Chapter 6
Notes
Just wanted to say—thanks for being here! I hope you’re enjoying the story so far. If you like it and are feeling up to it, I’d much appreciate if you passed it along to a friend, followed the project on social media (@orelsemystery on Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter), or left a comment! And if you’re just quietly following along, that’s wonderful too. <3
Julian begins his search, to Charles’ great delight, by lying flat on the floor and sticking his head under the bed. Charles watches his long legs inch from right to left and then flip over as he turns face-up to look at the bottom of the mattress frame. He slides himself out a moment later, dusting off the back of his shirt as he sits up. It takes him a second to notice that Charles and Piper are staring at him; his eyes narrow and he gets to his feet, not quite gracefully.
“If she’s in the habit of reading detective fiction, the most likely place for her to hide something is under the mattress,” he says briskly. “Nothing there, though.”
Julian turns next to the closet. The rack inside is sparse—a couple dresses, several of what look like costume pieces, a raincoat. On the floor are spaces in between pairs of shoes, gaps where more should have been. A crumpled scarf lies in the corner. The few items left in the closet make the empty spaces seem even emptier. There isn’t really room for Charles to join Julian in his search, so he continues to perch awkwardly on the footstool, trying to ignore the fact that his pulse is racing.
“Do you want to see a photo of Lu?” Piper asks him suddenly. He tears his eyes off Julian’s bent back and looks at Piper; they stand in the middle of the room, looking for all the world as though they think the floor might buckle beneath them like ice on the surface a pond. Charles nods, hoping to give them something to hold onto. Piper looks relieved as they take out their phone, thumbing through their photos and coming to crouch against the wall next to where Charles is seated.
“This is her from a few months ago. She’s terrible at baking.” Their crooked smile is back. Charles looks at the picture. It had been Christmastime when it was taken; Charles recognizes the kitchen from a glimpse into it earlier, on the other side of the sitting room, but it’s decorated in the photo with paper snowflakes, sprigs of ivy, and a clump of mistletoe hanging from the light fixture. Lu is leaning on the counter, grinning at a plate of burnt gingerbread men, her cheek dusted with flour. For some reason, her ordinary appearance startles Charles; he hadn’t expected the grey sweatshirt or polka-dot apron.
She is around Piper’s age, in her late twenties, and she has hazel eyes and dark blonde hair cut chin-length. Her face is round, with a spattering of freckles across her cheeks, and she wears a small glittering stud in her nose, almost too tiny to notice. Charles glances at Piper; it is obvious they think she is unspeakably beautiful. She isn’t, really, and she hasn’t put herself together with quite the deliberate aestheticism that Piper has. But there is something infectious about her smile.
“Charles, save a picture of her for me, please.” Julian’s voice is muffled by the closet. “I ought to know what she looks like.”
“Sure,” Charles says. He and Piper exchange phone numbers and Piper texts Charles the Christmas photo, along with another of Lu dressed as Sherlock Holmes, standing next to Piper as Dr. Watson. The two of them are posed stiffly beside the decorative mantel in the living room, unsmiling and solemn.
“What was this for?” Charles asks, as Julian disappears all the way into the closet.
Piper shrugs. “Nothing in particular. We just dress up sometimes. Lu likes to sort of…pretend to be other people.” They hesitate, eyelids lowered, and play with the edge of their phone. “Sometimes we do it all day. Just—when it’s just the two of us, I mean. We’ll…talk to each other as other people.” They don’t meet Charles’ eyes, and he can see a faint blush on their cheeks, but they are smiling. “I thought of it earlier, when you said your name. We did the Shelleys, once. The writers, I mean. She was Mary and I was Percy. We got drunk and sat on Flagstaff Hill and argued about which of us was a more annoying prose stylist.”
A traveller from an antique land. Charles’ heart plummets, dropping like a stone into his stomach.
“What?” says Piper, startled. “What is it?”
“Oh,” says Charles. “It’s…nothing. I…uh. Studied the Romantics.”
“In undergrad?”
Fuck, thinks Charles. “No, I actually started a Master’s degree. In English. But I…didn’t finish.”
Piper lights up. “Really? That’s great! Where?”
