Who is right?!
Well, that’s easy, because Amy is always right, in every story. (Don’t think I haven’t brought this up in my arguments with my real Amy, because I have, more than once.)
The quizzes – written by two psychologists, who are also parents like you! – were supposed to tease out a child’s personality traits: Is your wee one a sulker who can’t stand to be corrected, like Brian? A spineless enabler, like Suzy? A pot-stirrer, like Joanna? Or perfect, like Amy? The books became extremely trendy among the rising yuppie class: They were the Pet Rock of parenting. The Rubik’s Cube of child rearing. The Elliotts got rich. At one point it was estimated that every school library in America had an Amazing Amy book.
‘Do you have worries that this might link back to the Amazing Amy business?’ I asked.
‘We do have a few people we thought might be worth checking out,’ Rand began.
I coughed out a laugh. ‘Do you think Judith Viorst kidnapped Amy for Alexander so he wouldn’t have any more Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days?’
Rand and Marybeth turned matching surprised-disappointed faces toward me. It was a gross, tasteless thing to say – my brain had been burping up such inappropriate thoughts at inopportune moments. Mental gas I couldn’t control. Like, I’d started internally singing the lyrics to ‘Bony Moronie’ whenever I saw my cop friend. She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni, my brain would bebop as Detective Rhonda Boney was telling me about dragging the river for my missing wife. Defense mechanism, I told myself, just a weird defense mechanism. I’d like it to stop.
I rearranged my leg delicately, spoke delicately, as if my words were an unwieldy stack of fine china. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.’
‘We’re all tired,’ Rand offered.
‘We’ll have the cops round up Viorst,’ Marybeth tried. ‘And that bitch Beverly Cleary too.’ It was less a joke than a pardon.
‘I guess I should tell you,’ I said. ‘The cops, it’s normal in this kind of case—’
‘To look at the husband first, I know,’ Rand interrupted. ‘I told them they’re wasting their time. The questions they asked us—’
‘They were offensive,’ Marybeth finished.
‘So they have spoken with you? About me?’ I moved over to the minibar, casually poured a gin. I swallowed three belts in a row and felt immediately worse. My stomach was working its way up my esophagus. ‘What kind of stuff did they ask?’
‘Have you ever hurt Amy, has Amy ever mentioned you threatening her?’ Marybeth ticked off. ‘Are you a womanizer, has Amy ever mentioned you cheating on her? Because that sounds like Amy, right? I told them we didn’t raise a doormat.’
Rand put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Nick, what we should have said, first of all, is: We know you would never, ever hurt Amy. I even told the police, told them the story about you saving the mouse at the beach house, saving it from the glue trap.’ He looked over at Marybeth as if she didn’t know the story, and Marybeth obliged with her rapt attention. ‘Spent an hour trying to corner the damn thing, and then literally drove the little rat bastard out of town. Does that sound like a guy who would hurt his wife?’
I felt a burst of intense guilt, self-loathing. I thought for a second I might cry, finally.
‘We love you, Nick,’ Rand said, giving me a final squeeze.
‘We do, Nick,’ Marybeth echoed. ‘You’re our son. We are so incredibly sorry that on top of Amy being gone, you have to deal with this – cloud of suspicion.’
I didn’t like the phrase cloud of suspicion. I much preferred routine investigation or a mere formality.
‘They did wonder about your restaurant reservations that night,’ Marybeth said, an overly casual glance.
‘My reservations?’
‘They said you told them you had reservations at Houston’s, but they checked it out, and there were no reservations. They seemed really interested in that.’
I had no reservation, and I had no gift. Because if I planned on killing Amy that day, I wouldn’t have needed reservations for that night or a gift I’d never need to give her. The hallmarks of an extremely pragmatic killer.
I am pragmatic to a fault – my friends could certainly tell the police that.
‘Uh, no. No, I never made reservations. They must have misunderstood me. I’ll let them know.’
I collapsed on the couch across from Marybeth. I didn’t want Rand to touch me again.
‘Oh, okay. Good,’ Marybeth said. ‘Did she, uh, did you get a treasure hunt this year?’ Her eyes turned red again. ‘Before …’
‘Yeah, they gave me the first clue today. Gilpin and I found the second one in my office at the college. I’m still trying to figure it out.’
‘Can we take a look?’ my mother-in-law asked.
‘I don’t have it with me,’ I lied.
‘Will you … will you try to solve it, Nick?’ Marybeth asked.
‘I will, Marybeth. I’ll solve it.’
