Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Stay away from boys. They’ll either
throw rocks or look up your skirt
.’
‘You should make a T-shirt that says that.’
She laughs. ‘It’s true, though. It’s always true. My mom
lives in a lesbian village down in Texas. I keep thinking I
should join her. Everyone seems happy there.’
‘A lesbian village?’
‘Like a, a whaddayacallit. A commune. Bunch of
lesbians bought land, started their own society, sort of. No
men allowed. Sounds just freakin’ great to me, world
without men.’ She cups another handful of water, pulls up
her sunglasses, and wets her face. ‘Too bad I don’t like
pussy.’
She laughs, an old woman’s angry-bark laugh. ‘So, are
there any asshole guys here I can start dating?’ she says.

---

‘That’s my, like, pattern. Run away from one, bump into the
next.’
‘It’s half empty most of the time. There’s Jeff, the guy
with the beard, he’s actually really nice,’ I say. ‘He’s been
here longer than me.’
‘How long are you staying?’ she asks.
I pause. It’s odd, I don’t know the exact amount of time I
will be here. I had planned on staying until Nick was
arrested, but I have no idea if he will be arrested soon.
‘Till he stops looking for you, huh?’ Greta guesses.
‘Something like that.’
She examines me closely, frowns. My stomach
tightens. I wait for her to say it: You look familiar.
‘Never go back to a man with fresh bruises. Don’t give
him the satisfaction,’ Greta intones. She stands up, gathers
her things. Dries her legs on the tiny towel.
‘Good day killed,’ she says.
For some reason, I give a thumbs-up, which I’ve never
done in my life.
‘Come to my cabin when you get out, if you want to,’
she says. ‘We can watch TV.’
I bring a fresh tomato from Dorothy, held in my palm like a
shiny housewarming gift. Greta comes to the door and
barely acknowledges me, as if I’ve been dropping over for
years. She plucks the tomato from my hand.
‘Perfect, I was just making sandwiches,’ she says.
‘Grab a seat.’ She points toward the bed – we have no
sitting rooms here – and moves into her kitchenette, which
has the same plastic cutting board, the same dull knife, as
mine. She slices the tomato. A plastic disc of lunch meat

---

sits on the counter, the stomachy-sweet smell filling the
room. She sets two slippery sandwiches on paper plates,
along with handfuls of goldfish crackers, and marches them
into the bedroom area, her hand already on the remote,
flipping from noise to noise. We sit on the edge of the bed,
side by side, watching the TV.
‘Stop me if you see something,’ Greta says.
I take a bite of my sandwich. My tomato slips out the
side and onto my thigh.
The 
Beverly 
Hillbillies, 
Suddenly 
Susan,
Armageddon
.
Ellen Abbott Live
. A photo of me fills the screen. I am
the lead story. Again. I look great.
‘You seen this?’ Greta asked, not looking at me,
talking as if my disappearance were a rerun of a decent TV
show. ‘This woman vanishes on her five-year wedding
anniversary. Husband acts real weird from the start, all
smiley and shit. Turns out he bumped up her life insurance,
and they just found out the wife was 
pregnant
. And the guy
didn’t want it.’
The screen cuts to another photo of me juxtaposed
with 
Amazing Amy
.
Greta turns to me. ‘You remember those books?’
‘Of course!’
‘You 
like
those books?’
‘Everyone likes those books, they’re so cute,’ I say.
Greta snorts. ‘They’re so fake.’
Close-up of me.
I wait for her to say how beautiful I am.
‘She’s not bad, huh, for, like, her age,’ she says. ‘I
hope I look that good when I’m forty.’

---

Ellen is filling the audience in on my story; my photo
lingers on the screen.
‘Sounds to me like she was a spoiled rich girl,’ Greta
says. ‘High-maintenance. Bitchy.’
That is simply unfair. I’d left no evidence for anyone to
conclude that. Since I’d moved to Missouri – well, since I’d
come up with my plan – I’d been careful to be low-
maintenance, easygoing, cheerful, all those things people
want women to be. I waved to neighbors, I ran errands for
Mo’s friends, I once brought cola to the ever-soiled Stucks
Buckley. I visited Nick’s dad so that all the nurses could
testify to how nice I was, so I could whisper over and over
into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain: 
I love you, come live
with us, I love you, come live with us
. Just to see if it would
catch. Nick’s dad is what the people of Comfort Hill call a
roamer – he is always wandering off. I love the idea of Bill
Dunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could
become, the object of Nick’s most profound despair,
showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.
‘How does she seem bitchy?’ I ask.
She shrugs. The TV goes to a commercial for air
freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family
will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty
liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet
the man she will later spray air freshener for.
Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.
‘You can just tell,’ Greta says. ‘She just sounds like a
rich, bored bitch. Like those rich bitches who use their
husbands’ money to start, like, 
cupcake
companies and
card shops
and shit. 
Boutiques
.’
In New York, I had friends with all those kinds of

---

businesses – they liked to be able to say they worked, even
though they only did the little stuff that was fun: Name the
cupcake, order the stationery, wear the adorable dress that
was from 
their very own
store.
‘She’s definitely one of those,’ Greta said. ‘Rich bitch
putting on airs.’
Greta leaves to go to the bathroom, and I tiptoe into
her kitchen, go into her fridge, and spit in her milk, her
orange juice, and a container of potato salad, then tiptoe
back to the bed.
Flush. Greta returns. ‘I mean, all that doesn’t mean it’s
okay that he 
killed
her. She’s just another woman, made a
very bad choice in her man.’
She is looking right at me, and I wait for her to say,
‘Hey, wait a minute …’
But she turns back to the TV, rearranges herself so
she is lying on her stomach like a child, her chin in her
hands, her face directed at my image on the screen.
‘Oh, shit, here it goes,’ Greta says. ‘People are hatin’
on this guy.’
The show gets underway, and I feel a bit better. It is the
apotheosis of Amy.
Campbell MacIntosh, childhood friend: ‘Amy is just a
nurturing, motherly type of woman. She loved being a wife.
And I know she would have been a great mother. But Nick –
you just knew Nick was wrong somehow. Cold and aloof
and really calculating – you got the feeling that he was
definitely aware of how much money Amy had.’
(Campbell is lying: She got all googly around Nick, she
absolutely adored him. But I’m sure she liked the idea that
he only married me for my money.)

---

Shawna Kelly North, Carthage resident: ‘I found it
really, really strange how totally unconcerned he was at the
search for his wife. He was just, you know, chatting,
passing the time. Flirting around with me, who he didn’t
know from Adam. I’d try to turn the conversation to Amy,
and he would just – just no interest.’
(I’m sure this desperate old slut absolutely did not try to
turn the conversation toward me.)
Steven ‘Stucks’ Buckley, longtime friend of Nick
Dunne: ‘She was a sweetheart. Sweet. Heart. And Nick?
He just didn’t seem that worried about Amy being gone.
The guy was always like that: self-centered. Stuck up a little.
Like he’d made it all big in New York and we should all bow
down.’
(I despise Stucks Buckley, and what the fuck kind of
name is that?)
Noelle Hawthorne, looking like she just got new
highlights: ‘I think he killed her. No one will say it, but I will.
He abused her, and he bullied her, and he finally killed her.’
(Good dog.)
Greta glances sideways at me, her cheeks smushed
up under her hands, her face flickering in the TV glow.
‘I hope that’s not true,’ she says. ‘That he killed her. It’d
be nice to think that maybe she just got away, just ran away
from him, and she’s hiding out all safe and sound.’
She kicks her legs back and forth like a lazy swimmer.
I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me.

---