“Uh. Penn. But…” But round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away. “It didn’t really suit me.”
If he’d had someone who wanted to pretend to be Mary to his Percy, maybe it would have.
Piper says, their tone more confiding and less hesitant now, “Lu and I did Percy and Lord Byron once, too.” They their neck back to rest their head against the wall and smirk slightly. “We stayed in for that one.”
Charles snorts, half with startled laughter and half with shock. His head is whirling. At twenty-three, he had discovered—or thought he had—that no one played pretend anymore. He’s seized with a sudden hunger: he wants more—more about Lu, about her life with Piper, about the worlds she constructed in her head and the ways she wanted to make them come to life.
“Are you finding anything?” he asks Julian, needing to turn away, to get himself back on solid ground. Julian is still rooting around in the back of the closet. “Can I help you look?”
In reply, the detective thrusts a hand out, clutching a couple of old dresses. “Did Lu wear these often?”
Piper blinks. “Hardly ever.”
“What about these shoes?”
“No.”
Julian emerges, looking serious. But then, Charles thinks, he always looks serious. “If Lu had had time to make decisions about which clothes she’d leave behind, would she have chosen these?”
Piper nods slowly, the implications of this question sinking in. Lu had packed methodically. She hadn’t been in too much of a hurry, and she probably hadn’t left under direct duress. Charles guesses that Piper isn’t sure whether or not to be relieved. They are quiet as Julian throws back the bedcovers, feels under the armchair, and nudges Charles off the footstool to check if anything’s been taped to its underside (it hasn’t). Then a sudden loud buzz makes them all jump.
“Ah, sorry, that’s the doorbell,” Piper says. Neither Charles nor Julian miss the sudden spark of hope that electrifies Piper’s face. Piper hurries out into the living room and presses a button on a little white box by the door. “Hello?”
A voice—definitely not Lu’s—says something through a tremendous amount of static. Piper appears to understand, though; their face falls momentarily before they prop it up again. “Okay. Let me come down. The—the thing’s not working.” It seems possible to Charles that this is a lie. Piper looks oddly guilty as they poke their head back into the bedroom. “Um. A friend of mine is here. I’m going to go let him in. I’ll be right back.”
The two men nod and Piper leaves the apartment. Charles and Julian look at each other, automatically, easily, as if to communicate what their next steps should be, and then draw back, eyes skittering away, both of them caught off guard by the familiarity of the action. Abruptly, Julian opens the top drawer of the dresser, and Charles stands close but not too close, following his gaze.
It’s about as picked-through as the closet. Some rumpled T-shirts—Charles notices one from Lu’s grad student workers’ union, another from the Mattress Factory museum, and another, surprisingly, sporting an image of Taylor Swift—keep company with old jeans and shorts. Another drawer reveals sweaters, and a third socks and underwear.
Charles wonders idly what’s taking Piper so long as Julian rifles through this final, half-filled drawer. Amongst the underwear, he unearths first a deerstalker hat, then, strangely, a riding crop, and finally a length of black rubber that he drops quickly upon holding it up. He and Charles immediately ensure that they’re not making eye contact.
Charles can’t tell if Julian is embarrassed or simply unfazed as he gingerly pokes through the rest of the drawer, avoiding contact with the strap-on; as for Charles, he can’t avoid the certainty that these three objects are meant to be used in combination. He feels the back of his neck grow warm.
Footsteps sound on the stairs and Charles backs away hurriedly from the drawer. Julian shuts it calmly and stands in the doorframe. Piper enters, followed by a young man.
“This is Tyler,” Piper says. “Tyler, this is Julian and Charles.”
Tyler does not look pleased to see them. He stands very close to Piper, his chest brushing Piper’s back. He is very tall, with dark skin and dreadlocks and a face that looks like it will probably be on the cover of a magazine sometime soon.
“So you’re detectives,” he says, his voice thick with skepticism.
Julian says nothing. Piper glances between the three men, looking both guilty and defiant, but mostly worried. Charles sighs internally; it feels absurd when he is the most socially adept person in the room.
