For Duffy Madison, the period between missing persons cases was never wasted time. Relieved not to be working against an ever-ticking clock to find someone who had been abducted or had simply vanished, Duffy would not let his mind go unoccupied; he’d do research into the latest technologies for evaluating crime scenes or sharpen his observational skills even on short strolls through his own neighborhood.
“That man is lonely and frustrated,” he told Angela Mosconi on a walk through Schooley’s Mountain Park this Saturday morning. “He looks only at women, but not in a leering fashion. He presses his hands together and flexes his arms whenever he sees a woman he finds attractive, but not to show off any musculature. It’s a gesture of anxiety and hopelessness.”
“Maybe he’s just cold,” Angela said. “It can’t be more than forty degrees out here today. I should have worn a heavier coat.” She hugged herself for warmth, but Duffy, in his intense desire to be more observant, missed the signal that perhaps she would like to have his arms around her.
He shook his head. “It is forty-seven degrees today, and the temperature will rise to about sixty later in the morning. That’s not weather-related. Look at the way he—”
“Look, we haven’t known each other very long,” Angela broke in. “But there’s something I think you might need to know.”
“If this is about your two failed marriages or the childhood bicycle accident that resulted in your left leg being a quarter inch shorter than your right, you have no reason to be concerned,” Duffy said, still watching the man he’d deemed lonely as he walked through the park. “I don’t believe anyone but I is aware of those things without your knowledge.”
Angela stared at him for a moment with a mixture of admiration and annoyance. “I know you well enough not to ask how you know about those things,” she said. “But I was getting at something else entirely.”
“Interesting,” Duffy answered. But his mind was clearly elsewhere. “See that woman in the orange T-shirt? I believe she might once have spent time in county prison.”
Angela sighed a little too heavily. Getting through to Duffy Madison when he was trying desperately to focus on something in the absence of an immediate problem to solve was a daunting task she was just beginning to understand.
“Duffy,” she began again.
But his face had already frozen in place, and his gait, until now difficult to match, had stopped completely. Duffy looked ahead and stared, so Angela followed his gaze. People were running and gathering at a spot easily two hundred yards ahead.
“Perhaps you’d better stay here,” Duffy told her. He began running toward the crowd before she could reply. Angela pursed her lips and followed him.
At the crest of the hill in front of him, Duffy found the crowd gathering. Some women were moaning rather than weeping, and some of the men had to turn away. Duffy shouted, “Morris County Prosecutor’s Office,” and still had to gently push a couple of people out of the way to get to the edge of the hill and look down.
Off to one side of the hill was a drop of about thirty feet, which had been fenced in to avoid exactly what had happened: A man dressed in bicycle pants and a blue T-shirt was lying faceup, staring blankly at the sky. He was impaled on one of the fence posts that had been poorly maintained and had pierced his chest. The man was dead.
“What a terrible accident,” a woman next to Duffy said.
Duffy took in the scene as closely as he could. “This was not an accident,” he said, more to himself than to the woman. “That man was murdered.”
* * *
I stared at the screen and scowled. I know I scowled because my face was reflected in the screen of my computer, and there was no mistaking the look on my face. It perfectly matched my mood.
Usually, beginning a new Duffy Madison mystery novel was my second favorite part of the writing process. (The favorite part for every writer everywhere is typing the words The End, and I also enjoy seeing the name Rachel Goldman on the front of the book.) But this one seemed heavy-handed and clumsy. The fact that I just used two terms that mean the same thing might give you an idea of how I felt.
Paula Sessions, my part-time assistant, looked at me from the door to my office, which is in my house in Adamstown, New Jersey, and belongs more to Valley National Bank than to me. “You just started, and you’re already unhappy with it?” she asked.
“It’s trite and stupid,” I said, at least using adjectives that meant separate things. “It’s like I’m trying too hard, as if I were writing someone else’s character. I used to know Duffy Madison, and now he’s a mystery to me.”
Paula stifled a chuckle. “Imagine that,” she said.
It had been six months since a man had called my house claiming to be the living incarnation of my fictional character. He called himself Duffy Madison, and instead of working for the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office as a consultant on missing persons cases, this Duffy had creatively chosen to present himself as a consultant on missing persons cases for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. See that subtle change there?
The problem was, I’d discovered that he really did work for the Bergen County prosecutor, he really did consult on missing person cases, and everyone he had met knew him as Duffy Madison. They had no idea I wrote a series of mystery novels with a character by that name, so I had both the utter confusion of the situation and the thrill of knowing that no one working one county over from where I lived had ever heard of my books. It’s a writer’s dream, truly.
I’m being sarcastic. It’s a Jersey thing.
