Gone Girl

Part One: Boy Loses Girl Chapter Fifteen
NICK DUNNE

THREE DAYS GONE

The police weren't going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

'I still say it's the river,' one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. 'Right behind the guy's house, what easier way?'

'She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.'

'Not if she's been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms ... the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.'

I turned away before they noticed me.

A former teacher of mine, Mr Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, 'My granddaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so ...' We'd murmured and patted each other awkwardly.

My cell rang, the disposable  -  I couldn't figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I'd made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn't take it. I turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn't seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm's length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.

'How many hours from here is Memphis?' she asked.

'Little under five hours, driving. What's in Memphis?'

'Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy's stalker from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?'

I didn't know what to say: none?

'Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too. We can't authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago. A*shole. Guy always treats me like I'm on the verge of hysteria; he'll talk to Rand when I'm right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me. A*shole.'

'The city's broke,' I said. 'I'm sure they really don't have the budget, Marybeth.'

'Well, we do. I'm serious, Nick, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.'

'She never told me that.'

'What's it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you'd go. Please? I won't be able to stop thinking until I know someone's talked to her.'

I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn't cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a grand scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to rape and kill her.

I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife's fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.

'Of course I'll go. And I'll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the way. Consider it done.' I turned around, started my dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.

'Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,' he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke: Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you ...

'Yeah. Nothing.'

'Yesterday. They went yesterday, the jackasses.' He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they'd overheard him. He leaned closer to me. 'You go at night, that's when they're there. Daytime, they're down by the river, or out flying a flag.'

'Flying a flag?'

'You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs: Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money, whatever,' he said, scanning the room. 'Flying a flag, man.'

'Okay.'

'At night they're at the mall,' he said.

'Then let's go tonight,' I said. 'You and me and whoever.'

'Joe and Mikey Hillsam,' Stucks said. 'They'd be up for it.' The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.

'Good,' I said. 'Tonight we go.'

My phone rang in my pocket. The thing didn't turn off right. It rang again.

'You gonna get that?' Stucks asked.

'Nah.'

'You should answer every call, man. You really should.'

There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.

'Anyone hear from the detectives?' Rand asked.

'Nothing,' Marybeth and I both answered.

'That may be good, right?' Rand asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.

'When are you leaving for Memphis?' she asked me.

'Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don't think it was done right yesterday.'

'Excellent,' Marybeth said. 'That's the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn't done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just  -  I'm just not that impressed with what's been done so far.'

Rand put a hand on his wife's shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.

'I'd like to come with you, Nick,' he said. 'Tonight. I'd like to come.' Rand was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine  -  hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours?  -  and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.

'Of course, Rand. Of course.'

I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me  -  having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume  -  so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling grandmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.

'I'm just driving Mr Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,' she said to one of her friends. 'No more than half an hour.'

Gilpin had not taken Amy's second note into evidence; he'd been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife's second clue:

Picture me: I'm crazy about you

My future is anything but hazy with you

You took me here so I could hear you chat

About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat

Screw everyone else, for us they're all ditched

And let's sneak a kiss ... pretend we just got hitched.

It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I'd worked summers growing up, where I'd wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say: Oh yeah, me too.

The 'visor hat' comment was a little inside joke: When I'd first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she'd been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, 'Oh, I meant a straw hat!' As if those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, any time we watched tennis, we always complimented the players' sporty straw hats.

Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don't remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, 'That's interesting,' while the other one agreed, 'That is.' I'd been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up  -  because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn't really feel as good as you think, but you can't quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.

It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.

I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses  -  ruined community banks and defunct movie houses  -  toward the river. I parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the Mark Twain riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores  -  quilts and antiques and taffy  -  I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher's house was closed for renovations, to be paid with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer's whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.

I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I'd applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant. Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan. Amazing Amy was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.

The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too. You are BRILLIANT. In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.

I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn House but didn't bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain  -  white hair, white suit  -  got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that had been the courtroom of Samuel Clemens's dad. The sign out front read: J. M. Clemens, Justice of the Peace.

Let's sneak a kiss ... pretend we just got hitched.

You're making these so nice and easy, Amy. As if you actually want me to find them, to feel good about myself. Keep this up and I'll break my record.

