Written Off

by E. J. Copperman

  “The only place large enough to hide a person is the steamer trunk,” Ben told Duffy. “But it’s locked.”

  “It’s the toolbox!” Duffy shouted. “That’s the one we wouldn’t expect! Rachel would know.” I heard more running around, and after that, I don’t remember much except that I had started taking those gulps of air.

  And coming up short.

  * * *

  The next thing I remember—and since I was alive, it couldn’t have been long after that—was something big, black, and round breaking through the ceiling above me. There was a very loud cracking sound, and then it came in. When it was pulled out again, air, which I would never take for granted again, flooded in. There was a fairly substantial hole in the top part of the toolbox. That was it—I was in a toolbox! And then the black thing came down again. And again. Maybe a few more times.

  Then the ceiling over me was gone, and there was Duffy Madison’s face. He put down the lamp I’d thrown across the room, the base of which he’d used to break through the locked doors of the toolbox, and removed the duct tape from my mouth. “Rachel,” he said.

  “Are you real?” I asked. My voice was raspy.

  Duffy smiled. “Depends on who you talk to,” he said.

  Chapter 28

  “Damien Mosley,” I said.

  Four hours later, we were driving back to my house in Duffy’s car. I’d been questioned, requestioned, and then questioned again. I didn’t think they had asked Shana Kineally that many questions, and she was being driven back to New Jersey—it turned out we were in Syracuse, New York (home of caramel candies), at Kineally’s ex-husband’s house, an abandoned rental property—in the back of a police car, and she was wearing zip strips on her wrists, which were behind her.

  Ben Preston had offered to drive me back, but I had opted to ride shotgun in Duffy’s car. Somehow the “Don’t trust Duffy Madison” note, which had in an indirect way been Kineally’s undoing, had done exactly what Ben and Dad had said it should do: it had made me trust Duffy that much more.

  I’d called Dad on my cell phone—the one they’d found in Kineally’s back pocket and in which Duffy had apparently slipped a GPS device when I’d left it in his car at Ocean Grove—as soon as I could breathe normally again. He sounded incredibly relieved, refused to even hint at an I-told-you-so, and must have been so happy that he’d lost his mind, because he offered to call my mother and fill her in on what had been going on.

  Personally, I just wanted to go back to my house and sleep for a few days, and then revise my novel with a new ending, in which the girl Duffy is searching for actually takes an active role in helping him locate her. She would not be TSTL if I had any say about it, and it looked like I would.

  “Who is Damien Mosley?” Duffy asked, not a hint of recognition, even to the point of an eyelid flutter, on his face.

  “You don’t remember him?” I asked sweetly. All right, manufactured sweetly. High fructose corn syrup sweetly. “He went to high school in Poughkeepsie, just like you. Went to Oberlin, just like you. Right about the same time, too.”

  “Coincidences are interesting but by definition meaningless if there is no pattern or intent,” Duffy said. I didn’t have time to analyze his sentence structure, but I thought he was asking me exactly what the hell the point of my exciting Damien Mosley story might be.

  The highway was not crowded, unusual for any time of any day on Route 17. Maybe my luck was changing. I looked through the windshield at the road and saw nothing but open space, which admittedly was crowded with strip malls and office buildings. It still looked like an unlimited source of possibilities.

  “Damien Mosley vanished about four years ago,” I said. “He left his job, his apartment, his mother, and his life. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

  “What is the significance?” Duffy asked. “I have no recollection of a Damien Mosley.”

  I sat back and rested my head, closing my eyes for a refreshing moment. “Don’t you see any interesting parallels?” I asked Duffy.

  His gaze never left the road. “Parallels?”

  “Damien Mosley left New Rochelle, where he lived at the time, and never came back. At almost exactly that moment, a man shows up at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office with no background, no history, and no memory, except that he calls himself Duffy Madison, oddly the same name as the character in my novel.”

  Duffy smiled slightly and let out a small sigh. “Are we back to this?” he asked.

  “You don’t think the facts fit the theory?” I asked. I can speak his language. I invented his language.

  “I’m saying that I’m not Damien Mosley,” he answered. “I am Duffy Madison.”

  “And you leapt to existence from my tortured mind?” I closed my eyes again. I thought the sedative Kineally had given me, coupled with my time inside the wooden toolbox, had not entirely worn off.

