Gone Girl: A Novel Read online

  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 terry-cloth 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.” On her end, I could hear cartoons playing—rubbery voices and calliope music—then suddenly not. Then whining voices. Go watch downstairs. Downstairs, please.

  “So, freshman year. I’m the kid from Memphis. Everyone else is East Coast, I swear. It felt weird, different, you know? All the girls at Wickshire, it was like they’d been raised communally—the lingo, the clothes, the hair. And it wasn’t like I was a pariah, I was just … insecure, for sure. Amy was already The Girl. Like, first day, I remember, everyone knew her, everyone was talking about her. She was Amazing Amy—we’d all read those books growing up—plus, she was just gorgeous. I mean, she was—”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Right. And pretty soon she was showing an interest in me, like, taking me under her wing or whatever. She had this joke that she was Amazing Amy, so I was her sidekick Suzy, and she started calling me Suzy, and pretty soon everyone else did too. Which was fine by me. I mean, I was a little toadie: Get Amy a drink if she was thirsty, throw in a load of laundry if she needed clean underwear. Hold on.”

  Again I could hear the shuffle of her hair against the receiver. Marybeth had brought every Elliott photo album with her in case we needed more pictures. She’d shown me a photo of Amy and Hilary, cheek-to-cheek grins. So I could picture Hilary now, the same butter-blond hair as my wife, framing a plainer face, with muddy hazel eyes.

  “Jason, I am on the phone—just give them a few Popsicles, it’s not that dang hard.

  “Sorry. Our kids are out of school, and my husband never ever takes care of them, so he seems a little confused about what to do for the ten minutes I’m on the phone with you. Sorry. So … so, right, I was little Suzy, and we had this game going, and for a few months—August, September, October—it was great. Like intense friendship, we were together all the time. And then a few weird things happened at once that I knew kind of bothered her.”

  “What?”

  “A guy from our brother school, he meets us both at the fall dance, and the next day he calls me instead of Amy. Which I’m sure he did because Amy was too intimidating, but whatever … and then a few days later, our midterm grades come, and mine are slightly better, like, four-point-one versus four-point-oh. And not long after, one of our friends, she invites me to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Me, not Amy. Again, I’m sure this was because Amy intimidated people. She wasn’t easy to be around, you felt all the time like you had to impress. But I can feel things change just a little. I can tell she’s really irritated, even though she doesn’t admit it.

  “Instead, she starts getting me to do things. I don’t realize it at the time, but she starts setting me up. She asks if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, because mine’s mousy, and it’ll look so nice a brighter shade. And she starts complaining about her parents. I mean she’s always complained about her parents, but now she really gets going on them—how they only love her as an idea and not really for who she is—so she says she wants to mess with her parents. She has me start prank-calling her house, telling her parents I’m the new Amazing Amy. We’d take the train into New York some weekends, and she’d tell me to stand outside their house—one time she had me run up to her mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be her new Amy or some crap like that.”

  “And you did it?”

  “It was just dumb stuff girls do. Back before cell phones and cyber-bullying. A way to kill time. We did prank stuff like that all the time, just dumb stuff. Try to one-up each other on how daring and freaky we could be.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And I think—I think that she doesn’t like me anymore. Girls at school start looking at me funny. I’m shut out of the cool circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called in to see the headmistress. Amy has had a horrible accident—twisted ankle, fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down this long set of stairs, and she says it was me who pushed her. Hold on.

  “Go back downstairs now. Go. Down. Stairs. Goooo downstairs.

  “Sorry, I’m back. Never have kids.”

  “So Amy said you pushed her?” I asked.

  “Yeah, because I was craaaazy. I was obsessed with her, and I wanted to be Suzy, and then being Suzy wasn’t enough—I had to be Amy. And she had all this evidence that she’d had me create over the past few months. Her parents, obviously, had seen me lurking around the house. I theoretically accosted her mom. My hair dyed blond and the clothes I’d bought that matched Amy’s—clothes I bought while shopping with her, but I couldn’t prove that. All her friends came in, explained how Amy for the past month had been so frightened of me. All this shit. I looked totally insane. Completely insane. Her parents got a restraining order on me. And I kept swearing it wasn’t me, but by then I was so miserable that I wanted to leave school anyway. So we didn’t fight the expulsion. I wanted to get away from her by that time. I mean, the girl cracked her own ribs. I was scared—this little fifteen-year-old, she’d pulled this off. Fooled friends, parents, teachers.”

