Written Off (6 page)

“It’s a card table,” the uniformed officer said with a hopeful voice. “Maybe she came down to play cards?”

“With no garbage, no empty bottles or glasses obviously used, and no deck of cards anywhere, I would say not,” Duffy answered him. He wasn’t trying to dash the kid’s hopes of becoming a plainclothes detective anytime soon, but his tone probably had that effect anyway.

“The table isn’t entirely dusted,” I pointed out. “Just the side by the one chair. There’s nothing on the other side at all
except
dust. And the seat of the chair has just about the same look to it, a little dust but not as much as everything else.”

“So Ms. Bledsoe used the table, but not for eating, since that doesn’t seem to have happened here recently.” Duffy knew I was on to something, but he didn’t know what yet. To me, it seemed obvious.

“This is Sunny’s writer’s retreat,” I told him. “She comes down here when she gets stuck, maybe, or just needs a change of scenery to keep the work coming. She uses that table, but she probably goes out for dinner instead of cooking. She wouldn’t want to take the time to cook dinner, and if she’s down here alone, there’s no reason to cook when there are plenty of restaurants in the area. Any excuse to get up from the table and move around is probably welcome. She works here. Probably not all the time because the house isn’t winterized, but she definitely works here.”

Duffy smiled an enigmatic smile. The sergeant and the uniformed cop who had looked in the kitchen appeared perplexed by my explanation, but Duffy pointed at the table and waved his finger a bit.

“There are no indications there were notes, paper files, index cards,” he said. “No scratches from paper clips, no pens or pencils, no note pads.”

“Welcome to the computer age,” I said.

“There is no desktop computer.”

“Okay, welcome to the laptop computer age. I haven’t written anything out on paper for years. My desk doesn’t even have enough open space for me to consider writing on it. No flat surface that isn’t taken up with something. The only reason I think this isn’t Sunny’s primary workspace is that there’s no visible modem, no Wi-Fi server. There’s no printer. She only uses this place when she needs to be away from her usual office because she’s reached maximum density there.”

“Writer’s block?” Duffy suggested.

I waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no such thing. Writers made that up so they could procrastinate better. We love to make up excuses not to write, and we’re great at making things up. Writers are the best procrastinators on the planet.”

“Still, no indication there ever were notes. Is that all on her laptop?” Duffy seemed genuinely intrigued by my explanation of the process; it was like he was asking me how he’d been born. I got a little nauseous but fought that feeling off.

“Not necessarily. From what I can see, Sunny’s probably a pantser.”

The two cops indulged in a shared look, and Duffy’s eyes widened a bit. “A
pantser
?” he asked.

“Sure. There are two kinds of writers: plotters and pantsers. Plotters work out every detail before they ever commit a word to their hard drives. They outline. They take notes on the backs of napkins and pull them out of their pockets at the end of the night. They have charts and graphs and three-by-five file cards that tell them the whole story they’re about to write before they dare try to write it.

“But pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. They start with a premise, maybe have a scene or two in their heads that will serve as landmarks along the way, and that’s it. They know who their characters are and what their stories are generally about, but they don’t have any idea what the connective tissue will be. How they get from point A to point Z is a complete mystery. For pantsers, that makes the writing process more fun, if something that difficult and painful can be considered fun.”

“And you?” Duffy asked.

“Pantser. From day one.”

“You frown on those who plan ahead?” Duffy is meticulous and plodding; he rarely takes a wild chance. He was asking me for some sign of acceptance—or not.

“No, of course not,” I assured him. “Writing’s too hard to exclude people whose style is not the same as mine. Whatever process works is the one people should use.”

He grinned. “That’s very understanding of you,” he said.

“But it doesn’t get us any closer to what happened here,” the sergeant pointed out, no doubt anxious for the writing seminar to be over. “It looks like the owner of the house was here pretty recently, but it doesn’t look like there’s any sign
of a crime. If she’s missing now, she probably isn’t missing from here.”

“I must disagree,” Duffy said. “Ms. Bledsoe was definitely taken from this bungalow.”

“How do you figure?” The sergeant might not have been pleased with this civilian tutoring him on the fine points of crime investigation, and he certainly wasn’t crazy about the “assistant” to the consultant going on about the creative writing life.

Duffy, unfortunately, was blind to the muffled disdain in the sergeant’s voice. “It’s simple. What led us into this house?”

Oh, boy. He was going to hold a symposium. I instinctively backed up a step away from the sergeant, if for no other reason than to give him a visual separation between myself and Duffy, a quick “Hey, that’s him, not me” indicator.

“You called our department and said that a missing woman might be found here,” the sergeant answered through thin lips. “And I’ll report that we didn’t find her.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Duffy insisted, the tough-but-fair professor trying to point his clever-but-limited student back to the right path. “What gave us the impetus to enter the house?”

I worried momentarily that the sergeant would stumble on the word “impetus,” but he went straight through. “When we called her cell phone, it rang inside this house,” he said, squinting as if the answer to the puzzle were far away and he couldn’t quite make out the lettering.

“Exactly,” Duffy said. “Very good.” It was a miracle he didn’t try to feed the sergeant a liver treat. “And did we find
the mobile?” There are times he uses words that make him sound British; that’s unintentional on my part. Sometimes I think he bleeds a little into Sherlock Holmes in my head. I should work harder on that.

“Yeah,” the uniformed cop said, producing the phone in his latex-gloved hand. “It was right there on the floor next to the table.”

“Excellent!” Duffy gushed. “You’re doing very well indeed.” You see what I mean about the British thing?

“So how does that lead to her being taken from the house?” the sergeant wanted to know.

“Ms. Bledsoe comes down here to work on her latest novel,” Duffy began. “She might be floundering at home and decides she needs a change of scene, or maybe she just wants to go to the beach. That doesn’t matter at this point.

“Once she’s here, she encounters another person who might show some interest in her work or simply strike up a conversation at the beach or at dinner in a restaurant one night. A person dining out alone is not impossible but certainly not standard. It draws attention to her, and maybe she is happy for the company.”

“You’re getting this from a cell phone on the floor?” the officer asked.

“I’m not sure about the details,” Duffy said. “What I know is that Ms. Bledsoe and another person—because that folding chair must have been stored in the back of the house and then brought here for a guest, based on the trail of sand—came back here, and from here they made a very hasty exit. That, given the fact that her sister called the police
concerned—because this is a serious break in Ms. Bledsoe’s routine—leads me to believe that she was taken.”

“How does the cell phone lead to abduction?” I asked, finally.
Somebody
had to get him to the reveal or we’d be here all night, and I wanted to get home. To revise. No, really.

“A writer without a cellular phone is unthinkable,” Duffy said. “To be out of touch with an editor, an agent, a publicist? Never. Am I correct about that?” he asked me.

Considering that I’d talked to my agent today and had to e-mail my editor as soon as I got home, I nodded.

“So she forgot her phone,” the sergeant said. “It happens to everybody.”

“Yes, but then everybody comes back to get it,” Duffy said. “Ms. Bledsoe’s sister confirms there is no second cell number. That is the only phone she has. And since it’s still holding a charge enough that we could hear the ringing from outside the house, we can assume it has not been lying on the floor here for much more than a day, two on the outside.”

“That means she’s not here,” the sergeant argued. “It doesn’t mean she’s been kidnapped.”

“The phone was on the floor next to the table. It had been dropped there. And it was left there.”

“So she dropped her phone on her way out the door,” the sergeant said.

“Look at this house,” Duffy countered. “It’s not clean, but it’s neat. There isn’t one thing out of place. Everything, down to the last cereal spoon, has been put back in its designated spot. Everything except that cell phone, the one item
Ms. Bledsoe would probably have been most cognizant of the whole time. No, the phone on the floor is very telling, sergeant. There’s no sign of a struggle, but that phone makes it kidnapping for me, and if that’s the case, I’m afraid we have very little time left to find Ms. Bledsoe.”