  “I did not leap to existence from a man who happens to share my initials,” he contended.

  “You’re right. Your explanation makes way more sense. By the way, nice not checking on some woman who marches into your office and says she’s an FBI agent. Excuse me, special agent.”

  Duffy’s eyes never left the road. “There is a Special Agent Shana Kineally in the Newark office, but since the photo on her credentials, which she never reported stolen because she was embarrassed, was taken when she was a rookie ten years ago, there was no reason for us to suspect the woman we were checking on was anyone but who she claimed to be.”

  Oh.

  We drove in silence for a while. I might even have fallen asleep at one point; the next thing I knew, we were on Route 78 in New Jersey. Duffy had turned on the radio because there was a baseball game being broadcast. Duffy is a Mets fan. They were losing, the sportscaster said, four to two.

  “Why did you talk up my book to publishers?” I asked him. I think I must have caught Duffy by surprise; his mouth twitched a little when I spoke.

  “Because I believed it was obvious that the killer had some connection to the publishing industry,” he answered. He had missed a beat and was trying to compensate by talking too fast. “No matter what anyone was saying, the link among the victims, including Ms. Bledsoe, had to do with crime fiction publishing.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  “If the publishing business was buzzing with word of your work, it could have the possibility of shaking loose someone who was already involved in the industry but had another agenda. It was the same principle as the e-mail I had you send back to Ms. Kineally when she threatened you.”

  My lips pushed out, I think without my consent. “You were using me as bait.”

  Duffy did look a little flustered at that; he actually broke eye contact with the road for a split second and looked at the radio. “Fly ball scores a run,” he said quietly.

  “You heard me,” I said.

  “Yes. I suppose I was making you a target. I had determined that I could track you using your cell phone, and I thought that even if something were to go wrong and you were taken, we would be able to find you in time.”

  “You almost didn’t,” I said.

  “I know. I apologize.”

  I should have been furious with him. A day before, I probably would have been. But spending some time inside a dark box with your kneecaps in your eye sockets can change your perspective. In this case, it made me a little more tolerant of the man who had worked so hard to get me abducted and then harder to get me out of danger.

  I waved a hand at him. “Could happen to anyone,” I said.

  We didn’t say anything more on the drive home. The Mets rallied and won, six to four in ten innings.

  * * *

  Dad stayed another two days, worried that somehow Kineally would bust out of jail or that she had an accomplice the police hadn’t detected who would emerge from the bushes in front of my house to seek revenge. When no one did, he admitted to a desire to get back to his barn and packed up. I’m always sorry to see him go, but it
would be nice to have the house back to myself again.

  One reason I wanted the solitude was that I’d decided it was time to start dating again, although I was not going to pursue a relationship with Ben Preston. For one thing, he reminded me of being trapped in a toolbox. For another, he’d been a little—no, a lot—too dismissive of me when I’d been right about who the killer might be. Any guy who deserved me would have at least pretended to take me seriously.

  Paula showed up on Monday, full of energy and unaware of the drama that had taken place over the weekend because no one—not Dad, Duffy, or Ben—had bothered to call her. I told her about it, only because it felt dishonest not to, and she was aghast, despite seeing that I was perfectly all right (I didn’t tell her about the nightmare I’d had that I was becoming a socket wrench). But I gave her some more research to do, and she was back to work. I did notice her coming out of her office more often, ostensibly with a question about something I knew she understood.

  She called Damien Mosley’s mother, only to find that she had moved away and not left a forwarding address. That cut off any possible photographs of Damien that might have been helpful. But now it felt less urgent to look into Duffy’s possible past. There were times I actually found myself wanting him to be the character I’d written, sprung from the bounds of his papery existence and existing entirely as the creation I’d envisioned. It was like having a movie made of one of my books, except that the movie followed you around and you could talk to it. And you didn’t get any money.

  Speaking of having movies made from my books, Adam was somewhat distraught—almost to the point that I thought he’d have to be put on suicide watch—when he found out that the impending offer from Beverly Hills Productions had in fact been a ruse designed to help me be murdered. Mostly it was the loss of the potential deal that was bothering him, but that’s his job.

