Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn

NICK DUNNE
SIX DAYS GONE
The 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