lashbulbs exploded, and I dropped the smile, but not soon enough. I felt a wave of heat roll up my neck, and beads of sweat broke out on my nose. Stupid, Nick, stupid. And then, just as I was pulling myself together, the press conference was over, and it was too late to make any other impression.

I walked out with the Elliotts, my head ducked low as more flashbulbs popped. I was almost to the exit when Gilpin trotted across the room toward me, flagging me down: ‘Canna grab a minute, Nick?’

He updated me as we headed toward a back office: ‘We checked out that house in your neighborhood that was broken into, looks like people camped out there, so we’ve got lab there. And we found another house on the edge of your complex, had some squatters.’

‘I mean, that’s what worries me,’ I said. ‘Guys are camped out everywhere. This whole town is overrun with pissed-off, unemployed people.’

Carthage was, until a year ago, a company town and that company was the sprawling Riverway Mall, a tiny city unto itself that once employed four thousand locals – one fifth the population. It was built in 1985, a destination mall meant to attract shoppers from all over the Middle West. I still remember the opening day: me and Go, Mom and Dad, watching the festivities from the very back of the crowd in the vast tarred parking lot, because our father always wanted to be able to leave quickly, from anywhere. Even at baseball games, we parked by the exit and left at the eighth inning, me and Go a predictable set of mustard-smeared whines, petulant and sun-fevered: We never get to see the end. But this time our faraway vantage was desirable, because we got to take in the full scope of the Event: the impatient crowd, leaning collectively from one foot to another; the mayor atop a red-white-and-blue dais; the booming words – pride, growth, prosperity, success – rolling over us, soldiers on the battlefield of consumerism, armed with vinyl-covered checkbooks and quilted handbags. And the doors opening. And the rush into the air-conditioning, the Muzak, the smiling salespeople who were our neighbors. My father actually let us go inside that day, actually waited in line and bought us something that day: sweaty paper cups brimming with Orange Julius.

For a quarter century, the Riverway Mall was a given. Then the recession hit, washed away the Riverway store by store until the whole mall finally went bust. It is now two million square feet of echo. No company came to claim it, no businessman promised a resurrection, no one knew what to do with it or what would become of all the people who’d worked there, including my mother, who lost her job at Shoe-Be-Doo-Be – two decades of kneeling and kneading, of sorting boxes and collecting moist foot hosiery, gone without ceremony.

The downfall of the mall basically bankrupted Carthage. People lost their jobs, they lost their houses. No one could see anything good coming anytime soon. We never get to see the end. Except it looked like this time Go and I would. We all would.

The bankruptcy matched my psyche perfectly. For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

Gilpin opened the door to the same room where they’d questioned me the night before. In the center of the table sat Amy’s silvery gift box.

I stood staring at the box sitting in the middle of the table, so ominous in this new setting. A sense of dread descended on me. Why hadn’t I found it before? I should have found it.

‘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 ofeverything – 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, and then drove the 45 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.’

The Elliotts nodded in tandem but said nothing, watching. When the spot was done, Rand broke the silence: ‘I feel sick.’

‘I know,’ Marybeth said.

‘How are you holding up, Nick?’ Rand asked, hunched over, hands on both knees, as if he were preparing to get up from the sofa but couldn’t quite do it.

‘I’m a goddamn mess, to tell the truth. I feel so useless.’

‘You know, I gotta ask, what about your employees, Nick?’ Rand finally stood. He went to the minibar, poured himself a ginger ale, then turned to me and Marybeth. ‘Anyone? Something? Anything?’ I shook my head; Marybeth asked for a club soda.

‘Want some gin with it too, babe?’ Rand asked, his deep voice going high on the final word.

‘Sure. Yes. I do.’ Marybeth closed her eyes, bent in half, and brought her face between her knees; then she took a deep breath and sat back up in her exact previous position, as if it were all a yoga exercise.

‘I gave them lists of everyone,’ I said. ‘But it’s a pretty tame business, Rand. I just don’t think that’s the place to look.’

Rand put a hand across his mouth and rubbed upward, the flesh of his cheeks bunching up around his eyes. ‘Of course, we’re doing the same with our business, Nick.’

Rand and Marybeth always referred to the Amazing Amy series as a business, which on the surface never failed to strike me as silly: They are children’s books, about a perfect little girl who’s pictured on every book cover, a cartoonish version of my own Amy. But of course they are (were) a business, big business. They were elementary-school staples for the better part of two decades, largely because of the quizzes at the end of every chapter.

In third grade, for instance, Amazing Amy caught her friend Brian overfeeding the class turtle. She tried to reason with him, but when Brian persisted in the extra helpings, Amy had no choice but to narc on him to her teacher: ‘Mrs Tibbles, I don’t want to be a tattletale, but I’m not sure what to do. I’ve tried talking to Brian myself, but now … I guess I might need help from a grown-up …’ The fallout:

1) Brian told Amy she was an untrustworthy friend and stopped talking to her.

