AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
NINE DAYS GONE
I wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. I cannot be found here, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words, like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast enough, and my money situation is just the opposite, and Jeff and Greta’s greedy antennae are up. And I smell like fish.
There was something about Jeff and that race to the shoreline, toward my bundled dress and my money belt. Something about the way Greta keeps alighting on Ellen Abbott. It makes me nervous. Or am I being paranoid? I sound like Diary Amy: Is my husband going to kill me or am I imagining!?!? For the first time I actually feel sorry for her.
I make two calls to the Amy Dunne tip line, and speak to two different people, and offer two different tips. It’s hard to tell how quickly they’ll reach the police – the volunteers seem utterly disinterested. I drive to the library in a dark mood. I need to pack up and leave. Clean my cabin with bleach, wipe my fingerprints off everything, vacuum for any hairs. Erase Amy (and Lydia and Nancy) and go. If I go, I’ll be safe. Even if Greta and Jeff do suspect who I am, as long as I’m not caught in the flesh, I’m okay. Amy Elliott Dunne is like a yeti – coveted and folkloric – and they are two Ozarks grifters whose blurry story will be immediately debunked. I will leave today. That’s what I decide when I walk with my head bowed into the chilly, mostly uninhabited library with its three vacant computers and I go online to catch up on Nick.
Since the vigil, the news about Nick has been on repeat – the same facts on a circuit, over and over, getting louder and louder, but with no new information. But today something is different. I type Nick’s name into the search engine, and the blogs are going nuts, because my husband has gotten drunk and done an insane interview, in a bar, with a random girl wielding a Flip camera. God, the idiot never learns.
NICK DUNNE’S VIDEO CONFESSION!!!
NICK DUNNE, DRUNKEN DECLARATIONS!!!
My heart jumps so high, my uvula begins pulsing. My husband has fucked himself again.
The video loads, and there is Nick. He has the sleepy eyes he gets when he’s drunk, the heavy lids, and he’s got his sideways grin, and he’s talking about me, and he looks like a human being. He looks happy. ‘My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.’
My stomach flutters delicately. I was not expecting this. I almost smile. ‘What’s so cool about her?’ the girl asks off-screen. Her voice is high, sorority-cheery.
Nick launches into the treasure hunt, how it was our tradition, how I always remembered hilarious inside jokes, and right now this was all he had left of me, so he had to complete the treasure hunt. It was his mission.
‘I just reached the end this morning,’ he says. His voice is husky. He has been talking over the crowd. He’ll go home and gargle with warm salt water, like his mother always made him do. If I were at home with him, he’d ask me to heat the water and make it for him, because he never got the right amount of salt. ‘And it made me … realize a lot. She is the only person in the world who has the power to surprise me, you know? Everyone else, I always know what they’re going to say, because everyone says the same thing. We all watch the same shows, we read the same stuff, we recycle everything. But Amy, she is her own perfect person. She just has this power over me.’
‘Where do you think she is now, Nick?’
My husband looks down at his wedding band and twirls it twice.
‘Are you okay, Nick?’
‘The truth? No. I failed my wife so entirely. I have been so wrong. I just hope it’s not too late. For me. For us.’
‘You’re at the end of your rope. Emotionally.’
Nick looks right at the camera. ‘I want my wife. I want her to be right here.’ He takes a breath. ‘I’m not the best at showing emotion. I know that. But I love her. I need her to be okay. She has to be okay. I have so much to make up to her.’
‘Like what?’
He laughs, the chagrined laugh that even now I find appealing. In better days, I used to call it the talk-show laugh: It was the quick downward glance, the scratching of a corner of the mouth with a casual thumb, the inhaled chuckle that a charming movie star always deploys right before telling a killer story.
‘Like, none of your business.’ He smiles. ‘I just have a lot to make up to her. I wasn’t the husband I could have been. We had a few hard years, and I … I lost my shit. I stopped trying. I mean, I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times: We stopped trying. Everyone knows it means the end of a marriage – it’s textbook. But I stopped trying. It was me. I wasn’t the man I needed to be.’ Nick’s lids are heavy, his speech off-kilter enough that his twang is showing. He is past tipsy, one drink before drunk. His cheeks are pink with alcohol. My fingertips glow, remembering the heat of his skin when he had a few cocktails in him.
‘So how would you make it up to her?’ The camera wobbles for a second; the girl is grabbing her cocktail.
‘How will I make it up to her. First I’m going to find her and bring her home. You can bet on that. Then? Whatever she needs from me, I’ll give her. From now on. Because I reached the end of the treasure hunt, and I was brought to my knees. Humbled. My wife has never been more clear to me than she is now. I’ve never been so sure of what I needed to do.’
