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

NICK DUNNE
ONE DAY GONE
I
didn’t listen to Go about the booze. I finished half the
bottle sitting on her sofa by myself, my eighteenth burst of
adrenaline kicking in just when I thought I’d finally go to
sleep: My eyes were shutting, I was shifting my pillow, my
eyes were closed, and then I saw my wife, blood clotting
her blond hair, weeping and blind in pain, scraping herself
along our kitchen floor. Calling my name. 
Nick, Nick, Nick!
I took repeated tugs on the bottle, psyching myself up
for sleep, a losing routine. Sleep is like a cat: It only comes
to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my
mantra. 
Stop thinking
, swig, 
empty your head
, swig, 
now,
seriously, empty your head, do it now
, swig. 
You need to
be sharp tomorrow, you need to sleep
! Swig. I got nothing
more than a fussy nap toward dawn, woke up an hour later
with a hangover. Not a disabling hangover, but decent. I
was tender and dull. Fuggy. Maybe still a little drunk. I
stutterwalked to Go’s Subaru, the movement feeling alien,
like my legs were on backward. I had temporary ownership
of the car; the police had graciously accepted my gently
used Jetta for inspection along with my laptop – all just a
formality, I was assured. I drove home to get myself some
decent clothes.
Three police cruisers sat on my block, our very few

---

neighbors milling around. No Carl, but there was Jan
Teverer – the Christian lady – and Mike, the father of the
three-year-old IVF triplets – Taylor, Topher, and Talullah. (‘I
hate them all, just by name,’ said Amy, a grave judge of
anything trendy. When I mentioned that the name Amy was
once trendy, my wife said, ‘Nick, you 
know
the story of my
name.’ I had no idea what she was talking about.)
Jan nodded from a distance without meeting my eyes,
but Mike strode over to me as I got out of my car. ‘I’m so
sorry, man, anything I can do, you let me know. Anything. I
did the mowing this morning, so at least you don’t needta
worry about that.’
Mike and I took turns mowing all the abandoned
foreclosed properties in the complex – heavy rains in the
spring had turned yards into jungles, which encouraged an
influx of raccoons. We had raccoons everywhere, gnawing
through our garbage late at night, sneaking into our
basements, lounging on our porches like lazy house pets.
The mowing didn’t seem to make them go away, but we
could at least see them coming now.
‘Thanks, man, thank you,’ I said.
‘Man, my wife, she’s been hysterical since she heard,’
he said. ‘Absolutely hysterical.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I said. ‘I gotta—’ I pointed at
my door.
‘Just sitting around, crying over pictures of Amy.’
I had no doubt that a thousand Internet photos had
popped up overnight, just to feed the pathetic needs of
women like Mike’s wife. I had no sympathy for drama
queens.
‘Hey, I gotta ask—’ Mike started.

---

I patted his arm and pointed again at the door, as if I
had pressing business. I turned away before he could ask
any questions and knocked on the door of my own house.
Officer Velásquez escorted me upstairs, into my own
bedroom, into my own closet – past the silvery perfect-
square gift box – and let me rifle through my things. It made
me tense, selecting clothes in front of this young woman
with the long brown braid, this woman who had to be
judging me, forming an opinion. I ended up grabbing
blindly: The final look was business-casual, slacks and
short sleeves, like I was going to a convention. It would
make an interesting essay, I thought, picking out
appropriate clothes when a loved one goes missing. The
greedy, angle-hungry writer in me, impossible to turn off.
I jammed it all into a bag and turned back around,
looking at the gift box on the floor. ‘Could I look inside?’ I
asked her.
She hesitated, then played it safe. ‘No, I’m sorry, sir.
Better not right now.’
The edge of the gift wrapping had been carefully slit.
‘Has somebody looked inside?’
She nodded.
I stepped around Velásquez toward the box. ‘If it’s
already been looked at then—’
She stepped in front of me. ‘Sir, I can’t let you do that.’
‘This is ridiculous. It’s 
for
me from 
my
wife—’
I stepped back around her, bent down, and had one
hand on the corner of the box when she slapped an arm
across my chest from behind. I felt a momentary spurt of
fury, that this 
woman
presumed to tell me what to do in 
my
own home
. No matter how hard I try to be my mother’s son,

---

my dad’s voice comes into my head unbidden, depositing
awful thoughts, nasty words.
‘Sir, this is a crime scene, you—’
Stupid bitch
.
Suddenly her partner, Riordan, was in the room and on
me too, and I was shaking them off – 
fine, fine, fuck
– and
they were forcing me down the stairs. A woman was on all
fours near the front door, squirreling along the floorboards,
searching, I assume for blood spatter. She looked up at me
impassively, then back down.
I forced myself to decompress as I drove back to Go’s
to dress. This was only one in a long series of annoying and
asinine things the police would do in the course of this
investigation (I like rules that make sense, not rules without
logic), so I needed to calm down: 
Do not antagonize the
cops
, I told myself. Repeat if necessary: 
Do not antagonize
the cops
.
I ran into Boney as I entered the police station, and she
said, ‘Your in-laws are here, Nick’ in an encouraging tone,
like she was offering me a warm muffin.
Marybeth and Rand Elliott were standing with their
arms around each other. Middle of the police station, they
looked like they were posing for prom photos. That’s how I
always saw them, hands patting, chins nuzzling, cheeks
rubbing. Whenever I visited the Elliott home, I became an
obsessive throat-clearer – 
I’m about to enter
– because the
Elliotts could be around any corner, cherishing each other.
They kissed each other full on the mouth whenever they
were parting, and Rand would cup his wife’s rear as he
passed her. It was foreign to me. My parents divorced when

---

I was twelve, and I think maybe, when I was very young, I
witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it
was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On
their best married days, their communications were entirely
transactional: 
We’re out of milk again. (I’ll get some today.)
I need this ironed properly. (I’ll do that today.) How hard is
it to buy milk? (Silence.) You forgot to call the plumber.
(Sigh.) Goddammit, put on your coat, right now, and go
out and get some goddamn milk. Now
. These messages
and orders brought to you by my father, a mid-level phone-
company manager who treated my mother at best like an
incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but
his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days,
weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my
father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving
him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his
teeth so loud you could hear it across the room. Throwing
things near her but not exactly at her. I’m sure he told
himself: 
I never hit her
. I’m sure because of this technicality
he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family
life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-
clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be
fun. 
Don’t make me turn this car around
. Please, really,
turn it around.
I don’t think my father’s issue was with my mother in