  “And this was all because of a boy and some grades and a Thanksgiving invitation?”

  “About a month after I moved back to Memphis, I got a letter. It wasn’t signed, it was typed, but it was obviously Amy. It was a list of all the ways I’d let her down. Crazy stuff: Forgot to wait for me after English, twice. Forgot I am allergic to strawberries, twice.”

  “Jesus.”

  “But I feel like the real reason wasn’t even on there.”

  “What was the real reason?”

  “I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming and all that, but she was also controlling and OCD and a drama queen and a bit of a liar. Which was fine by me. It just wasn’t fine by her. She got rid of me because I knew she wasn’t perfect. It made me wonder about you.”

  “About me? Why?”

  “Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit. If she punished a friend of a few months by throwing herself down a flight of stairs, what would she do to a man who was dumb enough to marry her?”

  I hung up as one of Hilary’s kids picked up the second extension and began singing a nursery rhyme. I immediately phoned Tanner and relayed my conversations with Hilary and Tommy.

  “So we have a couple of stories, great,” Tanner said, “this’ll really be great!” in a way that told me it wasn’t that great. “Have you heard from Andie?”

  I hadn’t.

  “I have one of my people waiting for her at her apartment building,” he said. “Discreet.”

  “I didn’t know you had people.”

  “What we really need is to find Amy,” he said, ignoring me. “Girl like that, I can’t imagine she’d be able to stay hidden for too long. You have any thoughts?”

  I kept picturing her on a posh hotel balcony near the ocean, wrapped in a white robe thick as a rug, sipping a very good Montrachet, while she tracked my ruin on the Internet, on cable, in the tabloids. While she enjoyed the endless coverage and exultation of Amy Elliott Dunne. Attending her own funeral. I wondered if she was self-aware enough to realize: She’d stolen a page from Mark Twain.

  “I picture her near the ocean,” I said. Then I stopped, feeling like a boardwalk psychic. “No. I have no ideas. She could lit
erally be anywhere. I don’t think we’ll see her unless she decides to come back.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Tanner breathed, annoyed. “So let’s try to find Andie and see where her head is. We’re running out of wiggle room here.”

  Then it was dinnertime, and then the sun set, and I was alone again in my haunted house. I was thinking about all of Amy’s lies and whether the pregnancy was one of them. I’d done the math. Amy and I had sex sporadically enough it was possible. But then she would know I’d do the math.

  Truth or lie? If it was a lie, it was designed to gut me.

  I’d always assumed that Amy and I would have children. It was one of the reasons I knew I would marry Amy, because I pictured us having kids together. I remember the first time I imagined it, not two months after we began dating: I was walking from my apartment in Kips Bay to a favorite pocket park along the East River, a path that took me past the giant LEGO block of the United Nations headquarters, the flags of myriad countries fluttering in the wind. A kid would like this, I thought. All the different colors, the busy memory game of matching each flag to its country. There’s Finland, and there’s New Zealand. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I realized it wasn’t a kid, but our kid, mine and Amy’s, who would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the floor with an old encyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be alone, I’d be sprawled next to him. Aiding him in his budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of flags than a study in annoyance, which would have suited my father’s attitude toward me. But not mine toward my son’s. I pictured Amy joining us on the floor, flat on her stomach, her feet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot just left of center on the crisp blue background, which I was sure would be her favorite.

  From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl, but mostly a boy). He was inevitable. I suffered from regular, insistent paternal aches. Months after the wedding, I had a strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, floss between my teeth, when I thought: She wants kids, right? I should ask. Of course I should ask. When I posed the question—roundabout, vague—she said, Of course, of course, someday, but every morning she still perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill. For three years she did this every morning, while I fluttered near the topic but failed to actually say the words: I want us to have a baby.