Gone Girl

safe and sound.’
    She kicks her legs back and forth like a lazy swimmer. I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me.

NICK DUNNE
    EIGHT DAYS GONE
    W e searched every cranny of my father’s house, which didn’t take long, since it’s so pathetically empty. The cabinets, the closets. I yanked at the corners of rugs to see if they came up. I peeked into his washer and dryer, stuck a hand up his chimney. I even looked behind the toilet tanks.
    ‘Very Godfather of you,’ Go said.
    ‘If it were very Godfather , I’d have found what we were looking for and come out shooting.’
    Tanner stood in the center of my dad’s living room and tugged at the end of his lime tie. Go and I were smeared with dust and grime, but somehow Tanner’s white button-down positively glowed, as if it retained some of the strobe-light glamour of New York. He was staring at the corner of a cabinet, chewing on his lip, tugging at the tie, thinking . The man had probably spent years perfecting this look: the Shut up, client, I’m thinking look.
    ‘I don’t like this,’ he finally said. ‘We have a lot of uncontained issues here, and I won’t go to the cops until we’re very, very contained. My first instinct is to get ahead of the situation – report that stuff in the shed before we get busted with it. But if we don’t know what Amy wants us to find here, and we don’t know Andie’s mind-set … Nick, do you have a guess about what Andie’s mind-set is?’
    I shrugged. ‘Pissed.’
    ‘I mean, that makes me very, very nervous. We’re in a very prickly situation, basically. We need to tell the cops about the woodshed. We have to be on the front end of that discovery. But I want to lay out for you what will happen when we do. And what will happen is: They will go after Go. It’ll be one of two options. One: Go is your accomplice, she was helping you hide this stuff on her property, and in all likelihood, she knows you killed Amy.’
    ‘Come on, you can’t be serious,’ I said.
    ‘Nick, we’d be lucky with that version,’ Tanner said. ‘They caninterpret this however they want. How about this one: It was Go who stole your identity, who got those credit cards. She bought all that crap in there. Amy found out, there was a confrontation, Go killed Amy.’
    ‘Then we get way, way ahead of all this,’ I said. ‘We tell them about the woodshed, and we tell them Amy is framing me.’
    ‘I think that is a bad idea in general, and right now it’s a really bad idea if we don’t have Andie on our side, because we’d have to tell them about Andie.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because if we go to the cops with your story, that Amy framed you—’
    ‘Why do you keep saying my story , like it’s something I made up?’
    ‘Ha. Good point. If we explain to the cops how Amy is framing you, we have to explain why she is framing you. Why: because she found out you have a very pretty, very young girlfriend on the side.’
    ‘Do we really have to tell them that?’ I asked.
    ‘Amy framed you for her murder because … she was … what, bored?’
    I swallowed my lips.
    ‘We have to give them Amy’s motive, it doesn’t work otherwise. But the problem is, if we set Andie, gift-wrapped, on their doorstep, and they don’t buy the frame-up theory, then we’ve given them your motive for murder. Money problems, check. Pregnant wife, check. Girlfriend, check. It’s a murderer’s triumvirate. You’ll go down. Women will line up to tear you apart with their fingernails.’ He began pacing. ‘But if we don’t do anything, and Andie goes to them on her own …’
    ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.
    ‘I think the cops will laugh us out of the station if we say right now that Amy framed you. It’s too flimsy. I believe you, but it’s flimsy.’
    ‘But the treasure hunt clues—’ I started.
    ‘Nick, even I don’t understand those clues,’ Go said. ‘They’re all inside baseball between you and Amy. There’s only your word that they’re leading you into … incriminating situations. I mean, seriously: crummy jeans and visor equals Hannibal?’
    ‘Little brown house equals your dad’s house, which is blue ,’ Tanner added.
    I could feel Tanner’s doubt. I needed to really show him Amy’s character. Her lies, her vindictiveness, her score-settling. I neededother people to back me up – that my wife wasn’t Amazing Amy but Avenging Amy.
    ‘Lets see if we can reach out to Andie today,’ Tanner finally said.
    ‘Isn’t it a risk to