Gone Girl (16 page)

Rand put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.

‘I’d like to come with you, Nick,’ he said. ‘Tonight. I’d like to
come.’ Rand was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine –
hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours?
– and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.

‘Of course, Rand. Of course.’

I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me – having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume – so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling grandmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.

‘I’m just driving Mr Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,’ she said to one of her friends. ‘No more than half an hour.’

Gilpin had not taken Amy’s second note into evidence; he’d been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife’s second clue:

Picture me: I’m crazy about you

My future is anything but hazy with you

You took me here so I could hear you chat

About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat

Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched

And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched
.

It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say:
Oh yeah, me too
.

The ‘visor hat’ comment was a little inside joke: When I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, ‘Oh, I meant a straw hat!’ As if
those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, any time we watched tennis, we always complimented the players’ sporty straw hats.

Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, ‘That’s interesting,’ while the other one agreed, ‘That is.’ I’d been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up – because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.

It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.

I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses – ruined community banks and defunct movie houses – toward the river. I parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the
Mark Twain
riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores – quilts and antiques and taffy – I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house was closed for renovations, to be paid with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.

I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant.
Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan.
Amazing Amy
was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.

The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too.
You are BRILLIANT
. In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.

I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn House but didn’t bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain – white hair, white suit – got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that had been the courtroom of Samuel Clemens’s dad. The sign out front read:
J. M. Clemens, Justice of the Peace
.

Let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.

You’re making these so nice and easy, Amy. As if you actually want me to find them, to feel good about myself. Keep this up and I’ll break my record
.

No one was inside. I got down on my knees on the dusty floorboards and peered under the first bench. If Amy left a clue in a public place, she always taped it to the underside of things, in between the wadded gum and the dust, and she was always vindicated, because no one likes to look at the underside of things. There was nothing under the first bench, but there was a flap of paper hanging down from the bench behind. I climbed over and tugged down the Amy-blue envelope, a piece of tape winging off it.

Hi Darling Husband,

You found it! Brilliant man. It may help that I decided to not make this year’s treasure hunt an excruciating forced march through my arcane personal memories.

I took a cue from your beloved Mark Twain: ‘What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.’

I finally get it, what you’ve said year after year, that this
treasure hunt should be a time to celebrate us, not a test about whether you remember everything I think or say throughout the year. You’d think that would be something a grown woman would realize on her own, but … I guess that’s what husbands are for. To point out what we can’t see for ourselves, even if it takes five years.

So I wanted to take a moment now, in the childhood stomping grounds of Mark Twain, and thank you for your WIT. You are truly the cleverest, funniest person I know. I have a wonderful sense memory: of all the times over the years you’ve leaned in to my ear – I can feel your breath tickling my lobe, right now, as I’m writing this – and whispered something just to me, just to make me laugh. What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh. And you always picked the best moments. Do you remember when Insley and her dancing-monkey husband made us come over to admire their baby, and we did the obligatory visit to their strangely perfect, overflowered, overmuffined house for brunch and baby-meeting and they were so self-righteous and patronizing of our childless state, and meanwhile there was their hideous boy, covered in streaks of slobber and stewed carrots and maybe some feces – naked except for a frilly bib and a pair of knitted booties – and as I sipped my orange juice, you leaned over and whispered, ‘That’s what I’ll be wearing later.’ And I literally did a spit take. It was one of those moments where you saved me, you made me laugh at just the right time. Just one olive, though. So let me say it again: You are WITTY. Now kiss me!

I felt my soul deflate. Amy was using the treasure hunt to steer us back to each other. And it was too late. While she had been writing these clues, she’d had no idea of my state of mind.
Why, Amy, couldn’t you have done this sooner?

Our timing had never been good.

I opened the next clue, read it, tucked it in my pocket, then headed back home. I knew where to go, but I wasn’t ready yet. I couldn’t handle another compliment, another kind word from my wife, another olive branch. My feelings for her were veering too quickly from bitter to sweet.

