Gone Girl

parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Nick shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.
    He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Nick’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

NICK DUNNE
    THREE DAYS GONE
    T he police weren’t going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.
    ‘I still say it’s the river,’ one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. ‘Right behind the guy’s house, what easier way?’
    ‘She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.’
    ‘Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.’
    I turned away before they noticed me.
    A former teacher of mine, Mr Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, ‘My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …’ We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.
    My cell rang, the disposable – I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quicksteps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.
    ‘How many hours from here is Memphis?’ she asked.
    ‘Little under five hours, driving. What’s in Memphis?’
    ‘Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy’s stalker from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?’
    I didn’t know what to say: none?
    ‘Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too. We can’t authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago . Asshole. Guy always treats me like I’m on the verge of hysteria; he’ll talk to Rand when I’m right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me. Ass hole.’
    ‘The city’s broke,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they really don’t have the budget, Marybeth.’
    ‘Well, we do. I’m serious, Nick, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.’
    ‘She never told me that.’
    ‘What’s it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you’d go. Please? I won’t be able to stop thinking until I know someone’s talked to her.’
    I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn’t cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.
    I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife’s fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.
    ‘Of course I’ll go. And I’ll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the