‘I just hate the idea of things she touched, left out there, all alone—’
My phone rang, the disposable, and I flicked a glance at the display, then shut it off. I needed to get rid of the thing, but I couldn’t yet.
‘You should pick up every call, Nick,’ Marybeth said.
‘I recognized this one – just my college alum fund looking for money.’
Rand sat beside me on the couch. The ancient, much abused cushions sank severely under our weight, so we ended up pushed toward each other, arms touching, which was fine with Rand. He was one of those guys who’d pronounce I’m a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.
Marybeth returned to business: ‘We do think it’s possible an Amy obsessive took her.’ She turned to me, as if pleading a case. ‘We’ve had ’em over the years.’
Amy had been fond of recollecting stories of men obsessed with her. She described the stalkers in hushed tones over glasses of wine at various periods during our marriage – men who were still out there, always thinking about her and wanting her. I suspected these stories were inflated: The men always came off as dangerous to a very precise degree – enough for me to worry about but not enough to require us to involve the police. In short, a play world where I could be Amy’s chest-puffed hero, defending her honor. Amy was too independent, too modern, to be able to admit the truth: She wanted to play damsel.
‘Lately?’
‘Not lately, no,’ Marybeth said, chewing her lip. ‘But there was a very disturbed girl back in high school.’
‘Disturbed how?’
‘She was obsessed with Amy. Well, with Amazing Amy. Her name was Hilary Handy – she modeled herself after Amy’s best friend in the books, Suzy. At first it was cute, I guess. And then it was like that wasn’t good enough anymore – she wanted to be Amazing Amy, not Suzy the sidekick. So she began imitating our Amy. She dressed like Amy, she colored her hair blond, she’d linger outside our house in New York. One time I was walking down the street and she came running up to me, this strange girl, and she looped her arm through mine and said, “I’m going to be your daughter now. I’m going to kill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn’t really matter to you, does it? As long as you have an Amy.” Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite.’
‘We finally got a restraining order because she threw Amy down a flight of stairs at school,’ Rand said. ‘Very disturbed girl. That kind of mentality doesn’t go away.’
‘And then Desi,’ Marybeth said.
‘And Desi,’ Rand said.
Even I knew about Desi. Amy had attended a Massachusetts boarding school called Wickshire Academy – I had seen the photos, Amy in lacrosse skirts and headbands, always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a town but in a month. October. Desi Collings attended the boys’ boarding school that was paired with Wickshire. In Amy’s stories, he was a pale, Romantic figure, and their courtship had been of the boarding-school variety: chilly football games and overheated dances, lilac corsages and rides in a vintage Jaguar. Everything a little bit mid-century.
Amy dated Desi, quite seriously, for a year. But she began to find him alarming: He talked as if they were engaged, he knew the number and gender of their children. They were going to have four kids, all boys. Which sounded suspiciously like Desi’s own family, and when he brought his mother down to meet her, Amy grew queasy at the striking resemblance between herself and Mrs Collings. The older woman had kissed her cheek coldly and murmured calmly in her ear, ‘Good luck.’ Amy couldn’t tell if it was a warning or a threat.
After Amy cut it off with Desi, he still lingered around the Wickshire campus, a ghostly figure in dark blazers, leaning against wintry, leafless oak trees. Amy returned from a dance one February night to find him lying on her bed, naked, on top of the covers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose. Desi left school shortly after.
But he still phoned her, even now, and several times a year sent her thick, padded envelopes that Amy tossed unopened after showing them to me. They were postmarked St. Louis. Forty minutes away. ‘It’s just a horrible, miserable coincidence,’ she’d told me. Desi had the St. Louis family connections on his mother’s side. This much she knew but didn’t care to know more. I’d picked through the trash to retrieve one, read the letter, sticky with alfredo sauce, and it had been utterly banal: talk of tennis and travel and other things preppy. Spaniels. I tried to picture this slender dandy, a fellow in bow ties and tortoiseshell glasses, busting into our house and grabbing Amy with soft, manicured fingers. Tossing her in the trunk of his vintage roadster and taking her … antiquing in Vermont. Desi. Could anyone believe it was Desi?
‘Desi lives not far away, actually,’ I said. ‘St. Louis.’
‘Now, see?’ Rand said. ‘Why are the cops not all over this?’
‘Someone needs to be,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. After the search here tomorrow.’
‘The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home,’ Marybeth said. She kept her eyes on me one beat too long, then shivered, as if shaking off a thought.