Read Online Written Off by E. J. Copperman - Free Book Online Page B

else, ate dinner here recently. No dust on the table means it was being used for some other purpose.”
    “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