“That’s right,” Charles says, trying to keep his tone as light as possible. It doesn’t seem like the right moment to explain that Julian is the detective, not him, though the misunderstanding bothers him. “Are you, um, also a Ph.D. student?”
Tyler snorts. “Definitely not. I’m in the grad acting program.” He places a protective hand on Piper’s shoulder. “Sometimes Piper needs a break from all the thinking.”
“And sometimes you need a break from all the drama,” Piper counters, but they relax visibly into Tyler’s grip.
“Fair.” Tyler eyes the men for another uncomfortable moment, then turns away. He runs his thumb down the back of Piper’s neck, his expression suddenly far gentler than before. “Are you doing okay? Have you eaten anything since this morning?”
Piper looks sheepish. Tyler shakes his head. “Eat something. Please. Do you want to stay at my place again tonight?”
Piper hesitates, then nods. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“Piper,” Julian breaks in, startling everyone, “sorry to interrupt”—(he obviously isn’t)—“but I’d like to look through Lu’s desk and I’d appreciate your help.”
“Yeah, sorry, right,” Piper fumbles, breaking away from Tyler and hurrying to Julian’s side. Julian begins leafing through stacks of paper, keeping his voice deliberately low as he asks Piper questions. Charles looks between him and Tyler, feeling caught in the middle.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” Tyler asks abruptly.
“Oh,” Charles says, his eyes shifting to Julian. He really wants to watch him work. But the detective looks back at him, overhearing Tyler’s question, and gives a brief nod. Tyler catches it, his lip curling upward.
“Let’s go outside,” he suggests, and then heads out the door without waiting for Charles’ acquiescence. Reluctantly, Charles follows him down the narrow staircase and into the backyard, grabbing his coat as he goes. Tyler leans against a low wall of concrete blocks in front of the scruffy patch of dead grass, lighting a cigarette with practiced fingers. Charles shivers, drawing his hands into his sleeves, but somehow the cold doesn’t seem to affect Tyler.
“So,” Tyler says, inhaling slowly. “What the hell do you two think you’re doing here, exactly?”
Charles raises his eyebrows. For a second he’s offended, and then, as Tyler blows a thin cloud of smoke out his nose, he realizes why Julian sent him out here—maybe even why he’d wanted Piper separated from Tyler. Because Tyler could be involved. If Lu’s disappearance was not actually as innocuous as it seemed, he could be a suspect.
Charles feels momentarily breathless. He’d had this fantasy so many times as a kid—him, a hostile suspect, the tension thick in the air. Granted, in his imaginings, Charles had been the one blowing cigarette smoke in the suspect’s face.
Coughing a little, Charles reins himself in. “We’re looking into Lu’s disappearance, at Piper’s request. They just want to make sure she’s not in any kind of trouble.”
Tyler grimaces. “Right.” He scuffs his black boot against an uneven chunk of concrete. “Look,” he says, voice flat, “Piper’s a little—irrational when it comes to Lu. I know they don’t want to think that she’d just up and leave them, but honestly—” He kicks the ground. “Just don’t get their hopes up, okay? They’re going to have to accept it sooner or later.”
Charles watches silently as Tyler takes another long drag on his cigarette and wonders at his vehemence. Is he just being protective of Piper? Or is there another reason he doesn’t want them investigating?
Charles casts about in his mind as he rubs his hands to warm them, looking for the right question to ask. Various detectives tumble through his thoughts—Spade, Wimsey, Marple, Dalgleish—whose approach is best? Should he be straightforward, humorous, meandering, cold? He looks at Tyler, standing there with his brow furrowed and nerves tight, and his newspaper training wins out. People like to talk about themselves, Charles reminds himself; that’s always the way to get them to open up.
“Are you and Piper…” Charles hesitates, thinking of Tyler’s thumb at the base of Piper’s neck.
He smiles humorlessly. “Friends? Classmates? Comrades-in-arms?” He flicks cigarette ash off his long dark coat. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“Sleeping together,” Charles clarifies bluntly.
He lets out a short ha. “As a matter of fact, yes. Occasionally, that is a thing that we do.”
Piper had asked why now and Julian had asserted that there had to be a reason for the timing of Lu’s disappearance—could this be it? Charles’ heart is racing. “And did Lu know?”
