‘The next thing I know, two cops are at my door, and they’ve done a rape kit on Amy, and she has “wounds consistent with forcible rape.” And she has ligature marks on her wrists, and when they search my apartment, there on the headboard of my bed are two ties – like, neckties – tucked down near the mattress, and the ties are, quote, “consistent with the ligature marks.”’
‘Had you tied her up?’
‘No, the sex wasn’t even that … that, you know? I was totally caught off guard. She must have tied them there when I got up to take a piss or whatever. I mean, I was in some serious shit. It was looking very bad. And then suddenly she dropped the charges. Couple of weeks later, I got a note, anonymous, typed, says: Maybe next time you’ll think twice.’
‘And you never heard from her again?’
‘Never heard from her again.’
‘And you didn’t try to press charges against her or anything?’
‘Uh, no. Fuck no. I was just glad she went away. Then last week, I’m eating my Thai food, sitting in my bed, watching the news report. On Amy. On you. Perfect wife, anniversary, no body, a real shitstorm. I swear, I broke out in a sweat. I thought: That’s Amy, she’s graduated to murder. Holy shit. I’m serious, man, I bet whatever she’s got cooked up for you, it’s drum-fucking-tight. You should be fucking scared.’
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
I am wet from the bumper boats; we got more than five dollars’ worth of time because the two sun-stunned teenage girls would rather flip through gossip magazines and smoke cigarettes than try to herd us off the water. So we spent a good thirty minutes on our lawn-mower-motor-propelled ships, ramming each other and turning wild twists, and then we got bored and left of our own accord.
Greta, Jeff, and I, an odd crew in a strange place. Greta and Jeff have become good friends in just a day, which is how people do it here, where there’s nothing else to do. I think Greta is deciding whether she’ll make Jeff another of her disastrous mating choices. Jeff would like it. He prefers her. She is much prettier than I am, right now, in this place. Cheap pretty. She is wearing a bikini top and jean shorts, with a spare shirt tucked into the back pocket for when she wants to enter a store (T-shirts, wood carvings, decorative rocks) or restaurant (burger, barbecue, taffy). She wants us to get Old West photos taken, but that’s not going to happen for reasons aside from the fact that I don’t want redneck-lake-person lice.
We end up settling for a few rounds on a decrepit miniature golf course. The fake grass is torn off in patches, the alligators and windmills that once moved mechanically are still. Jeff does the honors instead, twirling the windmill, snapping open and shut the gator jaws. Some holes are simply unplayable – the grass rolled up like carpeting, the farmhouse with its beckoning mousehole collapsed in on itself. So we roam between courses in no particular order. No one is even keeping score.
This would have annoyed Old Amy no end: the haphazardness of it all, the pointlessness. But I’m learning to drift, and I do it quite well. I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one. I catch Jeff (cuckolded, divorced, complicated custody arrangement) furrowing his brow as we pass a Love Tester: Squeeze the metal grip and watch the temperature rise from ‘just a fling’ to ‘soulmate.’ The odd equation – a crushing clutch means true love – reminds me of poor smacked-around Greta, who often places her thumb over the bruise on her chest like it’s a button she can push.
‘You’re up,’ Greta says to me. She’s drying her ball off on her shorts – twice she’s gone into the cesspool of dirty water.
I get in position, wiggle once or twice, and putt my bright red ball straight into the birdhouse opening. It disappears for a second, then reappears out a chute and into the hole. Disappear, reappear. I feel a wave of anxiety – everything reappears at some point, even me. I am anxious because I think my plans have changed.
I have changed plans only twice so far. The first was the gun. I was going to get a gun and then, on the morning I disappeared, I was going to shoot myself. Nowhere dangerous: through a calf or a wrist. I would leave behind a bullet with my flesh and blood on it. A struggle occurred! Amy was shot! But then I realized this was a little too macho even for me. It would hurt for weeks, and I don’t love pain (my sliced arm feels better now, thank you very much). But I still liked the idea of a gun. It made for a nice MacGuffin. Not Amy was shot but Amy was scared. So I dolled myself up and went to the mall on Valentine’s Day, so I’d be remembered. I couldn’t get one, but it’s not a big deal as far as changed plans go.
The other one is considerably more extreme. I have decided I’m not going to die.
I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the injustice. It’s not fair that I have to die. Not really die. I don’t want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.
The problem now though, is money. It’s so ludicrous, that of all things it’s money that should be an issue for me. But I have only a finite amount – $9,132 at this point. I will need more. This morning I went to chat with Dorothy; as always, holding a handkerchief so as not to leave fingerprints (I told her it was my grandmother’s – I try to give her a vague impression of southern wealth gone to squander, very Blanche DuBois). I leaned against her desk as she told me, in great bureaucratic detail, about a blood thinner she can’t afford – the woman is an encyclopedia of denied pharmaceuticals – and then I said, just to test the situation: ‘I know what you mean. I’m not sure where I’m going to get rent for my cabin after another week or two.’
