Gone Girl

just my college alum fund looking for money.’
    Rand sat beside me on the couch. The ancient, much abused cushions sank severely under our weight, so we ended up pushed toward each other, arms touching, which was fine with Rand. He was one of those guys who’d pronounce I’m a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.
    Marybeth returned to business: ‘We do think it’s possible an Amy obsessive took her.’ She turned to me, as if pleading a case. ‘We’ve had ’em over the years.’
    Amy had been fond of recollecting stories of men obsessed with her. She described the stalkers in hushed tones over glasses of wine at various periods during our marriage – men who were still out there, always thinking about her and wanting her. I suspected these stories were inflated: The men always came off as dangerous to a very precise degree – enough for me to worry about but not enough to require us to involve the police. In short, a play world where I could be Amy’s chest-puffed hero, defending her honor. Amy was too independent, too modern, to be able to admit the truth: She wanted to play damsel.
    ‘Lately?’
    ‘Not lately, no,’ Marybeth said, chewing her lip. ‘But there was a very disturbed girl back in high school.’
    ‘Disturbed how?’
    ‘She was obsessed with Amy. Well, with Amazing Amy . Her name was Hilary Handy – she modeled herself after Amy’s best friend in the books, Suzy. At first it was cute, I guess. And then it was like that wasn’t good enough anymore – she wanted to be Amazing Amy, not Suzy the sidekick. So she began imitating our Amy. She dressed like Amy, she colored her hair blond, she’d linger outside our house in New York. One time I was walking down the street and she came running up to me, this strange girl, and she looped her arm through mine and said, “I’m going to be your daughter now. I’m going to kill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn’t really matter to you, does it? As long as you have an Amy .” Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite.’
    ‘We finally got a restraining order because she threw Amy down a flight of stairs at school,’ Rand said. ‘Very disturbed girl. That kind of mentality doesn’t go away.’
    ‘And then Desi,’ Marybeth said.
    ‘And Desi,’ Rand said.
    Even I knew about Desi. Amy had attended a Massachusetts boarding school called Wickshire Academy – I had seen the photos, Amy in lacrosse skirts and headbands, always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a town but in a month. October. Desi Collings attended the boys’ boarding school that was paired with Wickshire. In Amy’s stories, he was a pale, Romantic figure, and their courtship had been of the boarding-school variety: chilly football games and overheated dances, lilac corsages and rides in a vintage Jaguar. Everything a little bit mid-century.
    Amy dated Desi, quite seriously, for a year. But she began to find him alarming: He talked as if they were engaged, he knew the number and gender of their children. They were going to have four kids, all boys. Which sounded suspiciously like Desi’s own family, and when he brought his mother down to meet her, Amy grew queasy at the striking resemblance between herself and Mrs Collings. The older woman had kissed her cheek coldly and murmured calmly in her ear, ‘Good luck.’ Amy couldn’t tell if it was a warning or a threat.
    After Amy cut it off with Desi, he still lingered around the Wickshire campus, a ghostly figure in dark blazers, leaning against wintry, leafless oak trees. Amy returned from a dance one February night to find him lying on her bed, naked, on top of the covers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose. Desi left school shortly after.
    But he still phoned her, even now, and several times a year sent her thick, padded envelopes that Amy tossed unopened after showing them to me. They were postmarked St. Louis. Forty minutes away. ‘It’s just a horrible, miserable coincidence,’ she’d told me. Desi had the St. Louis family connections on his mother’s side. This much she knew but didn’t care to know more. I’d picked through the trash to retrieve one, read the letter, sticky with alfredo sauce, and it had been utterly banal: talk of tennis and travel and other things preppy. Spaniels. I tried to picture this slender dandy, a fellow in bow ties and tortoiseshell glasses, busting into our house and grabbing