“You were extremely helpful,” Duffy Madison told me. “I would not have been able to adequately evaluate the crime scene if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”

All this buttering up was taking place in the parking lot of the Bergen County office building, after another interminable trip, this time from Ocean Grove to Hackensack to pick up my car. Duffy had nattered on about the case in a monologue, almost nonstop, since we’d said our good-byes to the Ocean Grove police department and headed northwest to our—or my, at least—home county.

I’d been taking notes, as he’d . . . is there a word that could make it sound like he didn’t actually order me to?
Instructed
, perhaps. Gentler, without actually being polite.

The three murders of crime writers were perplexing at the very least, he’d said. They weren’t the same kind of writers. One, Missy Hardaway, lived in New Hampshire and wrote “cozies,” the kind of mystery that features no “bad” language, no graphic violence, and, above all, no explicit sex. (You can
kill anyone you want—except the cat—but you can’t have your heroine
shtup
anybody or you’re toast.) She had published two books in trade paperback with a small publisher headquartered in Baltimore.

The second dead writer, J. B. Randolph (I didn’t think any of these were their real names), wrote tough thrillers. The initials instead of a first name probably indicated that her publisher wanted readers to think the books were written by a man, or at least not to think about the author’s gender at all. Randolph had written seven books, all stand-alones. They’d managed some success, but she was hardly a household name.

The third was Marion Benedict, a lab assistant and an unpublished writer who had created two e-book short stories on her own and was at work on her first full-length novel (the first two had not been purchased by a publisher, and she’d been talking about self-publishing), a police procedural about a beautiful but shy forensic lab technician, when she was found murdered.

I did not get to ask Duffy how the women died because he literally never stopped talking during the ride, but he volunteered the information anyway somewhere around Exit 143B (Irvington/Hillside) on the Garden State Parkway. “Ms. Hardaway was found at her home in Nashua, New Hampshire, with trauma to her head; she’d been hit from behind with a manual typewriter she kept in her writing room but did not use,” he said. I thought—but, again, didn’t get the chance to say—that no writer uses a typewriter anymore, and certainly not a manual one, so it had probably been a decoration—or an inspiration. Some people get a charge out
of the good old days of writing. Give me a good word processor and the ability to cut and paste, and I’m a happy woman.

“J. B. Randolph was electrocuted directly by current from her desktop computer,” Duffy went on as I scribbled. “She lived in Manhattan, Kansas, and had no connection to either of the other victims or Ms. Bledsoe, according to the research I’ve done and have been given by the other three police departments. If the women weren’t all crime writers, they would seem to have been chosen at random. Because they clearly
weren’t
random crimes, the motive must somehow be tied to the idea of writing crime fiction.”

I knew Sunny Maugham’s reputation well enough to dismiss the idea of a jealous rival doing her in. She was generous to a fault with other writers, had been working with the same editor for decades without so much as a hint of friction, and was considered one of the truly nicest people in the business. If I hadn’t been so busy taking dictation from Duffy, I might have had a moment to be truly worried about possibly being in very severe danger.

But on he went: “Marion Benedict was found in her home in Philadelphia. She rented an apartment over a pizzeria and wrote in her bedroom. Her death was perhaps the most gruesome of the three.”

I considered asking him to let me off here, but we were still on the Parkway, and getting out to walk while other cars zipped by at eighty-five miles an hour could make me an even more gruesome statistic, so I took a breath and told myself simply to write the words I heard and not to think about their meaning.

“She was found literally choked to death with printouts of rejection letters stuffed into her throat,” Duffy said. “She suffocated.”

He was right; that was pretty bad.

“In Ms. Bledsoe’s case,” he continued, the words just coming out as if he had already written them down and was now reading off cards, “the abduction is unusually subtle. The other victims were reported missing but immediately found murdered at home. Ms. Bledsoe is missing from both her Upper Saddle River home and her beach house in Ocean Grove, indicating she was taken and kept longer. There is a reason the criminal has changed his pattern, but it is not yet apparent.”

