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  “I don’t want you to do anything,” I said. “I’m flailing here. I’m confused. There’s no reason for you to be who you say you are, and no matter which way we interpret your identity, I should be able to write my original Duffy the way I always have. So I’ve asked you here today because I want to say good-bye so I can go back to the way things were before.”

  Duffy sat and squinted at me for a moment; it’s what he’s always done when confronted with behavior he believes to be irrational. I wrote that for him. This guy who claimed never to have cracked the cover on my novels had my character’s mannerisms down cold.

  “You are asking me not to contact you again?” he said. “You believe if I absent myself from your life that you’ll be able to revert to your old style of writing?”

  I turned away from him again. I had to like the guy; I’d written him over and over again. It was very painful to hurt his feelings this way because I was one of the few people on the planet who knew he had feelings.

  “That’s basically it,” I mumbled.

  Duffy stood up; I could see the movement from the corner of my eye. “You realize this behavior is not rational,” he said. I figured he was the expert on irrational behavior, so maybe I should consider what he was suggesting. “Banishing me from your sight will not erase me from your mind.”

  I hate it when he has a point.

  “No, it won’t,” I told him. “You’re a good man, and you literally saved my life, so I’m more than grateful to you. But this is my means of making a living, and you’re standing in my eyeline when I’m trying to write. You’re a distraction.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the issue,” Duffy admitted. “Have I done anything or in any way behaved in a fashion that is inconsistent with your concept of the Duffy character?”

  I acknowledged that he hadn’t done so without saying aloud that I believed it was because he’d internalized the character from my books so completely that he could do a truly admirable impression. He’d have told me he never read a Duffy Madison book before I gave him my rough draft after we met.

  “Then how is the concept of the character at all affected by my presence?” he asked.

  It was a good question, and I had been considering it for some time, so I had an answer ready. “The thing is, I like you, Duffy. You’re a nice guy, and I don’t want to see you come to any harm.”

  That didn’t seem to impact real-life Duffy significantly; he looked puzzled. “Your writing a novel will not cause me any harm,” he said.

  “No. But in order to make the story work, I have to put Duffy Madison through the wringer. The job of an author is to take the character and create a situation that tests him to his limits. This is the sixth Duffy book, and each one requires me to raise the stakes a little. In my head, I have to come up with more and more trying circumstances for the character to face. And knowing you makes it hard for me to torture the character because I feel like it will be torturing you. Like I’ll be torturing you.”

  “I understand there is an artistic process, but I have to say that is not a rational argument,” Duffy told me. “Nothing in your books has ever actually happened to me. The cases I’ve worked with Ben Preston on at the prosecutor’s office have never even mildly resembled the ones you’ve written. You’re not going to do me any harm.” The nutjob was telling me what was rational. And it was still early in the week.

  “Maybe not, but your personal circumstances are almost exactly like the ones I’ve written for you. Like this: I just started writing Duffy a romantic interest.”

  The reaction I’d expected and hoped I wouldn’t get was exactly what happened. Duffy grimaced a little and stood still. “I have recently started seeing someone,” he said quietly.

  I pointed at him, acknowledging the coincidence we both noted. “I’m planning on killing Duffy’s love interest.” (I hadn’t actually decided on that yet, but why quibble on the details?) “Do you want me to take that chance?”

  “If this magical connection exists as you seem to suggest,” Duffy said, “the consequences will occur whether I am a presence in your life or not.”

  “Maybe, but maybe not. All those times I wrote about Duffy before I met you, I wasn’t worried about hurting you, and you were all right as far as we know. Maybe if we’re not in contact, that will still be the case. I just don’t want to take the chance.”

  Duffy pursed his lips and nodded slightly; he was thinking. Pretty sure I gave him that move, too.

  “I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said. Duffy’s speech tends to lean a little British when he’s thinking because I think of Sherlock Holmes when I’m writing those moments. “I think I can help you with your problem.”

  Well, I hadn’t seen that coming.

  “You do,” I said. It was a placeholder. In a couple of hours, I’d think of what I should have said there and double back in my mind. It’s why I’m an author and not, say, a stand-up comedian.

  “Yes. As you see it, the impediment to your writing me as a character is that as a three-dimensional man standing in front of you, I change your perspective on the person you’re writing; is that correct?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “So if you were to prove once and for all that I am not Duffy Madison, that I am in fact someone else who perhaps suffered a trauma and took on this personality after reading your novels, despite the fact that you hadn’t published them at that time, you could go on writing your fictional Duffy without any further difficulty. Does that make sense to you?” Duffy was pacing in front of me, slightly stooped and with his hands clasped behind his back. If Groucho Marx was a tall, thin, serious man and gave up the greasepaint mustache and eyebrows, he’d be Duffy.

  I thought through what he was saying, feeling like it was going in a direction I didn’t like but not actually understanding how it was getting there. If we could prove this Duffy wasn’t my Duffy, would that help me write him—my Duffy, for those keeping score at home—again?

  “Yes, I guess it makes sense,” I said.