“Yes.”
“And do you think she might have been jealous?” A jilted lover, he thinks excitedly; that would be straight out of Agatha Christie. He knows what Piper said about being non-monogamous, but still—can it really be that simple? But Tyler just laughs.
“Oh, you’re really straight, aren’t you? Cute. That’s not how their relationship works. They’re not dating. And they certainly sleep with other people. That’s how they want it. They’d both have laughed at the idea of being secretly jealous.” He jabs his half-smoked cigarette against the concrete, hard enough to crumple the paper until it rips. Charles feels himself turning pink, something hot lining his stomach: embarrassment, maybe. But he watches Tyler quietly, sensing that he is bottling something up that’s fighting to come to the surface.
“Not that there isn’t something weird about their whole relationship,” Tyler says, the words coming out in a rush. “But it’s not that.” He pulls out another cigarette and lights it, less gracefully this time.
“Weird how?” Charles tried to keep his voice mild.
“I don’t know.” Tyler shakes his head. “Well, okay, for one thing, they’re not dating. They’re not a couple. But they live together. They’re best friends. They have sex. They practically speak their own private little language. All that dressing up, playing around, the Sherlock Holmes stuff—” He gesticulated with his cigarette. “Oh god, don’t even get me started on Sherlock Holmes. Talk about weird. What exactly is the appeal of all that? Okay, sure, I could see how that’s kind of hot, for a minute, imagining Holmes and Watson were getting it on, but the way they talk about it, it’s like—it’s everything. I can’t even read the fanfiction they write, Piper’s tried to show me but I just…” He lets out an impatient huff of breath. “I know, I know, I’m being narrow-minded. Intimacy is complicated, blah blah blah. People are into weird stuff. It’s just—I don’t know.”
He leans back moodily against the wall. Charles is reminded forcefully that he is an actor. His speech had been passionate and it hadn’t sounded disingenuous, but it also hadn’t sounded to Charles like the first time he’d said all that. The cigarette glows orange in Tyler’s languidly outstretched arm; Charles wonders wryly if he’s supposed to clap.
“It sounds like Sherlock Holmes wasn’t always going to be enough to keep them together, though,” he says finally, when it becomes clear that Tyler’s dramatic pause is going to stretch on indefinitely. “Piper said that the two of them ‘wanted different things’ out of life.”
“Did they?” Tyler looks mildly surprised. “Piper doesn’t usually talk about that. Mostly it just makes them sad when they’ve had too much to drink.” He inspects his smooth fingernails. “From what I can tell, Piper thinks Lu’s going to leave eventually so she can run around protesting against the strictures of academia and heteronormativity and sowing her wild gay oats. My phrasing, not theirs,” he adds dryly. “And they were going to stay with her until then, end of story.”
A cold gust of wind blows across the brown grass. Both of them shiver, drawing their coats tight, but make no move to go inside. Tyler shifts against the concrete ledge.
“You know, I think that’s the thing I find weird about their relationship,” he admits, and this time it doesn’t sound rehearsed to Charles. “Not that they’re whatever the fuck they are to each other, and not the kinky Sherlock Holmes sex. Each to their own, et. cetera. But the way Piper talks about her. Like she’s—like she’s this fabulous tropical storm. They love being caught up in her, but when she moves on, there’s nothing they can do. I mean, you can’t ask a storm to stick around for a little longer, can you?” He shakes his head. “And the thing is, it’s not like Lu treats them badly. She’s never manipulated them or made promises she couldn’t keep.” It looks as if this is difficult for him to say; Charles wonders why. “They both know exactly where they stand with each other. I just…Piper doesn’t have to just stick around waiting for her to leave them. They’re a great person—they could find somebody who’d stay with them, like, for real. But they want Lu. For as long as she’ll have them.”
Charles thinks of their sitting room, decked out as 221B; he pictures them pretending to be the Shelleys together. If he had the chance to be with someone like that, someone who understood his desire for elsewhere and the not real, who shared it, wouldn’t he stick around as long as she’d have him? A shiver runs through him, and not from the wind this time.