He had then recited various observations from each of the crime scenes, from Sunny’s house, which had shown no sign of any serious altercation, to the newest data (as Duffy would call it, despite the fact that it was all from his own mind) from the house in Ocean Grove, with its incongruous card table and folding chairs—really not the kind of place a woman like Julia, whose books had achieved a very high level of success, would usually be expected to own. “It is odd that she chose that house for her writing retreat and that she had clearly been there recently but had not seemed to do much more than exist there. Even the backyard did not show signs of much activity, and that would have been the route to the beach, surely one of the draws for Ms. Bledsoe to make the drive down.”

He had never speculated on the kidnapper’s motive or any possible identity for the criminal. I knew he wouldn’t; that
Holmesian brain would never admit any thought that hadn’t been created from facts. Guessing was simply not something Duffy Madison would ever do.

And whoever this guy was, he clearly knew all about what Duffy Madison would and would not do.

Now in the Bergen County parking lot, I could put away the note pad and accept his compliment. “I am happy to be of help,” I said, and to some degree I meant it. “I’ll type these notes up and e-mail them to you tomorrow morning; how’s that?”

“Oh, that’s no good,” he answered.

I had been reaching for the door handle; now I stopped and regarded him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ms. Bledsoe has not yet been found. Every minute counts.” His tone indicated that I was no longer the brightest third grader in the class.

“And my typing up the notes is going to get her rescued faster?” I
knew
he was crazy. Now the deep psychosis was going to come out. I reached for the door latch again.

“Of course not,” Duffy said. “Type up the notes at your leisure. But you can’t leave now. We have work to do. I want you to lend the same expertise at Ms. Bledsoe’s home in Upper Saddle River. It’s possible there is something there that I missed, as well. And
that
might get her rescued faster.”

“Upper Saddle River?” I moaned wearily. “That’s got to be a half-hour drive.”

“Thirty-three minutes,” Duffy corrected. It occurred to me to mention that specificity might not be the most important thing at this moment. “Assuming there isn’t much traffic.”

“You can’t be serious.” Then I realized he was about to inform me that he was nothing
but
serious, and I cut him off at the pass. “If you wanted me to go with you to Sunny’s house in Upper Saddle River, why did you bring me back here?”

Duffy looked uncomfortable. “I thought you might want to get your car or need to go home to freshen up,” he said. “Ladies do that, don’t they?” Maybe he really was four years old. Had I ever written a love interest for Duffy? Now that I thought about it, the answer was no. He’d probably never had anything but a professional conversation with a woman in his “life.”

“Well, it’s always welcome, but if we’re going to—” I caught myself. “Hold on. I’m not going anywhere with you anymore. You’re the consultant with the cops. Go consult. I’m a mystery writer. I have revisions that need to get done. Call me with any updates, and good night, Mr. . . .”

“Madison. Duf—”

“Whatever.” This time I opened the car door and got out. And I was about to slam it, harder than I probably should, when a wave of guilt, probably sent across thousands of miles by my mother telepathically, hit me between the eyes. I turned back and looked at Duffy. “Look, there’s nothing at Sunny’s house that I could see if you didn’t see it. If you really believe that I am responsible for your existence, then you have to believe it the whole way. That means I can’t know anything you don’t. So I’m sure you didn’t miss a thing. Just keep on investigating. Duffy Madison hasn’t ever failed to find the missing person.” I closed the car door, respectfully and quietly. “Good night,” I repeated.

He probably wouldn’t have heard me, but he was in the process of lowering the passenger window. “I saw the table and the dust in Ocean Grove. You interpreted them. You’re the writer. You have the same sensibility as the victim here. You can help.”

The fatigue that had set in was too strong. I shook my head. “Not tonight, Duffy. I don’t have anything left in me. You keep working the case tonight without me. I guarantee you’ll make more progress that way, and I bet by the morning you will have found Sunny Maugham. Meanwhile, I’ll get your notes together. If you still feel like you need me in the morning, go ahead and call, okay?”

He looked like a disappointed puppy, but he nodded once. “Fair enough. You’ve already gone above and beyond the call of duty. Thank you for your help, Ms. Goldman. I’ll call you tomorrow morning either way, if that’s all right.”

