Chapter 3
Piper isn’t worried when Lu isn’t in the apartment on Monday morning. Sometimes she gets up early to work or get coffee or just wander around. They don’t worry when Lu isn’t back by the afternoon; sometimes she holes up in the library all day. They don’t even worry when Lu doesn’t come back that evening—well, not too much.
Piper picks up takeout from Lulu’s, the noodle restaurant on Craig St., and uses the time alone to get some work done. They fiddle with their chapter on Wilkie Collins till almost ten, pretending they don’t have one ear cocked for the sound of the downstairs door. They go to bed, telling themself it’s not really all that late, and that Lu will be home soon.
But on Tuesday morning she still isn’t there. It’s possible that she’d spent the night with someone; she knows a few people in town whom she hooks up with occasionally, and maybe she met someone new at the library or a bar or, who knows, halfway across the Schenley Bridge. Lu’s good at meeting people, Piper reassures themself. Yes, she usually lets them know if she’s going to be out all night, but she probably just forgot. She’s fine.
They text her anyway, trying to sound casual about it. You going to be home before you teach today? I could make goat cheese omelettes.
She doesn’t reply. Piper doesn’t make goat cheese omelettes.
Charles clears out his desk at the newspaper on Monday afternoon, bidding farewell to his slightly taken aback but rather relieved editor, and tries to stop himself from looking for clips of Young Sherlock on YouTube. It seems unprofessional, somehow.
On Tuesday morning, he eats a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and then somewhat self-consciously puts on a suit and tie and consults the full length-mirror on the outside of the bathroom door. He’s unsure whether this is the appropriate attire, but he is instinctively taking his cue from the detectives in British TV imports on PBS Masterpiece. He stares into the mirror, wishing he were taller and thinner, with a craggier face and an Oxbridge accent and a thousand fewer butterflies in his stomach. Charles has spent a good deal of time—more than most other straight men he’s known—photoshopping his own appearance in his head. His mousy hair and dull brown eyes are so pedestrian. There’s nothing striking about him at all. He doesn’t look like the kind of person who makes things happen, or even that things happen to.
Well, he thinks wryly, flattening his already-flat hair with his hand, it’s not like Julian is interested in him for his looks.
His anxiety, hitherto more or less quelled by the routine familiarity of his job at the paper, is in high gear by the time he reaches Long Street. The awareness of who he is going to be working for keeps breaking over him like waves, each fresh realization a new shock as the image of Julian Ellsworth—young, brilliant, brimming with energy and mischievous laughter and sparkling intelligence—crashes through his mind. How on earth will he be able to keep steady when time itself keeps shifting like the sea under his feet?
But the reality—as always, in Charles’ experience—is very different than his imagination. Julian is as quiet and reserved as he had been the week before, not so much a shadow of his younger self as the photographic negative. He shows Charles around the first floor of the building—the waiting room, his office, the bathroom and tiny kitchen, and a locked door he passes without comment—and then gives Charles a pile of old case files and instructs him to begin archiving them digitally. His reticence ought to be a disappointment, Charles thinks, but instead it fuels the fires of his curiosity, as he wonders with burning intensity why Julian is so changed, why so quiet and withdrawn when Charles remembers him positively bursting with life.
Charles sits at his desk in the front room with the orthodontist’s-waiting-room chairs, sneaking an occasional glance at Julian through the half-open door of his office. He thinks maybe his presence has thrown Julian off; he’s focusing on his papers with an absolute attentiveness that doesn’t seem quite natural. Charles recognizes from his own past experiences with social anxiety the particular mode of diligent concentration that can serve as a plausible excuse for not talking to anyone else.
