Gone Girl(107)

I sat down and ordered a Scotch from the bartender, a guy about my age who stared at me a beat too long, deciding whether he would serve me. He finally, grudgingly, set down a small tumbler in front of me, his nostrils flared. When I got out my wallet, he aimed an alarmed palm up at me. ‘I do not want your money, man. Not at all.’

I left cash anyway. Asshole.

When I tried to flag him for another drink, he glanced my way, shook his head, and leaned in toward the woman he was chatting up. A few seconds later, she discreetly looked toward me, pretending she was stretching. Her mouth turned down as she nodded. That’s him. Nick Dunne. The bartender never came back.

You can’t yell, you can’t strong-arm: Hey, jackass, will you get me a goddamn drink or what? You can’t be the * they believe you are. You just have to sit and take it. But I wasn’t leaving. I sat with my empty glass in front of me and pretended I was thinking very hard. I checked my cell, just in case Andie had called. No. Then I pulled out my real phone and played a round of solitaire, pretending to be engrossed. My wife had done this to me, turned me into a man who couldn’t get a drink in his own hometown. God, I hated her.

‘Was it Scotch?’

A girl about Andie’s age was standing in front of me. Asian, black shoulder-length hair, cubicle-cute.

‘Excuse me?’

‘What you were drinking? Scotch?’

‘Yeah. Having trouble getting—’

She was gone, to the end of the bar, and she was nosing into the bartender’s line of vision with a big help me smile, a girl used to making her presence known, and then she was back with a Scotch in an actual big-boy tumbler.

‘Take it,’ she nudged, and I did. ‘Cheers.’ She held up her own clear, fizzing drink. We clinked glasses. ‘Can I sit?’ ‘I’m not staying long, actually—’ I looked around, making sure no one was aiming a cameraphone at us.

‘So, okay,’ she said with a shruggy smile. ‘I could pretend I don’t know you’re Nick Dunne, but I’m not going to insult you. I’m rooting for you, by the way. You’ve been getting a bad rap.’

‘Thanks. It’s, uh, it’s a weird time.’

‘I’m serious. You know how, in court, they talk about the CSI effect? Like, everyone on the jury has watched so much CSI that they believe science can prove anything?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I think there’s an Evil Husband effect. Everyone has seen too many true-crime shows where the husband is always, always the killer, so people automatically assume the husband’s the bad guy.’

‘That’s exactly it,’ I said. ‘Thank you. That is exactly it. And Ellen Abbott—’

‘Fuck Ellen Abbott,’ my new friend said. ‘She’s a one-woman walking, talking, man-hating perversion of the justice system.’ She raised her glass again.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Another Scotch?’

‘That’s a gorgeous name.’

Her name, as it turned out, was Rebecca. She had a ready credit card and a hollow leg. (Another? Another? Another?) She was from Muscatine, Iowa (another Mississippi River town), and had moved to New York after undergrad to be a writer (also like me). She’d been an editorial assistant at three different magazines – a bridal magazine, a working-mom magazine, a teen-girl magazine – all of which had shuttered in the past few years, so she was now working for a crime blog called Whodunnit, and she was (giggle) in town to try to get an interview with me. Hell, I had to love her hungry-kid chutzpah: Just fly me to Carthage – the major networks haven’t gotten him, but I’m sure I can!

‘I’ve been waiting outside your house with the rest of the world, and then at the police station, and then I decided I needed a drink. And here you walk in. It’s just too perfect. Too weird, right?’ she said. She had little gold hoop earrings that she kept playing with, her hair tucked behind her ears.

‘I should go,’ I said. My words were sticky around the edges, the beginnings of a slur.

‘But you never told me why you’re here,’ Rebecca said. ‘I have to say, it takes a lot of courage, I think, for you to head out without a friend or some sort of backup. I bet you get a lot of shitty looks.’

I shrugged: No big deal.

‘People judging everything you do without even knowing you. Like you with the cell phone photo at the park. I mean, you were probably like me: You were raised to be polite. But no one wants the real story. They just want to … gotcha. You know?’

‘I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.’

She raised her eyebrows; her earrings jittered.

I thought of Amy sitting in her mystery control center, wherever the f*ck she was, judging me from every angle, finding me wanting even from afar. Was there anything she could see that would make her call off this madness?

I went on, ‘I mean, people think we were in a rocky marriage, but actually, right before she disappeared, she put together a treasure hunt for me.’

Amy would want one of two things: for me to learn my lesson and fry like the bad boy I was; or for me to learn my lesson and love her the way she deserved and be a good, obedient, chastised, dickless little boy.

‘This wonderful treasure hunt.’ I smiled. Rebecca shook her head with a little-V frown. ‘My wife, she always did a treasure hunt for our anniversary. One clue leads to a special place where I find the next clue, and so on. Amy …’ I tried to get my eyes to fill, settled for wiping them. The clock above the door read 12:37 a.m. ‘Before she went missing, she hid all the clues. For this year.’