flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 70
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She leaned back and waited,relaxed as the star of an iced-tea commercial. I gave Tanner an angry nod: Go ahead.“Amy Elliott Dunne is alive, and she is framing Nick Dunne for her murder,” he said.I clasped my hands and sat up straight, tried to do anything that would lend me an airof reason. Boney stared at me. I needed a pipe, eyeglasses I could swiftly remove foreffect, a set of encyclopedias at my elbow. I felt giddy. Do not laugh.Boney frowned. “What’s that again?”“Amy is alive and very well, and she is framing Nick,” my proxy repeated.They exchanged a look, hunched over the table: Can you believe this guy?“Why would she do that?” Gilpin asked, rubbing his eyes.“Because she hates him.
Obviously. He was a shitty husband.”Boney looked down at the floor, let out a breath. “I’d certainly agree with you there.”At the same time, Gilpin said: “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”“Is she crazy, Nick?” Boney said, leaning in. “What you’re talking about, it’s crazy.You hear me? It would have taken, what, six months, a year, to set all this up. She wouldhave had to hate you, to wish you harm—ultimate, serious, horri c harm—for a year. Doyou know how hard it is to sustain that kind of hatred for that long?”She could do it. Amy could do it.“Why not just divorce your ass?” Boney snapped.“That wouldn’t appeal to her … sense of justice,” I replied.
Tanner gave me anotherlook.“Jesus Christ, Nick, aren’t you tired of all this?” Gilpin said. “We have it in yourwife’s own words: I think he may kill me.”Someone had told them at some point: Use the suspect’s name a lot, it will make himfeel comfortable, known. Same idea as in sales.“You been in your dad’s house lately, Nick?” Boney asked.
“Like on July ninth?”Fuck. That’s why Amy changed the alarm code. I battled a new wave of disgust atmyself: that my wife played me twice. Not only did she dupe me into believing she stillloved me, she actually forced me to implicate myself. Wicked, wicked girl. I almostlaughed. Good Lord, I hated her, but you had to admire the bitch.Tanner began: “Amy used her clues to force my client to go to these various venues,where she’d left evidence—Hannibal, his father’s house—so he’d incriminate himself. Myclient and I have brought these clues with us. As a courtesy.”He pulled out the clues and the love notes, fanned them in front of the cops like acard trick. I sweated while they read them, willing them to look up and tell me all wasclear now.“Okay.
You say Amy hated you so much that she spent months framing you for hermurder?” Boney asked in the quiet, measured voice of a disappointed parent.I gave her a blank face.“This does not sound like an angry woman, Nick,” she said.“She’s falling all over herself to apologize to you, to suggest that you both startagain, to let you know how much she loves you: You are warm—you are my sun. You arebrilliant, you are witty.”“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”“Once again, Nick, an incredibly strange reaction for an innocent man,” Boney said.“Here we are, reading sweet words, maybe your wife’s last words to you, and youactually look angry. I still remember that very rst night: Amy’s missing, you come inhere, we park you in this very room for forty- ve minutes, and you look bored.
Wewatched you on surveillance, you practically fell asleep.”“That has nothing to do with anything—” Tanner started.“I was trying to stay calm.”“Youlookedvery,verycalm,”Boneysaid.“Allalong,you’veacted … inappropriately. Unemotional, flippant.”“That’s just how I am, don’t you see? I’m stoic. To a fault. Amy knows this … Shecomplained about it all the time. That I wasn’t sympathetic enough, that I retreated intomyself, that I couldn’t handle di cult emotions—sadness, guilt. She knew I’d looksuspicious as hell. Jesus fucking Christ! Talk to Hilary Handy, will you? Talk to TommyO’Hara. I talked to them! They’ll tell you what she’s like.”“We have talked to them,” Gilpin said.“And?”“Hilary Handy has made two suicide attempts in the years since high school. TommyO’Hara has been in rehab twice.”“Probably because of Amy.”“Or because they’re deeply unstable, guilt-ridden human beings,” Boney said.
“Let’sgo back to the treasure hunt.”Gilpin read aloud Clue 2 in a deliberate monotone.You took me here so I could hear you chatAbout your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hatScrew everyone else, for us they’re all ditchedAnd let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.“You say this was written to force you to go to Hannibal?” Boney said.I nodded.“It doesn’t say Hannibal anywhere here,” she said.
“It doesn’t even imply it.”“The visor hat, that’s an old inside joke between us about—”“Oh, an inside joke,” Gilpin said.“What about the next clue, the little brown house?” Boney asked.“To go to my dad’s,” I said.Boney’s face grew stern again. “Nick, your dad’s house is blue.” She turned to Tannerwith rolling eyes: This is what you’re giving me?“It sounds to me like you’re making up ‘inside jokes’ in these clues,” Boney said. “Imean, you want to talk about convenient: We nd out you’ve been to Hannibal,whaddaya know, this clue secretly means go to Hannibal.”“The nal present here,” Tanner said, pulling the box onto the table, “is a not-sosubtle hint.
Punch and Judy dolls. As you know, I’m sure, Punch kills Judy and her baby.This was discovered by my client. We wanted to make sure you have it.”Boney pulled the box over, put on latex gloves, and lifted the puppets out. “Heavy,”she said, “solid.” She examined the lace of the woman’s dress, the male’s motley. Shepicked up the male, examined the thick wooden handle with the finger grooves.She froze, frowning, the male puppet in her hands. Then she turned the femaleupside down so the skirt flew up.“No handle for this one.” She turned to me. “Did there used to be a handle?”“How should I know?”“A handle like a two-by-four, very thick and heavy, with built-in grooves to get areally good grip?” she snapped.