No one was inside. I got down on my knees on the dusty floorboards and peered under the first bench. If Amy left a clue in a public place, she always taped it to the underside of things, in between the wadded gum and the dust, and she was always vindicated, because no one likes to look at the underside of things. There was nothing under the first bench, but there was a flap of paper hanging down from the bench behind. I climbed over and tugged down the Amy-blue envelope, a piece of tape winging off it.

Hi Darling Husband,

You found it! Brilliant man. It may help that I decided to not make this year's treasure hunt an excruciating forced march through my arcane personal memories.

I took a cue from your beloved Mark Twain: 'What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.'

I finally get it, what you've said year after year, that this treasure hunt should be a time to celebrate us, not a test about whether you remember everything I think or say throughout the year. You'd think that would be something a grown woman would realize on her own, but ... I guess that's what husbands are for. To point out what we can't see for ourselves, even if it takes five years.

So I wanted to take a moment now, in the childhood stomping grounds of Mark Twain, and thank you for your WIT. You are truly the cleverest, funniest person I know. I have a wonderful sense memory: of all the times over the years you've leaned in to my ear  -  I can feel your breath tickling my lobe, right now, as I'm writing this  -  and whispered something just to me, just to make me laugh. What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh. And you always picked the best moments. Do you remember when Insley and her dancing-monkey husband made us come over to admire their baby, and we did the obligatory visit to their strangely perfect, overflowered, overmuffined house for brunch and baby-meeting and they were so self-righteous and patronizing of our childless state, and meanwhile there was their hideous boy, covered in streaks of slobber and stewed carrots and maybe some feces  -  naked except for a frilly bib and a pair of knitted booties  -  and as I sipped my orange juice, you leaned over and whispered, 'That's what I'll be wearing later.' And I literally did a spit take. It was one of those moments where you saved me, you made me laugh at just the right time. Just one olive, though. So let me say it again: You are WITTY. Now kiss me!

I felt my soul deflate. Amy was using the treasure hunt to steer us back to each other. And it was too late. While she had been writing these clues, she'd had no idea of my state of mind. Why, Amy, couldn't you have done this sooner?

Our timing had never been good.

I opened the next clue, read it, tucked it in my pocket, then headed back home. I knew where to go, but I wasn't ready yet. I couldn't handle another compliment, another kind word from my wife, another olive branch. My feelings for her were veering too quickly from bitter to sweet.

I went back to Go's, spent a few hours alone, drinking coffee and flipping around the TV, anxious and pissy, killing time till my eleven p.m. carpool to the mall. My twin got home just after seven, looking wilted from her solo bar shift. Her glance at the TV told me I should turn it off. 'What'd you do today?' she asked, lighting a cigarette and flopping down at our mother's old card table.

'Manned the volunteer center ... then we go search the mall at eleven,' I said. I didn't want to tell her about Amy's clue. I felt guilty enough.

Go doled out some solitaire cards, the steady slap of them on the table a rebuke. I began pacing. She ignored me.

'I was just watching TV to distract myself.'

'I know, I do.'

She flipped over a Jack.

'There's got to be something I can do,' I said, stalking around her living room.

'Well, you're searching the mall in a few hours,' Go said, and gave no more encouragement. She flipped over three cards.

'You sound like you think it's a waste of time.'

'Oh. No. Hey, everything is worth checking out. They got Son of Sam on a parking ticket, right?'

Go was the third person who'd mentioned this to me; it must be the mantra for cases going cold. I sat down across from her.

'I haven't been upset enough about Amy,' I said. 'I know that.'

'Maybe not.' She finally looked up at me. 'You're being weird.'

'I think that instead of panicking, I've just focused on being pissed at her. Because we were in such a bad place lately. It's like it feels wrong for me to worry too much because I don't have the right. I guess.'

'You've been weird, I can't lie,' Go said. 'But it's a weird situation.' She stubbed out her cigarette. 'I don't care how you are with me. Just be careful with everyone else, okay? People judge. Fast.'

She went back to her solitaire, but I wanted her attention. I kept talking.

'I should probably check in on Dad at some point,' I said. 'I don't know if I'll tell him about Amy.'

