“Fair point,” he conceded.
“I don’t think she was having an affair.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Because I wouldn’t.”
“Damn,” he murmured like a prayer. “Fine. So who did kill her?”
She asked if his wife had ever mentioned Brooke Fenton or Vernon Gaddis, but he only knew the name Vernon Gaddis as “the cloning guy.” He asked what they had to do with it, and against her better judgment, she told him everything she knew. By the time she finished, his expression was one of wary disbelief.
“You have to know how that sounds,” he said, throwing her words back at her.
“I’m aware. Tell me about Charlottesville.”
Levi exhaled like he’d breathed in smoke. “After she disappeared, the police traced her car to a garage in Charlottesville near the UVA campus. According to the car’s navigation history, that’s where she always parked when she went down there. Which she did a lot over the last year. Always while I was on the road with the team. She’d stay down there, sometimes two or three days at a stretch. Never said a word about it to me.”
“Did she have any friends in Charlottesville?”
“You tell me.”
Constance shook her head. She’d never been to Charlottesville in her life.
“The cops canvassed around the garage but came up empty. I’ve driven down there twice now since she disappeared,” Levi said. “Thought maybe I’d know where she’d gone if I saw it for myself, but it’s just shops and restaurants and stuff. I don’t know what I thought I’d find. It’s not like I knew her.”
“You really think that?”
“I didn’t even know she had a clone. Didn’t know she was going to Charlottesville. Only thing I do know is she was planning on leaving for good.”
“If she’d been going down there so much, what makes you think this last time was any different?” she asked.
“Because after you left the other day, I went through the room she used as a music studio and found some things missing. Let me ask you this, if you were leaving somewhere, what’re the two things you wouldn’t leave behind?”
Constance nodded, understanding. “My guitar and my notebooks.”
“Exactly. She even took the little purple Christmas tree. Cops weren’t so interested in that theory, though,” Levi said. “You ever feel like you don’t know why anything is happening?”
“Only since I was six.”
“When your dad died,” Levi said. “She talked a lot about that. I wanted to invite her mom—your mom—to the wedding, but Con wouldn’t have it.”
“Wouldn’t have been your wedding anymore. Would have been the Mary D’Arcy show, trust me.”
“That’s just what she said,” Levi said. “Man, this is so damn weird. Like, my wife is dead. But . . .”
“But here I am.”
“What am I supposed to do with all this?” he said, jabbing himself hard in the chest with four fingers.
“Can I ask how you two met?”
“You really don’t know?”
“No, I have no memory of you at all. She met you and stopped doing her refreshes. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The team was in DC for a versus against the Filibusters. If we won, we’d make the playoffs for the first time. We did. A group of us went out to celebrate. It was the day after Christmas. We wound up at this club in Shaw. Con was singing with Weathervane. Couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a way on stage. A presence. I didn’t meet her that night, but I made an excuse and didn’t take the team bus back to Richmond just so I could see her sing again the next night. Thought that’d be it, but the show was at a tiny little club, and she wound up next to me at the bar after the show. Got to talking. Never stopped. You know those moments when you can feel something happening, but you’re too in it to know what it is? Like you’re on the train going a hundred miles an hour, not watching a train go a hundred miles an hour, so you’ve got no perspective on it.”
She did. That’s exactly how she would have described meeting Zhi.
He continued. “I stayed up at her place. We sat around this fake little purple Christmas tree and just talked until it was time to go to the next show.”
“I loved that tree,” Con said.