The truth is that Charles is a recovering wallflower. Not so long ago, the thought of being alone in a room for hours with someone he didn’t know was enough to twist his stomach into knots. All throughout high school and college and his abortive attempt at grad school, he’d considered himself an irredeemably shy person, dreading parties and dinners and functions of all stripes. It wasn’t until talking to people became his job that he really learned how to do it. But he still understands what it’s like to be shy. And that understanding may be the only thing that salvages that first day working for Julian Ellsworth, since their cumulative amount of conversation that morning totals about four minutes. He has to strive diligently to focus on the work he’s been set instead of on Julian; the detective is like a black hole, a bit of matter so dense that gravity bends his way. Charles finds himself getting sucked into his orbit as he sits at the front desk, each atom of his body straining towards Julian. Be normal, he instructs himself, or at least pretend to be, but each time Julian leaves his office to use the bathroom or the kitchen, his shock of pale hair makes Charles’ heart leap into his throat.
Once he has familiarized himself with Julian’s record-keeping program, he turns to the old case files he’s been given to archive. He opens the first manila folder with reverence: these records can’t help but seem like lost episodes of Young Sherlock, hidden for years in some dusty, secret vault—and Charles is privileged enough, mind-blowingly lucky enough, to be given access.
But soon his awe changes into puzzlement. They’re all, frankly, pretty dull. The vast majority involve clients who’d suspected their partners of cheating on them; a few are about parents who’d thought their kids were doing drugs or homeowners who’d believed their neighbors were violating city ordinances involving trash cans and lawn mowing. There are a scattering of more intriguing reports—a suspected stalker, a lost will, a couple genuinely missing persons—but only a handful of these had up involving actual crime and, eventually, the police. All in all, it looks like the career of a mediocre P.I. who has not yet gotten his big break.
But, Charles knows, Julian Ellsworth has gotten his big break. At the age of nine, he’d solved a break-in-turned-homicide in his suburban Minnesota neighborhood and skyrocketed to national fame. He’d been on Good Morning America and David Letterman; even NPR had interviewed him. He’d been declared by several psychologists and MENSA to be a genuine prodigy. All that attention caught the eye of a TV producer and the next year Young Sherlock went on the air. Granted, the TV show happened a long time ago and is largely forgotten now, but that was mostly due to the disappearance of its star from the public eye. Julian had started the Long Street agency six years ago; surely if he’d wanted publicity, it would have been easy to get it. The return of the kid detective! Surely he could be in New York or L.A. by now, solving high-profile cases, doing interviews on true crime shows, helping the police—he could be a celebrity P.I.
So why, Charles wonders, isn’t he?
His mind runs through the possibilities as he tries not to watch Julian, his too-long legs tucked under his desk, his eyes fixed on his computer as he bends rigidly over the keyboard.
He can’t get anyone to take him seriously because everyone thinks his first case was a fluke, and that Young Sherlock was fully scripted, and that he never really solved any of those mysteries, because they weren’t real.
Charles has heard that theory before, once or twice.
His first case really was a fluke, and Young Sherlock really was fully scripted, and he never really did solve any of those mysteries, because they weren’t real.
Charles clenches his fingers tight, his nails digging into his palm. No. That can’t be true.
So something happened to him. Something that made him camera-shy, people-shy, and now he doesn’t want the attention. He doesn’t want to be recognized.
But what? And if he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is, why not change his name? Why be a detective at all?
Over at his computer, in the other room, Julian Ellsworth lets out a short huff of breath. Charles jumps. He hasn’t heard that sound in years, but it’s so familiar he would know it anywhere.
He stares at the curve of Julian’s long neck and loves that he is a mystery.
When Lu doesn’t respond to Piper’s casual texts or their more pointed questions about Lu’s plans for the day, Piper starts to worry. Lu teaches on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10 a.m., and she’s not in her office when Piper gets to school. They call her at 9:30 but get no answer. Would it be paranoid, they wonder, to show up at Lu’s class just to make sure she’s there?
Probably, Piper thinks, and does it anyway.
And a good thing, too—Lu doesn’t show up, but twenty-three undergraduates do. Piper asks them as offhandedly as possible if Lu had mentioned being away today—she hadn’t—and then pretends that Lu asked them to sub at the last minute.
Piper teaches them how to write an outline and silently worries.
Charles spends the rest of Tuesday at his desk in the waiting room, archiving dry old case files and answering the phone. A couple of clients show up, one just after lunch and one around four; Charles sends them into Julian’s office, the door shutting after them. He can hear only the murmur of low voices—spinning tales, he imagines (despite the bland case files) as snarled as knots of yarn, which Julian untangles with deft fingers until they are straight and shining, stretching from point A to point B in one clear line. He leaves for about an hour at one point, presumably to trail people or hunt for clues or interview witnesses—or at least, that’s what Charles hopes he’s doing. His mind takes Julian on spectacular adventures, over rooftops and into cellars and secret hideaways and the company of strange and dangerous characters. When he returns, hands in his pockets and silent as ever, nodding quickly at Charles before disappearing into his office, Charles suppresses his urge to pepper him with questions and wonders if Julian’s shyness is some sort of cover: a front, a blind to distract people from—well, from what, exactly?
Charles’ pulse is racing by the end of the day. He can’t stop glancing toward Julian’s closed door. He wants to see him deducing things in the flesh, wants to know whether his pale eyes still gleam with the light of discovery, whether his voice still grows just a fraction higher when he’s on the trail of something good. He is burning with curiosity, as if curiosity is some sort of fever.
It is, he tells himself. Don’t let this happen again.
The truth is, he can feel it coming on like a sore throat or a faint but unmistakable ache in the temples. He knows the symptoms: the heightened awareness, the hair-trigger reflexes, and above all the skittering restlessness that makes him want to get up and run—run to—
Where? he asks himself sternly. There’s nowhere, Charles. Nowhere to go.
It’s just that his childhood idol is right next door. And it’s all so new, he tells himself. It’ll calm down. It’ll feel normal soon.
Normal. Like any other job.
Yes, he tells himself. That’s what you need.
But later that night he finds he can’t sleep. After much tossing and turning, he digs out his old copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes and switches on his bedside lamp. Reading it again is like rediscovering an entire world he had once inhabited, like beginning an archaeological dig into his past: each story unearths memories and echoes, each smudge of dirt or peanut butter recalling some long-past day of clambering up a big tree in his backyard with the book to sit and dream of missing jewels and mysterious messages. At times he swears he can feel the past surrounding him, ghostlike in its near-tangibility; when he reaches The Hound of the Baskervilles, he keeps sniffling, and halfway through he remembers that the first time he’d read it, he’d had a terrible cold. He can almost taste the cherry cough syrup his mother had forced down his throat.
Most of all, he feels a sense of expansive possibility, the wide-open frontier of adolescence whose borders are somewhere far away and out of sight. He is sure now that this particular dream of his—this dream of detectives—is stronger than any he’d had since, even stronger than the ones that had fucked up his plans to become a Romanticist scholar. Stronger than his visions of nightingales and rolling hills, of clear blue lakes and a woman with golden hair.
Oh no, Charles thinks as he finally drifts off to sleep. This was a big mistake.
He dreams of the adult Julian in a deerstalker cap, crawling on his knees in his fifth-grade classroom with a magnifying glass, declaring that he would not rest until he had found something—at the time, it’s clear that they both know what he’s looking for, but upon waking Charles finds that that knowledge has gone. Meanwhile, in the dream, the young Julian Ellsworth sits up near the ceiling, perched somehow on the wall, and laughs as they look, for he has hidden whatever they are searching for and he’s not going to tell them where it is.
Lu doesn’t appear at school for the rest of the day. Piper goes home in the evening and, unable to work and forgetting to eat, finally decides they can’t stand being alone in the apartment all night again. They go stay with their friend Tyler, an M.F.A. acting student whose distance from the English department’s problems and politics comes as a welcome relief to Piper.
On Wednesday, Charles almost manages to concentrate on digitizing Julian’s old cases all morning. Julian has stepped out for a quick walk to the nearest coffee shop when a client comes in. She’s youngish, about Charles’ age, and she looks more annoyed than upset.
“I think my boyfriend’s cheating on me,” she says without preamble, hands on her hips. “Can you find out?”
Charles blinks. “I’m just the, um, administrative assistant. The detective will be back in shortly. You’re welcome to wait.” He hesitates. “And if I could get your name and contact info…”
She flops down into one of the stiff chairs and gives Charles her name and phone number and much more information about her situation than he needs or, he’s pretty sure, is supposed to be privy to.
