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

PART THREE
BOY GETS GIRL BACK
(OR VICE VERSA)

---

NICK DUNNE
FORTY DAYS GONE
O
ut on bond, awaiting trial. I’d been processed and
released – the depersonalized in-and-outing of jail, the
bond hearing, the fingerprints and photos, the rotating and
the shuffling and the 
handling
, it didn’t make me feel like an
animal, it made me feel like a product, something created
on an assembly line. What they were creating was Nick
Dunne, Killer. It would be months until we’d begin my trial
(my trial: the word still threatened to undo me completely,
turn me into a high-pitched giggler, a madman). I was
supposed to feel privileged to be out on bond: I had stayed
put even when it was clear I was going to be arrested, so I
was deemed no flight risk. Boney might have put a good
word in for me, too. So I got to be in my own home for a few
more months before I was carted off to prison and killed by
the state.
Yes, I was a lucky, lucky man.
It was mid-August, which I found continually strange: 
It’s
still summer
, I’d think. 
How can so much have happened
and it’s not even autumn?
It was brutally warm. Shirtsleeve
weather, was how my mom would have described it,
forever more concerned with her children’s comfort than the
actual Fahrenheit. Shirtsleeve weather, jacket weather,
overcoat weather, parka weather – the Year in Outerwear.

---

For me this year, it would be handcuff weather, then
possibly prison-jumpsuit weather. Or funeral-suit weather,
because I didn’t plan on going to prison. I’d kill myself first.
Tanner had a team of five detectives trying to track
Amy down. So far, nothing. Like trying to catch water. Every
day for weeks, I’d done my little shitty part: videotape a
message to Amy and post it on young Rebecca’s
Whodunnit blog. (Rebecca, at least, had remained loyal.) In
the videos, I wore clothes Amy had bought me, and I
brushed my hair the way she liked, and I tried to read her
mind. My anger toward her was like heated wire.
The camera crews parked themselves on my lawn
most mornings. We were like rival soldiers, rooted in
shooting distance for months, eyeing each other across no-
man’s-land, achieving some sort of perverted fraternity.
There was one guy with a voice like a cartoon strongman
whom I’d become attached to, sight unseen. He was dating
a girl he really, really liked. Every morning his voice
boomed in through my windows as he analyzed their dates;
things seemed to be going very well. I wanted to hear how
the story ended.
I finished my evening taping to Amy. I was wearing a
green shirt she liked on me, and I’d been telling her the
story of how we first met, the party in Brooklyn, my awful
opening line, 
just one olive
, that embarrassed me every
time Amy mentioned it. I talked about our exit from the
oversteamed apartment out into the crackling cold, with her
hand in mine, the kiss in the cloud of sugar. It was one of
the few stories we told the same way. I said it all in the
cadence of a bedtime tale: soothing and familiar and
repetitive. Always ending with 
Come home to me, Amy
.

---

I turned off the camera and sat back on the couch (I
always filmed while sitting on the couch under her
pernicious, unpredictable cuckoo clock, because I knew if I
didn’t show her cuckoo clock, she’d wonder whether I had
finally gotten rid of her cuckoo clock, and then she’d stop
wondering whether I had finally gotten rid of her cuckoo
clock and simply come to believe it was true, and then no
matter what sweet words came out of my mouth, she’d
silently counter with: ‘