Текст книги "Gone Girl"

Автор книги: Gillian Flynn

Соавторы: Gillian Flynn,Gillian Flynn
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

NINE DAYS GONE

I wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. I cannot be found here, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words, like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast enough, and my money situation is just the opposite, and Jeff and Greta’s greedy antennae are up. And I smell like fish.

There was something about Jeff and that race to the shoreline, toward my bundled dress and my money belt. Something about the way Greta keeps alighting on Ellen Abbott. It makes me nervous. Or am I being paranoid? I sound like Diary Amy: Is my husband going to kill me or am I imagining!?!? For the first time I actually feel sorry for her.

I make two calls to the Amy Dunne tip line, and speak to two different people, and offer two different tips. It’s hard to tell how quickly they’ll reach the police – the volunteers seem utterly disinterested. I drive to the library in a dark mood. I need to pack up and leave. Clean my cabin with bleach, wipe my fingerprints off everything, vacuum for any hairs. Erase Amy (and Lydia and Nancy) and go. If I go, I’ll be safe. Even if Greta and Jeff do suspect who I am, as long as I’m not caught in the flesh, I’m okay. Amy Elliott Dunne is like a yeti – coveted and folkloric – and they are two Ozarks grifters whose blurry story will be immediately debunked. I will leave today. That’s what I decide when I walk with my head bowed into the chilly, mostly uninhabited library with its three vacant computers and I go online to catch up on Nick.

Since the vigil, the news about Nick has been on repeat – the same facts on a circuit, over and over, getting louder and louder, but with no new information. But today something is different. I type Nick’s name into the search engine, and the blogs are going nuts, because my husband has gotten drunk and done an insane interview, in a bar, with a random girl wielding a Flip camera. God, the idiot never learns.

NICK DUNNE’S VIDEO CONFESSION!!!

NICK DUNNE, DRUNKEN DECLARATIONS!!!

My heart jumps so high, my uvula begins pulsing. My husband has fucked himself again.

The video loads, and there is Nick. He has the sleepy eyes he gets when he’s drunk, the heavy lids, and he’s got his sideways grin, and he’s talking about me, and he looks like a human being. He looks happy. ‘My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘How many guys can say that? I married the coolest girl I ever met.’

My stomach flutters delicately. I was not expecting this. I almost smile. ‘What’s so cool about her?’ the girl asks off-screen. Her voice is high, sorority-cheery.

Nick launches into the treasure hunt, how it was our tradition, how I always remembered hilarious inside jokes, and right now this was all he had left of me, so he had to complete the treasure hunt. It was his mission.

‘I just reached the end this morning,’ he says. His voice is husky. He has been talking over the crowd. He’ll go home and gargle with warm salt water, like his mother always made him do. If I were at home with him, he’d ask me to heat the water and make it for him, because he never got the right amount of salt. ‘And it made me … realize a lot. She is the only person in the world who has the power to surprise me, you know? Everyone else, I always know what they’re going to say, because everyone says the same thing. We all watch the same shows, we read the same stuff, we recycle everything. But Amy, she is her own perfect person. She just has this power over me.’

‘Where do you think she is now, Nick?’

My husband looks down at his wedding band and twirls it twice.

‘Are you okay, Nick?’

‘The truth? No. I failed my wife so entirely. I have been so wrong. I just hope it’s not too late. For me. For us.’

‘You’re at the end of your rope. Emotionally.’

Nick looks right at the camera. ‘I want my wife. I want her to be right here.’ He takes a breath. ‘I’m not the best at showing emotion. I know that. But I love her. I need her to be okay. She has to be okay. I have so much to make up to her.’

‘Like what?’

He laughs, the chagrined laugh that even now I find appealing. In better days, I used to call it the talk-show laugh: It was the quick downward glance, the scratching of a corner of the mouth with a casual thumb, the inhaled chuckle that a charming movie star always deploys right before telling a killer story.

