Chapter 2
Charles leaves work during his lunch hour on Monday and drives from the newspaper office to the detective agency from the Craigslist advertisement. Long Street, it turns out, is one of those brief Pittsburgh roads that branches off one busy street, ploughs confidently ahead for a couple of blocks, makes an unexpected curve, and hits a second busy street, where it ends abruptly. It occupies an indecisive area between wealthy Shadyside, not-so-wealthy East Liberty, and the small nebulous neighborhood of Friendship. The detective agency itself is sandwiched between two dingy stone buildings of rented offices and sits across the street from a mattress warehouse. An incongruously sleek health food shop, advertising wheat grass shots and carrot juice, stands at the corner of Long Street.
Charles parallel parks his car, eyeing his surroundings with more excitement than they probably warrant. For some reason, the unaesthetic hodgepodge of buildings makes his pulse quicken in anticipation. He clutches a folder containing his résumé and a few of the more newsworthy articles he’s written and walks over to 3636. It’s a nondescript building, concrete painted white, its window and door shuttered on the inside with venetian blinds. On the glass of the door, neat black letters read:
Long Street Detective Agency
Hours: M-F, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Charles stands outside, listening to the rush of cars on the busy street several blocks down, and tries not to get his hopes up. He tries not to think, anything could be inside those doors: Sam Spade spotlighted by a fluorescent bulb, cigarette clenched in his teeth as he fast-talks his way through a phone call, holding up a finger for Charles to wait when he sees, with a swiftly suppressed flicker of disappointment, that Charles isn’t some knockout dame who’ll cry all over his shirt, seduce him into bed, and then double-cross him without blinking an eye. Charles tries not to picture forgers and gangsters, hapless fraud victims and mysterious widows; he tries not to feel as though this is his entrée into a more exciting life.
Charles pinches himself on his arm, hard, and then opens the door.
Before him is an empty waiting room with off-white walls and a drooping potted plant and a closed inner door with more shuttered blinds, which he assumes leads to the detective’s office. A sign on an unoccupied desk politely invites visitors to take a seat. He does so, noting—with a sharp, sour downturn of his stomach—that the chairs, with their stiff green-striped cushions and ugly puce frames, are identical to those found in the waiting room of his childhood orthodontist. He forces himself to look at the threadbare carpet, spotted with water stains, and at the stack of old magazines on the table, last September’s People, last July’s Newsweek. Every pedestrian, nonliterary detail hurts, a faint pang under his breastbone, and he’s angry that it does.
A muffled noise from behind the inner door pulls him back to the present moment—the sound of a voice raised behind the closed blinds—and then the door swings open.
The man who emerges is clearly distraught, pushing fifty and gleaming with sweat. He shuts the door behind him, fumbling with the knob, slapping a hand against his shiny forehead.
“Oh, god!” he breaks out. Then he sees Charles and flushes to the tips of his ears. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes in a rush. “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
“It’s all right,” Charles says mildly, slipping automatically into what he thinks of as his “journalist mode.” He’s learned in his years working at the newspaper that people usually stop being embarrassed about showing their feelings once they see that he’s not embarrassed to witness them. And he knows that most people actually want to tell him what’s wrong, whether they realize it or not—it’s gratifying, having someone listen so closely. And by now Charles has written enough articles on cancer survivors and local soldiers killed in action to be able to read people’s distress pretty well. He can tell what’s going to make them open up, whether it’s a sympathetic touch, a gentle question, or just a wide-eyed look of utter engagement. Occasionally Charles has wondered if it’s manipulative, but usually he likes to think he’s helping pull the sadness out of people like a doctor removing a splinter. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he reassures the shaking man.
The man’s face crumples briefly. After a moment, the words pour out of him: “I don’t know what to do.”
Charles lets him breathe for a second, knowing he’ll continue when he’s ready if Charles keeps quiet. Charles feels a pang of pity for him; whatever brought him to a P.I.’s office, it can’t be good.
“My wife has a necklace. A family heirloom. It went missing sometime last week,” the man says, wiping his brow. “I decided to hire a P.I. to look for it. But I…this morning. I found something—a receipt, I think it’s a receipt from—from a pawn shop. For the necklace.” His voice softens miserably. So does his mouth, falling in on itself like oatmeal after it’s taken off the heat. “It fell out of my daughter’s math book.”
Charles’ stomach clenches. There is always a moment like this—“He’d proposed to his fiancée just before he was deployed, they were a boat on the river, the skyline was all lit up and he told me he’d never been so happy” or “They said it was in remission, but six months later I got this terrible nosebleed”—when Charles loses himself, briefly but fully, in somebody else’s tragedy. He’s good at concealing it by now, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
“She’s fourteen,” the man says brokenly. “Why would she take it? Why?”
Charles glances at the closed door of the inner office. “What did the detective say about it?”
The man shakes his head violently. “No, no, I haven’t told him. Yet. I don’t—I don’t know if I want to know.” He looks miserable, and utterly lost. “It’ll change everything. If Hailey—if she took it…” He shuts his eyes. “I don’t know if I can handle that.”