She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV set, a game show where people screamed and cried a lot. She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let me stay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no harm.
‘You better get a job, then,’ Dorothy said, not turning away from the TV. A contestant made a bad choice, the prize was lost, a wuhwaaahhh sound effect voiced her pain.
‘A job like what? What kind of job can I get around here?’
‘Cleaning, babysitting.’
Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay. Irony enough for a million Hang in There posters.
It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t ever have to actually budget. I couldn’t go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and so they left me unprepared for the real world. For instance, when Greta complained that the convenience store at the marina charged five dollars for a gallon of milk, I winced because the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d thought that seemed like a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number to see if I’d pay.
So I’d budgeted, but my budget – guaranteed, according to the Internet, to last me six to nine months – is clearly off. And so I am off.
When we’re done with golf – I win, of course I do, I know because I’m keeping score in my head – we go to the hot-dog stand next door for lunch, and I slip around the corner to dig into my zippered money belt under my shirt, and when I glance back, Greta has followed me, she catches me right before I can stuff the thing away.
‘Ever heard of a purse, Moneybags?’ she cracks. This will be an ongoing problem – a person on the run needs lots of cash, but a person on the run by definition has nowhere to keep the cash. Thankfully, Greta doesn’t press the issue – she knows we are both victims here. We sit in the sun on a metal picnic bench and eat hot dogs, white buns wrapped around cylinders of phosphate with relish so green it looks toxic, and it may be the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten because I am Dead Amy and I don’t care.
‘Guess what Jeff found in his cabin for me?’ Greta says. ‘Another book by the Martian Chronicle guy.’
‘Ray Bradburrow,’ Jeff says. Bradbury, I think.
‘Yeah, right. Something Wicked This Way Comes,’ Greta says. ‘It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.
‘I read it when I first moved in there,’ Jeff says. ‘It is good. Creepy.’ He catches me watching him and makes a goblin face, all crazy eyes and leering tongue. He isn’t my type – the fur on the face is too bristly, he does suspicious things with fish – but he is nice-looking. Attractive. His eyes are very warm, not like Nick’s frozen blues. I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him – a nice slow screw with his body pressed against mine and his breath in my ear, the bristles on my cheeks, not the lonely way Nick fucks, where our bodies barely connect: right angle from behind, L-shape from the front, and then he’s out of bed almost immediately, hitting the shower, leaving me pulsing in his wet spot.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Jeff says. He never calls me by name, as if to acknowledge that we both know I’ve lied. He says this lady or pretty woman or you. I wonder what he would call me in bed. Baby, maybe.
‘Just thinking.’
‘Uh-oh,’ he says, and smiles again.
‘You were thinking about a boy, I can tell,’ Greta says.
‘Maybe.’
‘I thought we were steering clear of the assholes for a while,’ she says. ‘Tend to our chickens.’ Last night after Ellen Abbott, I was too excited to go home, so we shared a six-pack and imagined our recluse life as the token straight girls on Greta’s mother’s lesbian compound, raising chickens and hanging laundry to dry in the sun. The objects of gentle, platonic courtship from older women with gnarled knuckles and indulgent laughs. Denim and corduroy and clogs and never worrying about makeup or hair or nails, breast size or hip size, or having to pretend to be the understanding wifey, the supportive girlfriend who loves everything her man does.
‘Not all guys are assholes,’ Jeff says. Greta makes a noncommital noise.
We return to our cabins liquid-limbed. I feel like a water balloon left in the sun. All I want to do is sit under my sputtering window air conditioner and blast my skin with the cool while watching TV. I’ve found a rerun channel that shows nothing but old ’70s and ’80s shows, Quincy and The Love Boat and Eight Is Enough, but first comes Ellen Abbott, my new favorite show!
Nothing new, nothing new. Ellen doesn’t mind speculating, believe me, she’s hosted an array of strangers from my past who swear they are my friends, and they all have lovely things to say about me, even the ones who never much liked me. Post-life fondness.
Knock on the door, and I know it will be Greta and Jeff. I switch off the TV, and there they are on my doorstep, aimless.
‘Whatcha doing?’ Jeff asks.
‘Reading,’ I lie.
He sets down a six-pack of beer on my counter, Greta padding in behind. ‘Oh, I thought we heard the TV.’
Three is literally a crowd in these small cabins. They are blocking the door for a second, sending a pulse of nervousness through me – why are they blocking the door? – and then they keep moving and they are blocking my bedside table. Inside my bedside table is my money belt packed with eight thousand dollars in cash. Hundreds, fifties, and twenty-dollar bills. The money belt is hideous, flesh-colored and bunchy. I can’t possibly wear all my money at once – I leave some scattered around the cabin – but I try to wear most, and when I do, I am as conscious of it as a girl at the beach with a maxipad. A perverse part of me enjoys spending money, because every time I pull off a wad of twenties, that’s less money to hide, to worry about being stolen or lost.
Jeff clicks on the TV, and Ellen Abbott – and Amy – buzz into focus. He nods, smiles to himself.
‘Want to watch … Amy?’ Greta asks.
I can’t tell if she used a comma: Want to watch, Amy? or Want to watch Amy?
‘Nah. Jeff, why don’t you grab your guitar and we can sit on the porch?’
Jeff and Greta exchange a look.
‘Awww … but that’s what you were watching, right?’ Greta says. She points at the screen, and it’s me and Nick at a benefit, me in a gown, my hair pulled back in a chignon, and I look more like I look now, with my short hair.
‘It’s boring,’ I say.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s boring at all,’ Greta says, and flops down on my bed.
I think what a fool I am, to have let these two people inside. To have assumed I could control them, when they are feral creatures, people used to finding the angle, exploiting the weakness, always needing, whereas I am new to this. Needing. Those people who keep backyard pumas and living room chimps – this must be how they feel when their adorable pet rips them open.
‘You know what, would you guys mind … I feel kinda crummy. Too much sun, I think.’
They look surprised and a little offended, and I wonder if I’ve got it wrong – that they are harmless and I’m just paranoid. I’d like to believe that.
‘Sure, sure, of course,’ Jeff says. They shuffle out of my cabin, Jeff grabbing his beer on the way. A minute later, I hear Ellen Abbott snarling from Greta’s cabin. The accusatory questions. Why did … Why didn’t … How can you explain …
Why did I ever let myself get friendly with anyone here? Why didn’t I keep to myself? How can I explain my actions if I’m found out?
I can’t be discovered. If I were ever found, I’d be the most hated woman on the planet. I’d go from being the beautiful, kind, doomed, pregnant victim of a selfish, cheating bastard to being the bitter bitch who exploited the good hearts of all America’s citizens. Ellen Abbott would devote show after show to me, angry callers venting their hate: ‘This is just another example of a spoiled rich girl doing what she wants, when she wants and not thinking of anyone else’s feelings, Ellen. I think she should disappear for life – in prison!’ Like that, it would go like that. I’ve read conflicting Internet information on the penalties for faking a death, or framing a spouse for said death, but I know the public opinion would be brutal. No matter what I do after that – feed orphans, cuddle lepers – when I died, I’d be known as That Woman Who Faked Her Death and Framed Her Husband, You Remember.
I can’t allow it.
Hours later, I am still awake, thinking in the dark, when my door rattles, a gentle bang, Jeff’s bang. I debate, then open it, ready to apologize for my rudeness before. He’s tugging on his beard, staring at my doormat, then looks up with amber eyes.
‘Dorothy said you were looking for work,’ he said.
‘Yeah. I guess. I am.’
‘I got something tonight, pay you fifty bucks.’
Amy Elliott Dunne wouldn’t leave her cabin for fifty bucks, but Lydia and/or Nancy needs work. I have to say yes.
‘Coupla hours, fifty dollars.’ He shrugs. ‘Doesn’t make any difference to me, just thought I’d offer.’
‘What is it?’
‘Fishing.’
I was positive Jeff would drive a pickup, but he guides me to a shiny Ford hatchback, a heartbreaking car, the car of the new college grad with big plans and a modest budget, not the car a grown man should be driving. I am wearing my swimsuit under my sundress, as instructed (‘Not the bikini, the full one, the one you can really swim in,’ Jeff intoned; I’d never noticed him anywhere near the pool, but he knew my swimwear cold, which was flattering and alarming at the same time).
He leaves the windows down as we drive through the forested hills, the gravel dust coating my stubby hair. It feels like something from a country-music video: the girl in the sundress leaning out to catch the breeze of a red-state summer night. I can see stars. Jeff hums off and on.
He parks down the road from a restaurant that hangs out on stilts over the lake, a barbecue place known for its giant souvenir cups of boozy drinks with bad names: Gator Juice and Bassmouth Blitz. I know this from the discarded cups that float along all the shores of the lake, cracked and neon-colored with the restaurant’s logo: Catfish Carl’s. Catfish Carl’s has a deck that overhangs the water – diners can load up on handfuls of kitty kibble from the crank machines and drop them into the gaping mouths of hundreds of giant catfish that wait below.
‘What exactly are we going to do, Jeff?’
‘You net ’em, I kill ’em.’ He gets out of the car, and I follow him around to the hatchback, which is filled with coolers. ‘We put ’em in here, on ice, resell them.’
‘Resell them. Who buys stolen fish?’
Jeff smiles that lazy-cat smile. ‘I got a clientele of sorts.’
