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

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
NINE DAYS GONE
I
wake up feeling immediately nervous. Off. 
I cannot be
found here
, that’s what I wake up thinking, a burst of words,
like a flash in my brain. The investigation is not going fast
enough, and my money situation is just the opposite, and
Jeff and Greta’s greedy antennae are up. And I smell like
fish.
There was something about Jeff and that race to the
shoreline, toward my bundled dress and my money belt.
Something about the way Greta keeps alighting on 
Ellen
Abbott
. It makes me nervous. Or am I being paranoid? I
sound like Diary Amy: 
Is my husband going to kill me or
am I imagining!?!?
For the first time I actually feel sorry for
her.
I make two calls to the Amy Dunne tip line, and speak
to two different people, and offer two different tips. It’s hard
to tell how quickly they’ll reach the police – the volunteers
seem utterly disinterested. I drive to the library in a dark
mood. I need to pack up and leave. Clean my cabin with
bleach, wipe my fingerprints off everything, vacuum for any
hairs. Erase Amy (and Lydia and Nancy) and go. If I go, I’ll
be safe. Even if Greta and Jeff do suspect who I am, as
long as I’m not caught in the flesh, I’m okay. Amy Elliott
Dunne is like a yeti – coveted and folkloric – and they are

---

two Ozarks grifters whose blurry story will be immediately
debunked. I will leave today. That’s what I decide when I
walk with my head bowed into the chilly, mostly uninhabited
library with its three vacant computers and I go online to
catch up on Nick.
Since the vigil, the news about Nick has been on
repeat – the same facts on a circuit, over and over, getting
louder and louder, but with no new information. But today
something is different. I type Nick’s name into the search
engine, and the blogs are going nuts, because my husband
has gotten drunk and done an insane interview, in a bar,
with a random girl wielding a Flip camera. God, the idiot
never learns.
NICK DUNNE’S VIDEO CONFESSION!!!
NICK DUNNE, DRUNKEN DECLARATIONS!!!
My heart jumps so high, my uvula begins pulsing. My
husband has fucked himself again.
The video loads, and there is Nick. He has the sleepy
eyes he gets when he’s drunk, the heavy lids, and he’s got
his sideways grin, and he’s talking about me, and he looks
like a human being. He looks happy. ‘My wife, she just
happens to be the coolest girl I’ve ever met,’ he says. ‘How
many guys can say that? 
I married the coolest girl I ever
met
.’
My stomach flutters delicately. I was not expecting this.
I almost smile. ‘What’s so cool about her?’ the girl asks off-
screen. Her voice is high, sorority-cheery.
Nick launches into the treasure hunt, how it was our
tradition, how I always remembered hilarious inside jokes,
and right now this was all he had left of me, so he had to
complete the treasure hunt. It was his mission.

---

‘I just reached the end this morning,’ he says. His voice
is husky. He has been talking over the crowd. He’ll go home
and gargle with warm salt water, like his mother always
made him do. If I were at home with him, he’d ask me to
heat the water and make it for him, because he never got
the right amount of salt. ‘And it made me … realize a lot.
She is the only person in the world who has the power to
surprise me, you know? Everyone else, I always know what
they’re going to say, because everyone says the same
thing. We all watch the same shows, we read the same
stuff, we recycle everything. But Amy, she is her own perfect
person. She just has this 
power
over me.’
‘Where do you think she is now, Nick?’
My husband looks down at his wedding band and
twirls it twice.
‘Are you okay, Nick?’
‘The truth? No. I failed my wife so entirely. I have been
so wrong. I just hope it’s not too late. For me. For us.’
‘You’re at the end of your rope. Emotionally.’
Nick looks right at the camera. ‘I want my wife. I want
her to be right here.’ He takes a breath. ‘I’m not the best at
showing emotion. I know that. But I love her. I need her to be
okay. She has to be okay. I have so much to make up to
her.’
‘Like what?’
He laughs, the chagrined laugh that even now I find
appealing. In better days, I used to call it the talk-show
laugh: It was the quick downward glance, the scratching of
a corner of the mouth with a casual thumb, the inhaled
chuckle that a charming movie star always deploys right
before telling a killer story.

---

‘Like, none of your business.’ He smiles. ‘I just have a
lot to make up to her. I wasn’t the husband I could have
been. We had a few hard years, and I … I lost my shit. I
stopped trying. I mean, I’ve heard that phrase a thousand
times: