Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  Duffy tried to regain his dignity by drawing himself to full height and lacing his fingers behind his back, as if he had been given the order to be at ease. “Your reasoning isn’t bad,” he said. “But you must be careful. Jumping to conclusions in a case like this is extremely dangerous. We have to stay—”

  “—one step ahead of the kidnapper. Yes, I’ve heard that before. In fact, I wrote it.” I stopped pacing and faced him directly. “Cards on the table, Duffy. You truly believe that you’re a manifestation of the fictional character I created four years and now five manuscripts ago?”

  He nodded. “I confess, I can’t come up with another scenario that fits the facts. What’s that got to do with the case?”

  “You have to know that I think you’re a nut. But you’re a smart nut. You act exactly like the character I write, and he’s brilliant. You can’t do anything stupid. You can’t step out of character, not even once, especially when I’m around. And that gives me an advantage—I know your moves better than you do. I know them before you do them.”

  “This is not a competition, Ms. Goldman.” But the tightness in his mouth betrayed his real feelings.

  “You aren’t capable of dodging the question. I know that. So I’ll ask it: why are you so intent on talking to me about this case?” I put my palms on the conference table and leaned toward him. “Why do you need me?”

  “I think you know something about the victim,” he answered. I thought there’d be more, but there wasn’t.

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never heard of Julia Bledsoe.”

  In my books, Duffy Madison has a flair for the dramatic; he uses it to his advantage to get kidnappers to confess or witnesses to talk. So I fully expected to see him use it here, and he didn’t disappoint. “Yes, you have,” he said. “But you know her as Sunny Maugham.”

  I felt my eyes widen and drew a sharp intake of breath. Damn, he was good. “Julia Bledsoe is Sunny Maugham?”

  Duffy nodded. “Her pen name.”

  I knew Sunny Maugham. I didn’t know her well; we’d met at mystery conferences once or twice, and I was fairly sure we’d both been on a panel at the New York Public Library a couple of years before. She was a lot higher up on the literary food chain than I was. “You brought me in because the victim is a mystery author.”

  “That’s the pattern,” he almost whispered.

  I stared into his eyes. “The pattern? The other victims? They were all mystery authors?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Duffy said.

  It was too much to take in all at once. Sunny Maugham, an author of light, paper-thin mysteries, was missing. But that wasn’t all—Duffy believed that she was the fourth in a series of such abductions, and the other three women who had been taken had been found murdered. All three of them mystery authors.

  Like me.

  “I don’t mean to alarm you,” Duffy said, although he had done exactly that. “I thought you might have known Ms. Bledsoe.”

  “I know Sunny. Not well, though. We’ve met a few times and really only talked once.” At a convention in Bethesda, Maryland, Sunny and I had closed the bar one night when my first book was just on the shelves and her twelfth novel had just reached the New York Times Best Sellers list. We toasted each other until we were thoroughly toasted, and she gave me some advice about using social media to help people find your work. Mostly, it was about not being a pain and sounding like a commercial. She hadn’t had to do that. She had gone out of her way for me, strictly as a way of “paying it forward,” and I appreciated it.

  “What did you talk about?” Duffy asked, suddenly intent on the question.

  I left my reverie and looked at him. “Who are you, really?” I asked.

  “Duffy Madison. What did you talk to Sunny Maugham about?”

  “Nothing. Books. Publishing. Twitter. It wasn’t significant.”

  Duffy gave me a look, and I knew before he said it that he was going to tell me, “Until we hear all the facts, we don’t know what will be significant.” I was pretty sure I’d written that one for him. “Is there anything you can think of that might point us in a direction? A place she liked to go? A lover or a relative she’d visit? Something like that?” He said “lover” like it was something he’d heard about but didn’t really understand.

  “She didn’t tell me anything like that. I told you, we weren’t close.” Then, of course, just to prove that he was right and I was wrong, I remembered something. “Wait. She said she had a place down the shore. In Spring Lake, I think. She liked to go there when she got blocked writing or when she just needed to clear her head. She called it her bungalow.”

  Duffy’s eyes lit up. “Why wouldn’t her sister know about it?” he asked. “Was it a secret?”

  “I honestly have no idea,” I told him.

  He pulled a laptop computer from a bag he had on the floor and opened it on the conference table. “There must be some way to get the address,” he said to himself, because clearly there was no reason I needed to hear it. “Yes! Looking under Sunny Maugham, there’s a deed to a small house in Ocean Grove, not Spring Lake.” He couldn’t resist letting me know where I’d been mistaken. “She might have gone there or been taken there. It’s worth checking.” He grabbed a jacket off the chair he’d been standing near and threw it on in a dramatic gesture. “Let’s go.”

  Go? “What do you mean, ‘let’s go’?” I asked. “Isn’t this police work? What do you need me for?”

  Halfway to the door, he stopped to give me an incredulous look. “Don’t you want to know if your information helped solve the case?”

  “Not especially. I hope Sunny’s all right, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me later and let me know. But I’m going home. I’ve got revisions to do.” I picked up my purse. Now, I surely wasn’t going to do any revisions when I got home, but it sounded important enough. “After all, if I don’t fix my book, how will you know who to be tomorrow?” Maybe that was mean.