And then I realize: He isn’t a Grizzly Adams, guitar-playing, peace-loving granola guy at all. He is a redneck thief who wants to believe that he’s more complicated than that.
He pulls out a net, a box of Nine Lives, and a stained plastic bucket.
I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ‘I’ am game. I have become game again since I died. All the things I disliked or feared, all the limits I had, they’ve slid off me. ‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom.
We walk down the hill, under the deck of Catfish Carl’s, and onto the docks, which float slurpily on the wakes of a passing motorboat, Jimmy Buffett blaring.
Jeff hands me a net. ‘We need this to be quick – you just jump in the water, scoop the net in, nab the fish, then tilt the net up to me. It’ll be heavy, though, and squirmy, so be prepared. And don’t scream or nothing.’
‘I won’t scream. But I don’t want to go in the water. I can do it from the deck.’
‘You should take off your dress, at least, you’ll ruin it.’
‘I’m okay.’
He looks annoyed for a moment – he’s the boss, I’m the employee, and so far I’m not listening to him – but then he turns around modestly and tugs off his shirt and hands me the box of cat food without fully facing me, as if he’s shy. I hold the box with its narrow mouth over the water, and immediately, a hundred shiny arched backs roll toward me, a mob of serpents, the tails cutting across the surface furiously, and then the mouths are below me, the fish roiling over each other to swallow the pellets and then, like trained pets, aiming their faces up toward me for more.
I scoop the net into the middle of the pack and sit down hard on the dock to get leverage to pull the harvest up. When I yank, the net is full of half a dozen whiskery, slick catfish, all frantically trying to get back in the water, their gaping lips opening and shutting between the squares of nylon, their collective tugging making the net wobble up and down.
‘Lift it up, lift it up, girl!’
I push a knee below the net’s handle and let it dangle there, Jeff reaching in, grabbing a fish with two hands, each encased in terrycloth manicure gloves for a better grip. He moves his hands down around the tail, then swings the fish like a cudgel, smashing its head on the side of the dock. Blood explodes. A brief sharp pelt of it streaks across my legs, a hard chunk of meat hits my hair. Jeff throws the fish in the bucket and grabs another with assembly-line smoothness.
We work in grunts and wheezes for half an hour, four nets full, until my arms turn rubbery and the ice chests are full. Jeff takes the empty pail and fills it with water from the lake, pours it across the messy entrails and into the fish pens. The catfish gobble up the guts of their fallen brethren. The dock is left clean. He pours one last pail of water across our bloody feet.
‘Why do you have to smash them?’ I ask.
‘Can’t stand to watch something suffer,’ he says. ‘Quick dunk?’
‘I’m okay,’ I say.
‘Not in my car, you’re not – come on, quick dunk, you have more crap on you than you realize.’
We run off the dock toward the rocky beach nearby. While I wade ankle-deep in the water, Jeff runs with giant splashy footsteps and throws himself forward, arms wild. As soon as he’s far enough out, I unhook my money belt and fold my sundress around it, leave it at the water’s edge with my glasses on top. I lower myself until I feel the warm water hit my thighs, my belly, my neck, and then I hold my breath and go under.
I swim far and fast, stay underwater longer than I should to remind myself what it would feel like to drown – I know I could do it if I needed to – and when I come up with a single disciplined gasp, I see Jeff lapping rapidly toward shore, and I have to swim fast as a porpoise back to my money belt and scramble onto the rocks just ahead of him.
NICK DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
As soon as I hung up with Tommy, I phoned Hilary Handy. If my ‘murder’ of Amy was a lie, and Tommy O’Hara’s ‘rape’ of Amy was a lie, why not Hilary Handy’s ‘stalking’ of Amy? A sociopath must cut her teeth somewhere, like the austere marble halls of Wickshire Academy.
When she picked up, I blurted: ‘This is Nick Dunne, Amy Elliott’s husband. I really need to talk to you.’
‘Why.’
‘I really, really need more information. About your—’
‘Don’t say friendship.’ I heard an angry grin in her voice.
‘No. I wouldn’t. I just want to hear your side. I am not calling because I think you’ve got anything – anything – to do with my wife, her situation, currently. But I would really like to hear what happened. The truth. Because I think you may be able to shed light on a … pattern of behavior of Amy’s.’
‘What kind of pattern?’
‘When very bad things happen to people who upset her.’
She breathed heavily into the phone. ‘Two days ago, I wouldn’t have talked to you,’ she started. ‘But then I was having a drink with some friends, and the TV was on, and you came on, and it was about Amy being pregnant. Everyone I was with, they were so angry at you. They hated you. And I thought, I know how that feels. Because she’s not dead, right? I mean, she’s still just missing? No body?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So let me tell you. About Amy. And high school. And what happened. Hold on.’