‘Like, none of your business.’ He smiles. ‘I just have a lot to make up to her. I wasn’t the husband I could have been. We had a few hard years, and I … I lost my shit. I stopped trying. I mean, I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times: We stopped trying. Everyone knows it means the end of a marriage – it’s textbook. But I stopped trying. It was me. I wasn’t the man I needed to be.’ Nick’s lids are heavy, his speech off-kilter enough that his twang is showing. He is past tipsy, one drink before drunk. His cheeks are pink with alcohol. My fingertips glow, remembering the heat of his skin when he had a few cocktails in him.

‘So how would you make it up to her?’ The camera wobbles for a second; the girl is grabbing her cocktail.

‘How will I make it up to her. First I’m going to find her and bring her home. You can bet on that. Then? Whatever she needs from me, I’ll give her. From now on. Because I reached the end of the treasure hunt, and I was brought to my knees. Humbled. My wife has never been more clear to me than she is now. I’ve never been so sure of what I needed to do.’

‘If you could talk to Amy right now, what would you tell her?’

‘I love you. I will find you. I will …’

I can tell he is about to do the Daniel Day-Lewis line from The Last of the Mohicans: ‘Stay alive … I will find you.’ He can’t resist deflecting any sincerity with a quick line of movie dialogue. I can feel him teetering right on the edge of it. He stops himself.

‘I love you forever, Amy.’

How heartfelt. How unlike my husband.

Three morbidly obese hill people on motorized scooters are between me and my morning coffee. Their asses mushroom over the sides of the contraptions, but they still need another Egg McMuffin. There are literally three people, parked in front of me, in line, inside the McDonald’s.

I actually don’t care. I’m curiously cheerful despite this twist in the plan. Online, the video is already spiral-viraling away, and the reaction is surprisingly positive. Cautiously optimistic: Maybe this guy didn’t kill his wife after all. That is, word for word, the most common refrain. Because once Nick lets his guard down and shows some emotion, it’s all there. No one could watch that video and believe he was putting up an act. It was no swallow-the-pain sort of amateur theater. My husband loves me. Or at least last night he loved me. While I was plotting his doom in my crummy little cabin that smells of moldy towel, he loved me.

It’s not enough. I know that, of course. I can’t change my plan. But it gives me pause. My husband has finished the treasure hunt and he is in love. He is also deeply distressed: on one cheek I swear I could spot a hive.

I pull up to my cabin to find Dorothy knocking on my door. Her hair is wet from the heat, brushed straight back like a Wall Street slickster’s. She is in the habit of swiping her upper lip, then licking the sweat off her fingers, so she has her index finger in her mouth like a buttery corncob as she turns to me.

‘There she is,’ she says. ‘The truant.’

I am late on my cabin payment. Two days. It almost makes me laugh: I am late on rent.

‘I’m so sorry, Dorothy. I’ll come by with it in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.’ ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to stay. I might have to head on.’

‘Then you’d still owe me the two days. Eighty dollars, please.’

I duck into my cabin, undo my flimsy money belt. I counted my cash on my bed this morning, taking a good long time doling out each bill, a teasing economic striptease, and the big reveal was that I have, somehow, I have only $8,849 left. It costs a lot to live.

When I open the door to hand Dorothy the cash ($8,769 left), I see Greta and Jeff hanging out on Greta’s porch, watching the cash exchange hands. Jeff isn’t playing his guitar, Greta isn’t smoking. They seem to be standing on her porch just to get a better look at me. They both wave at me, hey, sweetie, and I wave limply back. I close the door and start packing.

It’s strange how little I own in this world when I used to own so much. I don’t own an eggbeater or a soup bowl. I own sheets and towels, but I don’t own a decent blanket. I own a pair of scissors so I can keep my hair butchered. It makes me smile because Nick didn’t own a pair of scissors when we moved in together. No scissors, no iron, no stapler, and I remember asking him how he thought he was possibly civilized without a pair of scissors, and he said of course he wasn’t and swooped me up in his arms and threw me on the bed and pounced on top of me, and I laughed because I was still Cool Girl. I laughed instead of thinking about what it meant.

