Out on bond, awaiting trial. I’d been processed and released – the depersonalized in-and-outing of jail, the bond hearing, the fingerprints and photos, the rotating and the shuffling and the handling, it didn’t make me feel like an animal, it made me feel like a product, something created on an assembly line. What they were creating was Nick Dunne, Killer. It would be months until we’d begin my trial (my trial: the word still threatened to undo me completely, turn me into a high-pitched giggler, a madman). I was supposed to feel privileged to be out on bond: I had stayed put even when it was clear I was going to be arrested, so I was deemed no flight risk. Boney might have put a good word in for me, too. So I got to be in my own home for a few more months before I was carted off to prison and killed by the state.
Yes, I was a lucky, lucky man.
It was mid-August, which I found continually strange: It’s still summer, I’d think. How can so much have happened and it’s not even autumn? It was brutally warm. Shirtsleeve weather, was how my mom would have described it, forever more concerned with her children’s comfort than the actual Fahrenheit. Shirtsleeve weather, jacket weather, overcoat weather, parka weather – the Year in Outerwear. For me this year, it would be handcuff weather, then possibly prison-jumpsuit weather. Or funeral-suit weather, because I didn’t plan on going to prison. I’d kill myself first.
Tanner had a team of five detectives trying to track Amy down. So far, nothing. Like trying to catch water. Every day for weeks, I’d done my little shitty part: videotape a message to Amy and post it on young Rebecca’s Whodunnit blog. (Rebecca, at least, had remained loyal.) In the videos, I wore clothes Amy had bought me, and I brushed my hair the way she liked, and I tried to read her mind. My anger toward her was like heated wire.
The camera crews parked themselves on my lawn most mornings. We were like rival soldiers, rooted in shooting distance for months, eyeing each other across no-man’s-land, achieving some sort of perverted fraternity. There was one guy with a voice like a cartoon strongman whom I’d become attached to, sight unseen. He was dating a girl he really, really liked. Every morning his voice boomed in through my windows as he analyzed their dates; things seemed to be going very well. I wanted to hear how the story ended.
I finished my evening taping to Amy. I was wearing a green shirt she liked on me, and I’d been telling her the story of how we first met, the party in Brooklyn, my awful opening line, just one olive, that embarrassed me every time Amy mentioned it. I talked about our exit from the oversteamed apartment out into the crackling cold, with her hand in mine, the kiss in the cloud of sugar. It was one of the few stories we told the same way. I said it all in the cadence of a bedtime tale: soothing and familiar and repetitive. Always ending with Come home to me, Amy.
I turned off the camera and sat back on the couch (I always filmed while sitting on the couch under her pernicious, unpredictable cuckoo clock, because I knew if I didn’t show her cuckoo clock, she’d wonder whether I had finally gotten rid of her cuckoo clock, and then she’d stop wondering whether I had finally gotten rid of her cuckoo clock and simply come to believe it was true, and then no matter what sweet words came out of my mouth, she’d silently counter with: ‘and yet he tossed out my cuckoo clock’). The cuckoo was, in fact, soon to pop out, its grinding windup beginning over my head – a sound that inevitably made my jaw tense – when the camera crews outside emitted a loud, collective, oceanic wushing. Somebody was here. I heard the seagull cries of a few female news anchors.
Something is wrong, I thought.
The doorbell rang three times in a row: Nick-nick! Nick-nick! Nick-nick!
I didn’t hesitate. I had stopped hesitating over the past month: Bring on the trouble posthaste.
I opened the door.
It was my wife.
Back.
Amy Elliott Dunne stood barefoot on my doorstep in a thin pink dress that clung to her as if it were wet. Her ankles were ringed in dark violet. From one limp wrist dangled a piece of twine. Her hair was short and frayed at the ends, as if it had been carelessly chopped by dull scissors. Her face was bruised, her lips swollen. She was sobbing.
When she flung her arms out toward me, I could see her entire midsection was stained with dried blood. She tried to speak; her mouth opened, once, twice, silent, a mermaid washed ashore.
‘Nick!’ she finally keened – a wail that echoed against all the empty houses – and fell into my arms.
I wanted to kill her.
