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

wicked good
); Jessie from
the fashion-design course. But then I’d ask about Jessie or
Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was
making up words.
Then there were the men who were always rattling

---

behind Amy, eager to do the husbandly things that her
husband failed to do. Fix a chair leg, hunt down her favorite
imported Asian tea. Men who she swore were her friends,
just good friends. Amy kept them at exactly an arm’s
distance – far enough away that I couldn’t get too annoyed,
close enough that she could crook a finger and they’d do
her bidding.
In Missouri … good God, I really didn’t know. It only
occurred to me just then. 
You truly are an asshole
, I
thought. Two years we’d been here, and after the initial
flurry of meet-and-greets, those manic first months, Amy
had no one she regularly saw. She had my mom, who was
now dead, and me – and our main form of conversation
was attack and rebuttal. When we’d been back home for a
year, I’d asked her faux gallantly: ‘And how are you liking
North Carthage, Mrs Dunne?’ ‘
New
Carthage, you mean?’
she’d replied. I refused to ask her the reference, but I knew
it was an insult.
‘She has a few good friends, but they’re mostly back
east.’
‘Her folks?’
‘They live in New York. City.’
‘And you still haven’t called any of these people?’
Boney asked, a bemused smile on her face.
‘I’ve been doing everything 
else
you’ve been asking
me to do. I haven’t had a chance.’ I’d signed away
permission to trace credit cards and ATMs and track
Amy’s cell phone, I’d handed over Go’s cell number and the
name of Sue, the widow at The Bar, who could presumably
attest to the time I arrived.
‘Baby of the family.’ She shook her head. ‘You really

---

do remind me of my little brother.’ A beat. ‘That’s a
compliment, I swear.’
‘She dotes on him,’ Gilpin said, scribbling in a
notebook. ‘Okay, so you left the house at about seven-thirty
a.m., and you showed up at The Bar at about noon, and in
between, you were at the beach.’
There’s a beachhead about ten miles north of our
house, a not overly pleasant collection of sand and silt and
beer-bottle shards. Trash barrels overflowing with
Styrofoam cups and dirty diapers. But there is a picnic
table upwind that gets nice sun, and if you stare directly at
the river, you can ignore the other crap.
‘I sometimes bring my coffee and the paper and just
sit. Gotta make the most of summer.’
No, I hadn’t talked to anyone at the beach. No, no one
saw me.
‘It’s a quiet place midweek,’ Gilpin allowed.
If the police talked to anyone who knew me, they’d
quickly learn that I rarely went to the beach and that I never
sometimes brought my coffee to just enjoy the morning. I
have Irish-white skin and an impatience for navel-gazing: A
beach boy I am not. I told the police that because it had
been Amy’s idea, for me to go sit in the spot where I could
be alone and watch the river I loved and ponder our life
together. She’d said this to me this morning, after we’d
eaten her crepes. She leaned forward on the table and
said, ‘I know we are having a tough time. I still love you so
much, Nick, and I know I have a lot of things to work on. I
want to be a good wife to you, and I want you to be my
husband and be happy. But you need to decide what you
want.’

---

She’d clearly been practicing the speech; she smiled
proudly as she said it. And even as my wife was offering
me this kindness, I was thinking,