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

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 Dunne, two years?’ she
asked.
‘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 anniversary.’
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.

---

‘Uh, I’m a little freaked out, obviously,’ I started.
‘I don’t blame you at all, Nick,’ Gilpin said earnestly. He
had pale blue eyes that jittered in place, an unnerving tic.
‘Can we do something? To find my wife. I mean,
because she’s clearly not here.’
Boney pointed at the wedding portrait on the wall: me
in my tux, a block of teeth frozen on my face, my arms
curved formally around Amy’s waist; Amy, her blond hair
tightly coiled and sprayed, her veil blowing in the beach
breeze of Cape Cod, her eyes open too wide because she
always blinked at the last minute and she was trying so
hard not to blink. The day after Independence Day, the
sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt –
summer.
The Cape had been good to us. I remember
discovering several months in that Amy, my girlfriend, was
also quite wealthy, a treasured only child of creative-genius
parents. An icon of sorts, thanks to a namesake book
series that I thought I could remember as a kid. 
Amazing
Amy
. Amy explained this to me in calm, measured tones,
as if I were a patient waking from a coma. As if she’d had
to do it too many times before and it had gone badly – the
admission of wealth that’s greeted with too much
enthusiasm, the disclosure of a secret identity that she
herself didn’t create.
Amy told me who and what she was, and then we went
out to the Elliotts’ historically registered home on Nantucket
Sound, went sailing together, and I thought: 
I am a boy from
Missouri, flying across the ocean with people who’ve seen
much more than I have. If I began seeing things now,
living big, I could still not catch up with them
. It didn’t make

---

me feel jealous. It made me feel content. I never aspired to
wealth or fame. I was not raised by big-dreamer parents
who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised
by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future
office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort. To
me, it was heady enough to be in the Elliotts’ proximity, to
skim across the Atlantic and return to a plushly restored
home built in 1822 by a whaling captain, and there to
prepare and eat meals of organic, healthful foods whose
names I didn’t know how to pronounce. Quinoa. I remember
thinking quinoa was a kind of fish.
So we married on the beach on a deep blue summer
day, ate and drank under a white tent that billowed like a
sail, and a few hours in, I sneaked Amy off into the dark,
toward the waves, because I was feeling so unreal, I
believed I had become merely a shimmer. The chilly mist
on my skin pulled me back, Amy pulled me back, toward
the golden glow of the tent, where the Gods were feasting,
everything ambrosia. Our whole courtship was just like that.
Boney leaned in to examine Amy. ‘Your wife is very
pretty.’
‘She is, she’s beautiful,’ I said, and felt my stomach lilt.
‘What anniversary today?’ she asked.
‘Five.’
I was jittering from one foot to another, wanting to 
do
something. I didn’t want them to discuss how lovely my wife
was, I wanted them to go out and search for my fucking
wife. I didn’t say this out loud, though; I often don’t say
things out loud, even when I should. I contain and I
compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-
basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear,

---

but you’d never guess from looking at me.
‘Five, big one. Let me guess, reservations at
Houston’s?’ Gilpin asked. It was the only upscale restaurant
in town. 
You all really need to try Houston’s
, my mom had
said when we moved back, thinking it was Carthage’s
unique little secret, hoping it might please my wife.
‘Of course, Houston’s.’
It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.

---