  “So then we have a common purpose, even if we are approaching it from opposite viewpoints.” Duffy stopped pacing and looked down at me, as I hadn’t moved from my swivel chair. “If we find evidence that I am actually Damien Mosley, I can stop being Duffy Madison in your mind and perhaps heal some hideous memory I have been repressing. You will be relieved of the notion that I am your character and can go back to writing him as you always have.”

  The trap was springing around me, and there was pretty much nothing I could do about it, but I gave it the old college try. “Suppose we find no evidence of Damien Mosley and you continue to insist I made you up and you sprang to life five years ago? That’s what you believe we’ll find. How does that help me?” The best defense, I felt, was a good get-Duffy-out-of-here ploy.

  He spoke quietly and with serious gravitas. “If that is the case, perhaps we can both find some peace of mind, no?”

  My immediate thought was no, but somehow three days later, I found myself in a car with Duffy Madison, heading to Poughkeepsie, New York.

  Chapter 3

  “I still don’t understand why we couldn’t just make a few phone calls,” I told Duffy, who was driving efficiently and lawfully on a highway that saw no other drivers doing the same. “Why do we have to go all the way up to Poughkeepsie for this?”

  Duffy never shows his impatience with me even when I’m doing my very best to elicit it. He did not sigh, and he would never, under any circumstances, roll his eyes while driving a car at exactly sixty-five miles per hour in the right lane. Without the benefit of cruise control.

  “I have explained this,” he said in a mild tone. “I did the background on the phone months ago. I have contacted anyone I could find online who might have a connection to Damien Mosley. I have so far been unable to find his mother, and his father is dead. A few acquaintances from high school remain, as does one coworker from a tavern at which Damien worked as a bartender. Other than that, there is ver
y little with which to begin.”

  “Clearly, the two-hour drive is well warranted, then,” I said. Just because Duffy was taking the high road (in the conversation, not toward Dutchess County) didn’t mean I had to.

  “It’s always best to get a sense of the area and see the people face-to-face,” he said without a hint of emotion. Dammit. “I will take video records with my iPhone that will make it possible to reference both places and people once we are back in New Jersey. This is not a major trip, Rachel.” In fact, Duffy and I had driven to the Jersey Shore the first day we started to “work together,” and that had taken roughly as long as this trip would on paper.

  Instead, there was quite a backup at the Tappan Zee Bridge, which was going through major renovations—they were actually building a new Tappan Zee Bridge next to the existing Tappan Zee Bridge, which had been threatening to fall into the river for years—and that meant a wait of about forty minutes during which Duffy and I had nothing to do but talk. Which he did.

  He went on about Louise Refsnyder, who waited tables while Damien had tended bar at Rapscallion’s, a local watering hole that apparently thought “Rapscallion” was someone’s name. She had told Duffy on the phone that Damien was a popular bartender with the customers because he made drinks quickly to avoid long waits and always scanned the bar even while mixing cocktails because he didn’t want patrons to feel they had to vie for his attention.

  It wasn’t that this information wasn’t fascinating, you understand, but I didn’t have much idea of how that pertained to our finding Damien, assuming that I wasn’t actually sitting next to him in the car right now. But that didn’t matter because Duffy had more to tell me. I actually sat back and closed my eyes to let it wash over me and distract me from the fact that we still weren’t moving.

  This, and we were waiting to get onto a bridge that had been repeatedly declared unsafe for the amount of traffic it gets in the course of an average day. And Duffy droned on, making me even gladder I had signed on for this goofy trip, which would require us to take this same bridge back again after our scheduled meetings with reported Damien Mosley acquaintances later today. All supposedly so I could purge my mind of the Duffy next to me and write the Duffy I had created and used to know so well.

  I don’t want you to think that I had stopped writing. I don’t stop writing because I am not happy with what’s coming out. I don’t believe there is such a thing as writer’s block. There is the fear of writing something lousy. Writing something lousy means you have something you can improve later. If you don’t write anything, you can’t improve the nothing you’ve written. So I had three thousand more words of total and complete crap that would hopefully be improved upon after the Damien Mosley adventure had been concluded, which I sincerely wanted to be only a few hours from now.

  Duffy then explained to me that Andrea Vorczek, the girl Damien had taken to the senior prom, who was now the woman Damien had not contacted in years, had nothing of import to say. She’d agreed to the date because she didn’t have a boyfriend and still wanted to go to the dance. They’d known each other from theater class in school. Damien hadn’t been an actor in high school productions but had worked with makeup.

  Again, not exactly the kind of “aha!” moment Sherlock Holmes would relish.

  When I could finally cram a spare word in through Duffy’s lecture, I brought up a point I’d been thinking about since agreeing to this merry escapade. “Won’t you recognize the landscape and the people?” I asked Duffy. “After all, you went to high school here. You grew up in Poughkeepsie.” We inched forward another car length. Only fifteen more minutes until we could crawl onto the Death Bridge.

  “I have no recollection of that,” he said. “I’ve told you, I do not remember anything before five years ago.”

  “But you should.” If I said it enough times, he’d see the logic, right? “I gave Duffy that backstory. If you’re Duffy and I created you on the page, you had that childhood.”