“She’s gone now, though,” Tyler says. “She has left them.”
“But why—” Charles stops, thinking. “If Piper knew she was going to leave, if they’d really accepted it, why don’t they believe that she’s done it now?”
Tyler pauses for a long moment. “Piper has never pretended, not even for a second, that Lu wasn’t going to leave someday. They’ve been looking that eventuality in the face for as long as I’ve known them. Longer, even. Since as long as they’ve known her.” He takes a last drag of his cigarette and flicks it to the ground, grinding it under his heel. “I think that when it finally happened—” he shrugs “—they blinked.”
Tyler doesn’t come back up to the apartment with Charles; his combative mood has dissipated by the end of their conversation, and he trudges wearily off to a rehearsal, saying he’ll call Piper later. Charles finds himself a little exhausted when the other man leaves, like he’s just sat through a harrowing performance, and he wonders exactly how many grains of salt he ought to be taking with this conversation. He isn’t sure if Tyler was being so intense about everything because he’s genuinely concerned for Piper, or because he wanted to direct Charles’ attention away from Lu’s disappearance, or because he’s an actor and being intense is what he does. Even the chill air and the gray sky had seemed like scenery, his cigarette like a prop. Charles shakes his head as he climbs back up the stairs, glad to be out of the cold, and hopes Julian will have a better sense of things when he relays the conversation to him.
When he walks into the living room, however, it’s clear that something more important is happening. Julian is sitting at Piper’s desk now, a laptop open in front of him, and Piper is slouched in an armchair, fingers over their mouth; neither of them are speaking. Charles hovers in the doorway, wondering how to break the silence without shattering the brittle atmosphere.
Instead, he walks over to Julian and looks at the computer screen. On it is the image of a boarding pass, retrieved, according to the text at the top of the screen, from the Trash folder. It’s for a flight to London. It’s dated for Monday morning, and it bears Lu’s name.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Piper says flatly, not moving from the sofa.
Julian’s mouth twitches, and he looks away. “She had time to pack, Piper. She had time to buy a plane ticket.”
“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t running from something.”
“She wasn’t running very fast.”
Piper looks like they are about to burst into tears. Charles has a horrible wrenching feeling in his stomach; the excitement of questioning Tyler, of hunting around in his words for some clue or sign, suddenly seems foolish, the product of the twelve-year-old Charles’ imagination.
“Piper, if Lu were going to leave of her own accord—if she was going to leave academia, to do things on her own, where would she have gone?” Julian asks quietly.
There’s a pause—a miserable pause—and Piper whispers, their voice quavering, “London.”
That’s it, then, Charles thinks. The end of the mystery, the end of his first case. He’d gotten a glimpse into somebody else’s life, magical and mysterious, only to have it snatched away. Piper, in his mind, will forever be sitting in that armchair, tears in their eyes, and Lu will always be somewhere else, far away and out of reach. Charles feels hollow. He feels ill.
“No,” Piper says, their voice hoarse but strong. “I don’t believe it. Why would she use my computer to book her flight? Why wouldn’t she make sure to erase her boarding pass completely?”
“Piper, people make mistakes—” Julian begins, but Piper cuts him off.
“Not Lu.” They stand, dark eyes glinting. “I think she planted that ticket.” They jab a finger at the laptop. “She meant for me to find it. She wanted me to assume she’d left for all the obvious reasons. Don’t you see? This is her Reichenbach Falls.”
Julian looks stunned, and then absolutely furious. He opens his mouth to retort and Charles cuts him off, confused by his reaction and in sudden fear of what he might say.
“What do you mean, her Reichenbach Falls?” Charles says to Piper, trying to sound as if they are all having an ordinary conversation, as if Piper and Julian aren’t both losing it a little right now.
“The Reichenbach Falls is where Sherlock Holmes fakes his death,” Piper answers, face set. Charles knows this, of course, but it seems wise to listen quietly. “He pretends to die in a struggle with his archnemesis, Professor Moriarty, so he can escape to the Continent and track down Moriarty’s associates in secret. He lets Watson think he’s dead so Watson doesn’t give away that he’s still alive.” Piper’s eyes flash. “Lu’s goodbye note to me quoted Holmes’s goodbye note to Watson. I think that means she faked her disappearance. I think she wanted it to seem voluntary, but I don’t believe it. I think she’s in trouble and for some reason she couldn’t let anyone know.”
