The night after my living room interview with Boney and Gilpin, there was a candlelight vigil for Amy in the town square. Go signed me up to speak there because she thought it’d be a good opportunity to rehabilitate my image. My image definitely needed some rehabilitation, because the media was continuing to batter me. Their newest thing was turning up purported “items of concern,” like the utterly irrelevant fact that in high school I was voted Most Likely to Kill His Wife.
There was a good side to all the media coverage, however: business at the cat cafe was booming. We’d hired three more baristas and 23 more cats. (Unfortunately these weren’t great cafe cats — they kept shedding on the biscotti.) Also, the cafe was now being sponsored by Fancy Feast. You’d think they might not want to sponsor a business co-owned by an alleged murderer, but I guess when it comes to cat food marketing there are only so many opportunities.
The town square was packed for the vigil, and there were TV vans everywhere. When it was my turn to speak I walked up to the microphone and looked out at the crowd, and I was a bit thrown by seeing Amy’s face everywhere on people’s T-shirts. Most of the shirts said COME BACK AMY and WE MISS YOU, but one of them said I WENT TO SEARCH FOR AMY DUNNE AND ALL I FOUND WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT.
I took out my prepared speech (unlike previous speeches, I’d actually written something in advance this time) and began to speak.
“Hi everyone. Thank you so, so much for coming out, I really appreciate it. As you know, my wife Amy is missing. Amy is my partner in every way, and I am incomplete without her. I miss her every second of every minute of every day, and I just want her to come home. Pause look left look right don’t smile especially don’t convey you’re happy Amy’s gone and that you pray every night she won’t come back and that you’d like to give her murderer a medal…”
Oops. That was supposed to be stage direction.
There was a loud chorus of boos. Go gave me the “cut it short” sign, chopping at her throat. But before I could finish, our neighbor Noelle Hawthorne had come out of the crowd and approached the stage.
“Hey, Nick!” she yelled. “I got a question for you!”
“Then you should raise your hand and wait and see if I call on you,” I said.
“Where’s your wife, Nick?” she yelled. “Where’s your pregnant wife?”
There was a collective gasp from the crowd.
I chuckled. “Pregnant? That’s impossible. I never came inside her. I only came on her face and on her tits. Oh also in her butt when she wasn’t being a bitch and was letting us have anal like normal people.”
I could feel the hostility of the crowd as they surged forward in anger. Go grabbed me and dragged me off the stage. As she did so, I could hear the questions shouted from the reporters:
“Nick, did you know Amy was pregnant?”
“Nick, had you chosen a name for the baby?”
“Nick, when you came on her face did she flinch or did she take it like a pro?”
I was about to complain about Amy’s constant flinching when Go shoved me into her car and drove away.
