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

NICK DUNNE
ONE DAY GONE
F
lashbulbs exploded, and I dropped the smile, but not soon
enough. I felt a wave of heat roll up my neck, and beads of
sweat broke out on my nose. 
Stupid, Nick, stupid
. And
then, just as I was pulling myself together, the press
conference was over, and it was too late to make any other
impression.
I walked out with the Elliotts, my head ducked low as
more flashbulbs popped. I was almost to the exit when
Gilpin trotted across the room toward me, flagging me
down: ‘Canna grab a minute, Nick?’
He updated me as we headed toward a back office:
‘We checked out that house in your neighborhood that was
broken into, looks like people camped out there, so we’ve
got lab there. And we found another house on the edge of
your complex, had some squatters.’
‘I mean, that’s what worries me,’ I said. ‘Guys are
camped out everywhere. This whole town is overrun with
pissed-off, unemployed people.’
Carthage was, until a year ago, a company town and
that company was the sprawling Riverway Mall, a tiny city
unto itself that once employed four thousand locals – one
fifth the population. It was built in 1985, a destination mall
meant to attract shoppers from all over the Middle West. I

---

still remember the opening day: me and Go, Mom and Dad,
watching the festivities from the very back of the crowd in
the vast tarred parking lot, because our father always
wanted to be able to leave quickly, from anywhere. Even at
baseball games, we parked by the exit and left at the eighth
inning, me and Go a predictable set of mustard-smeared
whines, petulant and sun-fevered: 
We never get to see the
end
. But this time our faraway vantage was desirable,
because we got to take in the full scope of the Event: the
impatient crowd, leaning collectively from one foot to
another; the mayor atop a red-white-and-blue dais; the
booming words – 
pride, growth, prosperity, success
–
rolling over us, soldiers on the battlefield of consumerism,
armed with vinyl-covered checkbooks and quilted
handbags. And the doors opening. And the rush into the
air-conditioning, the Muzak, the smiling salespeople who
were our neighbors. My father actually let us go inside that
day, actually waited in line and bought us something that
day: sweaty paper cups brimming with Orange Julius.
For a quarter century, the Riverway Mall was a given.
Then the recession hit, washed away the Riverway store by
store until the whole mall finally went bust. It is now two
million square feet of echo. No company came to claim it,
no businessman promised a resurrection, no one knew
what to do with it or what would become of all the people
who’d worked there, including my mother, who lost her job
at Shoe-Be-Doo-Be – two decades of kneeling and
kneading, of sorting boxes and collecting moist foot
hosiery, gone without ceremony.
The downfall of the mall basically bankrupted
Carthage. People lost their jobs, they lost their houses. No

---

one could see anything good coming anytime soon. 
We
never get to see the end
. Except it looked like this time Go
and I would. We all would.
The bankruptcy matched my psyche perfectly. For
several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless
child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a
dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was
nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was
utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word