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  Writers are contractors. We work for ourselves and then try to sell our work to someone who has—what do you call it—money. Duffy was essentially working under the same kind of arrangement for the prosecutor, in that he wasn’t a salaried employee and only worked for a fee when a case on which he was needed arose. So technically there was no reason for Ben to talk to Petrosky about Duffy until the issue of hiring him was brought up. It wasn’t much in the way of an argument, but it was all I had.

  It took a while until Ben answered. “I guess not,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he believed himself.

  “Good. Let’s hope nobody is reported missing in Bergen County for a while.”

  It was early in the book, time to get fictional Duffy into more trouble as the plot progressed. That’s the way it works—you give your character a problem and then continue to make it worse until it looks like things are just about impossible to fix. Then you come up with a way for the character to fix it. Unless you’re writing something depressing, which I’m told can be very lucrative.

  “I always hope that,” Ben said. He sounded tired, and I knew I was tired. “Rachel. Can I come talk to you tomorrow night, maybe? So we can maybe figure out this Duffy thing. About how you brought him to life with your word processor.”

  “I’ll bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Does it work for you?”

  “Well, let’s see. Dinner tomorrow? I’m buying.”

  So we were back to that, were we? Once again I was confused whether Ben was asking me out or wanted to discuss business with me. I’d have to ask Paula tomorrow. “Sure,” I said. We decided he’d pick me up at seven.

  I wrote the 224 more words, mostly dialogue, which meant that I could keep plot points coming and have a general feel for the characters even if Duffy was continuing to elude me. It took about a half hour, which is longer than it should, but I was so tired that I had already decided to sleep until Thursday, assuming I could remember which day of the week today might be.

  I did not read today’s writing over. For one thing, I was sure it was truly awful, and just as a matter of policy, I don’t ever do that. I’d read them tomorrow if I could summon the courage.

  Instead, realizing that I was exhausted but not as sleepy as I should have been, I searched my shelves for a paperback I could take to bed with me. I usually don’t read other people’s fiction when I’m writing because I’m paranoid about their voices or ideas creeping into my writing, but I didn’t think I’d get through a whole page tonight before I was asleep, and I wouldn’t remember a word of what I’d read the next morning.

  But I couldn’t find anything that piqued my interest at the moment. I’m a very picky reader, which is one of the reasons I started writing Duffy books, because they were the kind of books I wanted to read, and nobody else was writing them. Sometimes one has to take matters into one’s hands.

  Right now I couldn’t find anything I felt like taking into my hands, so I spent about a half hour working against the problem I’d been grappling with all day. I’d concluded, with Duffy’s help, that Damien Mosley was not the bridge to early Duffy Madison, so I’d have to find another way to solve the mystery of who this crazy man was before he’d showed up on the Bergen County prosecutor’s doorstep five years ago to help out with cases of people who vanished.

  In short, Duffy wasn’t going to be any help in finding himself, so I’d have to find him on my own. And even saying that sounds weird to me now.

  When living Duffy had first surfaced at my house, Paula had done her usual thorough job of research but had been unable to trace him back past Oberlin College and then an oblique reference with an unhelpful photograph—not unlike the one I’d seen today of Damien Mosley—in his high school yearbook. Assuming this Duffy was that Duffy. It’s not impossible there could be a number in the United States alone.

  But now that I knew a little more about Poughkeepsie, where I had arbitrarily written that Duffy had grown up and where that high school picture was taken, I could make a few more specific searches, get sleepy, and then leave notes for Paula to follow up on in the morning.

  It was a plan. Sort of.

  The high school records Paula had left me did not give a street address for Duffy or the names of his parents. He had been in only one student organization, the Classics Society, and the one member from his class Paula had located didn’t remember him. That was odd; it was a very small group, and you’d think Duffy would stand out even among earnest Latin geeks.

  Luckily, Paula had left me a pixel trail. Her search for Duffy in adolescence had gone through an online reunion-based website that scanned and displayed every page of the yearbook for each class in question. Paula had obtained a password, probably by posing as a member of Duffy’s graduating class—these sites don’t really care about security that much—and that gave me access to the yearbook.

  Now I could search for all the members of the Classics Society and see if there were other references or surviving classmates Paula had not contacted. She’s incredibly thorough, but maybe I could run some of the names of the missing past people I’d met in Poughkeepsie today and get a line on where their wandering classmates had wandered.

  But as it turned out, I wouldn’t have to do that. A quick glance through the yearbook found seven members of the Classics Society, mostly through a photograph in the “clubs and associations” section that listed all the members in the picture and the one (Duffy Madison) who “was absent on Picture Day.”

  Big surprise.

  The other six members included the woman Paula had spoken to on the phone and four classmates whose names I made sure to print out and store in a file. But the last one was the person I found most interesting, and I made sure to leave a note for Paula to follow up on the next morning, after letting herself in very quietly.

  That member was Louise Mendenhaus, whom the photograph confirmed I knew better as Louise Refsnyder.

  Armed with that information, I went to bed and slept like a log. Assuming logs sleep.