One should never marry a man who doesn’t own a decent set of scissors. That would be my advice. It leads to bad things.

I fold and pack my clothes in my tiny backpack – the same three outfits I bought and kept in my getaway car a month ago so I didn’t have to take anything from home. Toss in my travel toothbrush, calendar, comb, lotion, the sleeping pills I bought back when I was going to drug and drown myself. My cheap swimsuits. It takes such little time, the whole thing.

I put on my latex gloves and wipe down everything. I pull out the drains to get any trapped hair. I don’t really think Greta and Jeff know who I am, but if they do, I don’t want to leave any proof, and the whole time I say to myself, This is what you get for relaxing, this is what you get for not thinking all the time, all the time. You deserve to get caught, a girl who acts so stupidly, and what if you left hairs in the front office, then what, and what if there are fingerprints in Jeff’s car or Greta’s kitchen, what then, why did you ever think you could be someone who didn’t worry? I picture the police scouring the cabins, finding nothing, and then, like a movie, I go in for a close-up of one lone mousy hair of mine, drifting along the concrete floor of the pool, waiting to damn me.

Then my mind swings the other way: Of course no one is going to show up to look for you here. All the police have to go on is the claim of a few grifters that they saw the real Amy Elliott Dunne at a cheap broke-down cabin court in the middle of nowhere. Little people wanting to feel bigger, that’s what they’d assume.

An assertive knock at the door. The kind a parent gives right before swinging the door wide: I own this place. I stand in the middle of my room and debate not answering. Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device – the mysterious knock on the door – because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don’t know what’s out there, yet you know you’ll open it. You’ll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.

Hey, sweetheart, we know you’re home, open up!

I strip off my latex gloves, open the door, and Jeff and Greta are standing on my porch, the sun to their backs, their features in shadow.

‘Hey, pretty lady, we come in?’ Jeff asks.

‘I actually – I was going to come see you guys,’ I say, trying to sound flippant, harried. ‘I’m leaving tonight – tomorrow or tonight. Got a call from back home, got to get going back home.’

‘Home Louisiana or home Savannah?’ Greta says. She and Jeff have been talking about me.

‘Louisi—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jeff says, ‘let us in for a second, we come to say goodbye.’

He steps toward me, and I think about screaming or slamming the door, but I don’t think either will go well. Better to pretend everything is fine and hope that is true.

Greta closes the door behind them and leans against it as Jeff wanders into the tiny bedroom, then the kitchen, chatting about the weather. Opening doors and cabinets.

‘You got to clear everything out; Dorothy will keep your deposit if you don’t,’ he says. ‘She’s a stickler.’ He opens the refrigerator, peers into the crisper, the freezer. ‘Not even a jar of ketchup can you leave. I always thought that was weird. Ketchup doesn’t go bad.’

He opens the closet and lifts up the cabin bedding I’ve folded, shakes out the sheets. ‘I always, always shake out the sheets,’ he says. ‘Just to make sure nothing is inside – a sock or underwear or what have you.’

He opens the drawer of my bedside table, kneels down, and looks all the way to the back. ‘Looks like you’ve done a good job,’ he says, standing up and smiling, brushing his hands off on his jeans. ‘Got everything.’

He scans me, neck to foot and back up. ‘Where is it, sweetheart?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your money.’ He shrugs. ‘Don’t make it hard. Me ’n her really need it.’

Greta is silent behind me.

‘I have about twenty bucks.’

‘Lie,’ Jeff said. ‘You pay for everything, even rent, in cash. Greta saw you with that big wad of money. So hand it over, and you can leave, and we all never have to see each other again.’

‘I’ll call the police.’

‘Go ahead! My guest.’ Jeff waits, arms crossed, thumbs in his armpits.

‘Your glasses are fake,’ Greta says. ‘They’re just glass.’

I say nothing, stare at her, hoping she’ll back down. These two seem just nervous enough they may change their minds, say they’re screwing with me, and the three of us will laugh and know otherwise but all agree to pretend.

