“An exhumation?” Ben Preston looked incredulous, as any sane person would. “You ordered an exhumation in North Bergen, Duffy? That’s not even our county.”
I’d insisted that we call Ben, the investigator to whom Duffy reports, to get him up to speed on the events of what was now officially the longest day I’d ever spent in my life. Duffy had argued that the case as he saw it was outside Ben’s jurisdiction—which was undeniable—but I’d come back that Duffy was a consultant to Ben in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and that he should be informed whenever Duffy had any dealings with law enforcement.
But the truth was, I just needed another person who wasn’t Duffy in the room.
It had taken about ten minutes to convince Duffy I was right—a rarity—and another half hour or so for Ben to make it to my house, which he had visited before. Ben and I went out on a date once, and that had proved to be the wrong thing for both of us. At least then. He was still attractive and kind of self-effacing, but at the moment I’d just called him to be Duffy’s boss and my relief.
“I did not order an exhumation, Ben.” We had moved to my living room because if two was a crowd in my office, three people would constitute the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, and if you haven’t seen that, you should. Duffy stood next to the coffee table, which I usually used as a footrest while watching TV, and Ben was sitting in the easy chair while I took up a position on the sofa, where it was quite possible I would fall asleep soon. “I requested that they consider asking for one because I believe I might have found the solution to an open case they have.”
We’d gotten Ben current with the case of Damien Mosley without mentioning my interest in it, saying just that it had something to do with the book I was writing. Obviously, Ben knows Duffy shares his name with the character in my novels, and he has a vague idea that there’s more to it, but we hadn’t actually made clear exactly how closely Duffy thinks he’s connected. I don’t want him to lose his job, and I don’t want Ben to think either of us is insane. Mostly me.
“So you saw this Mosley guy’s car in a picture of the scene where a body was found,” Ben said. He was talking mostly to himself. I considered asking if he wanted a glass of wine, but somehow that didn’t seem strong enough fortification for the kind of conference we were having. Duffy doesn’t drink. I’m not sure Duffy is human. See previous comments. “The guy slipped and fell on a rock, and that’s just about the same time your friend Mosley went into the wind.” Ben likes to talk like a cop. He’s a county investigator who used to be a police officer, like many of them were at one time. He’d had to go on disability leave, and I think he still misses it, wonders what life would be like if he’d managed to stay healthy.
I made a mental note to consider writing a series about a county investigator haunted by his past as a police officer. The Duffy books can’t last forever, which would be very bad news for the man who had called all of us together tonight.
“That’s right, Ben,” he said. “If you add up the timing and the proximity of the car—”
“You get a series of circumstances,” Ben said, spreading his hands in a futile attempt to calm Duffy down. “Yeah, if you want to interpret it that way, you get the possibility that this body was Mosley. But an exhumation, especially when there’s no family involved, is expensive and complicated. You know that, Duffy. What do you think the North Bergen cops will do?”
“They’ll get in touch with the county,” Duffy said. And then he turned toward me. “You know some people in the prosecutor’s office here, don’t you, Rachel?”
“Yes, but North Bergen is in Hudson County,” I reminded him. It was odd that Duffy wouldn’t know that, or remember it. “I don’t know anybody there.” I was just as happy because I had no desire to use up my contacts in the county prosecutor’s office on something this flimsy, asking for an exhumation of a body when it hadn’t even been suggested a crime had been committed.
“That’s true,” Duffy said, looking baffled. Duffy rarely looks baffled. Usually he’s so sure of himself, you want to smack him, and he’s almost always right. I wondered whether some memories of his past life, his real life, were seeping into his head, confusing him.
Ben watched the dynamic between the two of us. He defers to Duffy a lot of the time, but he actually is Duffy’s boss. And Ben is not a bad investigator by any means. What he saw when he looked from Duffy’s face to mine must have told him something, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what, largely because I didn’t know what we were communicating to each other myself.
“What will an exhumation accomplish?” he asked Duffy after a moment. “We don’t have any DNA of Mosley that I know about. What are you going to match?”
“We can go to the apartment in West New York and find a sample of hair or something,” Duffy suggested. “No one has lived there since that night. We might find a match.”
He was really grasping at straws. “Duffy,” I said. “You couldn’t prove any DNA you found in the apartment was Damien’s. I don’t even understand why the North Bergen police didn’t know who the man was on the night the body was found. There was no identification in his wallet?”
“There was no wallet,” Duffy answered. “Either he didn’t have it with him, or someone took it before the EMS arrived.”
Ben’s forehead crinkled, which I had found endearing for a brief period. Now it just meant something was bothering him. “I don’t get it, Duffy,” he said. “What is it about this case that’s so fascinating to you? Nobody called you in; you’re not working it. How did you get interested in this guy to begin with?”
