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  “What makes him think so?” Ben is fascinated by Duffy’s methodology, even though he has, theoretically, seen it more often than I have.

  “Which part?”

  “Both.” Ben took a sip of beer from the bottle, which is the way to drink beer. I took a sip of wine from a wineglass, which is the way to drink wine. We were doing everything the way we were supposed to.

  “He says someone was living there because there is the proper amount of wear on the furniture and the rugs. He says you can’t fake that; either something’s been used or it hasn’t. And he says even with the obvious cleaning service that comes through periodically, things like light switches and doorknobs show signs of repeated use. Someone at least was living there, and might still be, he thinks. But the doorman said no, there hasn’t been anybody in that apartment in years.” Even chewing pizza was feeling like too much effort. Oddly, drinking wine was not. I concentrated on that.

  “What about the other part, that it was never Damien Mosley’s wife?” Ben asked.

  “I thought you weren’t involved in this case,” I reminded him.

  “I’m not. It’s professional curiosity. Besides, this falls under the ‘how was your day, honey?’ category.” His eyes showed a twinkle of humor. We had not reached the “honey” stage in any form, and Ben knew it.

  “Okay, so Duffy says it wasn’t Michelle—and we don’t know who Michelle actually is, whether they were married or what her original name might be because Duffy hasn’t found the records yet—because there is no personalization at all. No photographs. No cosmetics. No idiosyncrasies.”

  “Couldn’t she just be someone who doesn’t go in for any of that stuff?” Ben asked. He wasn’t comfortable enough in my house to put his foot up on the chair next to him, which I appreciated, but he did seem to blend into the setting well.

  “I can see no pictures and no tchotchkes,” I said, “but no cosmetics? For a woman in the twenty-first century? That’s really unlikely. Besides, Duffy said the second bedroom did show some personality, but it was male. Maybe Damien himself.”

  “No cosmetics can just be because of the time gone by,” Ben suggested. “Someone might have come through the place even a year after whatever happened and cleaned out the personal stuff.”

  “And left clothing and furniture? A flat-screen TV? A working refrigerator? It’s like somebody wanted people to think they’d come through and selectively cleaned it out.” I am perfectly comfortable in my own house so I did in fact put my feet up on the chair next to me. I wasn’t wearing shoes anyway. And everything about this whole situation from the first minute had simply made me tired.

  “It doesn’t make much sense. Do you want me to see what I can do with this?” Ben put his hand on mine, and it didn’t even feel like a false gesture. “I know Duffy wants me to, but he won’t ask because he’s a stickler for procedure.”

  I thought about it, but then I shook my head. “No. Duffy’s right. The last thing you should be doing is sticking your nose in while you’re trying to decide whether to tell your boss that Duffy is a dangerous lunatic. How’s that going, by the way?”

  Ben half-closed his eyes like he just wanted things to go away. Not me, necessarily, but things. “Not great,” he said. “A woman called in with a missing person complaint on her husband, and the only reason the Wallington cops aren’t looking into it is that it hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet since she last saw him. If it gets to eleven tomorrow morning and the guy doesn’t come ambling into the house smelling of beer or perfume, we’ll get a call, and Petrosky will want me to call Duffy. Then I’ll have to decide.”

  That could be bad. “Which way are you leaning?” I asked.

  But Ben didn’t answer. He stood up and walked into the kitchen to get another beer. This was going to be something of a problem since I’d given him the last bottle I’d had in the fridge. I don’t drink beer that much and until this afternoon hadn’t considered inviting him here for dinner.

  “There’s no more in there,” I warned him. “You want some wine?”

  He came back in carrying a glass of water. “I’m driving,” he said. “Unless you want me to stay.”

  Well, there it was. What kind of relationship were Ben and I going to have, and how fast was it going to move? He was an attractive man, and I liked him, certainly. But when I’d been in distress, it was Duffy and not Ben who had come through for me, and I hadn’t forgotten that. On the other hand, I might have been rating Ben a little too harshly, and I definitely didn’t want Duffy asking if he was going to spend the night.

  I punted. “Maybe not tonight,” I said. That held the option open that another night would be different, didn’t it?

  Ben didn’t look disappointed, and I wasn’t sure how to read that. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t have to leave now, do I?”

  I shook my head. He sat back down next to me, reached over, and kissed me, just like that. And I was glad he did. We kept that up for an undisclosed period of time (because I’m not disclosing it) and eventually came up for air. “Living room?” I asked.

  “Lead the way.” As if he didn’t know where it was.

  We settled into the nice soft couch, and Ben put his arm around me and held me lightly. That was all. We both just wanted to sit and stop thinking about pretty much anything, I believe.

  And oddly, Duffy Madison did not call. I would have almost expected Duffy to sense something was going on with Ben and me and interfere without even knowing why. When we’d dated the one other time, Duffy had seemed unnerved by the idea, as if people from his work should not have relationships that didn’t involve finding the missing individual. Then again, Duffy was seeing Emily Needleman now, so maybe his radar had been shut down. So he didn’t call.

  My father did.

  I looked at the caller ID and told Ben it was Dad. He nodded, having met my father, and let go of the hold he’d had on my shoulder. I pushed the talk button and said hello to my father.