“I probably seem totally crazy or something, hiring a private detective to trail my boyfriend,” she’s saying five minutes later, “but he just laughs at me every time I confront him about it. I just wanna be like, Look, asshole, here are actual photographs of you with her, you can’t possibly pretend I’m paranoid and hysterical now…”
She trails off as the bell on the front door jingles and Julian walks in. His white-blonde hair is glistening with the faint mist that’s falling outside, and he’s carrying a swamp-green smoothie from the health shop on the corner. The woman—whose name, Charles has learned, is Katrina—stares at him, her eyes narrowing.
“Hang on a sec,” she says. “You look totally familiar.”
Julian freezes. His long pale fingers clutch his drink so tightly Charles thinks it might burst, and his angular shoulders hunch, as if by compacting his body he can make himself disappear. His eyes move rapidly back and forth. Taken aback, Charles freezes too, and watches Julian physically step back from her, shaking his head.
“I just have one of those faces,” he says quietly.
She snorts. “No, you don’t, you have a really weird face. Now where…oh!” She snaps her fingers, grinning. “You were on TV. When I was a kid.”
Charles’ heart leaps to his throat, and his gaze fixes eagerly on Julian. The detective swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and then his eyes flicker, panicked, to Charles.
It feels like a moment of truth, the world spinning slowly around him like dust motes in light: time to choose your allegiance, he says to himself, the thought—absurd, frankly melodramatic, yet irresistible anyway—coming from some deep instinctive place within him. His curiosity is shrieking at him to say nothing, to see what Julian will do in the face of a direct confrontation about his past. He swallows it down, a hard lump that scrapes his gullet as it goes, and says, “Let’s get started, Katrina. If you would follow Detective Ellsworth into his office, you can tell him about—”
“Julian Ellsworth!” she says delightedly. “Holy crap, yeah, I used to be a big fan—”
Julian flinches.
Before he knows what he’s doing, Charles steps between them. “That’s not important right now,” he says firmly. “Julian, Katrina thinks her boyfriend has been cheating on her. He’s trying to convince her that she’s just being paranoid—I believe he has accused her several times of petty jealousy—”
For a second, Charles thinks it won’t work. But when he mentions the boyfriend’s accusations, Katrina’s face flushes with annoyance.
“Ugh, yes, please, I’ll take anything. I’m prepared for the worst, seriously, just so long as I can shove it in his face…”
She keeps talking, utterly distracted from her former train of thought, and Julian’s eyes wander to Charles’. His gaze is wary and a little uncertain; but he gives Charles an abrupt nod. Then he ushers Katrina, still chattering away, into his office and shuts the door.
Charles sits back, feeling peculiarly winded. What on earth was that? he thinks. Does Julian always respond like that when people bring up his past? What does he normally do when someone recognizes him and Charles isn’t there to fend them off? And why had he fended Katrina off, when he wanted to know exactly what she did—and far, far more besides?
Julian hadn’t wanted her to know. And so Charles had stopped her from asking. It’s simple, really. A matter of loyalty. Charles is on Julian’s side.
Whatever that means.
But his stomach is flipping as if it means something. He will guard Julian’s secrets, whatever they might be. From anyone who tries to discover them. He will be—he will be the thorns vining around his tower, refusing entrance to others even as he himself is kept out by walls of stone. A knight protecting a king, Sam protecting Frodo, Watson protecting Holmes—
For fuck’s sake, he thinks, suddenly turning icily furious with himself. You’re a complete idiot, Charles Shelley.
On Wednesday, Piper sits in Tyler’s apartment—ratty sofa, whitewashed brick walls, piles of scripts and pencils and random objects used for props in scene study class (empty chocolate box, toy train, a pineapple spray-painted gold)—and runs lines with him for Romeo and Juliet. Tyler stops Piper from going back to their apartment every hour to check if Lu is there and makes them eat the occasional almond. Despite this, Piper can’t help but think about Lu’s empty room and empty bed, and by Wednesday evening their worry has turned into fear.
