Gone Girl

stay tonight because I don’t want to deal with all the questions if I don’t stay. But I’ll sleep downstairs.’
    She cocked her head to one side, studied me.
    ‘Nick, I can still do very bad things to you, remember that.’
    ‘Ha! Worse than what you’ve already done?’
    She looked surprised. ‘Oh, definitely.’
    ‘I doubt that, Amy.’
    I began walking out the door.
    ‘Attempted murder,’ she said.
    I paused.
    ‘That was my original plan early on: I’d be a poor, sick wife with repeated episodes, sudden intense bouts of illness, and then it turns out that all those cocktails her husband prepared her …’
    ‘Like in the diary.’
    ‘But I decided attempted murder wasn’t good enough for you. It had to be bigger than that. Still, I couldn’t get the poisoning idea out of my head. I liked the idea of you working up to the murder. Trying the cowardly way first. So I went through with it.’
    ‘You expect me to believe that?’
    ‘All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened wife might have saved some of that vomit, just in case. You can’t blame her, being a little paranoid.’ She gave a satisfied smile. ‘Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.’
    ‘You actually poisoned yourself.’
    ‘Nick, please, you’re shocked? I killed myself.’
    ‘I need a drink,’ I said. I left before she could speak.
    I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the living room couch. Beyond the curtains, the strobes of the cameras were lighting up the yard. Soon it would no longer be night. I’d come to find the morning depressing, to know it would come again and again.
    Tanner picked up on the first ring.
    ‘She killed him,’ I said. ‘She killed Desi because he was basically … he was annoying her, he was power-playing her, and she realized she could kill him, and it was her way back to her old life, and she could blame everything on him. She murdered him, Tanner, she just told me this. She confessed .’
    ‘I don’t suppose you were able to … record any of it somehow? Cell phone or something?’
    ‘We were naked with the shower running, and she whispered everything.’
    ‘I don’t even want to ask,’ he said. ‘You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.’
    ‘What’s going on with the police?’
    He sighed. ‘She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no more ludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliable maxim.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.’
    ‘Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.’
    I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was nowhere nearby. We were whispering, but still. I had to be careful now.
    ‘For now we need to toe the line, Nick. She left you looking fairly bad: Everything in the diary was true, she says. All the stuff in the woodshed was you. You bought the stuff with those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. She’s just a sheltered little rich girl, what would she know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’s name? And my goodness, that pornography!’
    ‘She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.’
    ‘Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle Hawthorne.’
    ‘Noelle didn’t know.’
    I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even bother asking how. ‘We’ll keep thinking, we’ll keep looking,’ he said. ‘Something will break.’
    ‘I can’t stay in this house with that thing . She’s threatening me with—’
    ‘Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that was in the mix.’
    ‘They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she still has some vomit. Evidence. But can they really—’
    ‘Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?’ he said. ‘For now, play nice. I hate to say it, I hate to, but that’s my best legal advice for you right now: Play nice.’
    ‘Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal dream team: Play nice ? Fuck you.’
    I hung up in full fury.
    I’ll kill her , I thought. I will fucking kill the bitch .
    I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the past few years when Amy had made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking, finally , stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive. Un , basically.