Free Written Off by E. J. Copperman

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 signof 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 findthe 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