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

NICK DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
W
e searched every cranny of my father’s house, which
didn’t take long, since it’s so pathetically empty. The
cabinets, the closets. I yanked at the corners of rugs to see
if they came up. I peeked into his washer and dryer, stuck a
hand up his chimney. I even looked behind the toilet tanks.
‘Very 
Godfather
of you,’ Go said.
‘If it were very 
Godfather
, I’d have found what we were
looking for and come out shooting.’
Tanner stood in the center of my dad’s living room and
tugged at the end of his lime tie. Go and I were smeared
with dust and grime, but somehow Tanner’s white button-
down positively glowed, as if it retained some of the strobe-
light glamour of New York. He was staring at the corner of a
cabinet, chewing on his lip, tugging at the tie, 
thinking
. The
man had probably spent years perfecting this look: the 
Shut
up, client, I’m thinking
look.
‘I don’t like this,’ he finally said. ‘We have a lot of
uncontained issues here, and I won’t go to the cops until
we’re very, very contained. My first instinct is to get ahead
of the situation – report that stuff in the shed before we get
busted with it. But if we don’t know what Amy wants us to
find here, and we don’t know Andie’s mind-set … Nick, do
you have a 
guess
about what Andie’s mind-set is?’

---

I shrugged. ‘Pissed.’
‘I mean, that makes me very, very nervous. We’re in a
very prickly situation, basically. We need to tell the cops
about the woodshed. We have to be on the front end of that
discovery. But I want to lay out for you what will happen
when we do. And what will happen is: They will go after Go.
It’ll be one of two options. One: Go is your accomplice, she
was helping you hide this stuff on her property, and in all
likelihood, she knows you killed Amy.’
‘Come on, you can’t be serious,’ I said.
‘Nick, we’d be lucky with that version,’ Tanner said.
‘They can interpret this however they want. How about this
one: It was Go who stole your identity, who got those credit
cards. She bought all that crap in there. Amy found out,
there was a confrontation, Go killed Amy.’
‘Then we get way, way ahead of all this,’ I said. ‘We tell
them about the woodshed, and we tell them Amy is framing
me.’
‘I think that is a bad idea in general, and right now it’s a
really bad idea if we don’t have Andie on our side, because
we’d have to tell them about Andie.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if we go to the cops with your story, that Amy
framed you—’
‘Why do you keep saying 
my story
, like it’s something I
made up?’
‘Ha. Good point. If we explain to the cops how Amy is
framing you, we have to explain 
why
she is framing you.
Why: because she found out you have a very pretty, very
young girlfriend on the side.’
‘Do we really have to tell them that?’ I asked.

---

‘Amy framed you for her murder because … she was
… what, bored?’
I swallowed my lips.
‘We have to give them Amy’s motive, it doesn’t work
otherwise. But the problem is, if we set Andie, gift-
wrapped, on their doorstep, and they don’t buy the frame-
up theory, then we’ve given them your motive for murder.
Money problems, check. Pregnant wife, check. Girlfriend,
check. It’s a murderer’s triumvirate. You’ll go down. Women
will line up to tear you apart with their fingernails.’ He began
pacing. ‘But if we don’t do anything, and Andie goes to
them on her own …’
‘So what do we do?’ I asked.
‘I think the cops will laugh us out of the station if we say
right now that Amy framed you. It’s too flimsy. I believe you,
but it’s flimsy.’
‘But the treasure hunt clues—’ I started.
‘Nick, even I don’t understand those clues,’ Go said.
‘They’re all inside baseball between you and Amy. There’s
only your word that they’re leading you into … incriminating
situations. I mean, seriously: crummy jeans and visor
equals Hannibal?’
‘Little brown house equals your dad’s house, which is
blue
,’ Tanner added.
I could feel Tanner’s doubt. I needed to really show him
Amy’s character. Her lies, her vindictiveness, her score-
settling. I needed other people to back me up – that my wife
wasn’t Amazing Amy but