2) Her timid pal Suzy said Amy shouldn’t have told; she should have secretly fished out the food without Brian knowing.

3) Amy’s archrival, Joanna, said Amy was jealous and just wanted to feed the turtle herself.

4) Amy refused to back down – she felt she did the proper thing.

Who is right?!

Well, that’s easy, because Amy is always right, in every story. (Don’t think I haven’t brought this up in my arguments with my real Amy, because I have, more than once.)

The quizzes – written by two psychologists, who are also parents like you! – were supposed to tease out a child’s personality traits: Is your wee one a sulker who can’t stand to be corrected, like Brian? A spineless enabler, like Suzy? A pot-stirrer, like Joanna? Or perfect, like Amy? The books became extremely trendy among the rising yuppie class: They were the Pet Rock of parenting. The Rubik’s Cube of child rearing. The Elliotts got rich. At one point it was estimated that every school library in America had an Amazing Amy book.

‘Do you have worries that this might link back to the Amazing Amy business?’ I asked.

‘We do have a few people we thought might be worth checking out,’ Rand began.

I coughed out a laugh. ‘Do you think Judith Viorst kidnapped Amy for Alexander so he wouldn’t have any more Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days?’

Rand and Marybeth turned matching surprised-disappointed faces toward me. It was a gross, tasteless thing to say – my brain had been burping up such inappropriate thoughts at inopportune moments. Mental gas I couldn’t control. Like, I’d started internally singing the lyrics to ‘Bony Moronie’ whenever I saw my cop friend. She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni, my brain would bebop as Detective Rhonda Boney was telling me about dragging the river for my missing wife. Defense mechanism, I told myself, just a weird defense mechanism. I’d like it to stop.

I rearranged my leg delicately, spoke delicately, as if my words were an unwieldy stack of fine china. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.’

‘We’re all tired,’ Rand offered.

‘We’ll have the cops round up Viorst,’ Marybeth tried. ‘And that bitch Beverly Cleary too.’ It was less a joke than a pardon.

‘I guess I should tell you,’ I said. ‘The cops, it’s normal in this kind of case—’

‘To look at the husband first, I know,’ Rand interrupted. ‘I told them they’re wasting their time. The questions they asked us—’

‘They were offensive,’ Marybeth finished.

‘So they have spoken with you? About me?’ I moved over to the minibar, casually poured a gin. I swallowed three belts in a row and felt immediately worse. My stomach was working its way up my esophagus. ‘What kind of stuff did they ask?’

‘Have you ever hurt Amy, has Amy ever mentioned you threatening her?’ Marybeth ticked off. ‘Are you a womanizer, has Amy ever mentioned you cheating on her? Because that sounds like Amy, right? I told them we didn’t raise a doormat.’

Rand put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Nick, what we should have said, first of all, is: We know you would never, ever hurt Amy. I even told the police, told them the story about you saving the mouse at the beach house, saving it from the glue trap.’ He looked over at Marybeth as if she didn’t know the story, and Marybeth obliged with her rapt attention. ‘Spent an hour trying to corner the damn thing, and then literally drove the little rat bastard out of town. Does that sound like a guy who would hurt his wife?’

I felt a burst of intense guilt, self-loathing. I thought for a second I might cry, finally.

‘We love you, Nick,’ Rand said, giving me a final squeeze.

‘We do, Nick,’ Marybeth echoed. ‘You’re our son. We are so incredibly sorry that on top of Amy being gone, you have to deal with this – cloud of suspicion.’

I didn’t like the phrase cloud of suspicion. I much preferred routine investigation or a mere formality.

‘They did wonder about your restaurant reservations that night,’ Marybeth said, an overly casual glance.

‘My reservations?’

‘They said you told them you had reservations at Houston’s, but they checked it out, and there were no reservations. They seemed really interested in that.’

I had no reservation, and I had no gift. Because if I planned on killing Amy that day, I wouldn’t have needed reservations for that night or a gift I’d never need to give her. The hallmarks of an extremely pragmatic killer.

I am pragmatic to a fault – my friends could certainly tell the police that.

‘Uh, no. No, I never made reservations. They must have misunderstood me. I’ll let them know.’

I collapsed on the couch across from Marybeth. I didn’t want Rand to touch me again.

‘Oh, okay. Good,’ Marybeth said. ‘Did she, uh, did you get a treasure hunt this year?’ Her eyes turned red again. ‘Before …’

‘Yeah, they gave me the first clue today. Gilpin and I found the second one in my office at the college. I’m still trying to figure it out.’

‘Can we take a look?’ my mother-in-law asked.

