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

and
they have your fingerprints all over them
. We have a wife
suffering from what sounds like antifreeze poisoning weeks
before she 
disappears
. I mean, come on.’ He paused for
effect.
‘Anything else of note?’ Tanner asked.
‘We can place you in Hannibal, where your wife’s
purse shows up a few days later,’ Boney said. ‘We have a
neighbor who overheard you two arguing the night before.
A pregnancy you didn’t want. A bar borrowed on your wife’s
money that would revert to her in case of a divorce. And of

---

course, 
of course
: a secret girlfriend of more than a year.’
‘We can help you right now, Nick,’ Gilpin said. ‘Once
we arrest you, we can’t.’
‘Where did you find the diary? At Nick’s father’s
house?’ Tanner asked.
‘Yes,’ Boney said.
Tanner nodded to me: 
That’s what we didn’t find
. ‘Let
me guess: anonymous tip.’
Neither cop said a thing.
‘Can I ask where in the house you found it?’ I asked.
‘In the furnace. I know you thought you burned it. It
caught fire, but the pilot light was too weak; it got
smothered. So only the outer edges burned,’ Gilpin said.
‘Extremely good luck for us.’
The furnace – another inside joke from Amy! She’d
always proclaimed amazement at how little I understood the
things men are supposed to understand. During our search,
I’d even glanced at my dad’s old furnace, with its pipes and
wires and spigots, and backed away, intimidated.
‘It wasn’t luck. You were meant to find it,’ I said.
Boney let the left side of her mouth slide into a smile.
She leaned back and waited, relaxed as the star of an
iced-tea commercial. I gave Tanner an angry nod: 
Go
ahead
.
‘Amy Elliott Dunne is alive, and she is framing Nick
Dunne for her murder,’ he said. I clasped my hands and sat
up straight, tried to do anything that would lend me an air of
reason. Boney stared at me. I needed a pipe, eyeglasses I
could swiftly remove for effect, a set of encyclopedias at my
elbow. I felt giddy. Do 
not
laugh.
Boney frowned. ‘What’s that again?’

---

‘Amy is alive and very well, and she is framing Nick,’
my proxy repeated.
They exchanged a look, hunched over the table: 
Can
you believe this guy?
‘Why would she do that?’ Gilpin asked, rubbing his
eyes.
‘Because she hates him. Obviously. He was a shitty
husband.’
Boney looked down at the floor, let out a breath. ‘I’d
certainly agree with you there.’
At the same time, Gilpin said: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Is she 
crazy
, Nick?’ Boney said, leaning in. ‘What
you’re talking about, it’s crazy. You hear me? It would have
taken, what, six months, a 
year
, to set all this up. She would
have had to hate you, to wish you harm – ultimate, serious,
horrific harm – for a 
year
. Do you know how hard it is to
sustain that kind of hatred for that long?’
She could do it. Amy could do it
.
‘Why not just divorce your ass?’ Boney snapped.
‘That wouldn’t appeal to her … sense of justice,’ I
replied. Tanner gave me another look.
‘Jesus Christ, Nick, aren’t you tired of all this?’ Gilpin
said. ‘We have it in your wife’s own words: 
I think he may
kill me
.’
Someone had told them at some point: Use the
suspect’s name a lot, it will make him feel comfortable,
known. Same idea as in sales.
‘You been in your dad’s house lately, Nick?’ Boney
asked. ‘Like on July ninth?’
Fuck. 
That’s
why Amy changed the alarm code. I
battled a new wave of disgust at myself: that my wife played