“I don’t mean to intrude,” Charles begins, as gently as he can, “but I think you’d better tell him.” The man opens his eyes, uncertain. Firmness, Charles thinks; if he were interviewing this man, he’d be kind but firm. “Everything will change anyway. You’ll never be able to look at your daughter quite the same way again. There will always be some doubt in your mind, won’t there? Is that fair to her?”
The man gazes at Charles in silence. Then the corners of his mouth solidify again. He gives a short, almost soldierly nod. Charles watches as he turns around and opens the door into the detective’s office. When it swings wide, Charles catches a glimpse of the man inside before it falls shut again.
Charles’ world stops. He thinks: I know him. With that shock of recognition, he’s thrown suddenly back in time—he’s a kid again, the detective is grinning at him, he’s grinning back delightedly at some clever trick the other boy has pulled off—but where, and exactly when? For a brief, wild second, Charles thinks he’s some childhood friend, a neighbor, a schoolmate, and searches frantically for his name, because how could he have forgotten someone who had been so important to him?
But then he knows. It comes to him in a flash of microwave popcorn and his sneakers skidding on the stairs as he rushes home in time to flip on the TV, perching on the arm of the sofa until his mother tells him to sit properly on the cushions, for heaven’s sake, and turn the volume down, he’s giving her a headache. Charles’ head rings with the corny theme song, the announcer’s voice, and he can feel the decoder bracelet on his wrist, sent away for after innumerable boxes of sugary cereal.
“He cracked his first case at the age of nine, and now Julian Ellsworth is living every boy’s dream, solving mysteries brought to him by you, his loyal fans and viewers. He didn’t earn his nickname for nothing: they call him…Young Sherlock!”
Charles’ world takes a sharp turn. The rules of geometry shift in that moment: every angle, every line and curve, look ever so slightly off. The distance between his seat and the door, the shape of his hands resting on his knees, the droop of the potted plant—they are not quite the same as they were a second before. Everything bends infinitesimally towards the man in the other room.
Charles feels slightly ill. He wants very desperately to leave. His world will implode in upon itself if he walks through that door. He cannot face him.
He takes a long, deep breath.
He is twenty-seven now, not thirteen. So is Julian Ellsworth. Charles has no doubt that the man in the other room is in fact the detective from his favorite childhood TV show; he knows that face, the way it stretches narrowly from chin to forehead like a violin, the pale eyes under paler eyebrows, the nose long and sharp. But who Julian Ellsworth is now is as much a mystery to Charles as the cases he’d solved on television all those years ago. What on earth is he doing here, Charles wonders? How has he ended up on a one-way street in a city he has no connection to, as far as Charles knows, taking cases surely well below the level of both his skill and fame? Why is he advertising for an assistant on Craigslist, for goodness’ sake?
The advertisement. The interview. Julian Ellsworth is about to interview me, Charles thinks dazedly. For the job of his assistant.
Somewhere, his ten-year-old self is quietly fainting dead away.
The inner door bursts open again. The sweaty man emerges, looking even more keyed up than before. Beneath the floridness of his cheeks his face has gone pale, making his skin appear unhealthily mottled. Charles thinks he might be in shock.
His eyes slide to Charles, taking a moment to focus. “Thank you,” he says, his voice hoarse. “You were right. It was better to know.”
He grasps Charles’ hand with damp fingers and then he’s gone. Charles stares after him for a moment, feeling as though a whirlwind has just passed by, then glances toward the still-open inner door. He wonders what the detective said to the man to stun him so badly. Perhaps he’d made some quick and subtle deduction that clinched the matter beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Julian Ellsworth has closed another case! Charles looks around, experiencing the sudden sensation that he is standing on a film set. He shakes his head and takes a deep breath—his heart has not raced this quickly for anyone in a long time—and knocks on the half-open door.
“Come in,” Julian says. His voice is quiet and even and contains none of the barely-suppressed energy that had characterized him on Young Sherlock, but Charles knows it’s his. He steps into the office.
Seeing Julian Ellsworth in the flesh for the first time is simultaneously the strangest and most strangely unremarkable experience of Charles’ life thus far. It is as if he is looking at two faces, shifting in and out of focus: the mild, serious, grown-up countenance of the man who sits before him, and the restless and delighted features of his young idol. Julian’s hair, pale blonde and still in the same neat haircut he’d had in his youth, is the fixed point between them. His office is as different as it could have been from the one he’d had on TV—sparse, grey, well-lit, with no shadows or racks of disguises or pictures of Sherlock Holmes in sight—and it contains no memorabilia from the show either, no newspaper clippings or old photos; but his posture is identical to the one Charles remembers his younger self adopting in moments of unselfconscious rest, one arm laid out palm-up across his desk, the other tucked away in his lap. Charles’ heart lodges itself in his throat even as he reaches out a casual hand to shake Julian’s, smiling the easy, amiable smile he gives to interviewees when he’s on a job for the newspaper. The strangest thing about this, he thinks dazedly, is how not strange it is.