Charles looks helplessly at Julian, but the anger in his face has only grown. “Detective fiction,” he growls. Alarmed, Charles sees that his fists are clenched and shaking at his sides. “Let me tell you something, Piper. In real life, people don’t fake their disappearances. They don’t plant plane tickets on their friends’ computers to leave a false trail.” His thin lips all but disappear as he presses them together. “You’ve been reading too much Sherlock Holmes.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Piper retorts. “So has Lu.” They look shaken by Julian’s outburst, but they stand their ground. Charles hovers between them, not knowing how to interject, knocked off guard by the intensity of Julian’s reaction. “If Lu wanted to hide something, she’d know how. And she’d do it in the most complicated, classically detective-story way possible, because detective stories are her life. For her, they are real.”
Julian stares at them, then says, quietly but fiercely, “No, they are not. In the real world, people do things because they are petty or cruel or stupid or cowards, and there are no archenemies or mysterious secrets to excuse their bad behavior. She left you. All the evidence points to it.”
There’s a ringing silence. Piper looks at Julian, eyes brimming, then runs out of the room. The bathroom door slams shut, and the hiss of a running tap fills up the silence as Julian sits down heavily in an armchair, burying his head in his hands.
What, Charles thinks, what on earth—
He hears Piper leave the bathroom and go into their bedroom. He waits for that door to slam, too, but the sound doesn’t come.
Charles gazes at Julian for a long moment, then sneaks a glance behind his shoulder. Piper has left their bedroom door cracked; he can see them sitting upright on their bed through the sliver between the door and the frame. He looks to Julian for direction. But Julian doesn’t lift his head from his hands.
Hesitantly, not without a backward glance, Charles goes over and knocks softly on Piper’s doorframe.
“Yeah,” they say, hollow-voiced. Charles comes in, hovering in the doorway. Behind then, he hears Julian get up and walk away, into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” Charles says. “I don’t know what that was about.”
“He’s right.” Piper’s face is puffy and damp, their formerly slicked-back hair a rumpled mess. “I’m just being stupid.”
“No,” Charles says, sitting hesitantly on the embroidered footstool again. “I don’t think so.”
“I used to picture how it would be when we had to go our separate ways,” they say. “I was going to be so good about it. I was going to be mature and reasonable and understanding.” They give a bitter laugh. “Hysterical theories about faking her disappearance were not part of the plan.”
Charles thinks that seems like asking an awful lot of themself. “Neither was being scolded by an angry detective, probably.”
Piper gives a twisted smile. “No detectives, period.”
Neither of them speak as Piper picks at the blankets. Their room is sparer than Lu’s, with grey walls, dark red trim, and a few bits of personal ephemera tacked above the desk—train tickets, postcards from Paris and New Delhi, a photo of a younger Piper with two people who look like their parents. Charles wonders if he ought to go, but Piper seems comfortable with his presence there, in a way most people Charles knows wouldn’t have been; Piper doesn’t seem embarrassed that they’d cried in front of strangers, nor that one of those strangers is now sitting on their bed as they wipe a few stray tears from their eyes. Charles likes them for it, he realizes—he likes them, period. The hollowness Charles had felt at the sight of the plane ticket returns tenfold. This is it, he thinks, dread rumbling in his stomach. The adventure is over. Back to real life.
Charles had let himself get carried away. He had broken the cardinal rule of his existence. He had allowed himself to hope that the not real was finally happening to him.
Fuck you, Charles Shelley, he says to himself, shame and anger burning slow and hard in the pit of his stomach. Fuck you.
And that’s when Julian bursts into the room, clutching a bent length of pipe in his hand and grinning from ear to ear.
They stare at him for a long moment. The pipe in his hand is grimy and grey and about two inches thick, and the smile on his face is the spitting image of one Charles had seen countless times on Young Sherlock when the boy detective had uncovered a new clue.