'No,' she said. 'Don't. He was even weirder about Amy than you are.'

'I always felt like she must remind him of an old girlfriend or something  -  the one who got away. After he - 'I made the downward swoop of a hand that signified his Alzheimer's  -  'he was kind of rude and awful, but ...'

'Yeah, but he kind of wanted to impress her at the same time,' she said. 'Your basic jerky twelve-year-old boy trapped in a sixty-eight-year-old a*shole's body.'

'Don't women think that all men are jerky twelve-year-olds at heart?'

'Hey, if the heart fits.'

Eleven-oh-eight p.m., Rand was waiting for us just inside the automatic sliding doors to the hotel, his face squinting into the dark to make us out. The Hillsams were driving their pick-up; Stucks and I both rode in the bed. Rand came trotting up to us in khaki golf shorts and a crisp Middlebury T-shirt. He hopped in the back, planted himself on the wheel cover with surprising ease, and handled the introductions like he was the host of his own mobile talk show.

'I'm really sorry about Amy, Rand,' Stucks said loudly, as we hurtled out of the parking lot with unnecessary speed and hit the highway. 'She's such a sweet person. One time she saw me out painting a house, sweating my ba  -  my butt off, and she drove on to 7-Eleven, got me a giant pop, and brought it back to me, right up on the ladder.'

This was a lie. Amy cared so little for Stucks or his refreshment that she wouldn't have bothered to piss in a cup for him.

'That sounds like her,' Rand said, and I was flush with unwelcome, ungentlemanly annoyance. Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn't get to turn Amy into everyone's beloved best friend just because it was emotionally expedient.

'Middlebury, huh?' Stucks continued, pointing at Rand's T-shirt. 'Got a hell of a rugby team.'

'That's right we do,' Rand said, the big smile again, and he and Stucks began an improbable discussion of liberal-arts rugby over the noise of the car, the air, the night, all the way to the mall.

Joe Hillsam parked his truck outside the giant cornerstone Mervyns. We all hopped out, stretched our legs, shook ourselves awake. The night was muggy and moon-slivered. I noticed Stucks was wearing  -  maybe ironically, possibly not  -  a T-shirt that read Save Gas, Fart in a Jar.

'So, this place, what we're doing, it's freakin' dangerous, I don't want to lie,' Mikey Hillsam began. He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother; they weren't just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.

'We came here once, me and Mikey, just for  -  I don't know, to see it, I guess, see what it had become, and we almost got our asses handed to us,' said Joe. 'So tonight we take no chances.' He reached into the cab for a long canvas bag and unzipped it to reveal half a dozen baseball bats. He began handing them out solemnly. When he got to Rand, he hesitated. 'Uh, you want one?'

'Hell yes, I do,' Rand said, and they all nodded and smiled approval, the energy in the circle a friendly backslap, a good for you old man.

'Come on,' Mike said, and led us along the exterior. 'There's a door with a lock smashed off down here near the Spencer's.'

Just then we passed the dark windows of Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, where my mom had worked for more than half my life. I still remember the thrill of her going to apply for a job at that most wondrous of places  -  the mall!  -  leaving one Saturday morning for the job fair in her bright peach pantsuit, a forty-year-old woman looking for work for the first time, and her coming home with a flushed grin: We couldn't imagine how busy the mall was, so many different kinds of stores! And who knew which one she might work in? She applied to nine! Clothing stores and stereo stores and even a designer popcorn store. When she announced a week later that she was officially a shoe saleslady, her kids were underwhelmed.

'You'll have to touch all sorts of stinky feet,' Go complained.

'I'll get to meet all sorts of interesting people,' our mom corrected.

I peered into the gloomy window. The place was entirely vacant except for a shoe sizer lined pointlessly against the wall.

'My mom used to work here,' I told Rand, forcing him to linger with me.

'What kind of place was it?'

'It was a nice place, they were good to her.'

'I mean what did they do here?'

'Oh, shoes. They did shoes.'

'That's right! Shoes. I like that. Something people actually need. And at the end of the day, you know what you've done: You've sold five people shoes. Not like writing, huh?'

'Dunne, come on!' Stucks was leaning against the open door ahead; the others had gone inside.

