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

NICK DUNNE
TEN DAYS GONE
I
made a mistake, feeling so cocky. Whatever the hell this
diary was, it was going to ruin me. I could already see the
cover of the true-crime novel: the black-and-white photo of
us on our wedding day, the blood-red background, the
jacket copy: 
including sixteen pages of never-seen photos
and Amy Elliott Dunne’s actual diary entries – a voice
from beyond the grave
… I’d found it strange and kind of
cute, Amy’s guilty pleasures, those cheesy true-crime
books I’d discovered here and there around our house. I
thought maybe she was loosening up, allowing herself
some beach reading.
Nope. She was just studying.
Gilpin pulled over a chair, sat on it backward, and
leaned toward me on crossed arms – his movie-cop look. It
was almost midnight; it felt later.
‘Tell us about your wife’s illness these past few
months,’ he said.
‘Illness? Amy never got sick. Once a year she’d get a
cold, maybe.’
Boney picked up the book, turned to a marked page.
‘Last month you made Amy and yourself some drinks, sat
on your back porch. She writes here that the drinks were
impossibly sweet and describes what she thinks is an

---

allergic reaction: 
My heart was racing, my tongue was
slabbed, stuck to the bottom of my mouth. My legs turned
to meat as Nick walked me up the stairs
.’ She put a finger
down to hold her place in the diary, looked up as if I might
not be paying attention. ‘When she woke the next morning:
My head ached and my stomach was oily, but weirder, my
fingernails were light blue, and when I looked in the mirror,
so were my lips. I didn’t pee for two days after. I felt so
weak
.’
I shook my head in disgust. I’d become attached to
Boney; I expected better of her.
‘Is this your wife’s handwriting?’ Boney tilted the book
toward me, and I saw deep black ink and Amy’s cursive,
jagged as a fever chart.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘So does our handwriting expert.’
Boney said the words with a certain pride, and I
realized: This was the first case these two had ever had
that required outside experts, that demanded they get in
touch with professionals who did exotic things like analyze
handwriting.
‘You know what else we learned, Nick, when we
showed this entry to our medical expert?’
‘Poisoning,’ I blurted. Tanner frowned at me: 
steady
.
Boney stuttered for a second; this was not information I
was supposed to provide.
‘Yeah, Nick, thank you: antifreeze poisoning,’ she said.
‘Textbook. She’s lucky she survived.’
‘She didn’t 
survive
, because that never happened,’ I
said. ‘Like you said, it’s textbook – it’s made up from an
Internet search.’

---

Boney frowned but refused to bite. ‘The diary isn’t a
pretty picture of you, Nick,’ she continued, one finger
tracing her braid. ‘
Abuse
– you pushed her around. 
Stress
– you were quick to anger. Sexual relations that bordered
o n 
rape
. She was very frightened of you at the end there.
It’s painful to read. That gun we were wondering about, she
says she wanted it because she was afraid of you. Here’s
her last entry: 
This man might kill me. This man might kill
me
, in her own words.’
My throat clenched. I felt like I might throw up. Fear,
mostly, and then a surge of rage. 
Fucking bitch, fucking
bitch, cunt, cunt, cunt
.
‘What a smart, convenient note for her to end on,’ I
said. Tanner put a hand on mine to hush me.
‘You look like you want to kill her again, right now,’
Boney said.
‘You’ve done nothing but lie to us, Nick,’ Gilpin said.
‘You say you were at the beach that morning. Everyone we
talk to says you hate the beach. You say you have no idea
what all these purchases are on your maxed-out credit
cards. Now we have a shed full of exactly those items,