‘If you could talk to Amy right now, what would you tell her?’
‘I love you. I will find you. I will …’
I can tell he is about to do the Daniel Day-Lewis line from The Last of the Mohicans: ‘Stay alive … I will find you.’ He can’t resist deflecting any sincerity with a quick line of movie dialogue. I can feel him teetering right on the edge of it. He stops himself.
‘I love you forever, Amy.’
How heartfelt. How unlike my husband.
Three morbidly obese hill people on motorized scooters are between me and my morning coffee. Their asses mushroom over the sides of the contraptions, but they still need another Egg McMuffin. There are literally three people, parked in front of me, in line, inside the McDonald’s.
I actually don’t care. I’m curiously cheerful despite this twist in the plan. Online, the video is already spiral-viraling away, and the reaction is surprisingly positive. Cautiously optimistic: Maybe this guy didn’t kill his wife after all. That is, word for word, the most common refrain. Because once Nick lets his guard down and shows some emotion, it’s all there. No one could watch that video and believe he was putting up an act. It was no swallow-the-pain sort of amateur theater. My husband loves me. Or at least last night he loved me. While I was plotting his doom in my crummy little cabin that smells of moldy towel, he loved me.
It’s not enough. I know that, of course. I can’t change my plan. But it gives me pause. My husband has finished the treasure hunt and he is in love. He is also deeply distressed: on one cheek I swear I could spot a hive.
I pull up to my cabin to find Dorothy knocking on my door. Her hair is wet from the heat, brushed straight back like a Wall Street slickster’s. She is in the habit of swiping her upper lip, then licking the sweat off her fingers, so she has her index finger in her mouth like a buttery corncob as she turns to me.
‘There she is,’ she says. ‘The truant.’
I am late on my cabin payment. Two days. It almost makes me laugh: I am late on rent.
‘I’m so sorry, Dorothy. I’ll come by with it in ten minutes.’
‘I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.’ ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to stay. I might have to head on.’
‘Then you’d still owe me the two days. Eighty dollars, please.’
I duck into my cabin, undo my flimsy money belt. I counted my cash on my bed this morning, taking a good long time doling out each bill, a teasing economic striptease, and the big reveal was that I have, somehow, I have only $8,849 left. It costs a lot to live.
When I open the door to hand Dorothy the cash ($8,769 left), I see Greta and Jeff hanging out on Greta’s porch, watching the cash exchange hands. Jeff isn’t playing his guitar, Greta isn’t smoking. They seem to be standing on her porch just to get a better look at me. They both wave at me, hey, sweetie, and I wave limply back. I close the door and start packing.
It’s strange how little I own in this world when I used to own so much. I don’t own an eggbeater or a soup bowl. I own sheets and towels, but I don’t own a decent blanket. I own a pair of scissors so I can keep my hair butchered. It makes me smile because Nick didn’t own a pair of scissors when we moved in together. No scissors, no iron, no stapler, and I remember asking him how he thought he was possibly civilized without a pair of scissors, and he said of course he wasn’t and swooped me up in his arms and threw me on the bed and pounced on top of me, and I laughed because I was still Cool Girl. I laughed instead of thinking about what it meant.
One should never marry a man who doesn’t own a decent set of scissors. That would be my advice. It leads to bad things.
I fold and pack my clothes in my tiny backpack – the same three outfits I bought and kept in my getaway car a month ago so I didn’t have to take anything from home. Toss in my travel toothbrush, calendar, comb, lotion, the sleeping pills I bought back when I was going to drug and drown myself. My cheap swimsuits. It takes such little time, the whole thing.
I put on my latex gloves and wipe down everything. I pull out the drains to get any trapped hair. I don’t really think Greta and Jeff know who I am, but if they do, I don’t want to leave any proof, and the whole time I say to myself, This is what you get for relaxing, this is what you get for not thinking all the time, all the time. You deserve to get caught, a girl who acts so stupidly, and what if you left hairs in the front office, then what, and what if there are fingerprints in Jeff’s car or Greta’s kitchen, what then, why did you ever think you could be someone who didn’t worry? I picture the police scouring the cabins, finding nothing, and then, like a movie, I go in for a close-up of one lone mousy hair of mine, drifting along the concrete floor of the pool, waiting to damn me.
Then my mind swings the other way: Of course no one is going to show up to look for you here. All the police have to go on is the claim of a few grifters that they saw the real Amy Elliott Dunne at a cheap broke-down cabin court in the middle of nowhere. Little people wanting to feel bigger, that’s what they’d assume.