I'd expected the mall smell as we entered: that temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women's bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.

The whole mall was quiet; Mikey's voice echoed, our footsteps echoed, Stucks' drunken giggle echoed. We would not be a surprise attack, if attack was what we had in mind.

When we reached the central promenade of the mall, the whole area ballooned: four stories high, escalators and elevators crisscrossing in the black. We all gathered near a dried-up fountain and waited for someone to take the lead.

'So, guys,' Rand said doubtfully, 'what's the plan here? You all know this place, and I don't. We need to figure out how to systematically - '

We heard a loud metal rattle right behind us, a security gate going up.

'Hey, there's one!' Stucks yelled. He trained his flashlight on a man in a billowing rain slicker, shooting out from the entry of Claire's, running full speed away from us.

'Stop him!' Joe yelled, and began running after him, thick tennis shoes slapping against the ceramic tile floors, Mikey right behind him, flashlight trained on the stranger, the two brothers calling gruffly  -  hold up there, hey, guy, we just have a question. The man didn't even give a backward glance. I said hold on, motherf*cker! The runner remained silent amid the yelling, but he picked up speed and shot down the mall corridor, in and out of the flashlight's glow, his slicker flapping behind him like a cape. Then the guy turned acrobatic: leaping over a trash can, shimmying off the edge of a fountain, and finally slipping under a metal security gate to the Gap and disappearing.

'F*cker!' The Hillsams had turned heart-attack red in the face, the neck, the fingers. They took turns grunting at the gate, straining to lift it.

I reached down with them, but there was no budging it over half a foot. I lay down on the floor and tried threading myself under the gate: toes, calves, then stuck at my waist.

'Nope, no go.' I grunted. 'F*ck!' I pulled up and shone my flashlight into the store. The showroom was empty except for a pile of clothing racks someone had dragged to the center, as if to start a bonfire. 'All the stores connect in the back to passageways for trash, plumbing,' I said. 'He's probably at the other end of the mall by now.'

'Come out, you f*ckers!' Joe yelled, his head tilted back, eyes scrunched. His voice echoed through the building. We began walking ragtag, trailing our bats alongside us, except for the Hillsams, who used theirs to bang against security gates and doors, like they were on military patrol in a particularly nasty war zone.

'Better you come to us than we come to you!' Mikey called. 'Oh, hello!' In the entryway to a pet shop, a man and woman huddled on a few army blankets, their hair wet with sweat. Mikey loomed over them, breathing heavily, wiping his brow. It was the scene in the war movie when the frustrated soldiers come across innocent villagers and bad things happen.

'The f*ck you want?' the man on the floor asked. He was emaciated, his face so thin and drawn it looked like it was melting. His hair was tangled to his shoulders, his eyes mournful and upturned: a despoiled Jesus. The woman was in better shape, with clean, plump arms and legs, her lank hair oily but brushed.

'You a Blue Book Boy?' Stucks asked.

'Ain't no boy, anyhow,' the man muttered, folding his arms.

'Have some f*cking respect,' the woman snapped. Then she looked like she might cry. She turned away from us, pretending to look at something in the distance. 'I'm sick of no one having no respect.'

'We asked you a question, buddy,' Mikey said, moving closer to the guy, kicking the sole of his foot.

'I ain't Blue Book,' the man said. 'Just down on my luck.'

'Bullshit.'

'Lots of different people here, not just Blue Books. But if that's who you're looking for ...'

'Go on, go on, then, and find them,' the woman said, her mouth turning down. 'Go bother them.'

'They deal down in the Hole,' the man said. When we looked blank, he pointed. 'The Mervyns, far end, past where the carousel used to be.'

'And f*ck you very much,' the woman muttered.

A crop-circle stain marked where the carousel once was. Amy and I had taken a ride just before the mall shut down. Two grown-ups, side by side on levitating bunny rabbits, because my wife wanted to see the mall where I spent so much of my childhood. Wanted to hear my stories. It wasn't all bad with us.