  “What you write and what I experience do not seem to be connected,” he reminded me. “I have the personality and the circumstances of your character, but I do not share his every plot point. You know that.” I knew that was what he said; whether I believed it to be true was another question.

  No point in saying it again. Instead, I sat back. We’d come this far; we weren’t turning around. Trying to argue against it was pointless. Besides, there’s part of me that’s a hopeless gossip. “So who’s this woman you’ve been dating?” I asked Duffy. I honestly hadn’t known about that aspect of his life when I’d written my Duffy a love interest.

  I saw Duffy’s mouth tense up a little. He doesn’t like to talk about personal issues; the only thing he’s comfortable with is his work. “Her name is Emily Needleman,” he said. “I met her at a photography class I’ve been taking at William Paterson University.”

  “Photography?” Odd that was the part I found interesting, but my Duffy had no interests at all outside those that could help him find missing people.

  “I have not been consulted by the prosecutor since you and I worked on the case together,” he said. I wouldn’t have characterized the incident that way, but that’s how Duffy’s mind works. “I felt that learning more about the composition of a photograph might help me learn more about the pictures taken at crime scenes.” Maybe I should have taken notes on our conversations to help me write my version of this guy; again there was nothing but his mission in life, which was to find the missing and see justice done.

  “Is that why you have time to look for Damien Mosley now? Because you’re not working currently for the prosecutor’s office?” After months of not doing so, I was falling back into the pattern I’d noticed the first time I’d spent time with this Duffy Madison—I was interviewing him for character traits I might need when I wrote again. Which I would do sometime tonight when I got home. The book deadline waits for no woman.

  “I have been devoting any spare time since you first mentioned Damien Mosley to finding him,” Duffy said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  His lip curled a tiny bit. “I have not been consulted for a few months. I consider that a positive because it means there have been no missing person cases reported to the prosecutor’s office in that time.”

  “What are you living on when you’re not working for the prosecutor?” I asked. It had never occurred to me, I have to admit. My books always take place when Duffy is working.

  “I have a modest savings account and some investments,” he said. “I do the investigative work because it is what I feel I am best suited to do, not for the money.”

  “Still, you take the money.”

  We made it onto the bridge and picked up speed to a mind-blowing twenty-five miles per hour as Duffy smiled a little lopsided smile and said, “I’m not crazy.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  We arrived in Poughkeepsie a little before eleven in the morning. It’s both a city and a town, in that there is the City of Poughkeepsie and the Town of Poughkeepsie, right next to each other but separate because being just one municipality wouldn’t be confusing enough. Duffy had not stopped for breakfast and had only reluctantly allowed for a quick break at a rest stop so I could, you know, rest. He did not appear to have actual human needs for things like food or restrooms, which actually seemed kind of logical. In my mind, he still wasn’t a real person. Which I guessed was what we were here to prove—or not. Luckily, I had thought to fill a thermos with coffee (which had after all necessitated the rest stop), or I would not be a bit useful today.

  “What’s our first stop?” I asked as I gratefully stretched my legs.

  “The obvious place to start.” Duffy pointed. He stepped out of the car as if he’d simply forgotten his keys in the driveway and had been in the car only a few seconds. I decided to write him a leg cramp as soon as possible. We were standing in front of the City of Poughkeepsie civic complex, and I hadn’t been paying attention closely enough to notice
the sign reading, “Police Department.” Okay, so that did make some sense.

  * * *

  “As I told you on the phone,” said Sgt. Phillip Dougherty, “there just isn’t anything to tell you about Damien Mosley.”

  We sat in Dougherty’s office, which could charitably be described as cramped, and he, a tall, solid man in his fifties, sat behind his desk looking very competent and concerned. He had it down to an art.

  “The man vanished from his home here in the city,” Duffy said, no doubt not for the first time. “It’s hard to imagine why there was no investigation. I am not trying to impugn your department or yourself, Sergeant. I’m merely trying to understand.”

  “Nobody complained,” Dougherty answered. “The landlord got in touch just as a formality to evict the guy, who hadn’t been in the apartment or paid his rent for three months. The same was true of the utility company. He had no family in the area. No one reported him as a missing person. There was no crime to investigate.”

  “A friend didn’t call?” I asked. “His mother at least was alive then. Did you get in touch with her?”

  Dougherty looked at his computer screen, which no doubt held the case file on Damien Mosley. “The mother was called,” he said. “She was living in New Rochelle at the time. She didn’t know where her son was and hadn’t heard from him, but she said that wasn’t unusual. Apparently, they weren’t really close.”

  Duffy had obviously lost any hope the Poughkeepsie police were going to be a fount of information. “You don’t mind if we ask around?” he said.

  Dougherty shrugged. “Ask all you like, as long as you don’t harass people,” he said. “But it’s been five years. You want to talk about a cold trail.”

  “We’ll manage,” Duffy said.

  Chapter 4

  “What’s next?” I asked as Duffy pulled his car up to a spot on a completely nondescript street. Of course, never having been in this city before, none of Poughkeepsie’s roadways were especially descript to me.