Gone Girl

and Amy.’ I was panicked, aching to go – I could picture the cops right now sweating my sister under a bare lightbulb.
    ‘As long as you let me talk,’ Tanner said. ‘If it’s me talking about the frame-up, they can’t use it against us at trial … if we go with a different defense.’
    It concerned me that my lawyer found the truth to be so completely unbelievable.
    Gilpin met us at the steps of the station, a Coke in his hand, late dinner. When he turned around to lead us in, I saw a sweat-soaked back. The sun had long set, but the humidity remained. He flapped his arms once, and the shirt fluttered and stuck right back to his skin.
    ‘Still hot,’ he said. ‘Supposed to get hotter overnight.’
    Boney was waiting for us in the conference room, the one from the first night. The Night Of. She’d French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick. I wondered if she had a date. A meet you after midnight situation.
    ‘You have kids?’ I asked her, pulling out a chair.
    She looked startled and held up a finger. ‘One.’ She didn’t say a name or an age or anything else. Boney was in business mode. She tried to wait us out.
    ‘You first,’ Tanner said. ‘Tell us what you got.’
    ‘Sure,’ Boney said. ‘Okay.’ She turned on the tape recorder, dispensed with the preliminaries. ‘It is your contention, Nick, that you never bought or touched the items in the woodshed on your sister’s property.’
    ‘That is correct,’ Tanner replied for me.
    ‘Nick, your fingerprints are all over almost every item in the shed.’
    ‘That’s a lie! I touched nothing , not a thing in there! Except for my anniversary present, which Amy left inside .’
    Tanner touched my arm: shut the fuck up .
    ‘Which we have brought here today,’ Tanner said.
    ‘Nick, your fingerprints are on the porn, on the golf clubs, on the watch cases, and even on the TV.’
    And then I saw it, how much Amy would have enjoyed this: my deep, self-satisfied sleep (which I lorded over her, my belief that if she were only more laid-back, more like me, her insomnia would vanish) turned against me. I could see it: Amy down on her knees, my snores heating her cheeks, as she pressed a fingertip here and there over the course of months. She could have slipped me a mickey for all I knew. I remember her peering at me one morning as I woke up, sleep-wax gumming my lips, and she said, ‘You sleep the sleep of the damned, you know. Or the drugged.’ I was both and didn’t know it.
    ‘Do you want to explain about the fingerprints?’ Gilpin said.
    ‘Tell us the rest,’ Tanner said.
    Boney set a biblically thick leather-covered binder on the table between us, charred all along the edges. ‘Recognize this?’
    I shrugged, shook my head.
    ‘It’s your wife’s diary.’
    ‘Um, no. Amy didn’t do diaries.’
    ‘Actually, Nick, she did. She did about seven years’ worth of diaries,’ Boney said.
    ‘Okay.’
    Something bad was about to happen. My wife was being clever again.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
    TEN DAYS GONE
    W e drive my car across state lines into Illinois, to a particularly awful neighborhood of some busted river town, and we spend an hour wiping it down, and then we leave it with the keys in the ignition. Call it the circle of strife: The Arkansas couple who drove it before me were sketchy; Ozark Amy was obviously shady; hopefully, some Illinois down-and-outer will enjoy it for a bit too.
    Then we drive back into Missouri over wavy hills until I can see, between the trees, Lake Hannafan glistening. Because Desi has family in St. Louis, he likes to believe the area is old, East Coast old, but he is wrong. Lake Hannafan is not named after a nineteenth-century statesman or a Civil War hero. It is a private lake, machine-forged in 2002 by an oily developer named Mike Hannafan who turned out to have a moonlighting job illegally disposing of hazardous waste. The kerfuffled community is scrambling to find a new name for their lake. Lake Collings, I’m sure, has been floated.
    So despite the well-planned lake – upon which a few select residents can sail but not motor – and Desi’s tastefully grand house – a Swiss château on an American scale – I remain unwooed. That was always the problem with Desi. Be from Missouri or don’t, but don’t pretend Lake ‘Collings’ is Lake Como.
    He leans against his Jaguar and aims his gaze up at the house so that I have to pause