I hadn’t actually worked this out with Duffy ahead of time, but I knew he wouldn’t just launch into the truth in this case.
“Rachel’s assistant Paula found the man had the same initials as I do and that he disappeared at the same time I first came into your office and began working on cases,” Duffy told Ben. “She believes that I might have somehow been Damien Mosley previously, and some trauma made me believe I am Duffy Madison.”
Okay, so maybe I didn’t know he wouldn’t do that.
Ben’s reaction was not what I would have expected. He nodded as if that was exactly what he’d been thinking all the time. “So this is about your using Duffy’s name in your books,” he said to me.
“No.” I tried not to sound like a third-grade teacher who had already explained the concept of multiplication tables to her students five times. “I don’t just use Duffy’s name in my books. I created the character years before I knew anything about this man, and I believe that he somehow found out about the books and became the character for his own reasons, but he doesn’t remember.” Since we were all putting our cards on the table, I could go ahead and show them the two pairs I had in my hand.
Ben processed that, although I knew for a fact he’d at least sort of heard it before. Then he shook his head and looked at Duffy. “So you’re chasing after this guy because you think he might have been you?” I didn’t blame him for being overwhelmed by the concept—I’d been living with it for months, and it still caused me migraines—but Ben seemed almost like he was trying not to understand.
“No,” Duffy answered, “I do not believe that I ever went by the name Damien Mosley. I am attempting to convince Rachel of the same so she can reach the same conclusion I have—that I actually am the person she created.”
I’ll give Ben Preston credit: He did not react as I had when Duffy first surfaced with his nutty theory. I had hung up and disconnected my phone, then practically had him thrown out of a book signing I was doing before I was forced to talk to the man by the county prosecutor. Instead, Ben let his eyes widen a bit (probably because he couldn’t control them sufficiently) and let out his breath. He never broke eye contact with Duffy. Truly, it was an impressive act.
“You’re the character Rachel created five years ago?” he said with an even tone, as if he were asking Duffy whether he’d gotten whole milk or two-percent when he went out to the convenience store. “But you’re much older than that.” Not necessarily the argument I would have led with, but certainly a valid one.
“I have no coherent memory before that time,” Duffy said. “Since Rachel never wrote me as a child or a teenager, I believe this is the stage of life at which I began.”
Ben looked at me, either wanting help or at least an anchor in the real world. Then he shook his head as if trying to get water out of his hair after a swim. “One thing at a time,” he said. “Damien Mosley. You’re trying to solve his disappearance why?”
I decided to jump in ahead of Duffy, whose explanation would no doubt have been so ethereal and incomprehensible that it would have sent Ben to bed for three days. “Because he wants to prove to me that he wasn’t Damien Mosley.” I turned toward Duffy. “You win,” I said. “I believe you. Damien Mosley was an entirely different person. Okay? Can I go sleep now?”
Duffy looked at his watch. “It’s eight thirty.”
“Let’s say I’ve had a long day. Do you accept my concession? I no longer believe you used to be Damien Mosley.” And with the presence of a body and a car that had indeed been registered to a man with that name, my claim was almost true. “So let’s stop looking for him. You can go back to working with Ben when he needs you, and I can go back to making up stuff for my Duffy Madison to do. How’s that sound?”
Duffy looked oddly disappointed. I settled back into my sofa cushion, now determined to go to sleep whether these two guys left or not. I didn’t close my eyes, but that was definitely in my short-term plans. Ben, undoubtedly wondering what planet he had accidentally been transported to, leaned forward in the armchair and squinted, probably trying to see Duffy more clearly because this version was about as blurry as you could get.
“I have the theory about Damien’s case, and I believe it’s necessary to see it through,” Duffy answered. “I don’t know if the North Bergen police or the Hudson County prosecutor will agree to an exhumation, but I do believe I can gain access to the original medical examiner’s report. I imagine that will indicate that blunt force trauma was the cause of death.”
“Will that end your investigation?” Ben asked. He could approach the issue from a professional viewpoint, and he had worked with Duffy—this Duffy—more than I had.
“Now that they know there might be a connection, it is possible the police will be able to make a positive identification,” Duffy answered. “If that is done, my investigation will be complete.”
“Good,” I mumbled as I settled back more deeply. “Let me know how that works out.” My words were just a little slurred, and I hadn’t actually had more than the one beer.
Ben must have gotten the hint, especially now that my eyes were starting to close. Or the lights in the living room were dimming for no reason. Ben stood up. “I think I’ll be moving on. Come on, Duffy. Rachel needs to sleep.”
