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

NICK DUNNE
SIX DAYS GONE
T
he first forty-eight hours are key in any investigation. Amy
had been gone, now, almost a week. A candlelight vigil
would be held this evening in Tom Sawyer Park, which,
according to the press, was ‘a favorite place of Amy Elliott
Dunne’s.’ (I’d never known Amy to set foot in the park;
despite the name, it is not remotely quaint. Generic, bereft
of trees, with a sandbox that’s always full of animal feces; it
is utterly un-Twainy.) In the last twenty-four hours, the story
had gone national – it was everywhere, just like that.
God bless the faithful Elliotts. Marybeth phoned me last
night, as I was trying to recover from the bombshell police
interrogation. My mother-in-law had seen the 
Ellen Abbott
show and pronounced the woman ‘an opportunistic ratings
whore.’ Nevertheless, we’d spent most of today strategizing
how to handle the media.
The media (my former clan, my people!) was shaping
its story, and the media loved the 
Amazing Amy
angle and
the long-married Elliotts. No snarky commentary on the
dismantling of the series or the authors’ near-bankruptcy –
right now it was all hearts and flowers for the Elliotts. The
media loved them.
Me, not so much. The media was already turning up
items of concern
. Not only the stuff that had been leaked –

---

my lack of alibi, the possibly ‘staged’ crime scene – but
actual personality traits. They reported that back in high
school, I’d never dated one girl longer than a few months
and thus was clearly a ladies’ man. They found out we had
my father in Comfort Hill and that I rarely visited, and thus I
was an ingrate dad-abandoner. ‘It’s a problem – they don’t
like you,’ Go said after every bit of news coverage. ‘It’s a
real, real problem, Lance.’ The media had resurrected my
first name, which I’d hated since grade school, stifled at the
start of every school year when the teacher called roll: ‘It’s
Nick, I go by Nick!’ Every September, an opening-day rite:
‘Nick-I-go-by-Nick!’ Always some smart-ass kid would
spend recess parading around like a mincing gallant: ‘Hi,
I’m Laaaance,’ in a flowy-shirted voice. Then it would be
forgotten again until the following year.
But not now. Now it was all over the news, the dreaded
three-name judgment reserved for serial killers and
assassins – Lance Nicholas Dunne – and there was no one
I could interrupt.
Rand and Marybeth Elliott, Go and I carpooled to the vigil
together. It was unclear how much information the Elliotts
were receiving, how many damning updates about their
son-in-law. I knew they were aware of the ‘staged’ scene:
‘I’m going to get some of my own people in there, and
they’ll tell us just the opposite – that it clearly 
was
the scene
of a struggle,’ Rand said confidently. ‘The truth is malleable;
you just need to pick the right expert.’
Rand didn’t know about the other stuff, the credit cards
and the life insurance and the blood and Noelle, my wife’s
bitter best friend with the damning claims: abuse, greed,

---

fear. She was booked on 
Ellen Abbott
tonight, post-vigil.
Noelle and Ellen could be mutually disgusted by me for the
viewing audience.
Not everyone was repulsed by me. In the past week,
The Bar’s business was booming: Hundreds of customers
packed in to sip beers and nibble popcorn at the place
owned by Lance Nicholas Dunne, the maybe-killer. Go had
to hire four new kids to tend The Bar; she’d dropped by
once and said she couldn’t go again, couldn’t stand seeing
how packed it was, fucking gawkers, ghouls, all drinking
our booze and swapping stories about me. It was
disgusting. Still, Go reasoned, the money would be helpful if
…
If. Amy gone six days, and we were all thinking in 
if
s.
We approached the park in a car gone silent except
for Marybeth’s constant nail drumming on the window.
‘Feels almost like a double date.’ Rand laughed, the
laughter curving toward the hysterical: high-pitched and
squeaky. Rand Elliott, genius psychologist, best-selling
author, friend to all, was unraveling. Marybeth had taken to
self-medication: shots of clear liquor administered with
absolute precision, enough to take the edge off but stay
sharp. Rand, on the other hand, was literally losing his
head; I half expected to see it shoot off his shoulders on a
jack-in-the-box spring – cuckoooooo! Rand’s schmoozy
nature had turned manic: He got desperately chummy with
everyone he met, wrapping his arms around cops,
reporters, volunteers. He was particularly tight with our
Days Inn ‘liaison,’ a gawky, shy kid named Donnie who
Rand liked to razz and inform he was doing so. ‘Ah, I’m just
razzing you, Donnie,’ he’d say, and Donnie would break

---

into a joyous grin.
‘Can’t that kid go get validation somewhere else?’ I
groused to Go the other night. She said I was just jealous
that my father figure liked someone better. I was.
Marybeth patted Rand’s back as we walked toward the
park, and I thought about how much I wanted someone to
do that, just a quick touch, and I suddenly let out a gasp-
sob, one quick teary moan. I wanted someone, but I wasn’t
sure if it was Andie or Amy.
‘Nick?’ Go said. She raised a hand toward my
shoulder, but I shrugged her off.
‘Sorry. Wow, sorry for that,’ I said. ‘Weird outburst, very
un-Dunne-y.’
‘No problem. We’re both coming undone-y,’ Go said,
and looked away. Since discovering my 
situation
– which
is what we’d taken to calling my infidelity – she’d gotten a
bit removed, her eyes distant, her face a constant mull. I
was trying very hard not to resent it.
As we entered the park, the camera crews were
everywhere, not just local anymore but network. The
Dunnes and the Elliotts walked along the perimeter of the
crowd, Rand smiling and nodding like a visiting dignitary.
Boney and Gilpin appeared almost immediately, took to
our heels like friendly pointer dogs; they were becoming
familiar, furniture, which was clearly the idea. Boney was
wearing the same clothes she wore to any public event: a
sensible black skirt, a gray-striped blouse, barrettes
clipping either side of her limp hair. 
I got a girl named
Bony Moronie
… The night was steamy; under each of
Boney’s armpits was a dark smiley face of perspiration.

---

She actually grinned at me as if yesterday, the accusations
– they were accusations, weren’t they? – hadn’t happened.
The Elliotts and I filed up the steps to a rickety
makeshift stage. I looked back toward my twin and she
nodded at me and pantomimed a big breath, and I
remembered to breathe. Hundreds of faces were turned
toward us, along with clicking, flashing cameras. 
Don’t
smile
, I told myself. 
Do not smile
.
From the front of dozens of 
Find Amy
T-shirts, my wife
studied me.
Go had said I needed to make a speech (‘You need
some humanizing, fast’) so I did, I walked up to the
microphone. It was too low, mid-belly, and I wrestled with it
a few seconds, and it raised only an inch, the kind of
malfunction that would normally infuriate me, but I could no
longer be infuriated in public, so I took a breath and leaned
down and read the words that my sister had written for me:
‘My wife, Amy Dunne, has been missing for almost a week.
I cannot possibly convey the anguish our family feels, the
deep hole in our lives left by Amy’s disappearance. Amy is
the love of my life, she is the heart of her family. For those
who have yet to meet her, she is funny, and charming, and
kind. She is wise and warm. She is my helpmate and