  “Duffy Madison called,” he said. “Something about how a guy got murdered and you’re supposed to be able to help him figure out how it happened.”

  Duffy was telling my dad on me?

  “Why is Duffy calling you?” I asked as Ben sat up and looked justifiably startled. “How did he even get your number?”

  “From the last time,” Dad said. “We exchanged numbers when everybody was looking for you.” It was a short period in my life I preferred to block out. Like this guy named Jeff I went out with in college. “What’s this all about? Do I need to come down there again?”

  “No!” That might have come out a touch more forcefully than I had intended. “There is absolutely no danger to me at all. Nobody’s even sure that a guy was murdered. He fell and hit his head on a rock, and I never met him in my life.”

  “Duffy sounds pretty certain,” Dad said.

  “Aren’t you the one who kept telling me he was crazy and I shouldn’t listen to him?”

  “I’ve gotten to know him a little better.” My father sounded strangely sheepish. “He came up and visited a month or so ago.”

  I didn’t leap to my feet because this wasn’t a movie from 1954, but I did sit up a good deal straighter. Ben gave me a concerned look, and I ignored it because Ben was the one extra thing I couldn’t think about right now. “Duffy went up there and visited you?” When in doubt, repeat the other person’s words. It doesn’t help, but it kills time.

  “Yeah,” Dad said casually. “He’s pretty good company, actually. We talked about baseball a little, and I told him about a photography class I knew about down there because he wanted to know more about the technology available in digital cameras. I understand he met a woman in that class.” Dad sounded awfully proud of himself over that one.

  My head was starting to ache just a little. “Dad.” I blinked a couple of times while Ben wrote, “What?” on a Post-it note I had on the coffee table. You never know when you’ll get a usable idea. “Why did Duffy go up there to see you?”

&nb
sp; “He needed a place to stay. He said he was looking into a missing guy in Poughkeepsie, and he was going around the area trying to gather information. I’m not that close, but I’m closer than Jersey, so he asked if he could stay here for a couple of days. I said sure. Why? Is that a problem?”

  Was there any way in which that was not a problem? A guy who thought he was the living embodiment of a fictional character I made up had traveled to Claremont, New York, and stayed with my father while working on finding a missing man I thought was actually his previous identity.

  Wait, I’m just getting started. While there, he was traveling back and forth to Poughkeepsie, presumably talking to people involved in the case, probably including those he had then taken me to visit with, not one of whom had so much as blinked in recognition when we walked through their doors.

  And the fact that he might very well have been a classmate of some of them in high school, and that Paula (who is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met) believed he had dated one of them and then cruelly ended the relationship, hadn’t even completely permeated my brain yet. Okay, so maybe “cruelly” was just implied, but that was the mood I was building.

  The levels of deceit and obfuscation were impressive and infuriating at the same time. I clenched my teeth so tightly that I’d probably have to oil the hinges of my jaw later and said, “No. Not a problem. Listen, Dad. I have to get going. There’s someone here.”

  “What?” That jaw-clenching thing had made me pretty much unintelligible. Before I could make more impossible-to-understand noises into the phone, Dad added, “Are you and Duffy having some kind of argument? He said you had refused to help him with this Poughkeepsie thing.”

  Now Duffy was passive-aggressively trying to get me into his twisted plot by using my father. That was new, and it only made me angrier. So much so that I found I could open my mouth again. But I had enough self-control that I managed not to scream.

  I got off the phone with my father as quickly as I could and, again without actually throwing a tantrum or looking up weapons dealers on Google, filled Ben in on the parts of the conversation he couldn’t infer on his own.

  “I don’t see how I can cover for him now,” he said finally. “Duffy’s gone over the edge.”

  “There are so many things wrong with this,” I agreed. “And I’m not even taking into account the idea that he went out of his way to include my father in whatever goofy plot he’s hatching.”

  “What do you mean? Because he’s calling your dad to complain?”

  I shook my head, which was definitely calling for some Aleve and wasn’t shy about it. “Because he chose to stay with my father, an hour away from the area he was investigating, rather than stay in a hotel in Poughkeepsie. You’re telling me a guy who says his investments make it possible for him to go long periods without work was worried about saving the cost of a Holiday Inn?”

  Ben leaned forward, thinking. “That is weird. Do you think there’s some reason Duffy wants to gather information about your dad?”

  “What I’m worried about is that Duffy’s using my father to gather information about me.”

  It was a lot to consider. I almost called Dad back to get details, but then I decided that more insights into his sojourn with Duffy would only get me more upset. “Should I call Duffy?” I asked Ben. That’s what it had come to; I actually had to ask Ben whether it was a good idea to make a phone call.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I find it’s best to confront the issue head-on. Duffy might have an explanation that’s reasonable, and then you’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

  I pondered that while I got some ibuprofen from a cabinet in the kitchen and took it with a glass of water. I’d go back to drinking wine in a minute, but there was something about using alcohol to take pills that seemed a little too 1970s for me.

  For some reason, I waited until I was back in the living room with Ben to pull the phone out of my pocket again and push the speed-dial button for the raving lunatic who is using my character’s name and personality.

