Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“I guess a little cash would just make me feel more comfortable. Should something happen. Should I need to get out of here quickly.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out two twenty-dollar bills. Presses them gently in my hand. “There you are,” he says indulgently.

I wonder then if I have made a very big mistake.

NICK DUNNE

TEN DAYS GONE

I made a mistake, feeling so cocky. Whatever the hell this diary was, it was going to ruin me. I could already see the cover of the true-crime novel: the black-and-white photo of us on our wedding day, the blood-red background, the jacket copy: including sixteen pages of never-seen photos and Amy Elliott Dunne’s actual diary entries—a voice from beyond the grave … I’d found it strange and kind of cute, Amy’s guilty pleasures, those cheesy true-crime books I’d discovered here and there around our house. I thought maybe she was loosening up, allowing herself some beach reading.

Nope. She was just studying.

Gilpin pulled over a chair, sat on it backward, and leaned toward me on crossed arms—his movie-cop look. It was almost midnight; it felt later.

“Tell us about your wife’s illness these past few months,” he said.

“Illness? Amy never got sick. Once a year she’d get a cold, maybe.”

Boney picked up the book, turned to a marked page. “Last month you made Amy and yourself some drinks, sat on your back porch. She writes here that the drinks were impossibly sweet and describes what she thinks is an allergic reaction: My heart was racing, my tongue was slabbed, stuck to the bottom of my mouth. My legs turned to meat as Nick walked me up the stairs .” She put a finger down to hold her place in the diary, looked up as if I might not be paying attention. “When she woke the next morning: My head ached and my stomach was oily, but weirder, my fingernails were light blue, and when I looked in the mirror, so were my lips. I didn’t pee for two days after. I felt so weak .”

I shook my head in disgust. I’d become attached to Boney; I expected better of her.

“Is this your wife’s handwriting?” Boney tilted the book toward me, and I saw deep black ink and Amy’s cursive, jagged as a fever chart.

“Yes, I think so.”

“So does our handwriting expert.”

Boney said the words with a certain pride, and I realized: This was the first case these two had ever had that required outside experts, that demanded they get in touch with professionals who did exotic things like analyze handwriting.

“You know what else we learned, Nick, when we showed this entry to our medical expert?”

“Poisoning,” I blurted. Tanner frowned at me: steady .

Boney stuttered for a second; this was not information I was supposed to provide.

“Yeah, Nick, thank you: antifreeze poisoning,” she said. “Textbook. She’s lucky she survived.”

“She didn’t survive , because that never happened,” I said. “Like you said, it’s textbook—it’s made up from an Internet search.”

Boney frowned but refused to bite. “The diary isn’t a pretty picture of you, Nick,” she continued, one finger tracing her braid. “ Abuse —you pushed her around. Stress —you were quick to anger. Sexual relations that bordered on rape . She was very frightened of you at the end there. It’s painful to read. That gun we were wondering about, she says she wanted it because she was afraid of you. Here’s her last entry: This man might kill me. This man might kill me , in her own words.”

My throat clenched. I felt like I might throw up. Fear, mostly, and then a surge of rage. Fucking bitch, fucking bitch, cunt, cunt, cunt .

“What a smart, convenient note for her to end on,” I said. Tanner put a hand on mine to hush me.

“You look like you want to kill her again, right now,” Boney said.

“You’ve done nothing but lie to us, Nick,” Gilpin said. “You say you were at the beach that morning. Everyone we talk to says you hate the beach. You say you have no idea what all these purchases are on your maxed-out credit cards. Now we have a shed full of exactly those items, 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?”