---

me twice. Not only did she dupe me into believing she still
loved me, she actually 
forced me to implicate myself
.
Wicked, wicked girl. I almost laughed. Good Lord, I hated
her, but you had to admire the bitch.
Tanner began: ‘Amy used her clues to force my client
to go to these various venues, where she’d left evidence –
Hannibal, his father’s house – so he’d incriminate himself.
My client and I have brought these clues with us. As a
courtesy.’
He pulled out the clues and the love notes, fanned
them in front of the cops like a card trick. I sweated while
they read them, willing them to look up and tell me all was
clear now.
‘Okay. You say Amy hated you so much that she spent
months framing you for her murder?’ Boney asked, in the
quiet, measured voice of a disappointed parent.
I gave her a blank face.
‘This does not sound like an angry woman, Nick,’ she
said. ‘She’s falling all over herself to apologize to you, to
suggest that you both start again, to let you know how much
she loves you: 
You are warm – you are my sun. You are
brilliant, you are witty
.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Once again, Nick, an incredibly strange reaction for
an innocent man,’ Boney said. ‘Here we are, reading sweet
words, maybe your wife’s last words to you, and you
actually look angry. I still remember that very first night:
Amy’s missing, you come in here, we park you in this very
room for forty-five minutes, and you look 
bored
. We
watched you on surveillance, you practically fell asleep.’
‘That has nothing to do with anything—’ Tanner started.

---

‘I was trying to stay calm.’
‘You looked very, very calm,’ Boney said. ‘All along,
you’ve acted … inappropriately. Unemotional, flippant.’
‘That’s just how I am, don’t you see? I’m stoic. To a
fault. Amy knows this … She complained about it all the
time. That I wasn’t sympathetic enough, that I retreated into
myself, that I couldn’t handle difficult emotions – sadness,
guilt. She 
knew
I’d look suspicious as hell. Jesus fucking
Christ! Talk to Hilary Handy, will you? Talk to Tommy
O’Hara. I talked to them! They’ll tell you what she’s like.’
‘We have talked to them,’ Gilpin said.
‘And?’
‘Hilary Handy has made two suicide attempts in the
years since high school. Tommy O’Hara has been in rehab
twice.’
‘Probably because of 
Amy
.’
‘Or because they’re deeply unstable, guilt-ridden
human beings,’ Boney said. ‘Let’s go back to the treasure
hunt.’
Gilpin read aloud Clue 2 in a deliberate monotone.
You took me here so I could hear you chat
About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat
Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched
And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.
‘You say this was written to force you to go to
Hannibal?’ Boney said.
I nodded.
‘It doesn’t say Hannibal anywhere here,’ she said. ‘It
doesn’t even imply it.’
‘The visor hat, that’s an old inside joke between us
about—’

---

‘Oh, an inside joke,’ Gilpin said.
‘What about the next clue, the little brown house?’
Boney asked.
‘To go to my dad’s,’ I said.
Boney’s face grew stern again. ‘Nick, your dad’s
house is blue.’ She turned to Tanner with rolling eyes: 
This
is what you’re giving me?
‘It sounds to me like you’re making up “inside jokes” in
these clues,’ Boney said. ‘I mean, you want to talk about
convenient: We find out you’ve been to Hannibal, whaddaya
know, this clue secretly means 
go to Hannibal
.’
‘The final present here,’ Tanner said, pulling the box
onto the table, ‘is a not-so-subtle hint. Punch and Judy dolls.
As you know, I’m sure, Punch kills Judy and her baby. This
was discovered by my client. We wanted to make sure you
have it.’
Boney pulled the box over, put on latex gloves, and
lifted the puppets out. ‘Heavy,’ she said, ‘solid.’ She
examined the lace of the woman’s dress, the male’s
motley. She picked up the male, examined the thick
wooden handle with the finger grooves.
She froze, frowning, the male puppet in her hands.
Then she turned the female upside down so the skirt flew
up.
‘No handle for this one.’ She turned to me. ‘Did there
used to be a handle?’
‘How should I know?’
‘A handle like a two-by-four, very thick and heavy, with
built-in grooves to get a really good grip?’ she snapped. ‘A
handle like a goddamn club?’
She stared at me and I could tell what she was

---

thinking: 
You are a gameplayer. You are a sociopath. You
are a killer
.

---