  Hugh Ventnor had passed on Little Boy Lost, he reported, but vowed to play on until the book found a home with a nice caring producer who would take it for walks and scratch it behind the ears until it fell blissfully to sleep. Or something. I wasn’t the greatest listener these days; my mind tended to wander a bit.

  When Brian Coltrane called me from the Plaza Diner asking where the hell I was on our regular lunch day, I told him I hadn’t forgotten about the commitment so much as I’d thought it was on hiatus.

  “You told me Cathy was upset about how we were friends and you couldn’t hang out for a while,” I reminded him.

  “Cathy moved out,” Brian reported. “I told her it was unfair to try to alienate me from my closest friend, and she threw a fit and packed up her stuff.”

  “I feel awful. Your girlfriend moved out on you because of me.” I didn’t feel that bad, but it’s what you’re supposed to say.

  “Tell you the truth, it’s a relief,” Brian said. “She was driving me nuts, and the fact is, we hadn’t actually had sex in weeks.”

  “TMI,” I told him. “We’re friends. I’m not your shrink.”

  “Come to lunch. I’ll let you steal my French fries. I feel bad that I put Cathy ahead of you. How could I do that with what you were going through?”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking of breaking up with you as a friend.”

  “It would serve me right. Come to lunch. You can order a soda and hate it, and I won’t even point out that you do that every time.”

  I considered. “Nah. I appreciate the offer, but I really have to get to these revisions. I’m way behind.” It was true; I hadn’t done much work since being freed from the dusty confines of Kineally’s attic. Or her ex-husband’s attic. That guy must have been a piece of work—who marries a woman like that?

  Brian made me promise to show up for our next scheduled lunch, and I assured him I would. Now that he was unattached, I’d have to hear about every woman who passed him on the street and whether or not she was “the one.” By definition, the vast majority of them were not, and I could tell him that, but why kill the man’s dream?

  I sincerely, whole-mindedly dug in on the revisions to the new Duffy book. The first step is just to read through the whole manuscript looking for inconsistencies, mistakes, typos, anything (you never know who you’re annoying). Just make sure the story makes sense and the characters aren’t different in this book or this chapter because I was in an unusual mood or had written myself into a corner. It’s a first pass, and it should be simple. One problem is that reading anything off a screen, even something I wrote myself, tends to make me sleepy. Paula has had to wake me up some days when I start snoring at my computer.

  I was laboring to stay conscious today (in a less stressful atmosphere than the toolbox) when the doorbell rang, and Paula informed me that Duffy Madison was outside.

  The heat had broken a little—it was still in the lower eighties, but much less humid—so I went out and sat with Duffy on the bench next to where there would be a fountain if I had James Patterson’s money. He (Duffy, not James) looked a little wild, like he’d been up all night, and when I asked if he was okay, he informed me that he looked like what had indeed happened.

  “I couldn’t sleep the whole night,” he said. He stood up and put his hands behind him, a pacing pose that, when he bent over a little, made him look like Groucho Marx. “What you said to me was haunting me, prodding me. I think it was a call to action.”

  “What I said to you? What did I say to you?”

  “You told me that Damien Mosley was missing and had been missing for four years,” Duffy reminded me. It must have been sinking in that there were direct parallels he couldn’t explain. Maybe the information coming from me had actually awakened some memory in him and caused a breakthrough.

  Wait, maybe this meant he wasn’t going to be Duffy Madison anymore.

  I had to put my own feelings aside. If I could help the poor man remember his true identity, get back to who he really was, it would be selfish for me to hold him back just because I’d decided it was fun to have my little mind puppet running around in flesh and blood. I should be happy that I could be of so much assistance.

  “That’s right,” I said. “He left just about the time you showed up here in New Jersey.”

  “Exactly.” Duffy’s pacing was gaining speed. If he kept going back and forth like that, he would wear a groove in my flagstone. “So I think there’s only one thing we can do.”

  We? It was one thing to be his impetus; it was another to be his guide back to sanity. “I don’t think I’m qualified, Duffy,” I said.

  “Nonsense. You were invaluable on this last case. You’ll be invaluable on the new one.”

  There was clearly a disconnect here, and I was starting to realize it was based squarely in my court. “What new case?” I asked.

  “It’s clear,” Duffy said. “We need to find Damien Mosley.”