Gone Girl(124)

My throat clenched. I felt like I might throw up. Fear, mostly, and then a surge of rage. Fucking bitch, f*cking bitch, cunt, cunt, cunt.

‘What a smart, convenient note for her to end on,’ I said. Tanner put a hand on mine to hush me.

‘You look like you want to kill her again, right now,’ Boney said.

‘You’ve done nothing but lie to us, Nick,’ Gilpin said. ‘You say you were at the beach that morning. Everyone we talk to says you hate the beach. You say you have no idea what all these purchases are on your maxed-out credit cards. Now we have a shed full of exactly those items, and they have your fingerprints all over them. We have a wife suffering from what sounds like antifreeze poisoning weeks before she disappears. I mean, come on.’ He paused for effect.

‘Anything else of note?’ Tanner asked.

‘We can place you in Hannibal, where your wife’s purse shows up a few days later,’ Boney said. ‘We have a neighbor who overheard you two arguing the night before. A pregnancy you didn’t want. A bar borrowed on your wife’s money that would revert to her in case of a divorce. And of course, of course: a secret girlfriend of more than a year.’

‘We can help you right now, Nick,’ Gilpin said. ‘Once we arrest you, we can’t.’

‘Where did you find the diary? At Nick’s father’s house?’ Tanner asked.

‘Yes,’ Boney said.

Tanner nodded to me: That’s what we didn’t find. ‘Let me guess: anonymous tip.’

Neither cop said a thing.

‘Can I ask where in the house you found it?’ I asked.

‘In the furnace. I know you thought you burned it. It caught fire, but the pilot light was too weak; it got smothered. So only the outer edges burned,’ Gilpin said. ‘Extremely good luck for us.’

The furnace – another inside joke from Amy! She’d always proclaimed amazement at how little I understood the things men are supposed to understand. During our search, I’d even glanced at my dad’s old furnace, with its pipes and wires and spigots, and backed away, intimidated.

‘It wasn’t luck. You were meant to find it,’ I said.

Boney let the left side of her mouth slide into a smile. She leaned back and waited, relaxed as the star of an iced-tea commercial. I gave Tanner an angry nod: Go ahead.

‘Amy Elliott Dunne is alive, and she is framing Nick Dunne for her murder,’ he said. I clasped my hands and sat up straight, tried to do anything that would lend me an air of reason. Boney stared at me. I needed a pipe, eyeglasses I could swiftly remove for effect, a set of encyclopedias at my elbow. I felt giddy. Do not laugh.

Boney frowned. ‘What’s that again?’

‘Amy is alive and very well, and she is framing Nick,’ my proxy repeated.

They exchanged a look, hunched over the table: Can you believe this guy?

‘Why would she do that?’ Gilpin asked, rubbing his eyes.

‘Because she hates him. Obviously. He was a shitty husband.’

Boney looked down at the floor, let out a breath. ‘I’d certainly agree with you there.’

At the same time, Gilpin said: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Is she crazy, Nick?’ Boney said, leaning in. ‘What you’re talking about, it’s crazy. You hear me? It would have taken, what, six months, a year, to set all this up. She would have had to hate you, to wish you harm – ultimate, serious, horrific harm – for a year. Do you know how hard it is to sustain that kind of hatred for that long?’

She could do it. Amy could do it.

‘Why not just divorce your ass?’ Boney snapped.

‘That wouldn’t appeal to her … sense of justice,’ I replied. Tanner gave me another look.

‘Jesus Christ, Nick, aren’t you tired of all this?’ Gilpin said. ‘We have it in your wife’s own words: I think he may kill me.’

Someone had told them at some point: Use the suspect’s name a lot, it will make him feel comfortable, known. Same idea as in sales.

‘You been in your dad’s house lately, Nick?’ Boney asked. ‘Like on July ninth?’

Fuck. That’s why Amy changed the alarm code. I battled a new wave of disgust at myself: that my wife played me twice. Not only did she dupe me into believing she still loved me, she actually forced me to implicate myself. Wicked, wicked girl. I almost laughed. Good Lord, I hated her, but you had to admire the bitch.

Tanner began: ‘Amy used her clues to force my client to go to these various venues, where she’d left evidence – Hannibal, his father’s house – so he’d incriminate himself. My client and I have brought these clues with us. As a courtesy.’

He pulled out the clues and the love notes, fanned them in front of the cops like a card trick. I sweated while they read them, willing them to look up and tell me all was clear now.

‘Okay. You say Amy hated you so much that she spent months framing you for her murder?’ Boney asked, in the quiet, measured voice of a disappointed parent.

I gave her a blank face.

‘This does not sound like an angry woman, Nick,’ she said. ‘She’s falling all over herself to apologize to you, to suggest that you both start again, to let you know how much she loves you: You are warm – you are my sun. You are brilliant, you are witty.’