Then it occurred to me that Rachel needed something else entirely. I sat up, and I wasn’t happy about it. “What Rachel really needs is to write a thousand words tonight,” I said. “So give me a call when you know what’s going on with Damien Mosley, okay?”
Duffy was persuaded to head for the door over his protestations that this consultation was helping him sort out his thoughts. But Ben, who knows how to handle the man, said they could go to the Adamstown Diner and talk some more. Ben was rising in my estimation.
Once they left, I dragged my weary butt into my office and faced the blank screen, the thing that most offends the eyes of a writer. I started by reading over the pages I’d written the day before, which is supposed to help me improve them and then gain momentum going into today’s installment. This time I just wanted to put my head down on my keyboard and let ddddddddddddddddddddd a thousand times be my contribution for the day.
Instead, I started plowing through. I won’t tell you any more of the plot I was concocting because one of these days you’ll be walking by it in a bookstore, but suffice it to say that there are days when the words just flow out of you, when you can’t possibly put a finger wrong and every idea that comes to mind is absolutely fresh and brilliant.
This was not one of those days.
I’d been struggling with the pages for about an hour and a half and was getting somewhere in my word count but not much of anywhere in my story when my cell phone rang. Caller ID indicated it was Ben Preston on the other end of the satellite signal (I like to keep up to date; anyone can say “the other end of the line”), so I hit the accept button and said hello.
“What have you done to Duffy?” he demanded almost immediately. “The man is right on the edge of crazy.”
“On the edge?” I asked. “He jumped over the edge a while ago, I’d say. What’s especially crazy about him now?”
“Well, he thinks you made him up,” Ben reminded me. That was right; it was news to him. “That ain’t nothing.”
I looked over that last paragraph. I’d used the word control three times. Two of them had to go, and a thesaurus is cheating. I groaned a bit but not loudly enough for Ben to hear. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to mention that,” I told him. “But Duffy wasn’t going to lie about it. You know Duffy.”
“I thought I did,” Ben groused.
I substituted manipulate for one of the controls. That left one to replace. “Don’t get peevish,” I told Ben. “You should consider it a plus that Duffy didn’t try to cover up his nuts-ness.”
“To some extent I’d prefer it,” Ben told me. “That would mean he knew it sounded crazy. But he seems to believe it’s a logical, natural conclusion to reach, and he can’t understand why we’re not all on board with it.”
“I thought after I told him that the Damien Mosley thing wouldn’t make a difference, he’d lighten up,” I said. “I won’t push him on the whole creator idea anymore, and maybe he’ll just settle into it.”
“But then we’ll never know who he really is,” Ben pointed out.
Manipulate, control . . . manage! Now I was getting somewhere! But did manage sound too much like manipulate? Hard to say. If this guy wasn’t insisting on having a conversation, it would be easier to concentrate.
“I don’t know if it matters anymore,” I said. “He’s Duffy Madison now.” And if I thought about him less, I could think about my own Duffy more. Selfish? Moi?
“Of course it matters. The man is working for the prosecutor’s office. Now with this information in my lap, I should be talking to my boss right now and recommending we refrain from hiring our missing persons consultant because I have very good reason to think he might be suffering from a severe mental illness.”
That was true. Duffy’s revelation to Ben could mean he’d lose his means of employment. I honestly didn’t know if that would cripple him financially based on the fact that it didn’t seem to be bothering him now. But I knew for a fact that not working or having an outlet for his constantly striving mind would kill the man. He needed the work.
“You can’t do that,” I breathed all at once.
“I don’t want to,” Ben admitted. “But if it gets past me to the prosecutor or to my supervisor, Bill Petrosky, it wouldn’t just be Duffy’s job that would be in jeopardy.”
I decided manipulate and manage were different enough and started thinking about what would come next. I had 224 more words to write today, something that would take less than fifteen minutes if I actually had an idea. The way I was feeling tonight, we could be talking about the sun coming up before I was finished. But the thousand words were not negotiable.
“Can you hold off for a little while?” I sort of begged. “Maybe if Duffy sees that this Damien Mosley thing all comes together, that the guy fell down and hit his head and he really never was Duffy, he’ll just stop talking about it entirely, and everything can go back to what passes for normal.”
Ben let out a long breath. “Rachel, you know how much I trust Duffy. You know I think he’s the best I’ve ever seen at what he does. But if he really and truly believes he came to life because you started writing about a guy like him, I honestly don’t know if I can work with him again.”
“Well, you’re not actually working with him now,” I said. “You don’t have a missing person case you need to consult on, right? That’s what’s making Duffy so crazy right now, that he’s out of work. Until you get another case you’d call him in on, there’s no reason to talk to your boss, right?”
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.