I assured him it was, then turned and walked to my car as his tires crackled on the pavement. I didn’t look back, got in, and drove home without checking in the rearview mirror to see if Duffy Madison was following me.

Once there, I got out my key and opened the door. Being inside my very own house was the most comforting feeling I could remember having in a long, long time.

The revisions—I hadn’t been kidding about those—were waiting, but I decided first to put some water on to boil and make myself some pasta. Comfort food on a day when comfort was definitely a scarce commodity. Once the water was on the stove, I opened a bottle of red wine, let it breathe for close to ten seconds, and poured myself a glass. I don’t have
a fireplace, but it was July, so that was just as well, and I plopped myself down in front of the TV, put on a rerun of a sitcom I probably thought was stupid the first time it had aired, and luxuriated in the depths of ordinariness.

When the water boiled, I cooked some penne to the proper al dente, got out a jar of Alfredo sauce, and reveled in how badly I was treating my body. I probably would have eaten the whole box of pasta if those damn revisions hadn’t been calling from the back of my mind. Deadline was less than a week away; there was no avoiding them.

I got the laptop out of the case I’d been lugging it around in all day, then decided I’d do this right and actually go to my office and the desktop computer I had there. That would feel more like a responsible professional doing work.

It actually did seem right to work in the office, which still wasn’t straightened up, but I didn’t care about that right then. I touched the
R
key on the computer, which I always do to wake it up, and sure enough, it blazed to life. Well, “blazed” might be a trifle optimistic. My computer is a few years old. It rumbled to life.

There were, it noted, two hundred and sixteen e-mails in my inbox, accumulated since I’d left this morning. I knew it would take me precious time to sort through them, but it’s a compulsion. I can’t work if someone is trying to get in touch with me. What if it’s Steven Spielberg wanting to adapt a Duffy novel to the big screen?

Stop laughing. It could happen.

Alas, Steven had forsaken me once again. Most of the e-mails were either junk that the spam filter hadn’t managed
to, you know, filter or messages from one of the LISTSERVs I joined around the time
Olly Olly
was about to be published. The lists, for those interested in crime fiction, get an author in touch with people who might want to read her books, and they have been very helpful to me. I also love to get into discussions about my books and those of other writers in the field with the people on the lists. They’re really very respectful and extremely interested in the subject matter—sometimes I feel bad that they read so many more of the books in my own genre than I do.

I checked the subject lines on most of the e-mails and deleted many off the bat. Even on the lists, there are books I haven’t read or subjects on which I know I won’t have a pertinent comment. With so many messages a day, one must manage one’s time.

That left about twenty messages that actually had some relevance to my day. Some were from readers who wanted to make a comment on the latest book (latest to them—I was probably two installments ahead, but they didn’t know that) or ask for a bookmark. I’m happy to send those when I can get a snail mail address. Some people ask for the bookmark, which I always autograph, and don’t give me an address. And it’s so hard to stick those suckers in through the slots in the Internet.

I answered two or three reader e-mails (and I never know what to say; I’m bad at accepting compliments, but I think it’s bad policy to disagree with people who think my writing is wonderful) and moved on. There was one from Sol, not asking about the newly completed manuscript but hinting that
he wanted to know when he’d see it. Sol can be subtle. I shot him back a message that I was doing revisions and would have it for him in a few days, ahead of my deadline.

Three e-mails to go now. One was from a media newsletter reminding me that my subscription would soon expire—in four months. That got deleted. Let them get back to me in three and a half months.

The next was from my mother, who reported that she had felt a lump in her breast, correctly diagnosed it as a benign cyst, had it removed and biopsied, and was now in perfect health. That’s my mother. She’ll have a health crisis, go through any amount of suspense having it resolved, and never think that maybe her daughter might be able to support her through her time of need. I would have called her immediately, but it was late now where I was and not where she was, which meant she’d be twice as energetic as me, and that never leads to a pleasant conversation. I wrote a sticky note to call her when I got up in the morning (Mom rises with the sun in Colorado) and secured it to the frame of my computer screen.