  Chapter 12

  “So this Louise looked your Duffy right in the face and didn’t recognize him from high school?” Brian Coltrane looked up from his turkey club and French fries with a wry grin on his face, which is Brian’s default expression. But I love him like a brother anyway.

  “She didn’t react except to say that Duffy looked something like Damien Mosley,” I said. “But she said he wasn’t a dead ringer for Damien, and we’re pretty sure Damien ended up in a ditch with a great big bump on his head, so I don’t know what to make of it.”

  I had gone to the Plaza Diner for my semiweekly (that’s the one that means twice a week, right?) lunch with Brian and had brought my best intentions to order a salad with me.

  So I sat there with a grilled cheese on rye and stole a fry from Brian’s plate, knowing full well he’d do the same with my onion rings. Don’t judge unless you have the willpower of a demigod.

  “Best thing to do is confront Duffy with the picture,” Brian said. “Place it right in front of him and get him to explain it.”

  “That’s the thing—he won’t explain it,” I argued. “Anytime I’ve tried something like that on him, he just shrugs and tells me he has no idea what it all means. He is just what he is, and I’m supposed to take it on face value.” I was stealing a larger percentage of fries to Brian’s theft of onion rings, but onion rings are larger and therefore count more—you should pardon the expression—heavily.

  “So what are you going to do?” Brian thinks he’s clever and that he can manipulate me into thinking of a solution on my own. I had beaten him to the punch by coming up with a plan before I’d left my house, but that sort of played into his strategy, and . . . what was I talking about?

  “I’m already doing it,” I said triumphantly, when I probably should have been less smug. “I’ve got Paula on the case.”

  Brian snagged a ring and dropped his eyebrows down a litt
le. “You’ve done that before,” he reminded me, possibly thinking I had fallen into the same amnesia pit from which Duffy had first emerged. “Paula looked for Duffy and came up with Damien Mosley.”

  “That much is true, inspector,” I said, for once paying attention to my own food. “But now she’s armed with more information—namely, that Louise Refsnyder, or Mendenhaus, or something, was lying when she pretended not to know Duffy. That gives us something to work with. She also didn’t know that Louise has a different last name these days than she did in high school.” You can get your grilled cheese any way you like, but for me, it’s not worth it if it’s not on real rye bread. Or a bagel. Bagels are good, too.

  “Amazing, Holmes!” Brian was nothing if not quick on the uptake. “So what has she come up with so far?”

  “Nothing, but it’s only been a couple of hours. Give the woman time.”

  Brian put down the quarter of the sandwich he was eating, apparently to show his concern for me. “So how’s the writing going?”

  Let me be clear: Writers love to discuss their work. Indeed, we’d rather talk about things we’ve written than write something new, and it’s not even a close competition. But when people who aren’t close friends ask, “How’s the writing going?” or “How’s the book doing?” (I still don’t have an answer for that one—how’s the book doing what?) or my personal favorite at cocktail parties (which I never attend), “So, still writing?” the effect is more condescending than interested. Still writing? No, I’ve decided to give it up and go into animal husbandry. So, are you still a neurosurgeon?

  But when Brian, who knows me well despite never having read any of my books at all (his tastes run to news websites and graphic novels), asks how my writing is going, it’s because he knows that lately it hasn’t been going well at all. He knows that because I’ve told him. So I don’t take it as an insult.

  “Okay,” I said. “So tell me about Julie.”

  “Don’t try to dodge the question,” Brian said, taking two onion rings just to prove his point. “Has spending the time with Duffy cured you of your character problem?”

  I’d thought character problems were what happened when a political candidate was found in a hotel with someone other than the person they were supposed to be in a hotel with, but that would have been yet another dodge, and Brian would know it. “Not really,” I said. “I think it might be making it worse. I keep wondering if real Duffy would do what I’m making fictional Duffy do. I’m worried that if I write something bad that happens to Duffy, something bad will happen to Duffy. I’m stuck because I’m getting to be just as crazy as he is, Brian.”

  You would think that such an emotional self-discovery would obliterate one’s appetite for French fries. You would be wrong.

  “You’re not crazy,” my friend assured me. “You’re letting his crazy influence you. And you have two choices: You can dig in and really find out where this guy came from, or you can decide it doesn’t matter and move on with your work.”

  That was clear, it was concise, and it was true. I took a fry and bit it in half. Ketchup just confuses the issue.

  “If that’s the way you’re going to be, I don’t see any point in discussing this with you,” I said.

  Brian smiled. “I got through. Good. Now let me tell you about Julie.” He did, at length, and I even got a second soda despite the Plaza’s inability to make a decent diet cola.

  * * *

  “Louise Mendenhaus got married three years ago to a guy named Jared Refsnyder,” Paula told me even before I could take off my jacket. I had just gotten back from the Plaza, and my assistant was bursting with the work she’d been doing while I was gone. “They were divorced less than six months later.”

  “Sort of makes you wonder why they bothered with the wedding in the first place,” I said as I settled into my work chair.

  “Because Louise was pregnant,” Paula said without a beat. “She lost the baby less than a month after the wedding, and it appears there didn’t seem to be a point to staying together after that.”

