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

That’s him. Nick
Dunne
. The bartender never came back.
You can’t yell, you can’t strong-arm: 
Hey, jackass, will
you get me a goddamn drink or what?
You can’t be the
asshole they believe you are. You just have to sit and take
it. But I wasn’t leaving. I sat with my empty glass in front of
me and pretended I was thinking very hard. I checked my
cell, just in case Andie had called. No. Then I pulled out my
real phone and played a round of solitaire, pretending to be
engrossed. My wife had done this to me, turned me into a
man who couldn’t get a drink in his own hometown. God, I
hated her.
‘Was it Scotch?’
A girl about Andie’s age was standing in front of me.
Asian, black shoulder-length hair, cubicle-cute.
‘Excuse me?’
‘What you were drinking? Scotch?’
‘Yeah. Having trouble getting—’
She was gone, to the end of the bar, and she was
nosing into the bartender’s line of vision with a big 
help me
smile, a girl used to making her presence known, and then
she was back with a Scotch in an actual big-boy tumbler.
‘Take it,’ she nudged, and I did. ‘Cheers.’ She held up
her own clear, fizzing drink. We clinked glasses. ‘Can I sit?’
‘I’m not staying long, actually—’ I looked around, making
sure no one was aiming a cameraphone at us.
‘So, okay,’ she said with a shruggy smile. ‘I could
pretend I don’t know you’re Nick Dunne, but I’m not going to

---

insult you. I’m rooting for you, by the way. You’ve been
getting a bad rap.’
‘Thanks. It’s, uh, it’s a weird time.’
‘I’m serious. You know how, in court, they talk about the
CSI
effect? Like, everyone on the jury has watched so
much 
CSI
that they believe science can prove anything?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I think there’s an 
Evil Husband
effect. Everyone
has seen too many true-crime shows where the husband is
always, always the killer, so people automatically assume
the husband’s the bad guy.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ I said. ‘Thank you. That is exactly it.
And Ellen Abbott—’
‘Fuck Ellen Abbott,’ my new friend said. ‘She’s a one-
woman walking, talking, man-hating perversion of the
justice system.’ She raised her glass again.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Another Scotch?’
‘That’s a gorgeous name.’
Her name, as it turned out, was Rebecca. She had a ready
credit card and a hollow leg. (
Another? Another?
Another?
) She was from Muscatine, Iowa (another
Mississippi River town), and had moved to New York after
undergrad to be a writer (also like me). She’d been an
editorial assistant at three different magazines – a bridal
magazine, a working-mom magazine, a teen-girl magazine
– all of which had shuttered in the past few years, so she
was now working for a crime blog called Whodunnit, and
she was (giggle) in town to try to get an interview with me.
Hell, I had to love her hungry-kid chutzpah: 
Just fly me to

---

Carthage – the major networks haven’t gotten him, but I’m
sure I can!
‘I’ve been waiting outside your house with the rest of
the world, and then at the police station, and then I decided
I needed a drink. And here you walk in. It’s just too perfect.
Too weird, right?’ she said. She had little gold hoop
earrings that she kept playing with, her hair tucked behind
her ears.
‘I should go,’ I said. My words were sticky around the
edges, the beginnings of a slur.
‘But you never told me why you’re here,’ Rebecca said.
‘I have to say, it takes a lot of courage, I think, for you to
head out without a friend or some sort of backup. I bet you
get a lot of shitty looks.’
I shrugged: 
No big deal
.
‘People judging everything you do without even
knowing you. Like you with the cell phone photo at the park.
I mean, you were probably like me: You were raised to be
polite. But no one wants the real story. They just want to …
gotcha
. You know?’
‘I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a
certain mold.’
She raised her eyebrows; her earrings jittered.
I thought of Amy sitting in her mystery control center,
wherever the fuck she was, judging me from every angle,
finding me wanting even from afar. Was there anything she
could see that would make her call off this madness?
I went on, ‘I mean, people think we were in a rocky
marriage, but actually, right before she disappeared, she
put together a treasure hunt for me.’
Amy would want one of two things: for me to learn my

---

lesson and fry like the bad boy I was; or for me to learn my
lesson and love her the way she deserved and be a good,
obedient, chastised, dickless little boy.
‘This wonderful treasure hunt.’ I smiled. Rebecca
shook her head with a little-V frown. ‘My wife, she always
did a treasure hunt for our anniversary. One clue leads to a
special place where I find the next clue, and so on. Amy …’
I tried to get my eyes to fill, settled for wiping them. The
clock above the door read 12:37 a.m. ‘Before she went
missing, she hid all the clues. For this year.’
‘Before she disappeared on your anniversary.’
‘And it’s been all that’s kept me together. It made me
feel closer to her.’
Rebecca pulled out a Flip camera. ‘Let me interview
you. On camera.’
‘Bad idea.’
‘I’ll give it context,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what you
need, Nick, I swear. Context. You need it bad. Come on,
just a few words.’
I shook my head. ‘Too dangerous.’
‘Say what you just said. I’m serious, Nick. I’m the
opposite of Ellen Abbott. The anti–Ellen Abbott. You need
me in your life.’ She held up the camera, its tiny red light
eyeing me.
‘Seriously, turn it off.’
‘Help a girl out. I get the Nick Dunne interview? My
career is made. You’ve done your good deed for the year.
Pleeease? No harm, Nick, one minute. Just one minute. I
swear I will only make you look good.’
She motioned to a nearby booth where we’d be tucked
out of view of any gawkers. I nodded and we resettled, that

---

little red light aimed at me the whole time.
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked.
‘Tell me about the treasure hunt. It sounds romantic.
Like, quirky, awesome, romantic.’
Take control of the story, Nick
. For both the capital-P
public and the capital-C wife. 
Right now
, I thought, 
I am a
man who loves his wife and will find her. I am a man who
loves his wife, and I am the good guy. I am the one to root
for. I am a man who isn’t perfect, but my wife is, and I will
be very, very obedient from now on
.
I could do this more easily than feign sadness. Like I
said, I can operate in sunlight. Still, I felt my throat tighten as
I got ready to say the words.
‘My wife, she just happens to be the coolest girl I’ve
ever met. How many guys can say that? 
I married the
coolest girl I ever met
.’
Youfuckingbitchyoufuckingbitchyoufuckingbitch.
Come home so I can kill you
.

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