The barrier gate to the Mervyns had been busted through, so the store was open as wide and welcoming as the morning of a Presidents' Day sale. Inside, the place was cleared out except for the islands that once held cash registers and now held about a dozen people in various states of drug highs, under signs that read Jewelry and Beauty and Bedding. They were illuminated by gas camping lamps that flickered like tiki torches. A few guys barely opened an eye as we passed, others were out cold. In a far corner, two kids not long out of their teens were manically reciting the Gettysburg Address. Now we are engaged in a great civil war ... One man sprawled out on the rug in immaculate jean shorts and white tennis shoes, like he was on the way to his kid's T-ball game. Rand stared at him as if he might know the guy.

Carthage had a bigger drug epidemic than I ever knew: The cops had been here just yesterday, and already the druggies had resettled, like determined flies. As we made our way through the piles of humans, an obese woman shushed up to us on an electric scooter. Her face was pimply and wet with sweat, her teeth catlike.

'You buying or leaving, because this ain't a show-and-tell,' she said.

Stucks shone a flashlight on her face.

'Get that f*cking thing off me.' He did.

'I'm looking for my wife,' I began. 'Amy Dunne. She's been missing since Thursday.'

'She'll show up. She'll wake up, drag herself home.'

'We're not worried about drugs,' I said, 'we're more concerned about some of the men here. We've heard rumors.'

'It's okay, Melanie,' a voice called. At the edge of the juniors section, a rangy man leaned against a naked mannequin torso, watching us, a sideways grin on his face.

Melanie shrugged, bored, annoyed, and motored away.

The man kept his eyes on us but called toward the back of the juniors section, where four sets of feet poked out from the dressing rooms, men camped out in their individual cubicles.

'Hey, Lonnie! Hey, all! The a*sholes are back. Five of 'em,' the man said. He kicked an empty beer can toward us. Behind him, three sets of feet began moving, men pulling themselves up. One set remained still, their owner asleep or passed out.

'Yeah, f*ckos, we're back,' Mikey Hillsam said. He held his bat like a pool cue and punched the mannequin torso between the breasts. She tottered toward the ground, the Blue Book guy removing his arm gracefully as she fell, as if it were all part of a rehearsed act. 'We want some information on a missing girl.'

The three men from the dressing rooms joined their friends. They all wore Greek-party T-shirts: Pi Phi Tie-Dye and Fiji Island. Local Goodwills got inundated with these come summer  -  university graduates shedding their old souvenirs.

The men were all wiry-strong, muscular arms rivered with popping blue veins. Behind them, a guy with a long, drooping mustache and hair in a ponytail  -  Lonnie  -  came out of the largest corner dressing room, dragging a long length of pipe, wearing a Gamma Phi T-shirt. We were looking at mall security.

'What's up?' Lonnie called.

We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground ... the kids were reciting in a pitch that was close to screaming.

'We're looking for Amy Dunne, you probably seen her on the news, missing since Thursday,' Joe Hillsam said. 'Nice, pretty, sweet lady, stolen from her own home.'

'I heard about it. So?' said Lonnie.

'She's my wife,' I said.

'We know what you guys've been getting into out here,' Joe continued, addressing only Lonnie, who was tossing his ponytail behind him, squaring his jaw. Faded green tattoos covered his fingers. 'We know about the gang rape.'

I glanced at Rand to see if he was all right; he was staring at the naked mannequin on the floor.

'Gang rape,' Lonnie said, jerking his head back. 'The f*ck you talking about a gang rape.'

'You guys,' Joe said. 'You Blue Book Boys - '

'Blue Book Boys, like we're some kind of crew.' Lonnie sniffed. 'We're not animals, a*shole. We don't steal women. People want to feel okay for not helping us. See, they don't deserve it, they're a bunch of rapists. Well, bullshit. I'd get the f*ck out of this town if the plant would give me my back pay. But I got nothing. None of us got nothing. So here we are.'

'We'll give you money, good money, if you can tell us anything about Amy's disappearance,' I said. 'You guys know a lot of people, maybe you heard something.'

I pulled out her photo. The Hillsams and Stucks looked surprised, and I realized  -  of course  -  this was only a macho diversion for them. I pushed the photo in Lonnie's face, expecting him to barely glance. Instead, he leaned in closer.

'Oh, shit,' he said. 'Her?'

'You recognise her?'

He actually looked stricken. 'She wanted to buy a gun.'