Gone Girl(12)

The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer Velásquez. ‘Mr Dunne? I’m Detective Rhonda Boney. This is my partner, Detective Jim Gilpin. We understand there are some concerns about your wife.’

My stomach growled loud enough for us all to hear it, but we pretended we didn’t.

‘We take a look around, sir?’ Gilpin said. He had fleshy bags under his eyes and scraggly white whiskers in his mustache. His shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he wore it like it was; he looked like he should stink of cigarettes and sour coffee, even though he didn’t. He smelled like Dial soap.

I led them a few short steps to the living room, pointed once again at the wreckage, where the two younger cops were kneeling carefully, as if waiting to be discovered doing something useful. Boney steered me toward a chair in the dining room, away from but in view of the signs of struggle.

Rhonda Boney walked me through the same basics I’d told Velásquez and Riordan, her attentive sparrow eyes on me. Gilpin squatted down on a knee, assessing the living room.

‘Have you phoned friends or family, people your wife might be with?’ Rhonda Boney asked.

‘I … No. Not yet. I guess I was waiting for you all.’

‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘Let me guess: baby of the family.’

‘What?’

‘You’re the baby.’

‘I have a twin sister.’ I sensed some internal judgment being made. ‘Why?’ Amy’s favorite vase was lying on the floor, intact, bumped up against the wall. It was a wedding present, a Japanese masterwork that Amy put away each week when our housecleaner came because she was sure it would get smashed.

‘Just a guess of mine, why you’d wait for us: You’re used to someone else always taking the lead,’ Boney said. ‘That’s what my little brother is like. It’s a birth-order thing.’ She scribbled something on a notepad.

‘Okay.’ I gave an angry shrug. ‘Do you need my sun sign too, or can we get started?’

Boney smiled at me kindly, waiting.

‘I waited to do something because, I mean, she’s obviously not with a friend,’ I said, pointing at the disarray in the living room.

‘You’ve lived here, what, Mr Dunne, two years?’ she asked.

‘Two years September.’

‘Moved from where?’

‘New York.’

‘City?’

‘Yes.’

She pointed upstairs, asking permission without asking, and I nodded and followed her, Gilpin following me.

‘I was a writer there,’ I blurted out before I could stop myself. Even now, two years back here, and I couldn’t bear for someone to think this was my only life.

Boney: ‘Sounds impressive.’

Gilpin: ‘Of what?’

I timed my answer to my stair climbing: I wrote for a magazine (step), I wrote about pop culture (step) for a men’s magazine (step). At the top of the stairs, I turned to see Gilpin looking back at the living room. He snapped to.

‘Pop culture?’ he called up as he began climbing. ‘What exactly does that entail?’

‘Popular culture,’ I said. We reached the top of the stairs, Boney waiting for us. ‘Movies, TV, music, but, uh, you know, not high arts, nothing hifalutin.’ I winced: hifalutin? How patronizing. You two bumpkins probably need me to translate my English, Comma, Educated East Coast into English, Comma, Midwest Folksy. Me do sum scribbling of stuffs I get in my noggin after watchin’ them movin’ pitchers!

‘She loves movies,’ Gilpin said, gesturing toward Boney. Boney nodded: I do.

‘Now I own The Bar, downtown,’ I added. I taught a class at the junior college too, but to add that suddenly felt too needy. I wasn’t on a date.

Boney was peering into the bathroom, halting me and Gilpin in the hallway. ‘The Bar?’ she said. ‘I know the place. Been meaning to drop by. Love the name. Very meta.’

‘Sounds like a smart move,’ Gilpin said. Boney made for the bedroom, and we followed. ‘A life surrounded by beer ain’t too bad.’

‘Sometimes the answer is at the bottom of a bottle,’ I said, then winced again at the inappropriateness.

We entered the bedroom.

Gilpin laughed. ‘Don’t I know that feeling.’

‘See how the iron is still on?’ I began.

Boney nodded, opened the door of our roomy closet, and walked inside, flipping on the light, fluttering her latexed hands over shirts and dresses as she moved toward the back. She made a sudden noise, bent down, turned around – holding a perfectly square box covered in elaborate silver wrapping.

My stomach seized.

‘Someone’s birthday?’ she asked.

‘It’s our anniversary.’

Boney and Gilpin both twitched like spiders and pretended they didn’t.

By the time we returned to the living room, the kid officers were gone. Gilpin got down on his knees, eyeing the overturned ottoman.

‘Uh, I’m a little freaked out, obviously,’ I started.

‘I don’t blame you at all, Nick,’ Gilpin said earnestly. He had pale blue eyes that jittered in place, an unnerving tic.

‘Can we do something? To find my wife. I mean, because she’s clearly not here.’

Boney pointed at the wedding portrait on the wall: me in my tux, a block of teeth frozen on my face, my arms curved formally around Amy’s waist; Amy, her blond hair tightly coiled and sprayed, her veil blowing in the beach breeze of Cape Cod, her eyes open too wide because she always blinked at the last minute and she was trying so hard not to blink. The day after Independence Day, the sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt – summer.