“Uh-huh. But you’re still worried. Did you call the police?”
Jan nodded. “I called last night, and they pretty much told me to chill. I’m not a relative, I’m not a long-time companion, and Tyler’s well over eighteen, so I can’t file a missing person’s report without cause.” And the local cops had more important things to worry about than one adult who hadn’t checked in with his girlfriend; that vibe had come through loud and clear. Considering the scandals that had rocked the local P.D.s in the three years since she’d moved to the New Haven area, she wasn’t surprised.
“And you’ve gone over there and hammered on his door, demanding that he come out and explain himself?” Glory said.
Jan shook her head, biting her lip.
“No? Janny...” Glory leaned forward so that her face filled the screen. “Girl, if you’re that worried, why not?”
“I called his super—I met him once, when there was a problem with the heat. I asked him to check.” She hadn’t felt comfortable going over there, not if he hadn’t called; it was too...stalkery. She could worry in private, but letting him know she was worried...
“Oh, Jan. And?”
“And Tyler wasn’t there, and there was no sign of any forced entry, so...”
“So.” Glory sat back and idly twirled a pen in her fingers. “Back where we started, then.”
Jan reached out and touched her inhaler again, the way someone might touch a good-luck charm or a worry stone. “Yeah, I know, I know. Everyone’s giving me the same advice. You don’t think his silence is worrying, you don’t think there’s anything odd in someone going off-line for an entire day without calling or texting his girlfriend. And you all think I’m overreacting.”
“Janny...”
“No. I’m not pissed. Normally—normally I’d agree with you. I’d say, oh, he had something land overnight that he needed time away to deal with, and he forgot to email me. Maybe there’s an unsent email on his laptop, that says ‘going off-line for 24, dinner when I get back.’” She forced a smile for Glory’s sake. “You’re all probably right. Once I make him properly apologize, I’ll let you do all the toljasos in the world.”
“Damn straight,” Glory agreed. “Go back to work, girl. Let me know what happens, okay?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Jan ended the vid-call, and ran her hands along the surface of the desk, noting that new email had landed while she’d talked to Glory. One was from Steve, asking if there was any update.
All right, maybe she had overreacted a bit. Clicking on that email, she typed in a response.
Not yet. He so owes me dinner for this!
She studied her response, decided that it had just the right tone of aggrieved but not-worried girlfriend, and hit Send.
The other two emails were follow-ups on projects she’d closed out last week, her name on the cc list. She didn’t have any websites going live this week, and nothing else seemed currently to be on fire, so she had room to breathe.
Except she couldn’t. Despite what she’d said to Glory and to Steve, Tyler’s continued absence—the worry about his continued absence—was almost like an asthma attack, closing up her chest and making her feel a little weird, off balance and dizzy.
“It’s silly,” she said out loud. And it was. Everyone was right: she knew that. She and Tyler had only met four months ago, and, yes, they’d pretty much fallen into each other’s lives without a hitch, like the true love neither of them had claimed to believe in, but there were always surprises, bumps and revelations along the way, and twenty-four hours wasn’t all that long for an adult to be out of touch, especially since there wasn’t any indication there was anything wrong.
Except Jan knew. Deep inside, in some skittish reptile part of her brain, she knew. Something was wrong.
* * *
The rest of the day, Jan tried to take the excellent advice she had been given. She closed the text box in the corner of her monitor and cleared her in-box down to zero, then worked on a project with an extended deadline until she was actually ahead of schedule.
And if every ping of incoming mail or text message made her heart speed up in anticipation, she didn’t let it distract her. Too much.
She even left the apartment to have dinner downtown with a friend, didn’t mention anything to her about Tyler going missing, and tried not to think about going to bed alone. But when she woke up to a second day of silence, that sense of something being wrong began to chew on her nerves.
By midmorning, her nerves had gotten so bad, it was almost impossible to focus on her work. She opened the text box, closed it, and then opened it again, afraid that she would miss him when he did check in.
“Obsessive, much?” She clicked on the text box, closing it again. “Let it go.” But she couldn’t.
When afternoon rolled around, and there was still no word, Jan couldn’t just sit and wait and try to be patient. Sending an email to let the folks at the other end of her projects know that she would be off-line for a bit, she shut down her computer, shoved her cell phone, inhaler and wallet in her daypack, and headed across town. Glory was right, and she was a wimp. If the cops wouldn’t investigate, then she would.
It was only a twenty-minute bus ride downtown from her apartment building—but it took almost that long for a bus to actually show up. Jan tried to stay calm and not over-anticipate what she might find there.