‘And your hair, the roots are coming in, and they’re blond, a lot prettier than whatever color you dyed it – hamster – and that haircut is awful, by the way,’ Greta says. ‘You’re hiding – from whatever. I don’t know if it really is a guy or what, but you’re not going to call the police. So just give us the money.’

‘Jeff talk you into this?’ I ask.

‘I talked Jeff into it.’

I start toward the door that Greta’s blocking. ‘Let me out.’

‘Give us the money.’

I make a grab for the door, and Greta swings toward me, shoves me against the wall, one hand smashed over my face, and with the other, she pulls up my dress, yanks off the money belt.

‘Don’t, Greta, I’m serious! Stop!’

Her hot, salty palm is all over my face, jamming my nose; one of her fingernails scrapes my eye. Then she pushes me back against the wall, my head banging, my teeth coming down on the tip of my tongue. The whole scuffle is very quiet.

I have the buckle end of the belt in my hand, but I can’t see to fight her, my eye is watering too much, and she soon rips away my grip, leaving a burning scrape of fingernails on my knuckles. She shoves me again and opens the zipper, fingers through the money.

‘Holy shit,’ she says. ‘This is like’ – she counts – ‘more’n a thousand, two or three. Holy shit. Damn, girl! You rob a bank?’

‘She may have,’ Jeff says. ‘Embezzlement.’

In a movie, one of Nick’s movies, I would upthrust my palm into Greta’s nose, drop her to the floor bloody and unconscious, then roundhouse Jeff. But the truth is, I don’t know how to fight, and there are two of them, and it doesn’t seem worth it. I will run at them, and they will grab me by the wrists while I pat and fuss at them like a child, or they will get really angry and beat the crap out of me. I’ve never been hit. I’m scared of getting hurt by someone else.

‘You going to call the police, go ahead and call them,’ Jeff says again.

‘Fuck you,’ I whisper.

‘Sorry about this,’ Greta says. ‘Next place you go, be more careful, okay? You gotta not look like a girl traveling by herself, hiding out.’

‘You’ll be okay,’ Jeff says.

He pats me on the arm as they leave.

A quarter and a dime sit on the bedside table. It’s all my money in the world.

NICK DUNNE

NINE DAYS GONE

Good morning!

I sat in bed with my laptop by my side, enjoying the online reviews of my impromptu interview. My left eyeball was throbbing a bit, a light hangover from the cheap Scotch, but the rest of me was feeling pretty satisfied. Last night I cast the first line to lure my wife back in. I’m sorry, I will make it up to you, I will do whatever you want from now on, I will let the world know how special you are.

Because I was fucked unless Amy decided to show herself. Tanner’s detective (a wiry, clean-cut guy, not the boozy noir gumshoe I’d hoped for) had come up with nothing so far – my wife had disappeared herself perfectly. I had to convince Amy to come back to me, flush her out with compliments and capitulation.

If the reviews were any indication, I made the right call, because the reviews were good. They were very good:

The Iceman Melteth!

I KNEW he was a good guy.

In vino veritas!

Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.

Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.

Maybe he didn’t kill her after all.

And they’d stopped calling me Lance.

Outside my house, the cameramen and journalists were restless, they wanted a statement from the guy who Maybe Didn’t Kill Her After All. They were yelling at my drawn blinds: Hey, Nick, come on out, tell us about Amy. Hey, Nick, tell us about your treasure hunt. For them it was just a new wrinkle in a ratings bonanza, but it was much better than Nick, did you kill your wife?

And then, suddenly, they were yelling Go’s name – they loved Go, she had no poker face, you knew if Go was sad, angry, worried; stick a caption underneath, and you had a whole story. Margo, is your brother innocent? Margo, tell us about … Tanner, is your client innocent? Tanner—

The doorbell rang, and I opened the door while hiding behind it because I was still disheveled; my spiky hair and wilted boxers would tell their own story. Last night, on camera, I was adorably smitten, a tad tipsy, in vino veritastic. Now I just looked like a drunk. I closed the door and waited for two more glowing reviews of my performance.

