attorney, just so you know. I think even Rand had suggested it. So anyway … you know how bad I am on messages. I hope you call me back.’
Tanner Bolt’s office was in midtown, not far from where I used to work. The elevator shot me up twenty-five stories, but it was so smooth that I wasn’t sure I was moving until my ears popped. At the twenty-sixth floor, a tight-lipped blonde in a sleek business suit stepped on. She tapped her foot impatiently, waiting for the doors to shut, then snapped at me, ‘Why don’t you hit close?’ I flashed her the smile I give petulant women, the lighten-up smile, the one Amy called the ‘beloved Nicky grin,’ and then the woman recognised me. ‘Oh,’ she said. She looked as if she smelled something rancid. She seemed personally vindicated when I scuttled out on Tanner’s floor.
This guy was the best, and I needed the best, but I also resented being associated with him in any way – this sleazebag, this showboat, this attorney to the guilty. I pre-hated Tanner Bolt so much that I expected his office to look like a Miami Vice set. But Bolt & Bolt was quite the opposite – it was dignified, lawyerly. Behind spotless glass doors, people in very good suits commuted busily between offices.
A young, pretty man with a tie the color of tropical fruit greeted me and settled me down in the shiny glass-and-mirror reception area and grandly offered water (declined), then went back to a gleaming desk and picked up a gleaming phone. I sat on the sofa, watching the skyline, cranes pecking up and down like mechanical birds. Then I unfolded Amy’s final clue from my pocket. Five years is wood. Was that going to be the end prize of the treasure hunt? Something for the baby: a carved oak cradle, a wooden rattle? Something for our baby and for us, to start over, the Dunnes redone.
Go phoned while I was still staring at the clue.
‘Are we okay?’ she asked immediately.
My sister thought I was possibly a wife killer.
‘We’re as okay as I think we can ever be again, considering.’
‘Nick. I’m sorry. I called to say I’m sorry,’ Go said. ‘I woke up and felt totally insane. And awful. I lost my head. It was a momentary freakout. I really, truly apologize.’
I remained silent.
‘You got to give me this, Nick: exhaustion and stress and … I’m sorry … truly.’
‘Okay,’ I lied.
‘But I’m glad, actually. It cleared the air—’
‘She was definitely pregnant.’
My stomach turned. Again I felt as if I had forgotten something crucial. I had overlooked something and would pay for it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Go said. She waited a few seconds. ‘The fact of the matter is—’
‘I can’t talk about it. I can’t.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m actually in New York,’ I said. ‘I have an appointment with Tanner Bolt.’
She let out a whoosh of breath.
‘Thank God. You were able to see him that quick?’
‘That’s how fucked my case is.’ I’d been patched through at once to Tanner – I was on hold all of three seconds after stating my name – and when I told him about my living room interrogation about the pregnancy, he ordered me to hop on the next plane.
‘I’m kinda freaking out,’ I added.
‘You’re doing the smart thing. Seriously.’
Another pause.
‘His name can’t really be Tanner Bolt, can it?’ I said, trying to make light.
‘I heard it’s an anagram for Ratner Tolb.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’
I laughed, an inappropriate feeling, but good. Then, from the far side of the room, the anagram was walking toward me – black pinstriped suit and lime-green tie, sharky grin. He walked with his hand out, in shake-and-strike mode.
‘Nick Dunne, I’m Tanner Bolt. Come with me, let’s get to work.’
Tanner Bolt’s office seemed designed to resemble the clubroom of an exclusive all-men’s golf course – comfortable leather chairs, shelves thick with legal books, a gas fireplace with flames flickering in the air-conditioning. Sit down, have a cigar, complain about the wife, tell some questionable jokes, just us guys here.
Bolt deliberately chose not to sit behind his desk. He ushered me toward a