“I’m Charles Shelley,” he says. “I’ve come about the assistant position.”
“Julian Ellsworth,” the detective replies.
Charles sees (or thinks he sees?) the smallest flicker of trepidation in his voice as he says his name, the tiniest hint of wariness in his gaze as he awaits Charles’ response, and any thoughts Charles had had of confessing his youthful admiration of him fly straight out of his head.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, and he could swear that he sees the man’s whole body relax just a fraction in relief. He nods toward the seat across from him. Charles takes it, waiting for him to speak—the Julian Ellsworth he remembers would have been talking a mile a minute by now—but he remains silent.
“I’ve brought a résumé,” Charles says after a moment, opening his folder and offering it to the detective with another easy smile, wondering if his reticence is some kind of people-skills test. “I’ve been a reporter for three years. It’s made me good at talking to people and it’s made me observant. My schedule can be as flexible as it needs to be.”
Then he shuts up and lets Julian read. Only Julian doesn’t, really; his eyes slide cursorily down the page as if his mind is far away. Charles’ heart sinks. Of course he wasn’t what Julian’s looking for. Julian is hardly some average P.I. who’d be impressed by Charles’ ability to interview dog trainers and quilting bee champions. He watches Julian fail to take in his credentials, embarrassed disappointment curdling in his stomach.
Julian clears his throat awkwardly, and for a moment Charles wonders where the confident, vivacious boy from his childhood has gone. Surely that couldn’t have all been acting?
“It was the wife,” Julian says abruptly, and it takes Charles a full seven seconds to realize he’s talking about the man Charles had spoken to in the waiting room.
“Not the daughter?” he ventures, after nothing else is forthcoming.
Julian shakes his head. “When I was at their house,” he says, and Charles has to lean in to hear him, “I found a note in the trash can from her principal. She’s been skipping math class for the past three weeks. She hasn’t opened that textbook since before the necklace went missing. And the wife is in debt and didn’t want her husband to know.”
He says all this stiffly, almost tonelessly, and Charles wonders again if this is some strange test—is he supposed to find some flaw in Julian’s theory? But the detective’s eyes flick back and forth between Charles’ face and his fingers and it strikes him that the twenty-seven-year-old Julian Ellsworth is shy.
“Oh.” He pauses, torn between feeling thrilled at Julian’s deduction and disturbed by his unexpected reticence. “Well. That’s rough. I’m sorry for him.”
He doesn’t reply. Charles’ résumé is still clutched, forgotten, between his fingers.
“I can offer you a decent hourly rate and time off at holidays,” he says abruptly. His eyes barely meet Charles’. “I try to keep my investigations to daytime hours, but sometimes this is not possible. While your primary duties would be as a receptionist and secretary, I would expect you to be available to assist me on jobs if needed.”
Charles stares at him. As he struggles to grasp what exactly Julian is saying, he sees his silence register in the detective’s pale eyes; they began to close up, and Charles watches him start to retreat back into himself. Perhaps it’s the fact that the young Julian Ellsworth would never, ever have looked that way—shuttering his face against an impending No—that makes something wrench painfully deep inside Charles’ chest.
“I accept,” he says in a rush. Then, more calmly: “I would be happy to accept your offer. Thank you.”
Charles can see then—in the way the lines around Julian’s eyes lighten and his fingers unclench—that the detective is relieved, more than anything, at his acceptance. He shakes his new boss’s hand and thinks of telling him he needs to give two weeks’ notice at the paper. But there’s been so much talk at the office recently about the decline of print media and the paper needing to tighten its belt and the possibility of layoffs that Charles thinks they’ll probably be pleased to see him go.
“I can start whenever you need me to,” he says.
Julian nods, a short, abortive movement. “Tomorrow, nine a.m.”
Geometry is still acting up; Charles wants to shake his hand, but both their fingers are suddenly huge and crowded, like they belong to full-grown men. When did they get so old?
He blinks, and fourteen years pass rapidly before his eyes. “Yes. I mean, I’ll be here.”
He waits a moment in case Julian comes suddenly to his senses, but he says nothing, so Charles turns to go.
“Thank you, Mr. Shelley,” Julian says quietly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He turns back, heart pounding. “Charles, please.”
The detective hesitates. “Julian.”
Julian, Charles thinks, his chest expanding. Julian Ellsworth, he thinks, and he feels his heart quicken. The world is shifting around him, shimmering, expanding; oh god, he thinks; oh no.
He walks back outside, blinking dazedly at the cold winter sun, and thinks, oh no. He gets into his car and starts the ignition, thinking, oh no. He extricates himself carefully from his narrow parking spot and thinks, Oh, Charles, what disappointment have you set yourself up for now?
He drives back to the paper and quits his job.
That night, he lies in bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. His room seems alien and unfamiliar, somehow. Too familiar. Too real. It takes him a long time to drift off, and when his eyes finally close, Julian’s pale, serious face flashes through his mind. His chest clenches with joy, and for a second he can’t breathe; then a wave of fear sweeps through him, furtive and strangely pleasurable. He shivers, and falls asleep.