Gone Girl(40)

I felt my soul deflate. Amy was using the treasure hunt to steer us back to each other. And it was too late. While she had been writing these clues, she’d had no idea of my state of mind. Why, Amy, couldn’t you have done this sooner?

Our timing had never been good.

I opened the next clue, read it, tucked it in my pocket, then headed back home. I knew where to go, but I wasn’t ready yet. I couldn’t handle another compliment, another kind word from my wife, another olive branch. My feelings for her were veering too quickly from bitter to sweet.

I went back to Go’s, spent a few hours alone, drinking coffee and flipping around the TV, anxious and pissy, killing time till my eleven p.m. carpool to the mall. My twin got home just after seven, looking wilted from her solo bar shift. Her glance at the TV told me I should turn it off. ‘What’d you do today?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette and flopping down at our mother’s old card table.

‘Manned the volunteer center … then we go search the mall at eleven,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell her about Amy’s clue. I felt guilty enough.

Go doled out some solitaire cards, the steady slap of them on the table a rebuke. I began pacing. She ignored me.

‘I was just watching TV to distract myself.’

‘I know, I do.’

She flipped over a Jack.

‘There’s got to be something I can do,’ I said, stalking around her living room.

‘Well, you’re searching the mall in a few hours,’ Go said, and gave no more encouragement. She flipped over three cards.

‘You sound like you think it’s a waste of time.’

‘Oh. No. Hey, everything is worth checking out. They got Son of Sam on a parking ticket, right?’

Go was the third person who’d mentioned this to me; it must be the mantra for cases going cold. I sat down across from her.

‘I haven’t been upset enough about Amy,’ I said. ‘I know that.’

‘Maybe not.’ She finally looked up at me. ‘You’re being weird.’

‘I think that instead of panicking, I’ve just focused on being pissed at her. Because we were in such a bad place lately. It’s like it feels wrong for me to worry too much because I don’t have the right. I guess.’

‘You’ve been weird, I can’t lie,’ Go said. ‘But it’s a weird situation.’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I don’t care how you are with me. Just be careful with everyone else, okay? People judge. Fast.’

She went back to her solitaire, but I wanted her attention. I kept talking.

‘I should probably check in on Dad at some point,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll tell him about Amy.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t. He was even weirder about Amy than you are.’

‘I always felt like she must remind him of an old girlfriend or something – the one who got away. After he—’I made the downward swoop of a hand that signified his Alzheimer’s – ‘he was kind of rude and awful, but …’

‘Yeah, but he kind of wanted to impress her at the same time,’ she said. ‘Your basic jerky twelve-year-old boy trapped in a sixty-eight-year-old *’s body.’

‘Don’t women think that all men are jerky twelve-year-olds at heart?’

‘Hey, if the heart fits.’

Eleven-oh-eight p.m., Rand was waiting for us just inside the automatic sliding doors to the hotel, his face squinting into the dark to make us out. The Hillsams were driving their pick-up; Stucks and I both rode in the bed. Rand came trotting up to us in khaki golf shorts and a crisp Middlebury T-shirt. He hopped in the back, planted himself on the wheel cover with surprising ease, and handled the introductions like he was the host of his own mobile talk show.

‘I’m really sorry about Amy, Rand,’ Stucks said loudly, as we hurtled out of the parking lot with unnecessary speed and hit the highway. ‘She’s such a sweet person. One time she saw me out painting a house, sweating my ba – my butt off, and she drove on to 7-Eleven, got me a giant pop, and brought it back to me, right up on the ladder.’

This was a lie. Amy cared so little for Stucks or his refreshment that she wouldn’t have bothered to piss in a cup for him.

‘That sounds like her,’ Rand said, and I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient.

‘Middlebury, huh?’ Stucks continued, pointing at Rand’s T-shirt. ‘Got a hell of a rugby team.’

‘That’s right we do,’ Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.

Joe Hillsam parked his truck outside the giant cornerstone Mervyns. We all hopped out, stretched our legs, shook ourselves awake. The night was muggy and moon-slivered. I noticed Stucks was wearing – maybe ironically, possibly not – a T-shirt that read Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.

‘So, this place, what we’re doing, it’s freakin’ dangerous, I don’t want to lie,’ Mikey Hillsam began. He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.