Authors: Steve Lookner
Gilpin reached down the tweezers one more time, and my stomach dropped as I imagined him pulling out my
Preggo Pounders 5
DVD. But instead, he pulled out an envelope that said “Nick”. Clue number two.
I opened the envelope, and there were two notes instead of one. The first was written on a heart, and said,
My darling husband,
I figured this would be the ideal place
—
these hallowed halls of learning
—
to let you know that I’ve learned you’re right, and that I really should lose 15 pounds.
Xo,
Amy
It was a transparent attempt to win me back. But I admit I was turned on by the thought of her being 15 pounds lighter.
“Wow,” said Gilpin, who I hadn’t realized had been reading over my shoulder. “She’s hot now, but if she lost 15 pounds she’d be
smokin’
hot.”
“Thanks,” I said, and put the notes away and started leading Gilpin out.
“Aren’t you gonna read the second clue?” he said.
I told him I’d read it on the drive back. Anything to get him out of there before he found my midget bukkake videos.
After finally ridding myself of Gilpin, I drove over to the Days Inn where Rand and Marybeth were staying. I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to them in private since they’d arrived, which was fine with me. But for some stupid reason they wanted to meet, so now I had to take time out of my busy day to meet with them.
When I got to the hotel, the lobby was filled with people wearing lanyards, because that weekend the hotel was hosting the National Lanyard Wearers Convention. I headed up to the Elliotts’ room. They’d left the door open for me, and when I walked in they were watching a news report on TV about Amy.
“I hope they use the photos we sent them,” said Marybeth.
The photo montage started, and the photos were all covers of
Idiotic Amy
books which featured a cartoon version of Amy. “Perfect,” said Marybeth.
“Do you think we should give them any photos of Amy in real life?” said Rand.
“Good idea,” said Marybeth. “We have some great ones of her holding the books.”
“That’s why I love you,” said Rand, and they started that gay fake cuddling again.
The
Idiotic Amy
books had been wildly successful, and that success wasn’t simply an accident. Rand and Marybeth were both trained psychologists, and they realized that a woman’s need to feel superior to other women is actually part of her psychology when she’s as young as five. The
Idiotic Amy
books made girls who read them feel superior to another girl—Idiotic Amy—and they got hooked on this feeling for life. Every new
Idiotic Amy
book fed the addiction, and once Rand and Marybeth realized how much this was driving sales, the later titles really started playing on it. Case in point:
Idiotic Amy and the Girl Who’s Better Than Her (i.e. You)
.
“Do you guys think Amy’s disappearance might be related to the books?” I asked. “Like, maybe some crazed reader chopped Amy to pieces the way Gary the Guinea Pig got chopped up when Idiotic Amy accidentally dropped him down the garbage disposal?”
Rand and Amy just stared at me, stunned. It was a gross, terrible thing to say. Which is why I said it.
“Actually, Nick, people have been suggesting that someone a little closer to home did it,” said Rand. “Which is kinda why we wanted to talk to you. Because you know, the traditional first suspect to look at in these cases is—”
“I know, I know, the victim’s parents,” I said. “But just so you guys know, I told the cops that I was fairly confident you’d never hurt Amy. Although I couldn’t completely vouch for you because I don’t know you that well, and I had to admit to them that if someone told me you murdered Amy I wouldn’t be completely surprised.”
“We were actually thinking about you as the suspect,” said Marybeth. “Of course
we
don’t think you’d ever do anything like this, but when we spoke to the police, they seemed really interested in your alibi involving a karate lesson and hang gliding and shooting a major motion picture with Keanu Reeves.”
“Of course they were interested,” I said. “Who wouldn’t be interested in karate and hang gliding and a major motion picture starring Keanu Reeves?”
My disposable cellphone rang. Crap, I’d forgotten to put it on vibrate. I quickly silenced it.
“You really should pick up every call,” said Rand.
