Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl:

“Go ahead,” Gilpin said. “We wanted you to take a look at this.”

I opened it as gingerly as if a head might be inside. I found only a creamy blue envelope marked FIRST CLUE.

Gilpin smirked. “Imagine our confusion: A missing persons case, and here we find an envelope marked FIRST CLUE.”

“It’s for a treasure hunt that my wife—”

“Right. For your anniversary. Your father-in-law mentioned it.”

I opened the envelope, pulled out a thick sky-blue piece of paper—Amy’s signature stationery—folded once. Bile crept up my throat. These treasure hunts had always amounted to a single question: Who is Amy? (What is my wife thinking? What was important to her this past year? What moments made her happiest? Amy, Amy, Amy, let’s think about Amy.)

I read the first clue with clenched teeth. Given our marital mood the past year, it was going to make me look awful. I didn’t need anything else that made me look awful.

I picture myself as your student ,

With a teacher so handsome and wise

My mind opens up (not to mention my thighs!)

If I were your pupil, there’d be no need for flowers

Maybe just a naughty appointment during your office hours

So hurry up, get going, please do

And this time I’ll teach you a thing or two .

It was an itinerary for an alternate life. If things had gone according to my wife’s vision, yesterday she would have hovered near me as I read this poem, watching me expectantly, the hope emanating from her like a fever: Please get this. Please get me .

And she would finally say, So? And I would say:

“Oh, I actually know this! She must mean my office. At the junior college. I’m an adjunct professor there. Huh. I mean, it must be, right?” I squinted and reread. “She took it easy on me this year.”

“You want me to drive you over?” Gilpin asked.

“Nah, I’ve got Go’s car.”

“I’ll follow you then.”

“You think it’s important?”

“Well, it shows her movements the day or two before she went missing. So it’s not unimportant.” He looked at the stationery. “It’s sweet, you know? Like something out of a movie: a treasure hunt. My wife and I, we give each other a card and maybe get a bite to eat. Sounds like you guys were doing it right. Preserve the romance.”

Then Gilpin looked at his shoes, got bashful, and jingled his keys to leave.

The college had rather grandly presented me with a coffin of an office, big enough for a desk, two chairs, some shelves. Gilpin and I wended our way through the summer-school students, a combination of impossibly young kids (bored yet busy, their fingers clicking out texts or dialing up music) and earnest older people I had to assume were mall layoffs, trying to retrain for a new career.

“What do you teach?” Gilpin asked.

“Journalism, magazine journalism.” A girl texting and walking forgot the nuances of the latter and almost ran into me. She stepped to the side without glancing up. It made me feel cranky, off my lawn! old.

“I thought you didn’t do journalism anymore.”

“He who can’t do …” I smiled.

I unlocked my office, stepped into the close-smelling, dust-moted air. I’d taken the summer off; it had been weeks since I’d been here. On my desk sat another envelope, marked SECOND CLUE.

“Your key always on your key chain?” Gilpin asked.

“Yup.”

“So Amy could have borrowed that to get in?”

I tore down the side of the envelope.

“And we have a spare at home.” Amy made doubles of everything—I tended to misplace keys, credit cards, cell phones, but I didn’t want to tell Gilpin this, get another baby-of-the-family jab. “Why?”

“Oh, just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t have had to go through, I don’t know, a janitor or someone.”

“No Freddy Krueger types here, that I’ve noticed.”

“Never saw those movies,” Gilpin replied.

Inside the envelope were two folded slips of paper. One was marked with a heart; the other was labeled CLUE.

Two notes. Different. My stomach clenched. God knew what Amy was going to say. I opened the note with the heart. I wished I hadn’t let Gilpin come, and then I caught the first words.

My Darling Husband,

I figured this was the perfect place—these hallowed halls of learning!—to tell you I think you are a brilliant man. I don’t tell you enough, but I am amazed by your mind: the weird statistics and anecdotes, the strange facts, the disturbing ability to quote from any movie, the quick wit, the beautiful way you have of wording things. After years together, I think a couple can forget how wonderful they find each other. I remember when we first met, how dazzled I was by you, and so I want to take a moment to tell you I still am and it’s one of my favorite things about you: You are BRILLIANT.

My mouth watered. Gilpin was reading over my shoulder, and he actually sighed. “Sweet lady,” he said. Then he cleared his throat. “Um, hah, these yours?”

He used the eraser end of a pencil to pick up a pair of women’s underwear (technically, they were panties—stringy, lacy, red—but I know women get creeped out by that word—just Google hate the word panties). They’d been hanging off a knob on the AC unit.

“Oh, jeez. That’s embarrassing.”

Gilpin waited for an explanation.

“Uh, one time Amy and I, well, you read her note. We kinda, you know, you sometimes gotta spice things up a little.”

Gilpin grinned. “Oh I get it, randy professor and naughty student. I get it. You two really were doing it right.” I reached for the underwear, but Gilpin was already producing an evidence bag from his pocket and sliding them in. “Just a precaution,” he said inexplicably.

“Oh, please don’t,” I said. “Amy would die—” I caught myself.

“Don’t worry, Nick, it’s all protocol, my friend. You wouldn’t believe the hoops we gotta jump through. Just in case, just in case . Ridiculous. What’s the clue say?”

I let him read over my shoulder again, his jarringly fresh smell distracting me.

“So what’s that one mean?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I lied.

I finally rid myself of Gilpin, then drove aimlessly down the highway so I could make a call on my disposable. No pickup. I didn’t leave a message. I sped for a while longer, as if I could get anywhere, then I turned around and drove the forty-five minutes back toward town to meet the Elliotts at the Days Inn. I walked into a lobby packed with members of the Midwest Payroll Vendors Association—wheelie bags parked everywhere, their owners slurping complimentary drinks in small plastic cups and networking, forced guttural laughs and pockets fished for business cards. I rode up the elevator with four men, all balding and khaki’d and golf-shirted, lanyards bouncing off round married bellies.

Marybeth opened the door while talking on her cell phone; she pointed toward the TV and whispered to me, “We have a cold-cut tray if you want, sweetheart,” then went into the bathroom and closed the door, her murmurs continuing.

She emerged a few minutes later, just in time for the local five o’clock news from St. Louis, which led with Amy’s disappearance. “Perfect photo,” Marybeth murmured at the screen, where Amy peered back at us. “People will see it and really know what Amy looks like.”

I’d thought the portrait—a head shot from Amy’s brief fling with acting—beautiful but unsettling. Amy’s pictures gave a sense of her actually watching you, like an old-time haunted-house portrait, the eyes moving from left to right.

“We should get them some candid photos too,” I said. “Some everyday ones.”