‘I don’t have it with me,’ I lied.

‘Will you … will you try to solve it, Nick?’ Marybeth asked.

‘I will, Marybeth. I’ll solve it.’

‘I just hate the idea of things she touched, left out there, all alone—’

My phone rang, the disposable, and I flicked a glance at the display, then shut it off. I needed to get rid of the thing, but I couldn’t yet.

‘You should pick up every call, Nick,’ Marybeth said.

‘I recognized this one – just my college alum fund looking for money.’

Rand sat beside me on the couch. The ancient, much abused cushions sank severely under our weight, so we ended up pushed toward each other, arms touching, which was fine with Rand. He was one of those guys who’d pronounce I’m a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.

Marybeth returned to business: ‘We do think it’s possible an Amy obsessive took her.’ She turned to me, as if pleading a case. ‘We’ve had ’em over the years.’

Amy had been fond of recollecting stories of men obsessed with her. She described the stalkers in hushed tones over glasses of wine at various periods during our marriage – men who were still out there, always thinking about her and wanting her. I suspected these stories were inflated: The men always came off as dangerous to a very precise degree – enough for me to worry about but not enough to require us to involve the police. In short, a play world where I could be Amy’s chest-puffed hero, defending her honor. Amy was too independent, too modern, to be able to admit the truth: She wanted to play damsel.

‘Lately?’

‘Not lately, no,’ Marybeth said, chewing her lip. ‘But there was a very disturbed girl back in high school.’

‘Disturbed how?’

‘She was obsessed with Amy. Well, with Amazing Amy. Her name was Hilary Handy – she modeled herself after Amy’s best friend in the books, Suzy. At first it was cute, I guess. And then it was like that wasn’t good enough anymore – she wanted to be Amazing Amy, not Suzy the sidekick. So she began imitating our Amy. She dressed like Amy, she colored her hair blond, she’d linger outside our house in New York. One time I was walking down the street and she came running up to me, this strange girl, and she looped her arm through mine and said, “I’m going to be your daughter now. I’m going to kill Amy and be your new Amy. Because it doesn’t really matter to you, does it? As long as you have an Amy.” Like our daughter was a piece of fiction she could rewrite.’

‘We finally got a restraining order because she threw Amy down a flight of stairs at school,’ Rand said. ‘Very disturbed girl. That kind of mentality doesn’t go away.’

‘And then Desi,’ Marybeth said.

‘And Desi,’ Rand said.

Even I knew about Desi. Amy had attended a Massachusetts boarding school called Wickshire Academy – I had seen the photos, Amy in lacrosse skirts and headbands, always with autumn colors in the background, as if the school were based not in a town but in a month. October. Desi Collings attended the boys’ boarding school that was paired with Wickshire. In Amy’s stories, he was a pale, Romantic figure, and their courtship had been of the boarding-school variety: chilly football games and overheated dances, lilac corsages and rides in a vintage Jaguar. Everything a little bit mid-century.

Amy dated Desi, quite seriously, for a year. But she began to find him alarming: He talked as if they were engaged, he knew the number and gender of their children. They were going to have four kids, all boys. Which sounded suspiciously like Desi’s own family, and when he brought his mother down to meet her, Amy grew queasy at the striking resemblance between herself and Mrs Collings. The older woman had kissed her cheek coldly and murmured calmly in her ear, ‘Good luck.’ Amy couldn’t tell if it was a warning or a threat.

After Amy cut it off with Desi, he still lingered around the Wickshire campus, a ghostly figure in dark blazers, leaning against wintry, leafless oak trees. Amy returned from a dance one February night to find him lying on her bed, naked, on top of the covers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose. Desi left school shortly after.

But he still phoned her, even now, and several times a year sent her thick, padded envelopes that Amy tossed unopened after showing them to me. They were postmarked St. Louis. Forty minutes away. ‘It’s just a horrible, miserable coincidence,’ she’d told me. Desi had the St. Louis family connections on his mother’s side. This much she knew but didn’t care to know more. I’d picked through the trash to retrieve one, read the letter, sticky with alfredo sauce, and it had been utterly banal: talk of tennis and travel and other things preppy. Spaniels. I tried to picture this slender dandy, a fellow in bow ties and tortoiseshell glasses, busting into our house and grabbing Amy with soft, manicured fingers. Tossing her in the trunk of his vintage roadster and taking her … antiquing in Vermont. Desi. Could anyone believe it was Desi?

‘Desi lives not far away, actually,’ I said. ‘St. Louis.’

‘Now, see?’ Rand said. ‘Why are the cops not all over this?’

‘Someone needs to be,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. After the search here tomorrow.’

‘The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home,’ Marybeth said. She kept her eyes on me one beat too long, then shivered, as if shaking off a thought.