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’?”
Cards on the table. “Was Duffy Madison in the Classics Society with you?” I asked.
“Huh?” That had caught Louise off guard. Good. “Duffy Madison?”
“Yeah.” I could steal her tactic if I wanted to.
“Wasn’t that the guy who was with you when you were here?” she asked.
“Um, yes,” I said. “The yearbook lists him as a member of the Classics Society the same year you were in it. Did you know him?”
“No.” Louise was back to the one-syllable answers. I’d struck a nerve.
“There were only seven members,” I said. “How could you not know somebody who was in that club with you?”
“Look, what has this got to do with Damien Mosley leaving town and not coming back?” Louise was operating under the principle that accusing the accuser—and I wasn’t even accusing her of anything—would help her to dodge the question.
It was a decent tactic, considering that I couldn’t actually present a connection between the two things unless I were to get into the Twilight Zone logic that Duffy used to be Damien and that’s why everybody thought they looked alike. Louise had already said they were similar but not that similar, so it didn’t seem the right road to walk.
“I’m just wondering how that’s possible. I mean, if there were six other people in the club, and you did whatever a Classics Society does at the meetings, how could you not remember if the guy was there or not?” I’d chosen to ignore her question entirely because this was my interrogation, after all. I got back to being the reporter on the story. Woodward/Redford never let it throw him when the White House guys tried to make The Washington Post part of the Watergate story.
Really, you can develop a whole philosophy watching that movie.
“Okay!” Louise shouted. “I give up. You got me, okay? I never went to the Classics Society meetings.”
Well, of course she . . . what? But I resisted the urge to repeat her statement back to her in the form of a question. I’m just too professional for that. So it took me a moment to reply. “Why not?” I asked.
The answer took a long time coming, like Louise was trying to bolster her confidence. I heard some liquid swish in the background, and there might have been ice cubes clinking.
It was not yet eleven in the morning.
“I needed a reason to tell my parents why I wasn’t coming home,” she said finally. There was no slurring of words. Her s’s were not sloppy. I was hoping this was the first drink of the day, or that it was ginger ale or orange juice. With ice.
“So you joined the Classics Society?” Maybe that was the least of it, but it was the first thing that struck me.
“Yeah.”
I was going to have to do better than that. “Why did you need to put up a smoke screen for your parents?” And as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that was a stupid question.
“So I could be with my boyfriend,” Louise said, her tone indicating she too knew I was a bozo. “You know, be with him.”
It all came flooding toward me at that point. She needed to be with her boyfriend, so she joined the Classics Society. There was no evidence that Duffy had ever gone to a meeting of the Classics Society, either, since none of the other members Paula had contacted remembered him. And then Louise, after taking the SATs, had promptly given up any pretense of applying to colleges. I put it all together in my head, and it spelled out only one solution.
“Louise,” I said, my breath coming a little heavier than I intended, “did Duffy Madison get you pregnant?”
“What is it with you and Duffy Madison?” she demanded. “Are you his girlfriend or something?”
It was a much more complicated relationship than that, but I really didn’t have the time or the Tylenol to get through it right now. “No,” I said. “I’m not his girlfriend. So what happened?”
“I got pregnant, all right, but I don’t know anything about your Duffy Madison,” Louise said. She was going to drive the point home. “I never met the guy before you came to my house a couple of days ago, okay?”
Okay. Okay. I got it, although I still thought she was lying. Duffy had been going to Poughkeepsie to investigate Damien Mosley’s disappearance while he was staying at my father’s house a month before.
“So who was the boyfriend?” I asked. I’m not even sure why I cared unless it was Damien Mosley.
“It doesn’t matter,” Louise said. “I wasn’t really pregnant.”
In my experience, you either are or you’re not. “What does that mean?”
“I just thought I was. Turned out about a week later that I wasn’t.”
A week later? “Then why didn’t you go to college?” I asked.
“What’s college got to do with it?”
I was beginning to get the idea that maybe I shouldn’t make assumptions about people’s lives based on my own investigation. Or Paula’s. “I thought you didn’t go to college because you were pregnant,” I said.
“I didn’t go to college because I had to go to work,” Louise answered. “My dad was almost out of a job, we thought he was going to get laid off, and my mom was only working part-time, and I still don’t see what any of this had to do with Damien Mosley.”
She had a point, I had to admit. “Were you really involved with Damien right before he vanished?” I asked. What the hell; maybe I could find out something with this phone call.
“I don’t know if you’d call it involved,” she said. “He had a wife, but he wasn’t living with her. We did what we did, and that was it.”
The tone in my ear indicated someone else was trying to call me. I thanked Louise for her trouble—which seemed weird—and clicked through to the other call.
“Is this Ms. Rachel Goldman?” a man asked.
No good phone call ever started that way.
I admitted to being myself. It was one of the few things I was still sure about these days.
“I’m calling about a man named Duffy Madison,” the man said. “I’m Sgt. Michael O’Rourke with the North Bergen Police Department.”
Alarm bells went off in my head. “What about Duffy Madison?”
A call from the North Bergen police about Duffy? Were they trying to alert me to some new weird breach of protocol my Frankenstein creation had committed? Did they want to know if there was such a person as Duffy Madison? If so, how could I answer? But then my mind wandered into darker areas, and all in a flash, I had to wonder if I was Duffy’s emergency contact. Had they found his body in the same ditch they’d found Damien Mosley’s?
That was the kind of twist I might be looking for at the midpoint of a manuscript. If Duffy was dead, was I responsible?
“Mr. Madison asked us to call you,” Sgt. O’Rourke said. I heard myself let out a sigh of relief. Duffy wasn’t dead. Or wait—had he asked just before he let out his last agonized gasp? “He said he did not have a lawyer, so we should call you.”
A lawyer? “Why does Duffy need a lawyer?” I asked.
“We have him under arrest,” O’Rourke answered. “He’s being charged with regard to a murder.”