‘You don’t ever – ever – do something like that again,’ Tanner started. ‘What the hell is wrong with you, Nick? I feel like I need to put one of those toddler leashes on you. How stupid can you be?’

‘Have you seen all the comments online? People love it. I’m turning around public opinion, like you told me to.’

‘You don’t do that kind of thing in an uncontrolled environment,’ he said. ‘What if she worked for Ellen Abbott? What if she started asking you questions that were harder than What do you want to say to your wife, cutie-pumpkin-pie?’ He said this is a girlish singsong. His face under the orange spray tan was red, giving him a radioactive palette.

‘I trusted my instincts. I’m a journalist, Tanner, you have to give me some credit that I can smell bullshit. She was genuinely sweet.’

He sat down on the sofa, put his feet on the ottoman that would never have flipped over on its own. ‘Yeah, well, so was your wife once,’ he said. ‘So was Andie once. How’s your cheek?’

It still hurt; the bite seemed to throb as he reminded me of it. I turned to Go for support.

‘It wasn’t smart, Nick,’ she said, sitting down across from Tanner. ‘You were really, really lucky – it turned out really well, but it might not have.’

‘You guys are really overreacting. Can we enjoy a small moment of good news? Just thirty seconds of good news in the past nine days? Please?’

Tanner pointedly looked at his watch. ‘Okay, go.’

When I started to talk, he popped his index finger, made the uhp-uhp noise that grown-ups make when children try to interrupt. Slowly, his index finger lowered, then landed on the watch face.

‘Okay, thirty seconds. Did you enjoy it?’ He paused to see if I’d say anything – the pointed silence a teacher allows after asking the disruptive student: Are you done talking? ‘Now we need to talk. We are in a place where excellent timing is absolutely key.’

‘I agree.’

‘Gee, thanks.’ He arched an eyebrow at me. ‘I want to go to the police very, very soon with the contents of the woodshed. While the hoi polloi is—’

Just hoi polloi, I thought, not the hoi polloi. It was something Amy had taught me.

‘—all loving on you again. Or, excuse me, not again. Finally. The reporters have found Go’s house, and I don’t feel secure leaving that woodshed, its contents, undisclosed much longer. The Elliotts are …?’

‘We can’t count on the Elliotts’ support anymore,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’ Another pause. Tanner decided not to lecture me, or even ask what happened.

‘So we need offense,’ I said, feeling untouchable, angry, ready.

‘Nick, don’t let one good turn make you feel indestructible,’ Go said. She pressed some extra-strengths from her purse into my hand. ‘Get rid of your hangover. You need to be on today.’ ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I told her. I popped the pills, turned to Tanner. ‘What do we do? Let’s make a plan.’

‘Great, here’s the deal,’ Tanner said. ‘This is incredibly unorthodox, but that’s me. Tomorrow we are doing an interview with Sharon Schieber.’

‘Wow, that’s … for sure?’ Sharon Schieber was as good as I could ask for: the top-rated (ages 30–55) network (broader reach than cable) newswoman (to prove I could have respectful relations with people who have vaginas) working today. She was known for dabbling very occasionally in the impure waters of true-crime journalism, but when she did, she got freakin’ righteous. Two years ago, she took under her silken wing a young mother who had been imprisoned for shaking her infant to death. Sharon Schieber presented a whole legal – and very emotional – defense case over a series of nights. The woman is now back home in Nebraska, remarried and expecting a child.

‘That’s for sure. She got in touch after the video went viral.’

‘So the video did help.’ I couldn’t resist.

‘It gave you an interesting wrinkle: Before the video, it was clear you did it. Now there’s a slight chance you didn’t. I don’t know how it is you finally seemed genuine—’

‘Because last night it served an actual purpose: Get Amy back,’ Go said. ‘It was an offensive maneuver. Where before it would just be indulgent, undeserved, disingenuous emotion.’

I gave her a thank-you smile.

