Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

NICK DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I
waited for the police first in the kitchen, but the acrid smell
of the burnt teakettle was curling up in the back of my throat,
underscoring my need to retch, so I drifted out on the front
porch, sat on the top stair, and willed myself to be calm. I
kept trying Amy’s cell, and it kept going to voice mail, that
quick-clip cadence swearing she’d phone right back. Amy
always phoned right back. It had been three hours, and I’d
left five messages, and Amy had not phoned back.
I didn’t expect her to. I’d tell the police: Amy would
never have left the house with the teakettle on. Or the door
open. Or anything waiting to be ironed. The woman got shit
done, and she was not one to abandon a project (say, her
fixer-upper husband, for instance), even if she decided she
didn’t like it. She’d made a grim figure on the Fiji beach
during our two-week honeymoon, battling her way through a
million mystical pages of 
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
,
casting pissy glances at me as I devoured thriller after
thriller. Since our move back to Missouri, the loss of her job,
her life had revolved (devolved?) around the completion of
endless tiny, inconsequential projects. The dress would
have been ironed.
And there was the living room, 
signs pointing to a
struggle
. I already knew Amy wasn’t phoning back. I wanted

---

the next part to start.
It was the best time of day, the July sky cloudless, the
slowly setting sun a spotlight on the east, turning everything
golden and lush, a Flemish painting. The police rolled up. It
felt casual, me sitting on the steps, an evening bird singing
in the tree, these two cops getting out of their car at a
leisurely pace, as if they were dropping by a neighborhood
picnic. Kid cops, mid-twenties, confident and uninspired,
accustomed to soothing worried parents of curfew-busting
teens. A Hispanic girl, her hair in a long dark braid, and a
black guy with a marine’s stance. Carthage had become a
bit (a very tiny bit) less Caucasian while I was away, but it
was still so severely segregated that the only people of
color I saw in my daily routine tended to be occupational
roamers: delivery men, medics, postal workers. Cops.
(‘This place is so white, it’s disturbing,’ said Amy, who,
back in the melting pot of Manhattan, counted a single
African-American among her friends. I accused her of
craving ethnic window dressing, minorities as backdrops. It
did not go well.)
‘Mr Dunne? I’m Officer Velásquez,’ said the woman,
‘and this is Officer Riordan. We understand you’re
concerned about your wife?’
Riordan looked down the road, sucking on a piece of
candy. I could see his eyes follow a darting bird out over the
river. Then he snapped his gaze back toward me, his
curled lips telling me he saw what everyone else did. I have
a face you want to punch: I’m a working-class Irish kid
trapped in the body of a total trust-fund douchebag. I smile
a lot to make up for my face, but this only sometimes works.
In college, I even wore glasses for a bit, fake spectacles

---

with clear lenses that I thought would lend me an affable,
unthreatening vibe. ‘You do realize that makes you even
more of a dick?’ Go reasoned. I threw them out and smiled
harder.
I waved in the cops: ‘Come inside the house and see.’
The two climbed the steps, accompanied by the
squeaking and shuffling noises of their belts and guns. I
stood in the entry to the living room and pointed at the
destruction.
‘
Oh
,’ said Officer Riordan, and gave a brisk crack of
his knuckles. He suddenly looked less bored.
Riordan and Velásquez leaned forward in their seats at the
dining room table as they asked me all the initial questions:
who, where, how long. Their ears were literally pricked. A
call had been made out of my hearing, and Riordan
informed me that detectives were being dispatched. I had
the grave pride of being taken seriously.
Riordan was asking me for the second time if I’d seen
any strangers in the neighborhood lately, was reminding me
for the third time about Carthage’s roving bands of
homeless men, when the phone rang. I launched myself
across the room and grabbed it.
A surly woman’s voice: ‘Mr Dunne, this is Comfort Hill
Assisted Living.’ It was where Go and I boarded our
Alzheimer’s-riddled father.
‘I can’t talk right now, I’ll call you back,’ I snapped, and
hung up. I despised the women who staffed Comfort Hill:
unsmiling, uncomforting. Underpaid, gruelingly underpaid,
which was probably why they never smiled or comforted. I
knew my anger toward them was misdirected – it

---

absolutely infuriated me that my father lingered on while my
mom was in the ground.
It was Go’s turn to send the check. I was pretty sure it
was Go’s turn for July. And I’m sure she was positive it was
mine. We’d done this before. Go said we must be mutually
subliminally forgetting to mail those checks, that what we
really wanted to forget was our dad.
I was telling Riordan about the strange man I’d seen in
our neighbor’s vacated house when the doorbell rang. The
doorbell rang. It sounded so normal, like I was expecting a
pizza.
The 
two 
detectives 
entered 
with 
end-of-shift
weariness. The man was rangy and thin, with a face that
tapered severely into a dribble of a chin. The woman was
surprisingly ugly – brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday
ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a
nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color
of a dust bunny. I have an affinity for ugly women. I was
raised by a trio of women who were hard on the eyes – my
grandmother, my mom, her sister – and they were all smart
and kind and funny and sturdy, good, good women. Amy
was the first pretty girl I ever dated, really dated.
The ugly woman spoke first, an echo of Miss Officer
Velásquez. ‘Mr Dunne? I’m Detective Rhonda Boney. This
is my partner, Detective Jim Gilpin. We understand there
are some concerns about your wife.’
My stomach growled loud enough for us all to hear it,
but we pretended we didn’t.
‘We take a look around, sir?’ Gilpin said. He had
fleshy bags under his eyes and scraggly white whiskers in
his mustache. His shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he wore it like it

---

was; he looked like he should stink of cigarettes and sour
coffee, even though he didn’t. He smelled like Dial soap.
I led them a few short steps to the living room, pointed
once again at the wreckage, where the two younger cops
were kneeling carefully, as if waiting to be discovered
doing something useful. Boney steered me toward a chair
in the dining room, away from but in view of the