Gone Girl

‘Mr Du

Riordan looked down the road, sucking on a piece of candy. I could see his eyes follow a darting bird out over the river. Then he snapped his gaze back toward me, his curled lips telling me he saw what everyone else did. I have a face you want to punch: I’m a working-class Irish kid trapped in the body of a total trust-fund douchebag. I smile a lot to make up for my face, but this only sometimes works. In college, I even wore glasses for a bit, fake spectacles with clear lenses that I thought would lend me an affable, unthreatening vibe. ‘You do realize that makes you even more of a dick?’ Go reasoned. I threw them out and smiled harder.

I waved in the cops: ‘Come inside the house and see.’

The two climbed the steps, accompanied by the squeaking and shuffling noises of their belts and guns. I stood in the entry to the living room and pointed at the destruction.

‘Oh,’ said Officer Riordan, and gave a brisk crack of his knuckles. He suddenly looked less bored.

Riordan and Velásquez leaned forward in their seats at the dining room table as they asked me all the initial questions: who, where, how long. Their ears were literally pricked. A call had been made out of my hearing, and Riordan informed me that detectives were being dispatched. I had the grave pride of being taken seriously.

Riordan was asking me for the second time if I’d seen any strangers in the neighborhood lately, was reminding me for the third time about Carthage’s roving bands of homeless men, when the phone rang. I launched myself across the room and grabbed it.

A surly woman’s voice: ‘Mr Du

‘I can’t talk right now, I’ll call you back,’ I snapped, and hung up. I despised the women who staffed Comfort Hill: unsmiling, uncomforting. Underpaid, gruelingly underpaid, which was probably why they never smiled or comforted. I knew my anger toward them was misdirected – it absolutely infuriated me that my father lingered on while my mom was in the ground.

It was Go’s turn to send the check. I was pretty sure it was Go’s turn for July. And I’m sure she was positive it was mine. We’d done this before. Go said we must be mutually subliminally forgetting to mail those checks, that what we really wanted to forget was our dad.

I was telling Riordan about the strange man I’d seen in our neighbor’s vacated house when the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang. It sounded so normal, like I was expecting a pizza.

The two detectives entered with end-of-shift weariness. The man was rangy and thin, with a face that tapered severely into a dribble of a chin. The woman was surprisingly ugly – brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color of a dust bu

The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer Velásquez. ‘Mr Du

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 Du

‘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 a

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.