“I recognized the ring, it was Keanu,” I said. “That guy always wants to talk. Hey what about that mentally disturbed
Idiotic Amy
fan you guys told me about a while back? Did you tell the police to look into her?”
“You mean Hilary Handy?” said Marybeth. Hilary Handy was a book reviewer for the
Village Voice
who’d written a couple scathing reviews of
Idiotic Amy
books. To Marybeth and Rand this meant she was clearly mentally disturbed and had a sociopathic personal grudge against the Elliott family. “Yep, we gave them her name. We also mentioned Desi.”
“Desi” was Desi Collings, who’d been in the same kindergarten class as Amy and had been in love with her ever since. But Amy had never wanted to date him and put him in the friend zone. And Desi had stayed in the friend zone ever since. For almost 30 years he’d been going places with Amy, talking to Amy on the phone, and doing things for Amy, all in the hopes of hooking up with her. But Amy had never let him be more than friends, and she was never going to.
“Good call on Desi,” I said. “Anyone who lets himself stay in the friend zone for 30 years is obviously a wack job. I mean, just lower your standards a bit and find an uglier girl who’ll fuck you, am I right?” I offered Rand a hi-five, but he just stood there.
“We should be realistic, though,” Marybeth said. “While technically Desi and Hilary are possibilities, the police strongly suspect it’s someone more closely connected to Amy.”
I nodded at Marybeth and surreptitiously pointed at Rand. “Definitely,” I said.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: August 23, 2010
Everything happened at once.
First, Nick lost his job at the greeting card company. Which wouldn’t be a big deal in itself, except now all Nick does is sit around the house all day watching porn. He says he’s going to become a porn reviewer because that’s the big new industry. But I never see any actual reviews. I asked him about this once, and 20 minutes later he came up to me holding a wet, crumpled kleenex and said, “Four stars.”
Next, I lost my job at Yelp. Rather than being sympathetic like a decent husband should, Nick kept saying asshole-y things like, “That wasn’t a job,” completely inventing false bullshit just to annoy me.
Third and finally, my parents stopped by because we needed to have a “talk.” Turns out that over the past several years, they’d invested all of their savings in an Idiotic Amy theme park, “Idiotic Amy’s Idioting World.” They saw how much money the Harry Potter park was making and figured they could cash in. “It was gonna be so fun,” said Marybeth. “We’d built an exact replica of the school library where you crapped your pants.”
But they’d wildly miscalculated how many $1,500 season passes they could pre-sell (they’d assumed it’d be more than zero) and run out of money. Idiotic Amy’s Idioting World now stood half-built and empty. Equally empty was my parents’ bank account. That’s why they were here: they’d come to ask us to give back some of the money they’d given us over the years.
“How much do you need?” I ask.
“Oh not that much,” said Rand. “$650,000 should do it.”
It was almost everything we had.
“Plus $300,000 more,” said Marybeth.
“We don’t have that much,” I said. “We’ll have to sell the house.”
“Well since we’re technically on the deed, we saved you the trouble and sold it yesterday,” said Rand. “But don’t panic, you have until midnight to be out.”
Wonderful. And to top it all off, Nick suggested we move back to his hometown in Missouri.
Missouri
.
That killing myself idea is sounding better and better.
RAND AND MARYBETH ELLIOTT: August 23, 2010
Don’t feel bad for us. We didn’t actually lose the money. We just got sick of giving it to our idiot daughter and her annoying loser husband.
NICK DUNNE: Two Days Gone
Since my house was crawling with police, I decided to take the Elliotts up on their offer to stay the night in their suite. Which would have been a fine idea, except for the fact that they were planning on having sex that night. That fake, extra-loud gay sex people have when they’re trying to hide they’re both gay.
As I lay wide awake on the pull-out couch listening to their fake orgasms, I decided that I was going to go talk to Desi myself. Hilary Handy obviously wasn’t a suspect, so there was no need to talk to her. And I knew the police would talk to Desi, but that might take a week, maybe more. And I couldn’t wait that long. If Amy was gone for good, I wanted to know now! It’s like when you’re a kid, and it’s two days before your birthday, and you can’t help but search around the house for where your parents have hidden your presents.