‘Well, keep remembering that it is serving a purpose,’ Tanner said. ‘Nick, I’m not fucking around here: This is beyond unorthodox. Most lawyers would be shutting you up. But it’s something I’ve been wanting to try. The media has saturated the legal environment. With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate. Eighty, ninety percent of a case is decided before you get in the courtroom. So why not use it – control the story. But it’s a risk. I want every word, every gesture, every bit of information planned out ahead of time. But you have to be natural, likable, or this will all backfire.’

‘Oh, that sounds simple,’ I said. ‘One hundred percent canned yet totally genuine.’

‘You have to be extremely careful with your wording, and we will tell Sharon that you won’t answer certain questions. She’ll ask you anyway, but we’ll teach you how to say, Because of certain prejudicial actions by the police involved in this case, I really, unfortunately, can’t answer that right now, as much as I’d like to – and say it convincingly.’

‘Like a talking dog.’

‘Sure, like a talking dog who doesn’t want to go to prison. We get Sharon Schieber to take you on as a cause, Nick, and we are golden. This is all incredibly unorthodox, but that’s me,’ Tanner said again. He liked the line; it was his theme music. He paused and furrowed his brow, doing his pretend-thinking gesture. He was going to add something I wouldn’t like.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You need to tell Sharon Schieber about Andie – because it’s going to come out, the affair, it just will.’

‘Right when people are finally starting to like me. You want me to undo that?’

‘I swear to you, Nick – how many cases have I handled? It always – somehow, some way, always comes out. This way we have control. You tell her about Andie and you apologize. Apologize literally as if your life depends on it. You had an affair, you are a man, a weak, stupid man. But you love your wife, and you will make it up to her. You do the interview, it’ll air the next night. All content is embargoed – so they can’t tease the Andie affair in their ads. They can just use the word bombshell.’

‘So you already told them about Andie?’

‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘I told them: We have a nice bombshell for you. So you do the interview, and we have about twenty-four hours. Just before it hits TV, we tell Boney and Gilpin about Andie and about our discovery in the woodshed. Oh my gosh, we’ve put it all together for you: Amy is alive and she’s framing Nick! She’s crazy, jealous, and she is framing Nick! Oh, the humanity!’

‘Why not tell Sharon Schieber, then? About Amy framing me?’

‘Reason one. You come clean about Andie, you beg forgiveness, the nation is primed to forgive you, they’ll feel sorry for you – Americans love to see sinners apologize. But you can reveal nothing to make your wife look bad; no one wants to see the cheating husband blame the wife for anything. Let someone else do it sometime the next day: Sources close to the police reveal that Nick’s wife – the one he swore he loved with all his heart – is framing him! It’s great TV.’

‘What’s reason two?’

‘It’s too complicated to explain exactly how Amy is framing you. You can’t do it in a sound bite. It’s bad TV.’

‘I feel sick,’ I said.

‘Nick, it’s—’ Go started.

‘I know, I know, it has to be done. But can you imagine, your biggest secret and you have to tell the world about it? I know I have to do it. And it works for us, ultimately, I think. It’s the only way Amy might come back,’ I said. ‘She wants me to be publicly humiliated—’

‘Chastened,’ Tanner interrupted. ‘Humiliated makes it sound like you feel sorry for yourself.’

‘—and to publicly apologize,’ I continued. ‘But it’s going to be fucking awful.’

‘Before we go forward, I want to be honest here,’ Tanner said. ‘Telling the police the whole story – Amy’s framing Nick – it is a risk. Most cops, they decide on a suspect and they don’t want to veer at all. They’re not open to any other options. So there’s the risk that we tell them and they laugh us out of the station and they arrest you – and then theoretically we’ve just given them a preview of our defense. So they can plan exactly how to destroy it at trial.’

‘Okay, wait, that sounds really, really bad, Tanner,’ Go said. ‘Like, bad, inadvisable bad.’