I went back to Go’s, spent a few hours alone, drinking coffee and flipping around the TV, anxious and pissy, killing time till my eleven p.m. carpool to the mall. My twin got home just after seven, looking
wilted from her solo bar shift. Her glance at the TV told me I should turn it off. ‘What’d you do today?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette and flopping down at our mother’s old card table.

‘Manned the volunteer center … then we go search the mall at eleven,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell her about Amy’s clue. I felt guilty enough.

Go doled out some solitaire cards, the steady slap of them on the table a rebuke. I began pacing. She ignored me.

‘I was just watching TV to distract myself.’

‘I know, I do.’

She flipped over a Jack.

‘There’s got to be something I can
do
,’ I said, stalking around her living room.

‘Well, you’re searching the mall in a few hours,’ Go said, and gave no more encouragement. She flipped over three cards.

‘You sound like you think it’s a waste of time.’

‘Oh. No. Hey, everything is worth checking out. They got Son of Sam on a parking ticket, right?’

Go was the third person who’d mentioned this to me; it must be the mantra for cases going cold. I sat down across from her.

‘I haven’t been upset enough about Amy,’ I said. ‘I know that.’

‘Maybe not.’ She finally looked up at me. ‘You’re being weird.’

‘I think that instead of panicking, I’ve just focused on being pissed at her. Because we were in such a bad place lately. It’s like it feels wrong for me to worry too much because I don’t have the right. I guess.’

‘You’ve been weird, I can’t lie,’ Go said. ‘But it’s a weird situation.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I don’t care how you are with me. Just be careful with everyone else, okay? People judge. Fast.’

She went back to her solitaire, but I wanted her attention. I kept talking.

‘I should probably check in on Dad at some point,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll tell him about Amy.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t. He was even weirder about Amy than you are.’

‘I always felt like she must remind him of an old girlfriend or something – the one who got away. After he—’I made the downward swoop of a hand that signified his Alzheimer’s – ‘he was kind of rude and awful, but …’

‘Yeah, but he kind of wanted to impress her at the same time,’ she said. ‘Your basic jerky twelve-year-old boy trapped in a sixty-eight-year-old asshole’s body.’

‘Don’t women think that all men are jerky twelve-year-olds at heart?’

‘Hey, if the heart fits.’

Eleven-oh-eight p.m., Rand was waiting for us just inside the automatic sliding doors to the hotel, his face squinting into the dark to make us out. The Hillsams were driving their pick-up; Stucks and I both rode in the bed. Rand came trotting up to us in khaki golf shorts and a crisp Middlebury T-shirt. He hopped in the back, planted himself on the wheel cover with surprising ease, and handled the introductions like he was the host of his own mobile talk show.

‘I’m really sorry about Amy, Rand,’ Stucks said loudly, as we hurtled out of the parking lot with unnecessary speed and hit the highway. ‘She’s such a sweet person. One time she saw me out painting a house, sweating my ba – my butt off, and she drove on to 7-Eleven, got me a giant pop, and brought it back to me, right up on the ladder.’

This was a lie. Amy cared so little for Stucks or his refreshment that she wouldn’t have bothered to piss in a cup for him.

‘That sounds like her,’ Rand said, and I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient.

‘Middlebury, huh?’ Stucks continued, pointing at Rand’s T-shirt. ‘Got a hell of a rugby team.’

‘That’s
right
we do,’ Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.

Joe Hillsam parked his truck outside the giant cornerstone Mervyns. We all hopped out, stretched our legs, shook ourselves awake. The night was muggy and moon-slivered. I noticed Stucks was wearing – maybe ironically, possibly not – a T-shirt that read
Save Gas, Fart in a Jar
.

‘So, this place, what we’re doing, it’s freakin’ dangerous, I don’t want to lie,’ Mikey Hillsam began. He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.

‘We came here once, me and Mikey, just for – I don’t know, to see it, I guess, see what it had become, and we almost got our asses handed to us,’ said Joe. ‘So tonight we take no chances.’ He reached into the cab for a long canvas bag and unzipped it to reveal half a
dozen baseball bats. He began handing them out solemnly. When he got to Rand, he hesitated. ‘Uh, you want one?’