  “I’m not fictional, Ms. Goldman, I assure you. And I must insist that you accompany me to Ocean Grove.”

  It wasn’t until I noticed the room getting alternately dark and light that I realized I must have been blinking a mile a minute. “Ocean Grove? Now?” It was an hour and a half drive, and that was without traffic. Even if he hadn’t been pretending to be a figment of my imagination, now I would be sure this guy was nuts.

  “Yes, please. You see, you lend a perspective that I can’t hope to understand, never having written fiction. You can empathize with the victim, put yourself in her shoes. You can be invaluable.”

  “Why not just call the Ocean Grove cops and ask them to check in on her house?” I asked.

  “I will do that, but I think it’s imperative that you and I be on the scene as well,” the fake almost-a-cop answered. “If Ms. Bledsoe is not there, you might be able to spot clues to her next destination. If she is there, you might be able to draw her out and determine the reason for her behavior.”

  Something didn’t add up. “That doesn’t fit your assessment of the situation,” I told Duffy. “You practically told me before that you think Sunny might be the latest in a series of murders. You think she’s dead.”

  “I don’t think anything yet. I need facts. And you are keeping me from getting them as we speak.”

  I folded my arms. “I’m not keeping you from anything. You want to schlep down to Ocean Grove, enjoy yourself. The beach is lovely—and crowded—this time of year. But there’s no logical reason for me to go, and I am definitely not going.”

  He regarded me without a readable expression on his face for a long moment. “If the situation were reversed and I asked Julia Bledsoe to help me find you, would she do it?” he asked.

  Well, there went my day.

  Chapter 8

  In fact, it took almost two hours for us to reach Sunny Maugham’s little beach house. Duffy had indeed notified the Ocean Grove police, who reported no sign of activity in the area and no car parked in front of the bungalow. There wa
s no garage and no driveway.

  An Ocean Grove police car was already in front of the place when we got there, and I saw a few neighbors standing out on their doorsteps wondering what the cops were doing in the area. Ocean Grove is one of the quieter shore towns, even during the height of the season.

  We hadn’t spoken much on the long drive down. I had pretty much plastered myself against the passenger side door, trying to stay as far away from this odd manifestation of a fictional character as possible. He, probably sensing my apprehension, stared straight ahead. Maybe he thought I was worried about his driving, which was so safety conscious I gave some thought to hiring him as my chauffeur.

  My cell phone rang halfway down and I saw it was Brian calling. I don’t know why, but it seemed rude to take the call in the car. That was weird. Duffy Madison, or whoever he really was, made me act weird. That couldn’t be good.

  There was one moment, right around Holmdel, when Duffy blurted out, “I’m concerned that Ms. Bledsoe might not be in her house alone. The Ocean Grove police aren’t hearing anything, but they don’t want to break the door down without a warrant or some indication of wrongdoing inside.”

  I considered thanking him for the lovely images now bouncing around in my brain—a crime fiction writer’s mind is no place for the faint of heart—but didn’t respond. Words have always been my best weapons and my tools of choice. Now I was incapable of finding any that would help make sense of the situation.

  Let’s recap, shall we? A man claiming to be the physical embodiment of my own fictional creation had invaded my life, insisting that he had come to being at the exact moment I’d started writing about the character with his name. He had the same job, under different circumstances, as my character. He looked roughly like I’d pictured my character. He spoke like my character. His demeanor was . . . you get the idea. And yet, he insisted he’d never read a word I’d ever written.

  This guy wasn’t just disturbing every notion I had of reality; he was a really bad consumer.

  “How can you be Duffy Madison?” I demanded of him in lieu of a response to his worries. “There is no Duffy Madison. I made him up completely from scratch.”

  Not a flicker on his face, not a second when his eyes left the road. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I’ve never known anything else. It’s who I am.”

  “But you have identification. Mr. Petrosky told me. Voter registration. Fingerprint files. A driver’s license. You have records with the Selective Service, for Chrissakes. If I just started writing Duffy four years ago, you can’t be more than four years old. How can you have any official paper trail at all?”

  Duffy was driving at three miles over the posted speed limit; he must have been really worried about Sunny Maugham. “Wouldn’t your Duffy Madison have all those pieces of ID?” he asked.

  “Yes, but he’s a man in his thirties.”

  “So am I.”

  “You don’t remember a childhood? High school? College? I gave Duffy all those things, but you don’t remember anything before I started writing four years ago?” Duffy—my Duffy—was a logical man. If I could prove objectively that he was not who he believed himself to be, maybe we could figure out who he actually was.

  “That’s about right, yes.”

  We didn’t talk again until we reached Ocean Grove, and then it was just about directions to the house.

  It was, as advertised, a small structure, one of four raised a few feet higher than they had probably been before the shore was ravaged by winds and rain. More or less a clapboard version of a tent home, it had a triangular roof and one or two rooms—it was hard to tell from the outside—with three steps up to the front door. The four homes were surrounded on either side by much larger homes, clearly rental properties that leased by the apartment, as many as four flats in each house. Sunny’s little bungalow looked like it was the baby some of the bigger houses had spawned.

