Gone Girl

I had no idea they were making payments on it. I feel a sting of embarrassment that I am as sheltered as Nick says.
    ‘Like I said, we made some serious judgment errors,’ Marybeth says. ‘We should write a book: Amazing Amy and the Adjustable Rate Mortgage . We would flunk every quiz. We’d be the cautionary tale. Amy’s friend, Wendy Want It Now.’
    ‘Harry Head in the Sand,’ Rand adds.
    ‘So what happens next?’ I ask.
    ‘That is entirely up to you,’ my dad says. My mom fishes out a homemade pamphlet from her purse and sets it on the table in front of us – bars and graphs and pie charts created on their home computer. It kills me to picture my parents squinting over the user’s manual, trying to make their proposition look pretty for me.
    Marybeth starts the pitch: ‘We wanted to ask if we could borrow some money from your trust while we figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.’
    My parents sit in front of us like two eager college kids hoping for their first internship. My father’s knee jiggles until my mother places a gentle fingertip on it.
    ‘Well, the trust fund is your money, so of course you can borrow from it,’ I say. I just want this to be over; the hopeful look on my parents’ faces, I can’t stand it. ‘How much do you think you need, to pay everything off and feel comfortable for a while?’
    My father looks at his shoes. My mother takes a deep breath. ‘Six hundred and fifty thousand,’ she says.
    ‘Oh.’ It is all I can say. It is almost everything we have.
    ‘Amy, maybe you and I should discuss—’ Nick begins.
    ‘No, no, we can do this,’ I say. ‘I’ll just go grab my checkbook.’
    ‘Actually,’ Marybeth says, ‘if you could wire it to our account tomorrow, that would be best. Otherwise there’s a ten-day waiting period.’
    That’s when I know they are in serious trouble.

NICK DUNNE
    TWO DAYS GONE
    I woke up on the pullout couch in the Elliotts’ suite, exhausted. They’d insisted I stay over – my home had not yet been reopened to me – insisted with the same urgency they once applied to snapping up the check at dinner: hospitality as ferocious force of nature. You must let us do this for you . So I did. I spent the night listening to their snores through the bedroom door, one steady and deep – a hearty lumberjack of a snore – the other gaspy and arrhythmic, as if the sleeper were dreaming of drowning.
    I could always turn myself off like a light. I’m going to sleep , I’d say, my hands in prayer position against my cheek, Zzzzzz , the deep sleep of a NyQuiled child – while my insomniac wife fussed in bed next to me. Last night, though, I felt like Amy, my brain still going, my body on edge. I was, most of the time, a man who was literally comfortable in his own skin. Amy and I would sit on the couch to watch TV, and I’d turn to melted wax, my wife twitching and shifting constantly next to me. I asked her once if she might have restless leg syndrome – an ad for the disease was running, the actors’ faces all furrowed in distress as they shook their calves and rubbed their thighs – and Amy said, I have restless everything syndrome .
    I watched the ceiling of the hotel room turn gray then pink then yellow and finally pulled myself up to see the sun blaring right at me, across the river, again, a solar third degree. Then the names popped in my head – bing! Hilary Handy. Such an adorable name to be accused of such disturbing acts. Desi Collings, a former obsessive who lived an hour away. I had claimed them both as mine. It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and fucking figure it out for yourself because everyone’s overworked and understaffed. I was a journalist . I spent over ten years interviewing people for a living and getting them to reveal themselves. I was up to the task, and Marybeth and Rand believedso too. I was thankful they let me know I was still in their trust, the husband under a wispy cloud of suspicion. Or do I fool myself to use the word wispy ?
    The Days Inn had donated an underused ballroom to serve as the Find Amy Dunne headquarters. It was unseemly – a place of brown stains and canned smells – but just after dawn, Marybeth set about pygmalioning it, vacuuming and sani-wiping, arranging bulletin boards and phone banks, hanging a large headshot of Amy on one wall. The poster – with Amy’s cool, confident gaze, those eyes that followed you – looked