“This pipe,” Julian says, undaunted by their shocked silence, “is from underneath your kitchen sink.”
Piper makes a slightly strangled noise.
“Have you used that sink since Lu left?”
Piper blinks up at him. “Sorry?”
“The sink,” Julian says again, insistent but not impatient. “Have you used it since she left?”
“I must have,” Piper answers blurrily. Then they shake themself a bit. “Wait. No, I—well, yes, I must have on Monday, once or twice, but—I sort of keep forgetting to eat. And I’ve been staying at Tyler’s the last couple nights, so—I’m not sure I’ve been in the kitchen at all since the day after she left, actually.”
“So anything that’s down the drain might have come from her,” Julian says, a triumphant smile crossing his lips. Charles knows that expression, too. Belatedly, he realizes his heart is racing. He can’t take his eyes off Julian. Damn it, Charles, what are you doing? he asks himself. Don’t get your hopes up again.
“Do you smoke? Does Lu?” Julian asks, still more urgently.
Piper shakes their head.
“Tyler does, though,” Charles says, anxiously watching the expression on Julian’s face. It falls, ever so slightly, and Charles’ stomach dips along with it.
“Only outside,” Piper amends, and Julian brightens. “We don’t let anyone smoke in the apartment.” They shake their head. “Sorry, does that matter? What are you doing with my plumbing?”
Julian ignores them. “And can you think of any reason Lu might have had to burn something?”
“To burn something?” Piper looks utterly bewildered. “No, none at all.”
Julian lets out a satisfied breath. Charles would swear Julian would be rubbing his hands together if they were both free. Instead, he holds up the J-shaped length of pipe and pokes one long finger inside. When it comes out, it’s gray and grimy—no, not grimy, but sooty, Charles realizes, leaning in. There are ashes stuck to his fingertip.
“Between the time you and Lu went to bed and the time she left for her flight, she burned something and rinsed the ashes down the sink. Not very thoroughly, obviously, or they wouldn’t still be here.” He tips the pipe upside-down, over his open palm, and something falls out—a small piece of crumpled, water-stained paper.
Charles’ heart catches. “Is there anything written on it?”
Julian smooths out the paper carefully and Piper and Charles lean closer. It’s ash-covered and torn and the ink is bleeding a little, but they can make out just a couple of words, Times New Roman, 12 pt font:
or else
Julian exhales long and slow, a smile still simmering on his pale lips, and there isn’t a chance in hell that Charles can take his eyes off him, standing there in the doorway framed in late-afternoon sunlight, his slender sooty fingers clutching a piece of pipe like the absurd incredible brilliant miracle he is; his pale hair is glowing—he is glowing. He’s radiating light.
“She was hiding something,” Julian says quietly, steadily meeting Piper’s eyes. “You were right.”
Charles tears his gaze from Julian’s face to watch Piper slowly understand what the detective is saying. Hope and then doubt flicker across their face. “But—but what you said before. People don’t have mysterious secrets.”
Julian hesitates. “Why would she burn a piece of paper and then wash the ashes down the drain? Was ‘or else’ a threat?” Piper is quiet, unconvinced. Julian takes a breath. “And why would she buy her plane ticket on your computer, and then fail to erase it completely? You were right about that too. I’m sorry.”
Piper doesn’t look relieved, as Charles was expecting; they look, on the contrary, more frightened than before. “Don’t do this,” they say, shaking their head vehemently. “Don’t humor me, please. I can’t take it. If Lu left me, I want to know.”
“I’m not humoring you,” Julian says evenly. “I think there’s something more to Lu’s disappearance than it seems. I believe that, fully, and if you would like, I will try and find out what it is. But it’s your decision.”
Piper pauses. Later, Charles thinks that it may have been a long pause, or it may not have; his ears are roaring and he feels that his very existence hangs in the balance as he awaits Piper’s pronouncement, making each second seem an age. Yes, he thinks fervently, yes yes yes yes.
“Okay,” Piper says. They nod, looking suddenly dizzy. “Yes. Please find out.”
Charles feels like he could kiss them on the mouth. He could kiss Julian on the mouth, too, and that silly pipe he’s holding, and his ash-streaked fingertips.