Constance (Constance #1)(59)

“Nothing. Everything? She just became distant. If I asked, she always said everything was fine. Things were real busy with the team, and eventually I stopped asking. I know I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been, but I thought when the season was over that we’d go somewhere. Get back on track, you know? Now, I find out she’d been taking all these trips to Charlottesville while I was on the road.”

“Was she having an affair?”

“I don’t know,” Levi said, voice rising. “The way the police describe it to me, they’re talking about someone else’s life. Like she’s hiding bruises from people, and the neighbors saying we fought all the time.”

“You didn’t?”

“No, never. Part of me wishes we had. Maybe if we’d had it out, she’d still be here. I just didn’t try hard enough. Or maybe I never had a chance. What do you think? You’re her. Did she ever love me?”

Con didn’t have an answer, so she didn’t offer one. They sat there in the indistinguishable murmur of nearby conversations. It was a terrible irony. They were each haunted by the same questions: Who was Con D’Arcy, and why had she married Levi Greer? Con knew who she’d been before meeting him, while Greer only knew her afterward.

“So, what do I call you? Just can’t be calling you Con, you know? That would mess with my head.”

Since the beginning, she’d been fighting to convince everyone that she was Con D’Arcy. But it was more complicated than that. She was and she wasn’t. She was some of that person—they shared so much—but no matter how many questions she asked, no matter how much she learned about her missing eighteen months, they were never going to be her eighteen months. Any more than the original Con D’Arcy could know what she’d been through in the last few days.

“How about Constance?” she suggested.

“You hate that name.”

“It’s weird that you know that.”

“What’s not weird about this?” he said. “Alright, Constance it is.”

He smiled at her then for the first time since she’d met him, a bemused, crooked smile at the sheer absurdity of his situation. She saw what her original must have seen in Levi Greer: a sweet, quiet man who had been through hell as a kid and come out more or less intact. Well, he was back there now, and try as she might, she couldn’t talk herself into his having had anything to do with it.

“So, what else do you want to know?”

“If you didn’t kill her, who did?”

“Isn’t that the cops’ job?”

“The cops think it’s you; I don’t. You really want to roll the dice that they’ll come around?”

“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.”