The Days Inn had donated an underused function room to serve as the Find Amy Dunne headquarters, and after I woke up from my one hour of sleep I headed down there. There was a bank of phones, some volunteers, a table of pastries and coffee, and several homeless people. Apparently word had gotten out that there was free food and shelter nonstop at the Days Inn function room.
A moment after I walked in, Boney came up to me. “Hi Nick,” she said. “Just wanted to give you a little word of advice. See those women over there?”
She pointed at two OK-looking women in their 40s.
“Yeah, what about ‘em?”
“Watch out for them. I think they might be crime victim groupies.”
“Really? Such things exist?”
“Oh yeah. They see a husband on TV who’s lost his wife, and they get a little too interested in ‘consoling’ him, if you know what I mean.”
“You don’t say,” I said, and walked over to the two women. “’Sup ladies?” I said, and began working my Nick Dunne magic. I was minutes away from getting them back to the Elliotts’ suite for a three-way when I was cock-blocked by my mother’s friend Vicky, who had brought her grandkids over to help search for Amy and wanted to say hi.
Grandkids. My mother had really wanted them. Go and I had seriously considered having a kid ourselves, but Mom passed away before we could pull the trigger. We still hadn’t completely ruled it out, though.
As for having kids with Amy, once I realized how batshit crazy she was, there was no way it was happening. I did the math once: if you have a kid and then get divorced, and have to pay both alimony and child support every month, it comes to 143% of your total monthly income. You are literally better off being a homeless person. I secretly think a large proportion of homeless guys are divorced dudes with a kid who stopped trying to make money. That’s why homeless people often seem so carefree in spite of what would seem to be a miserable existence. To them, their life is way better than the alternative.
After saying hi to Vicky, I tried to get back to the two fortysomethings to salvage whatever momentum still remained, but any hope of that was dashed when I was interrupted yet again, this time by Stucks Buckley, a local guy with a handlebar mustache who I’d known forever.
“Cops are messin’ this search up,” Stucks said.
“Good,” I said.
“Whaddya mean,
good
?”
“Uh...I mean Good Lord I hope they stop messing this up soon!”
“A start would be investigating the Book Boys,” said Stucks.
The Book Boys were a bunch of guys who up until recently had worked at the local book printing plant that printed college textbooks. But since kids in college don’t read anymore, bye bye book printing plant! Now the Book Boys spent their endless hours of unemployment drinking and harassing people. They were even worse than the Tube TV Boys.
I thanked Stucks for his suggestion, and then headed out to check out the public searches the police had set up for today. There were three areas being searched: the woods, the “beach” area by the river, and the Karate Center. My plan was to show up at each spot for five minutes and then say I had to go because I was spending all day at one of the other spots, and I’d do that at all three spots. So I’d only have to spend fifteen minutes total at the searches and could take the rest of the day off and catch up on my TiVo.
My plans changed, however, when I got to the first search site and saw who was searching. It was like every cute girl in Missouri had come out to the search, I guess ‘cause they’d identified with Amy. Game on.
I rolled up to a cutie in Juicy short-shorts. “Search here often?” I said, and she laughed. Ended up getting her number. Boom. My writer skills were on full display as I produced some A-level pickup lines. The one that seemed to work best was, “Looks like my
search just ended!” But my personal favorite was, “I’d like to search
your
woods.”
I ended up getting 11 numbers, so in my book the woods search was a success. It was almost an off-the-charts success, because I nearly got this super-hot chick to come home with me with the line, “I still need to search my bedroom and I could really use some help.” But then her mom came to take her to high school volleyball practice. In retrospect, I should’ve worked the mom and tried for the three-way.
Stupid, Nick. Stupid
.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: September 15, 2010