How It All Goes Down
Nick Dunne—Two Days Gone
- Because his house is still under the jurisdiction of the North Carthage cops, Nick crashes at the Days Inn with the Elliotts for the night. He's always been able to sleep at the drop of a hat, unlike Amy, who is (was?) a restless insomniac; tonight though, he takes on her usual role.
- The next morning, he wakes up and vows to take matters into his own hands by investigating Hilary Handy and Desi Collings, taking the Elliotts' confidence in him as a sign that he's capable of doing this.
- The Days Inn has opened up its ballroom to be the Official Find Amy Dunne Headquarters. When Nick arrives, dozens of people are milling around waiting for an opportunity to volunteer with the search. They are mostly women, except for a loner guy dressed in a suit who keeps wandering around by himself and staring at Amy's picture.
- Boney shows up and explains that they always keep on the lookout for any suspicious characters at these task forces; she also advises him to watch out for a group of forty-somethings whom she says looks a little too interested in him.
- Boney also has a surprise: Noelle Hawthorne, one of his neighbors, called the cops and said she's Amy's friend. Nick, however, has never heard of her.
- Nick runs into a lot of old friends at the volunteer center, including friends of his late mother's and his old buddy, Stucks Buckley. At one time, Stucks was an aspiring baseball player who was actually no good. After he was shockingly (to him) cut from his college baseball team, he picked up hobbies like drugs and holding down inconsistent, spotty jobs.
- In Stucks's opinion, the cops are royally screwing up Amy's case. In the suspect department, his money is on the Blue Book Boys, a gang of laid-off guys from the local paper factory who used to print blue books for college exams until the Internet took over. They now make their headquarters at the abandoned mall, where they sell drugs and assault young women.
- Nick calls Boney on the way to the afternoon search party areas and asks why the mall hasn't been investigated, but Boney says that it's on their list of things to do and encourages him to trust their efforts.
- Nick is assigned to a local park for the search, but as it happens, he doesn't get to do any searching—instead the officer in charge assigns him to be a greeter of sorts, encouraging people and handing out water bottles. Nick has a suspicion that they're doing this to keep him out of the crime scene.
- While he's manning the search party welcome station, an SUV pulls up filled with the forty-somethings Boney warned him about. One of the women, a pretty, flirty lady named Shawna, latches onto Nick and won't leave him alone, even offering to make him something called a chicken-Frito casserole for dinner. Nick, on the other hand, just wants her to go away.
- But she doesn't. She accuses the infamous Blue Book Boys of attacking Amy, talks about how women tend to not like her, delivers a soliloquy on how hard it must be living in a new town, and, as a grand finale, asks Nick to take a selfie with her. Nick is too annoyed and too much of a people pleaser to do anything other than let her press her cheek against his and take the picture.