  I sincerely hoped there was never anything personal I felt the need to hide from Paula. “How do you find out all this stuff?” I asked her.

  “You’d be amazed what people feel obligated to share on Facebook,” she said.

  “Yes, I would. I assume you have more.” I gestured for her to continue, like she was going to need encouragement. If Paula wasn’t a great assistant, she would have a bright future as a gossip. The money would be about the same.

  Paula didn’t even acknowledge my compliment; of course she had more to tell me. She was Paula. “The thing is, Jared was not from Poughkeepsie. He was a guy Louise knew from her waiting tables at the bar, and he came in twice a week because he was a short-haul truck driver running a route from Albany to Atlantic City. They hit it off, so to speak, when Jared was en route one summer and then got married just long enough to get divorced by the end of the year.”

  “What does that tell us about Duffy?” I asked.

  “Virtually nothing,” Paula said. “But I thought it was interesting.”

  In a general way she was right, but I was sort of goal-oriented at the moment. “Our project is to find out where our living Duffy came from,” I reminded Paula. “What does Louise’s brief marriage have to do with that?”

  “Not that much, but Louise is probably important,” Paula said in an attempt to rebound. “She was in that club with Duffy, which we can confirm through the yearbook, but she doesn’t recognize present-day Duffy, who can’t look that different. So I looked into how many boyfriends Louise might have had in high school.”

  “Okay, now you are scaring me.”

  “Follow me on this,” Paula said, pulling the pencil from behind her ear and using it to gesture for emphasis. “Louise Mendenhaus wasn’t the most popular girl in school. She wasn’t voted most likely to do anything in particular. She was in two clubs: the Classics Society and the Honor Society. She was, for lack of a better term, a nerd.”

  That didn’t jibe with the Louise I’d met the day before. “Where did she go to college?” I asked. There is never the possibility that Paula won’t know, so it’s not rude to assume she will. It’s very convenient.

  As I expected, Paula did not find it necessary to refer to the notepad in her hand. “That’s the interesting part,” she said. “Louise didn’t go to college.”

  “We can assume her grades were good because she was in the Honor Society. There’s no reason to think she had to work to keep her family in food and shelter, is there?”

  Paula shook her head. “No. They’re not wealthy, but her mom was a bank teller until two years ago, and her father worked for IBM nearby, not as an executive exactly but selling computer parts to hardware manufacturers. They were doing okay, and they could have at least helped with college if she’d wanted to go. I don’t have hard data on it yet, but it doesn’t even appear she applied to schools. She took the SATs, according to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, and while they wouldn’t give me her scores, they were willing to say they had no record of her giving access to those scores to any college anywhere, ever.”

  That didn’t add up. “Why does a girl who worked hard enough to get good grades give up the chance to go to college and go to work waiting tables at a strip club?” I asked myself.

  Luckily, Paula didn’t know I wasn’t exactly talking to her, so she answered me. “It’s a good question. But that brings me back to how many boyfriends she might have had.”

  My expression must have been one of bafflement, and I added to it by saying, “Of course it does.”

  Paula never sits in my office. For one thing, as I’ve noted, there is no logical place other than my chair to do so. That is semi-intentional in that when I’m writing, I don’t want to have extended conversations with anyone (mostly Paula, because usually there’s nobody else around). But lately I’ve noticed I was having a number of long talks in this room and was starting to feel guilty about sitting wh
en she was standing. Paula did not know that and probably wouldn’t have cared. She didn’t pace like Duffy does. She tends to lean on the doorjamb from the hallway into my office, and that’s what she was doing now after having stood in the center of the room for a while. It gives her that casual look as if she’s brainstorming when in fact she already knows everything there is to know in the universe. I’m on to her game.

  “Think about it,” she said, as if I hadn’t been doing so. “Duffy is in the Classics Society, which we know from the yearbook and from one other member, although she didn’t exactly remember him. Louise is in the Classics Society, and she looks straight into Duffy’s face years later and comments only that he resembles Damien Mosley.”

  “We’re back to the idea that Duffy is Damien Mosley?” I was in way over my head and forgetting how to swim.

  “Not at all. We can be pretty sure Damien is dead because Duffy is never wrong about stuff like that.” That was true. Paula actually has read all my books and knows Duffy in some ways better than I do because she keeps the Duffy Bible. “But let’s just take a minute to consider: If you knew someone casually in high school, even just a little bit, you’d probably recognize him even after fifteen years, right? Maybe you wouldn’t be able to remember his name off the top of your head, but if someone mentioned it to you, there’s no way you’d blank on it entirely.”

  “So you’re saying Duffy and Louise didn’t go to high school together.” Now I was forgetting how to dog paddle, and there wasn’t much time left for me. It made me sad. To drown so young.

  “No, I’m saying this: Under what circumstances would you flat out lie to someone about a guy you knew in high school? What would make you insist you’d never even heard of him?”

  I thought about that, and with everything Paula had said, it hit me right between the eyes. “If he was some guy I dated in high school and I was embarrassed that he dumped me.”