The flesh-and-blood Duffy had told me at the time that he believed I had actually created him four years earlier, because he had no memory of anything before that time. He’d said it with a straight face and seemingly in earnest, so after he was out of earshot, I’d asked Paula to do as much research on the supposed Duffy as possible. She came up with very little; he had records stretching back to high school, but no one she contacted could ever remember seeing or talking to him. He seemed to have no family. He existed only on paper. Which somehow seemed appropriate.
“Maybe you need to see Duffy again,” Paula suggested now. “You’ve been ducking him for months.”
“I haven’t been ducking him,” I protested. “I don’t want to go off on a pointless crusade with him, but that’s not ducking.”
In the course of her research on “Duffy,” Paula had discovered the wispy trail of a man named Damien Mosley (note the initials), who was the same age as my Duffy, had grown up in the same town, attended the same college, and then vanished at almost the exact moment flesh-and-blood “Duffy” had arrived at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and helped with his first missing person.
After our adventure, which had ended in a harrowing fashion for me, Duffy had decided we needed to find Damien Mosley in an effort to prove to me (!) that he, Duffy, was real and not a literal figment of my imagination. I had resisted that suggestion on the grounds that he was nuts.
I thought that was a pretty strong argument, personally. But Duffy had been calling regularly every three days since then, and now it had been six months. Duffy might be crazy, but you couldn’t say he was easily dissuaded.
“It certainly is ducking,” Paula said, turning her back as she walked back to her office, across the hall from mine. “If it wasn’t ducking, you’d talk to him instead of making me lie every time he calls.”
“Duffy knows where I live,” I reminded her, loudly now because she was probably behind her desk, which is larger and disturbingly neater than mine. “If he really believed it was necessary, he could come here to persuade me.”
“He’s been here twelve times,” Paula said, not raising her voice at all. She just has an air of confidence that stems from always being right. “You keep pretending you’re taking a shower because you know he’ll get embarrassed and leave.”
“You work for me, you know.”
“You don’t want to fire me,” Paula said, and again, she was correct. “You think your whole life would collapse if I ever left.” And it would. Paula thinks it wouldn’t, but I barely make it through the days she’s not working.
I sat there and stewed for a while. There was obviously no point in trying to debate the point with Paula, especially since she’d continue to insist on being right about everything and taking all the fun out of it. But staring at my computer screen and seeing the fairly turgid prose I’d been turning out, with a deadline pressing in only three months, wasn’t helping.
The thing about every writer is that we’re sure we’re frauds, and sooner or later the world will catch on. Even the midlist types like me—who sell enough books to keep getting published but not enough to live on a tropical island and have young men fetch us drinks in coconut shells—see writing as a gift, and the thing about a gift is that it can be taken back at any moment. Even if you keep the receipt.
What I was seeing in front of me was clear evidence my gift’s warranty period had just expired.
This was going to lead to sleepless nights. Clenched stomach. Long hours spent looking at online employment ads. A strong consideration of going back to school to obtain a master’s degree in . . . something. And I’d no doubt gain six pounds in the next month, watching my screen stop accumulating words in significant numbers.
I’d watch the calendar and calculate how many words I’d have to write each day to hit my deadline before my editor, Sol Rosterman, started getting impatient. Sol had nurtured me through five Duffy Madison mysteries, the latest of which would be published in four months. He expected number six in three months, and sitting here on the first day I’d begun writing, I saw no clear path to delivering it on time.
The problem was the character. Duffy had always come naturally to me; I’d never really had to think about how he’d react to any situation. I just knew it because the character was part of me.
But now the character could stand in front of me and tell me how he’d react to something, and that was putting a serious damper on my creativity. What if Duffy read the book and thought I’d gotten him wrong? It had already happened once, but I’d had a completed draft then. This was new territory, and it wasn’t friendly.
The rational thing to do, of course, was to banish the living Duffy from my thoughts completely, to not care what he’d think because I’d never see him or talk to him again and therefore didn’t have to worry about his reaction. After all, he’d told me more than once that he was simply himself and had never read any of my books in his life. He said he didn’t even know there were Duffy Madison novels until he’d had to research a case involving a mystery novelist and stumbled across one of my titles.
Imagine the ego boost: Even the character I wrote almost every day for five years hadn’t read any of the books about him. And here I was, despairing over what he might think of the mess I was making of his character.
My interior life can be very complicated.
I stared at the screen another few minutes, changed three words that were especially egregious, and then sat back in my deluxe lumbar support swivel chair and sighed. The story in my head was okay, but it needed Duffy to show up and be himself. The way I saw it, there was only one possible solution to this problem, and I didn’t like it one bit.
I picked up my phone and called Duffy Madison.