She knew it would sound absurd to explain it to anyone else. Maybe only Peter would understand. Even though it had only been a few days, so much had changed. She saw herself differently now, and the idea of starting this journey again felt terrible. And anyway, it wouldn’t be her starting over. It would be a different Con waking up thinking it was the day after Christmas with not one but two predecessors to obsess over.
No. She wouldn’t give up whatever was in her head, and she wouldn’t take a new clone. She would finish this journey on her own. There were still questions she needed to answer. Starting with why the original Con D’Arcy went to Laleh Askari for help. How did she know she was in danger? And what did that mean?
“I’m going to Charlottesville,” Con said.
Vernon Gaddis nodded with grave disappointment. “And how will you get there?”
“I’ll walk if I have to.”
Gaddis pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead as if it were in danger of cracking open. “You are the most stubborn woman. When I said you reminded me of your aunt, I didn’t mean for you to take it to heart.”
“But if you let me keep the car and stay out of my way, I’ll give you what you want when I’m done.”
Gaddis thought it over. “I want it in writing.”
“Well, I assume you brought the lawyer for a reason.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The parking garage her original used on her clandestine visits to Charlottesville was on Water Street only a few blocks from the University of Virginia campus. Students wouldn’t return until the end of August, and the college town dozed contentedly in the June sunshine. Con parked and walked down to the sidewalk, where she looked up and down the street. It had felt important to come here. To retrace her original’s steps. See what she must have seen. Hear what she must have heard. But standing on the curb, it felt like a fool’s errand. She had no leads, not so much as a place to start. Nothing but this irrational certainty that if there was something here to find, she would be the one to find it.
That was the theory anyway. So, what now?
Well, the police had canvassed every business within a five-block radius but had stopped there. Understandable. At the time, Con D’Arcy had only been a missing person and not yet a murder victim. It wouldn’t have been a top priority, and now that Clarke had a suspect in custody, why would they bother looking any further? But their search had clearly assumed that her original parked here to be close to her destination. Con pulled up a map on her LFD. The next closest public garage was more than fifteen blocks away, and there wasn’t any overnight street parking without a resident sticker. What if her original hadn’t parked here because it was convenient but because it was the only alternative to getting towed? If so, the police had simply given up too soon.
Con created grids on her LFD’s map, expanding the search area by another five blocks. It was a daunting amount of ground to cover, but pleased to have a plan, she struck out toward the campus for no better reason than it looked pretty in that direction. She spent hours walking through neighborhoods of ancient, low-slung brick buildings, stopping at every business to ask if they had seen someone who looked, well, just like her. The question raised a few eyebrows, so as a cover, she invented a twin sister. It worked. Too well. A missing twin had a tragic allure that sparked people’s curiosity, and she’d had to improvise an entire backstory for her imaginary sibling just to satisfy the endless questions.
By early evening, her optimism had given way to the sinking realization that police work was tedious as hell. It would take a week to canvass the entire area, and even then, she would need dumb luck to stumble across anyone who remembered her original. If she hoped to find anything she needed to start thinking like a detective. Problem was, she was a musician, and there simply wasn’t a whole lot of overlap in the two skill sets. What did she hope to see that trained professionals had missed? Then she remembered something that Darius Clarke said to her at their first meeting in DC—that it wasn’t often that a detective got to interview a missing person while they were still missing. How it would help him understand Constance D’Arcy’s mindset.
She’d been thinking about this all wrong.
She didn’t need to interview the victim; she was the victim. She might be missing the last eighteen months, but she was still Con D’Arcy. So, what did she know that the police didn’t? Well, for one thing, her original wasn’t having an affair. No chance. She was far from perfect, but that just wasn’t how she did things. So who or what had kept her returning to Charlottesville over and over again? What was the draw to this place? Hoping something would jump out at her, Con created a list of all the businesses within a fifteen-block radius of the parking garage. The vast majority were restaurants and bars. About a million dry cleaners. Drugstores. Banks. Barbershops. Nail salons. Gyms. Coffee shops. Bike shops. Liquor stores. Head shops. The usual college-town stuff, and nothing that couldn’t be found in Richmond where her original lived. She wasn’t driving an hour out of her way to do her dry-cleaning.