  At the moment, it had police officers at its door and, I was certain, more in the rear, where there was a tiny yard with no fence. The cops didn’t have their weapons drawn, but I saw one rest his hand on his holster in anticipation.

  “What happens now?” I asked Duffy. I opened my door because the air conditioning had gone off; I really wasn’t interested in getting out of the car and becoming involved in this scene.

  “I’ll check in with the local police. I have no jurisdiction here or anywhere; I’m just a consultant.” Duffy got out of the car, then looked inside. “Come on.”

  Dammit! I couldn’t look cowardly around this guy; he wouldn’t let me write about him being heroic anymore. Yeah, I know it’s crazy. What about this situation wasn’t crazy? I got out of the car, feeling like the biggest sucker on the planet.

  Duffy started to close his door but stopped, looked inside, and reached in. “Your phone,” he said. I didn’t think I’d need it, but I didn’t want it to feel like molten plastic when I got back in. Duffy leaned in, said, “Oops,” when he dropped it—“Oops”? Really?—and after a few seconds, handed me my phone, which was only the temperature of a freshly baked bagel. I shoved it into my pocket and felt it warm my leg, which didn’t need warming.

  Without any further words or a look in my direction, he strode directly across the street to the house and spoke to the first officer he reached. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the officer pointed at the front door. I followed at a discreet distance (I wasn’t even a consultant) and stopped at the curb.

  Duffy shook hands with one of the officers at the door who was wearing sergeant’s stripes. They spoke briefly, and Duffy nodded, pointed at me, and nodded again. The cop acknowledged his nod, then turned back toward the door and said something into the comm link on his shoulder. Duffy walked down the three stairs and came to stand next to me.

  “They haven’t seen any sign of life,” he reported. “But they also have a decent view of most of the inside; it’s a small place. They don’t see anything disturbing or dangerous, or they would have gone inside already.”

  “So what are they going to do?” I asked.

  “They’re trying Julia Bledsoe’s cell phone again because there is no landline in the bungalow,” Duffy answered. “They want to see if they can hear the ringtone.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” I suggested. “If she’s there, they’d probably see her, and if she’s . . . if something happened, her cell phone is either gone, out of power, or holding enough messages that the call will be sent straight to voice mail. What happens if they don’t hear anything?”

  Duffy looked dubious. “They could try to get a judge to sign a warrant, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to merit one.” He stopped talking and looked intently at the officers at Sunny Maugham’s front door.

  One of them was punching numbers into a cell phone. He waited, phone away from his ear. The two other cops leaned in toward the front windows, one looking in, the other two with their ears to the glass.

  All of a sudden, the two listening both stood up straight with a jolt. They looked at the sergeant with whom Duffy had been talking, who nodded and pointed at the front door. Then the officer who’d been looking through the front window positioned himself at the door, got his balance, and kicked. Hard.

  “I guess they heard the phone ring,” Duffy said, not necessarily to me.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” He gave me a quick reproving look; I’d forgotten that Duffy doesn’t care for profanity. My publisher’s idea. Get more women to read the books. Hey, it’s a living.

  The cops, led by the sergeant, rushed into the tiny structure and then . . . nothing. We didn’t see anything through the front window but police officers walking around in a nondescript sort of pattern, and we didn’t hear anything through the open front door, which looked like it would require a decent amount of repair if Sunny was going to close and lock it again.

  Neither of us said anything; it was becoming a learned behavior. We avoided eye contact and didn’t speak to each other. A stranger passing by would have thought
we’d been married for fifteen years.

  Finally, the sergeant appeared in the front door again and beckoned. “Mr. Madison?”

  Duffy started toward the house and then turned and looked at me. “Come along,” he said.

  I had the strangest urge to look around for the person he was summoning, but I resisted it and did not ask, “Me?” I’d like it noted that when given the opportunity, I avoided the cliché. “You sure it’s all right?” I asked him. Any excuse to not go into that house, if something had been found, would do.

  “If it’s safe for me, it’s safe for you,” he said impatiently. “Let’s go.”

  Because—and only because—I couldn’t think of a plausible reason not to, I started toward the house. Duffy, already on the front steps, stopped and waited again when he saw I was clearly not relishing the amazing opportunity I was being given and was lagging behind. But he didn’t say anything.

  Eventually, I reached his position on the top step and waited for him to enter the house. But he, gallant as ever, waved an arm toward the interior. “After you,” he said.

  Finally, I meet a man with some manners, and he’s an idea I got in the shower. There was almost something poetically ironic about that.

  The inside was one room, and it was not large. There was no television, no sofa. To the right, there was a tiny galley kitchen that included a microwave oven, a minifridge, and a two-burner cook top. In the center of the room was a fold-up card table with one chair (also collapsible) next to it. There was a folding beach chair leaning against the wall near the table. A thin line of sand led from the folding chair to the door in the back. Toward the back were towels hung on a line that ran across the room and flip-flops by the back door, which led to a tiny porch. The back door was open, showing a small yard that had probably once been grass and was now mostly sand.