Thursday morning is bright and cold. Charles sits down at his desk and gets right to work. After about fifteen minutes, though, he realizes Julian is standing in the door of his office, hands in his suit pockets and eyes on the floor, waiting for him.
Charles swallows, heartbeat quickening. The silence stretches on. Charles isn’t sure if he should speak and, if so, what he might say. Finally, he takes a breath and puts on his journalist face, settling into a confident smile and an open posture, and looks at Julian, planning to make some inane comment about the intricacies of the computer program he’s using. But his words fail when Julian meets his eyes and something leaps between them, a spark like friction between two pieces of wool.
Charles sucks in a breath and bites the inside of his cheek, shocked. Julian still doesn’t say anything, but the way he’s looking at Charles is different from the way he’d been looking at him over the last few days and Charles, despite himself, feels another fierce surge of loyalty. Somewhat to his horror, he can tell Julian register it, his expression growing confused but also shyly grateful, as if he is uncertain what might have provoked Charles’ feelings. The answer, of course, lies in precisely that thing which Charles plans to defend him from, so he can’t explain, even if he’d been brave or foolish enough to try. He can’t say, You were my childhood or I know that stubborn curl of hair behind your ear as if it’s my own. He can’t say, I will thank you any way I can. So he says nothing.
Julian looks away and then coughs loudly and then nudges his toe against the carpet and scratches behind his neck and Charles watches, mesmerized, until he finally speaks.
“I would like you to come with me and observe on my next case. Seeing what I do will make it easier for you to fill out the paperwork in the future.”
The words are spoken rapidly and stiffly and Charles knows beyond a doubt that he rehearsed them in his office before coming out, and none of that matters one bit because his stomach has taken a dive off a cliff and is now turning somersaults in the air so wildly that the rest of his body is struggling to function.
He sucks in air, forcing himself to stare at his desk until his face stops contorting itself into who knows what strange expressions. He reaches desperately for his journalist face again and manages some approximation of it, so his voice is reasonably steady when he answers.
“Of course. I would be—happy to. Do I need to, um…prepare somehow, or…?”
Julian shakes his head. His face is pinched and Charles can’t tell if he is relieved or anxious or if he is aware that somewhere in the back of Charles’ mind a twelve-year-old boy is shrieking with joy.
“You’ll sit in the next time a client comes in. And we’ll take it from there.”
Charles nods.
“All right then,” Julian says, and then disappears quickly back into his office. Charles stares after him for a long moment before realizes he should probably get himself together—because all of a sudden, he can’t stop grinning like an idiot.
Thursday: the fourth morning Lu has been absent without explanation. Piper goes back to their apartment early in the morning—still no trace of Lu—and asks around at school, as casually as possible, if anyone has heard from her. They show up to teach her class again, guessing that she will miss it but still caught off-guard by the sharp painful spiral of dread that cuts through them when the hour begins and she still hasn’t arrived. They talk to Isabel Ortiz, the professor chairing both their dissertations, but Isabel hasn’t heard from her. Piper is evasive during this conversation; they don’t go so far as to imply that Lu is…well. That she seems to be—missing.
Piper’s not exactly sure why they don’t confess this to Isabel. Maybe because it would mean admitting that something is really wrong. Maybe it has to do with the intense gleam in Isabel’s eye lately, the one that appears every year during graduate student recruitment season. The approaching open house for new admits has everyone on edge; Isabel is primed, ready, in full-on battle mode; telling her that something has gone awry might throw her off course. Piper knows the department can’t afford that.
They think about consulting with one of their fellow grad students, Katie or Antonio or Phoebe, about what to do. They think about saying fuck it and going back and telling Isabel anyway. But in the end they don’t do either. Because as soon as Piper returns home, they finally find the note Lu left them on Sunday night, folded up under Piper’s pillow.
They stare at it for a long time, heart in their throat. And then they go online and, furtively, with a flush of embarrassment, search for private detective Pittsburgh.
One hour later, they end up at the Long Street Detective Agency.