Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“Few days. Still tastes good.”

We both smiled at each other: I know and you know. Game on . I actually thought those idiotic words: Game on . Yet I was pleased in a way: The next part was starting.

Boney turned to Gilpin, hands on knees, and gave a little nod. Gilpin chewed his lip some more, then finally pointed: toward the ottoman, the end table, the living room now righted. “See, here’s our problem, Nick,” he started. “We’ve seen dozens of home invasions—”

“Dozens upon dozens upon dozens,” Boney interrupted.

“Many home invasions. This—all this area right there, in the living room—remember it? The upturned ottoman, the overturned table, the vase on the floor”—he slapped down a photo of the scene in front of me—“this whole area, it was supposed to look like a struggle, right?”

My head expanded and snapped back into place. Stay calm . “Supposed to?”

“It looked wrong,” Gilpin continued. “From the second we saw it. To be honest, the whole thing looked staged. First of all, there’s the fact that it was all centered in this one spot. Why wasn’t anything messed up anywhere but this room? It’s odd.” He proffered another photo, a close-up. “And look here, at this pile of books. They should be in front of the end table—the end table is where they were stacked, right?”

I nodded.

“So when the end table was knocked over, they should have spilled mostly in front of it, following the trajectory of the falling table. Instead, they’re back behind it, as if someone swept them off before knocking over the table.”

I stared dumbly at the photo.

“And watch this. This is very curious to me,” Gilpin continued. He pointed at three slender antique frames on the mantelpiece. He stomped heavily, and they all flopped facedown immediately. “But somehow they stayed upright through everything else.”

He showed a photo of the frames upright. I had been hoping—even after they caught my Houston’s dinner slipup—that they were dumb cops, cops from the movies, local rubes aiming to please, trusting the local guy: Whatever you say, buddy . I didn’t get dumb cops.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I mumbled. “It’s totally— I just don’t know what to think about this. I just want to find my wife.”

“So do we, Nick, so do we,” Rhonda said. “But here’s another thing. The ottoman—remember how it was flipped upside down?” She patted the squatty ottoman, pointed at its four peg legs, each only an inch high. “See, this thing is bottom-heavy because of those tiny legs. The cushion practically sits on the floor. Try to push it over.” I hesitated. “Go on, try it,” Boney urged.

I gave it a push, but it slid across the carpet instead of turning over. I nodded. I agreed. It was bottom-heavy.

“Seriously, get down there if you need to, and knock that thing upside down,” Boney ordered.

I knelt down, pushed from lower and lower angles, finally put a hand underneath the ottoman, and flipped it. Even then it lifted up, one side hovering, and fell back into place; I finally had to pick it up and turn it over manually.

“Weird, huh?” Boney said, not sounding all that puzzled.

“Nick, you do any housecleaning the day your wife went missing?” Gilpin asked.

“No.”

“Okay, because the tech did a Luminol sweep, and I’m sorry to tell you, the kitchen floor lit up. A good amount of blood was spilled there.”

“Amy’s type —B positive .” Boney interrupted, “And I’m not talking a little cut, I’m talking blood .”

“Oh my God.” A clot of heat appeared in the middle of my chest. “But—”

“Yes, so your wife made it out of this room,” Gilpin said. “Somehow, in theory, she made it into the kitchen—without disturbing any of those gewgaws on that table just outside the kitchen—and then she collapsed in the kitchen, where she lost a lot of blood.”

“And then someone carefully mopped it up,” Rhonda said, watching me.

“Wait. Wait. Why would someone try to hide blood but then mess up the living room—”

“We’ll figure that out, don’t worry, Nick,” Rhonda said quietly.

“I don’t get it, I just don’t—”

“Let’s sit down,” Boney said. She pointed me toward a dining room chair. “You eat anything yet? Want a sandwich, something?”

I shook my head. Boney was taking turns playing different female characters: powerful woman, doting caregiver, to see what got the best results.

“How’s your marriage, Nick?” Rhonda asked. “I mean, five years, that’s not far from the seven-year itch.”

“The marriage was fine,” I repeated. “It’s fine. Not perfect, but good, good.”

She wrinkled her nose: You lie .

“You think she might have run off?” I asked, too hopefully. “Made this look like a crime scene and took off? Runaway-wife thing?”

Boney began ticking off reasons no: “She hasn’t used her cell, she hasn’t used her credit cards, ATM cards. She made no major cash withdrawals in the weeks before.”

“And there’s the blood,” Gilpin added. “I mean, again, I don’t want to sound harsh, but the amount of blood spilled? That would take some serious … I mean, I couldn’t have done it to myself. I’m talking some deep wounds there. Your wife got nerves of steel?”

“Yes. She does.” She also had a deep phobia of blood, but I’d wait and let the brilliant detectives figure that out.

“It seems extremely unlikely,” Gilpin said. “If she were to wound herself that seriously, why would she mop it up?”

“So really, let’s be honest, Nick,” Boney said, leaning over on her knees so she could make eye contact with me as I stared at the floor. “How was your marriage currently? We’re on your side, but we need the truth. The only thing that makes you look bad is you holding out on us.”

“We’ve had bumps.” I saw Amy in the bedroom that last night, her face mottled with the red hivey splotches she got when she was angry. She was spitting out the words—mean, wild words—and I was listening to her, trying to accept the words because they were true, they were technically true, everything she said.

“Describe the bumps for us,” Boney said.

“Nothing specific, just disagreements. I mean, Amy is a blow-stack. She bottles up a bunch of little stuff and—whoom!—but then it’s over. We never went to bed angry.”

“Not Wednesday night?” Boney asked.

“Never,” I lied.

“Is it money, what you mostly argue about?”

“I can’t even think what we’d argue about. Just stuff.”

“What stuff was it the night she went missing?” Gilpin said it with a sideways grin, like he’d uttered the most unbelievable gotcha .

“Like I told you, there was the lobster.”

“What else? I’m sure you didn’t scream about the lobster for a whole hour.”

At that point Bleecker waddled partway down the stairs and peered through the railings.

“Other household stuff too. Married-couple stuff. The cat box,” I said. “Who would clean the cat box.”

“You were in a screaming argument about a cat box,” Boney said.

“You know, the principle of the thing. I work a lot of hours, and Amy doesn’t, and I think it would be good for her if she did some basic home maintenance. Just basic upkeep.”

Gilpin jolted like an invalid woken from an afternoon nap. “You’re an old-fashioned guy, right? I’m the same way. I tell my wife all the time, ‘I don’t know how to iron, I don’t know how to do the dishes. I can’t cook. So, sweetheart, I’ll catch the bad guys, that I can do, and you throw some clothes in the washer now and then.’ Rhonda, you were married, did you do the domestic stuff at home?”