‘Let me finish,’ Tanner said. ‘One, I think you’re right, Nick. I think Boney isn’t convinced you’re a killer. I think she would be open to an alternate theory. She has a good reputation as a cop who’s actually fair. As a cop who has good instincts. I talked with her. I got a good vibe. I think the evidence is leading her in your direction, but I think her gut is telling her something’s off. More important, if we do go to trial, I wouldn’t use the Amy frame-up as your defense, anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like I said, it’s too complicated, a jury wouldn’t be able to follow. If it’s not good TV, believe me, it’s not for a jury. We’d go with more of an O.J. thing. A simple story line: The cops are incompetent and out to get you, it’s all circumstantial, if the glove doesn’t fit, blah blah, blah.’

‘Blah blah blah, that gives me a lot of confidence,’ I said.

Tanner flashed a smile. ‘Juries love me, Nick. I’m one of them.’

‘You’re the opposite of one of them, Tanner.’

‘Reverse that: They’d like to think they’re one of me.’

Everything we did now, we did in front of small brambles of flashing paparazzi, so Go, Tanner, and I left the house under pops of light and pings of noise (‘Don’t look down,’ Tanner advised, ‘don’t smile, but don’t look ashamed. Don’t rush either, just walk, let them take their shots, and shut the door before you call them names. Then you can call them whatever you want.’) We were headed down to St. Louis, where the interview would take place, so I could prep with Tanner’s wife, Betsy, a former TV news anchor turned lawyer. She was the other Bolt in Bolt & Bolt.

It was a creepy tailgate party: Tanner and I, followed by Go, followed by a half-dozen news vans, but by the time the Arch crept over the skyline, I was no longer thinking of the paparazzi.

By the time we reached Tanner’s penthouse hotel suite, I was ready to do the work I needed to nail the interview. Again I longed for my own theme music: the montage of me getting ready for the big fight.

What’s the mental equivalent of a speed bag?

A gorgeous six-foot-tall black woman answered the door.

‘Hi, Nick, I’m Betsy Bolt.’

In my mind Betsy Bolt was a diminutive blond Southern-belle white girl.

‘Don’t worry, everyone is surprised when they meet me.’ Betsy laughed, catching my look, shaking my hand. ‘Tanner and Betsy, we sound like we should be on the cover of The Official Preppy Guide, right?’

‘Preppy Handbook,’ Tanner corrected as he kissed her on the cheek.

‘See? He actually knows,’ she said.

She ushered us into an impressive penthouse suite – a living room sunlit by wall-to-wall windows, with bedrooms shooting off each side. Tanner had sworn he couldn’t stay in Carthage, at the Days Inn, out of respect for Amy’s parents, but Go and I both suspected he couldn’t stay in Carthage because the closest five-star hotel was in St. Louis.

We engaged in the preliminaries: small talk about Betsy’s family, college, career (all stellar, A-list, awesome), and drinks dispersed for everyone (soda pops and Clamato, which Go and I had come to believe was an affectation of Tanner’s, a quirk he thought would give him character, like my wearing fake glasses in college). Then Go and I sank down into the leather sofa, Betsy sitting across from us, her legs pressed together to one side, like a slash mark. Pretty/professional. Tanner paced behind us, listening.

‘Okay. So, Nick,’ Betsy said. ‘I’ll be frank, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You and TV. Aside from your bar-blog thingie, the Whodunnit. com thingie last night, you’re awful.’

‘There was a reason I went to print journalism,’ I said. ‘I see a camera, and my face freezes.’

‘Exactly,’ Betsy said. ‘You look like a mortician, so stiff. I got a trick to fix that, though.’

‘Booze?’ I asked. ‘That worked for me on the blog thingie.’

‘That won’t work here,’ Betsy said. She began setting up a video camera. ‘Thought we’d do a dry run first. I’ll be Sharon. I’ll ask the questions she’ll probably ask, and you answer the way you normally would. That way we can know how far off the mark you are.’ She laughed again. ‘Hold on.’ She was wearing a blue sheath dress, and from an oversize leather purse, she pulled a string of pearls. The Sharon Schieber uniform. ‘Tanner?’