“A handle like a goddamn club?”She stared at me and I could tell what she was thinking: You are a gameplayer. Youare a sociopath. You are a killer.AMY ELLIOTT DUNNEELEVEN DAYS GONETonight is Nick’s much touted interview with Sharon Schieber. I was going to watchwith a bottle of good wine after a hot bath, recording at the same time, so I can takenotes on his lies. I want to write down every exaggeration, half truth, fib, and bald-facerhe utters, so I can gird my fury against him.
It slipped after the blog interview—onedrunken, random interview!—and I can’t allow that to happen. I’m not going to soften.I’m not a chump. Still, I am eager to hear his thoughts on Andie now that she hasbroken. His spin.I want to watch alone, but Desi hovers around me all day, oating in and out ofwhatever room I retreat to, like a sudden patch of bad weather, unavoidable.
I can’t tellhim to leave, because it’s his house. I’ve tried this already, and it doesn’t work. He’ll sayhe wants to check the basement plumbing or he wants to peer into the fridge to seewhat food items need purchasing.This will go on, I think. This is how my life will be. He will show up when he wants andstay as long as he wants, he’ll shamble around making conversation, and then he’ll sit, andbeckon me to sit, and he’ll open a bottle of wine and we’ll suddenly be sharing a meal andthere’s no way to stop it.“I really am exhausted,” I say.“Indulge your benefactor a little bit longer,” he responds, and runs a nger down thecrease of his pant legs.He knows about Nick’s interview tonight, so he leaves and returns with all myfavorite foods: Manchego cheese and chocolate tru es and a bottle of cold Sancerreand, with a wry eyebrow, he even produces the chili-cheese Fritos I got hooked on backwhen I was Ozark Amy.
He pours the wine. We have an unspoken agreement not to getinto details about the baby, we both know how miscarriages run in my family, howawful it would be for me to have to speak of it.“I’ll be interested to hear what the swine has to say for himself,” he says. Desi rarelysays jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips.An hour later, we have eaten a light dinner that Desi cooked, and sipped the winethat Desi brought. He has given me one bite of cheese and split a tru e with me.
He hasgiven me exactly ten Fritos and then secreted away the bag. He doesn’t like the smell; ito ends him, he says, but what he really doesn’t like is my weight. Now we are side byside on the sofa, a spun-soft blanket over us, because Desi has cranked up the airconditioning so that it is autumn in July. I think he has done it so he can crackle a reand force us together under the blanket; he seems to have an October vision of the twoof us. He even brought me a gift—a heathery violet turtleneck sweater to wear—and Inotice it complements both the blanket and Desi’s deep green sweater.“You know, all through the centuries, pathetic men have abused strong women whothreaten their masculinity,” Desi is saying. “They have such fragile psyches, they needthat control …”I am thinking of a di erent kind of control.
I am thinking about control in the guiseof caring: Here is a sweater for the cold, my sweet, now wear it and match my vision.Nick, at least, didn’t do this. Nick let me do what I wanted.I just want Desi to sit still and be quiet. He’s dgety and nervous, as if his rival is inthe room with us.“Shhh,” I say as my pretty face comes on the screen, then another photo and another,like falling leaves, an Amy collage.“She was the girl that every girl wanted to be,” said Sharon’s voiceover. “Beautiful,brilliant, inspiring, and very wealthy.”“He was the guy that all men admired …”“Not this man,” Desi muttered.“… handsome, funny, bright, and charming.”“But on July fth, their seemingly perfect world came crashing in when Amy ElliottDunne disappeared on their fifth wedding anniversary.”Recap recap recap. Photos of me, Andie, Nick.
Stock photos of a pregnancy test andunpaid bills. I really did do a nice job. It’s like painting a mural and stepping back andthinking: Perfect.“Now, exclusively, Nick Dunne breaks his silence, not only on his wife’sdisappearance but on his infidelity and all those rumors.”I feel a gust of warmth toward Nick because he’s wearing my favorite tie that Ibought for him, that he thinks, or thought, was too girly-bright. It’s a peacocky purplethat turns his eyes almost violet. He’s lost his satis ed-asshole paunch over the lastmonth: His belly is gone, the eshiness of his face has vanished, his chin is less clefty.His hair has been trimmed but not cut—I have an image of Go hacking away at him justbefore he went on camera, slipping into Mama Mo’s role, fussing over him, doing thesaliva-thumb rubdown on some spot near his chin. He is wearing my tie and when helifts his hand to make a gesture, I see he is wearing my watch, the vintage BulovaSpaceview that I got him for his thirty-third birthday, that he never wore because itwasn’t him, even though it was completely him.“He’s wonderfully well groomed for a man who thinks his wife is missing,” Desisnipes.
“Glad he didn’t skip a manicure.”“Nick would never get a manicure,” I say, glancing at Desi’s buffed nails.“Let’s get right to it, Nick,” Sharon says. “Did you have anything to do with yourwife’s disappearance?”“No. No. Absolutely, one hundred percent not,” Nick says, keeping well-coached eyecontact. “But let me say, Sharon, I am far, far from being innocent, or blameless, or agood husband. If I weren’t so afraid for Amy, I would say this was a good thing, in away, her disappearing—”“Excuse me, Nick, but I think a lot of people will nd it hard to believe you just saidthat when your wife is missing.”“It’s the most awful, horrible feeling in the world, and I want her back more thananything.
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