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

NICK DUNNE
EIGHT DAYS GONE
A
s soon as I hung up with Tommy, I phoned Hilary Handy. If
my ‘murder’ of Amy was a lie, and Tommy O’Hara’s ‘rape’
of Amy was a lie, why not Hilary Handy’s ‘stalking’ of Amy?
A sociopath must cut her teeth somewhere, like the austere
marble halls of Wickshire Academy.
When she picked up, I blurted: ‘This is Nick Dunne,
Amy Elliott’s husband. I really need to talk to you.’
‘Why.’
‘I really, really need more information. About your—’
‘Don’t say 
friendship
.’ I heard an angry grin in her
voice.
‘No. I wouldn’t. I just want to hear your side. I am not
calling because I think you’ve got anything – 
anything
– to
do with my wife, her situation, currently. But I would really
like to hear what happened. The truth. Because I think you
may be able to shed light on a … pattern of behavior of
Amy’s.’
‘What kind of pattern?’
‘When very bad things happen to people who upset
her.’
She breathed heavily into the phone. ‘Two days ago, I
wouldn’t have talked to you,’ she started. ‘But then I was
having a drink with some friends, and the TV was on, and

---

you came on, and it was about Amy being pregnant.
Everyone I was with, they were so 
angry
at you. They 
hated
you. And I thought, 
I know how that feels
. Because she’s not
dead, right? I mean, she’s still just missing? No body?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So let me tell you. About Amy. And high school. And
what happened. Hold on.’ On her end, I could hear cartoons
playing – rubbery voices and calliope music – then
suddenly not. Then whining voices. 
Go watch downstairs.
Downstairs, please
.
‘So, freshman year. I’m the kid from Memphis.
Everyone
else is East Coast, I swear. It felt weird, different,
you know? All the girls at Wickshire, it was like they’d been
raised communally – the lingo, the clothes, the hair. And it
wasn’t like I was a pariah, I was just … insecure, for sure.
Amy was already The Girl. Like, first day, I remember,
everyone knew her, everyone was talking about her. She
was Amazing Amy – we’d all read those books growing up
– plus, she was just gorgeous. I mean, she was—’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Right. And pretty soon she was showing an interest in
me, like, taking me under her wing or whatever. She had
this joke that she was Amazing Amy, so I was her sidekick
Suzy, and she started calling me Suzy, and pretty soon
everyone else did, too. Which was fine by me. I mean, I was
a little toadie: Get Amy a drink if she was thirsty, throw in a
load of laundry if she needed clean underwear. Hold on.’
Again I could hear the shuffle of her hair against the
receiver. Marybeth had brought every Elliott photo album
with her in case we needed more pictures. She’d shown
me a photo of Amy and Hilary, cheek-to-cheek grins. So I

---

could picture Hilary now, the same butter-blond hair as my
wife, framing a plainer face, with muddy hazel eyes.
‘
Jason, I am on the phone – just give them a few
Popsicles, it’s not that dang hard
.
‘Sorry. Our kids are out of school, and my husband
never ever takes care of them, so he seems a little
confused about what to do for the ten minutes I’m on the
phone with you. Sorry. So … so, right, I was little Suzy, and
we had this game going, and for a few months – August,
September, October – it was great. Like 
intense
friendship, we were together all the time. And then a few
weird things happened at once that I knew kind of bothered
her.’
‘What?’
‘A guy from our brother school, he meets us both at the
fall dance, and the next day he calls 
me
instead of Amy.
Which I’m sure he did because Amy was too intimidating,
but whatever … and then a few days later, our midterm
grades come, and mine are slightly better, like, four-point-
one versus four-point. And not long after, one of our friends,
she invites me to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Me,
not Amy. Again, I’m sure this was because Amy intimidated
people. She wasn’t easy to be around, you felt all the time
like you had to impress. But I can feel things change just a
little. I can tell she’s really irritated, even though she doesn’t
admit it.
‘Instead, she starts getting me to do things. I don’t
realize it at the time, but she starts setting me up. She asks
if she can color my hair the same blond as hers, because
mine’s mousy, and it’ll look 
so nice
a brighter shade. And
she starts complaining about her parents. I mean she’s

---

always complained about her parents, but now she really
gets going on them – how they only love her as an idea and
not really for who she is – so she says she wants to mess
with her parents. She has me start prank-calling her house,
telling her parents I’m the new Amazing Amy. We’d take the
train into New York some weekends, and she’d tell me to
stand outside their house – one time she had me run up to
her mom and tell her I was going to get rid of Amy and be
her new Amy or some crap like that.’
‘And you did it?’
‘It was just dumb stuff girls do. Back before cell phones
and cyber-bullying. A way to kill time. We did prank stuff like
that all the time, just dumb stuff. Try to one-up each other on
how daring and freaky we could be.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then she starts distancing herself. She gets cold. And
I think – I think that she doesn’t like me anymore. Girls at
school start looking at me funny. I’m shut out of the cool
circle. Fine. But then one day I’m called into the principal’s
office. Amy has had a horrible accident – twisted ankle,
fractured arm, cracked ribs. Amy has fallen down this long
set of stairs, and she says it was