Had we been alone, my hands might have found their place around her neck, my fingers locating perfect grooves in her flesh. To feel that strong pulse under my fingers … but we weren’t alone, we were in front of cameras, and they were realizing who this strange woman was, they were coming to life as sure as the cuckoo clock inside, a few clicks, a few questions, then an avalanche of noise and light. The cameras were blasting us, the reporters closing in with microphones, everyone yelling Amy’s name, screaming, literally screaming. So I did the right thing, I held her to me and howled her name right back: ‘Amy! My God! My God! My darling!’ and buried my face in her neck, my arms wrapped tight around her, and let the cameras get their fifteen seconds, and I whispered deep inside her ear, ‘You fucking bitch.’ Then I stroked her hair, I cupped her face in my two loving hands, and I yanked her inside.
Outside our door, a rock concert was demanding its encore: Amy! Amy! Amy! Someone threw a scattering of pebbles at our window. Amy! Amy! Amy!
My wife took it all as her due, fluttering a dismissive hand toward the rabble outside. She turned to me with a worn but triumphant smile – the smile on the rape victim, the abuse survivor, the bed burner in the old TV movies, the smile where the bastard has finally received due justice and we know our heroine will be able to move on with life! Freeze frame.
I gestured to the twine, the hacked hair, the dried blood. ‘So, what’s your story, wife?’
‘I’m back,’ she whimpered. ‘I made it back to you.’ She moved to put her arms around me. I moved away.
‘What is your story, Amy?’
‘Desi,’ she whispered, her lower lip trembling. ‘Desi Collings took me. It was the morning. Of. Of our anniversary. And the doorbell rang, and I thought … I don’t know, I thought maybe it was flowers from you.’
I flinched. Of course she’d find a way to work in a gripe: that I hardly ever sent her flowers, when her dad had sent her mom flowers each week since they’d been married. That’s 2,444 bouquets of flowers vs. 4.
‘Flowers or … something,’ she continued. ‘So I didn’t think, I just flung open the door. And there he stood, Desi, with this look on his face. Determined. As if he’d been girding himself up for this all along. And I was holding the handle … to the Judy puppet. Did you find the puppets?’ She smiled up at me tearily. She looked so sweet.
‘Oh, I found everything you left for me, Amy.’
‘I had just found the handle to the Judy puppet – it had fallen off – I was holding it when I opened the door, and I tried to hit him, and we struggled, and he clubbed me with it. Hard. And the next thing I knew …’
‘You had framed me for murder and disappeared.’
‘I can explain everything, Nick.’
I stared at her a long hard moment. I saw days under the hot sun stretched across the sand of the beach, her hand on my chest, and I saw family dinners at her parents’ house, with Rand always refilling my glass and patting me on the shoulder, and I saw us sprawled on the rug in my crummy New York apartment, talking while staring at the lazy ceiling fan, and I saw mother of my child and the stunning life I’d planned for us once. I had a moment that lasted two beats, one, two, when I wished violently that she were telling the truth.
‘I actually don’t think you can explain everything,’ I said. ‘But I am going to love watching you try.’
‘Try me now.’
She tried to take my hand, and I flung her off. I walked away from her, took a breath, and then turned to face her. My wife must always be faced.
‘Go ahead, Nick. Try me now.’
‘Okay, sure. Why was every clue of the treasure hunt hidden in a place where I had … relations with Andie?’
She sighed, looked at the floor. Her ankles were raw. ‘I didn’t even know about Andie until I saw it on TV … while I was tied to Desi’s bed, hidden away in his lake house.’
‘So that was all … coincidence?’
‘Those were all places that were meaningful to us,’ she said. A tear slid down her face. ‘Your office, where you reignited your passion for journalism.’
I snuffed.
‘Hannibal, where I finally understood how much this area means to you. Your father’s house –confronting the man who hurt you so much. Your mother’s house, which is now Go’s house, the two people who made you such a good man. But … I guess it doesn’t surprise me that you’d like to share those places with someone you’ – she bowed her head – ‘had fallen in love with. You always liked repeats.’
‘Why did each of those places end up including clues that implicated me in your murder? Women’s undies, your purse, your diary. Explain your diary, Amy, with all the lies.’
She just smiled and shook her head like she was sorry for me. ‘Everything, I can explain everything,’ she said.
I looked in that sweet tear-stained face. Then I looked down at all the blood. ‘Amy. Where’s Desi?’
She shook her head again, a sad little smile.
I moved to call the police, but a knock on our door told me they were already here.