An assertive knock at the door. The kind a parent gives right before swinging the door wide: I own this place. I stand in the middle of my room and debate not answering. Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device – the mysterious knock on the door – because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don’t know what’s out there, yet you know you’ll open it. You’ll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.
Hey, sweetheart, we know you’re home, open up!
I strip off my latex gloves, open the door, and Jeff and Greta are standing on my porch, the sun to their backs, their features in shadow.
‘Hey, pretty lady, we come in?’ Jeff asks.
‘I actually – I was going to come see you guys,’ I say, trying to sound flippant, harried. ‘I’m leaving tonight – tomorrow or tonight. Got a call from back home, got to get going back home.’
‘Home Louisiana or home Savannah?’ Greta says. She and Jeff have been talking about me.
‘Louisi—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jeff says, ‘let us in for a second, we come to say goodbye.’
He steps toward me, and I think about screaming or slamming the door, but I don’t think either will go well. Better to pretend everything is fine and hope that is true.
Greta closes the door behind them and leans against it as Jeff wanders into the tiny bedroom, then the kitchen, chatting about the weather. Opening doors and cabinets.
‘You got to clear everything out; Dorothy will keep your deposit if you don’t,’ he says. ‘She’s a stickler.’ He opens the refrigerator, peers into the crisper, the freezer. ‘Not even a jar of ketchup can you leave. I always thought that was weird. Ketchup doesn’t go bad.’
He opens the closet and lifts up the cabin bedding I’ve folded, shakes out the sheets. ‘I always, always shake out the sheets,’ he says. ‘Just to make sure nothing is inside – a sock or underwear or what have you.’
He opens the drawer of my bedside table, kneels down, and looks all the way to the back. ‘Looks like you’ve done a good job,’ he says, standing up and smiling, brushing his hands off on his jeans. ‘Got everything.’
He scans me, neck to foot and back up. ‘Where is it, sweetheart?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your money.’ He shrugs. ‘Don’t make it hard. Me ’n her really need it.’
Greta is silent behind me.
‘I have about twenty bucks.’
‘Lie,’ Jeff said. ‘You pay for everything, even rent, in cash. Greta saw you with that big wad of money. So hand it over, and you can leave, and we all never have to see each other again.’
‘I’ll call the police.’
‘Go ahead! My guest.’ Jeff waits, arms crossed, thumbs in his armpits.
‘Your glasses are fake,’ Greta says. ‘They’re just glass.’
I say nothing, stare at her, hoping she’ll back down. These two seem just nervous enough they may change their minds, say they’re screwing with me, and the three of us will laugh and know otherwise but all agree to pretend.
‘And your hair, the roots are coming in, and they’re blond, a lot prettier than whatever color you dyed it – hamster – and that haircut is awful, by the way,’ Greta says. ‘You’re hiding – from whatever. I don’t know if it really is a guy or what, but you’re not going to call the police. So just give us the money.’
‘Jeff talk you into this?’ I ask.
‘I talked Jeff into it.’
I start toward the door that Greta’s blocking. ‘Let me out.’
‘Give us the money.’
I make a grab for the door, and Greta swings toward me, shoves me against the wall, one hand smashed over my face, and with the other, she pulls up my dress, yanks off the money belt.
‘Don’t, Greta, I’m serious! Stop!’
Her hot, salty palm is all over my face, jamming my nose; one of her fingernails scrapes my eye. Then she pushes me back against the wall, my head banging, my teeth coming down on the tip of my tongue. The whole scuffle is very quiet.
I have the buckle end of the belt in my hand, but I can’t see to fight her, my eye is watering too much, and she soon rips away my grip, leaving a burning scrape of fingernails on my knuckles. She shoves me again and opens the zipper, fingers through the money.
‘Holy shit,’ she says. ‘This is like’ – she counts – ‘more’n a thousand, two or three. Holy shit. Damn, girl! You rob a bank?’
‘She may have,’ Jeff says. ‘Embezzlement.’
In a movie, one of Nick’s movies, I would upthrust my palm into Greta’s nose, drop her to the floor bloody and unconscious, then roundhouse Jeff. But the truth is, I don’t know how to fight, and there are two of them, and it doesn’t seem worth it. I will run at them, and they will grab me by the wrists while I pat and fuss at them like a child, or they will get really angry and beat the crap out of me. I’ve never been hit. I’m scared of getting hurt by someone else.
‘You going to call the police, go ahead and call them,’ Jeff says again.
‘Fuck you,’ I whisper.
‘Sorry about this,’ Greta says. ‘Next place you go, be more careful, okay? You gotta not look like a girl traveling by herself, hiding out.’
‘You’ll be okay,’ Jeff says.
He pats me on the arm as they leave.
A quarter and a dime sit on the bedside table. It’s all my money in the world.