  And Duffy, with his unparalleled ability to infuriate me without actually doing much of anything, managed to prolong the suspense by not answering when I called.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of romantic spark left in the room by then, but Ben and I discussed our Duffy dilemma for another hour without reaching any conclusions about anything before he stood up to leave. He kissed me again just to remind me that this had started out as a date. It was a very satisfactory kiss, which I appreciated for what it was, but the moment ended, and we separated.

  He grinned ironically. “You still sure you don’t want me to stay?” he asked.

  “Not tonight, Ben,” I said. “I have a headache.”

  Chapter 17

  I tried calling Duffy twice more the next morning despite a sinus headache that would have killed a normal person. By the time I’d taken a hot shower to steam my respiratory system out and had taken enough ibuprofen to keep Pfizer in business for another day, I’d given up on contacting him and decided he was just a hallucination I’d had who wouldn’t answer the phone today. My head cleared up after a couple of hours, and I sat down to work.

  Shockingly, writing hadn’t gotten any easier while I slept the night before. I read over what I’d written the previous days, spent a half hour or so in despair, went out to Dunkin Donuts for badly needed coffee (it was the kind of morning when making my own seemed too tall an order), and was sitting at my desk again, showered again and dressed for real because that’s another way to procrastinate, contemplating cleaning my house.

  That’s how bad things were. I was thinking of cleaning my house.

  It was a day Paula wasn’t working, so I could sit and stare at my computer screen for an indefinite period of time if I allowed myself to do so. And that was unquestionably an option, but I had a cornucopia of possible nonwriting things to do, and my desperation level was rising. I decided that in order to maintain the moral high ground in the argument I was having with myself, I would have to take on the task other than writing that I most wanted not to do at this moment.

  So I called Louise Refsnyder.

  Yep. I really didn’t want to write that day.

  Just on the off chance that you’ve never called a woman you’ve met once to ask whether she was dumped by a guy who might very well be a raving nut case, let me assure you it’s not an experience to add to your bucket list. Louise answered the phone (Duffy and I had gotten numbers from everyone we’d interviewed the day we went to Poughkeepsie) already armed with a defensive attitude that was audible simply in her “Hello.” Not a question, an obligation.

  “Hi, Louise. This is Rachel Goldman. We met the day before yesterday”—good Lord, had it really just been two days ago?—“when Duffy Madison and I came up to talk about Damien Mosley.” I was an aspiring journalist when I graduated from college and had acquired my telephone interview style the way all aspiring journalists do—by watching All the President’s Men roughly thirty-six times. Roughly.

  “Yeah.” Louise was going to be a chatterbox, I could tell. She was probably dredging up negative memories of Duffy standing her up at the prom as we spoke. (I am a world-class assumer, by the way.)

  “I just had a few follow-up questions, if you have the time,” I went on. Make it sound professional. I was probably being Bob Woodward/Robert Redford because Carl Bernstein/Dustin Hoffman was going to be more abrasive, and that, at least for me, makes it more difficult to get answers. Because the person you’re talking to tends to hang up.

  “Yeah.” Of course, there’s also the possibility she’ll do nothing but say “yeah” to you all day, and although that sounds positive, it’s usually not terribly helpful. Louise didn’t add anything to her incisive comment, so it was clear I’d have to do the bulk of the work here.

  “Now, Damien Mosley was a classmate of yours.” I pretended I was reading from notes because that made me sound more detached, like this line of questioning wasn’t really for my own
benefit. I also started with Damien because jumping in with questions about Duffy would have sounded awfully strange.

  “Yeah.” Writing was starting to look at lot more attractive. The plan was working. Sort of.

  “Were you in any clubs with him? Anything like that?” You’ll see why I asked that in a minute.

  “Clubs?” Louise repeated. Hey, it was a change from “yeah,” and that wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t something, either, but you take what you can get.

  “Sure,” I said. “A look through your high school yearbook shows that you were in the Classics Society and the Honor Society.”

  Louise sounded like she wanted to talk about high school about as much as she wanted to talk about planning her own funeral. “So what?” she asked. “Do you have a question?”

  I had already asked one, but I repeated it for her benefit. “Was Damien Mosley in either of those organizations with you?”

  Louise made a noise with her lips. “I don’t know,” she said. “The Honor Society didn’t have meetings or anything. It was just this group for kids who had a grade point average that was high enough. We didn’t have the Honor Society dance. We didn’t sell Honor Society candy bars as a fundraiser.”

  “Well, what about the Classics Society?” I said. “That was a group you chose to join, right? Was there anybody of interest in that club?” See how clever I was to subtly move the topic off Damien and toward any other people (Duffy) whom Louise might have, you know, known in high school?

  “You got that information from my yearbook,” she reminded me. “Doesn’t it have the names of all the people who were in the club?”

  Okay, so she had me there, but Louise was being evasive for reasons that even an especially traumatic breakup wouldn’t explain. “Well yes,” I said, “but I was wondering if you were especially close to anybody in the Classics Society.”

  “Close?” Louise asked. “What do you mean by ‘close’?”