His building was older than hers, without a digital security box. If you had a key, you could go right in; if not, you had to wait for someone to buzz you through the lobby door. She had a key. He’d given it to her, two weeks after they’d met, on a little keychain with a vintage Hello Kitty on it. If she hadn’t already been pretty sure she was in love before, that would have sealed it for her. Hello Kitty wasn’t his thing, it was hers, and he’d known that.
She took the elevator up to the fifth floor and walked down the hallway to his door. Once there, though, all of her resolve fled. She’d never been here before, without him. He hadn’t called and said “get your ass over here, I miss you.” He hadn’t said anything at all, not to look after his plants—he had none, he was the original black thumb—or pick up his mail. The super might have come in at a bad time and missed him. Tyler might be inside, just not checking in, might be blowing her off, or...
If he was that much of a coward, she could hear Glory saying, then he totally deserved to be caught at it.
Jan agreed. She just didn’t want to be the one doing the catching.
“He gave you a key,” she told herself. “If anything is wrong...standing out here isn’t going to find that out, is it?
She was worried. No matter what anyone else said, this wasn’t like him. He never went offline this long. He couldn’t—he had clients and email, and even if his connection was down, he would have called and told her. If he was breaking up with her... No. He wouldn’t do it this way.
And it wasn’t as though she was breaking and entering. Okay, it was entering. But not breaking. She had a toothbrush there, and an extra emergency inhaler, and knew his super, and where he kept the spare change for when the ice cream truck came around and he had a craving for an ice cream sandwich.
So why was she standing in front of his door, key in hand, terrified to go in?
Because she wanted to find something to explain it...and was terrified of what she might find. Because maybe everyone was right, and she was a ninny. Or worse, they were wrong, and he was on the floor, dead, or dying, or...
She swallowed, trying to deal with the conflicting urges, half-ready to turn around and go home without even putting the key in the lock.
“Ma’am?”
She turned, her heart in her throat, and saw a cop standing in the hallway a few steps away from her. She had been so focused on the door, she hadn’t even heard the elevator open or anyone come out.
“You a friend of Tyler Wash?”
“I’m his girlfriend.” It still felt weird saying it out loud. Three months. What was three
months?
It was forever, when you knew, she reminded herself. And they had both known, so fast, never any doubt...right?
The cop looked her up and down, as if he was trying to memorize her to pick out of a lineup, later. “Have you heard from your boyfriend recently?”
“No. I came over... I haven’t heard from him in a couple of days, and that’s not like him at all. Are you... Did someone hear something? Is he okay?” Panic swamped her, cold and hard. Why else would the cops be here? Had the super heard or seen something, and not told her?
“He resigned his position but failed to return his equipment. I’m here to get it back.”
Her eyes focused on the badge on the shoulder of his uniform: not a cop, campus security. Then the words he’d spoken registered with her.
“Resigned?”
The security guard gave a shrug, as if he didn’t really care either way. “Polite way of saying he blew a major deadline, and hasn’t responded to the boss in three days, so they terminated his contract. Didn’t tell you, huh?” The look the man gave her now was filled with pity.
Jan swallowed, hard. The panic had subsided, leaving her too drained to move. “No.”
“Well, he did. People think that working out of the office means they can do whatever they want, they get an unhappy surprise. His choice. But the school wants its equipment back.” The guy wasn’t being mean, just matter-of-fact. He stepped forward, moving around her when she didn’t get out of the way, and knocked once, hard on the door.
Jan wanted to defend Tyler—he wasn’t like that!—but she couldn’t. Because that was just what he’d done, wasn’t it? Just disappeared, dumped all his obligations, responsibilities. And that wasn’t like Ty, wasn’t like him at all. But he wasn’t sick, he wasn’t in the hospital, so where was he?
There was no response to the knock, not even the sounds of someone trying to avoid visitors.
He knocked again, and then Jan spoke up.
“He’s not there. But I have a key.”
It was as much stubborn pride, a reaction to the way he’d looked at her, that made her say anything. See? I have a key. I’m not some fly-by-night chickie he just forgot about. Plus, if she was helping someone else get their property back, it wasn’t breaking and entering. Or being stalkery. Right? It was just keeping Tyler out of trouble. Out of more trouble, anyway.
The guy stepped back and let her have at the door. Her hand trembled a little in the locks, then she heard the dead bolt snick free, and the handle turned, opening into Tyler’s apartment.
There was no body lying sprawled in the main room.
The apartment looked...exactly the way it had the last time she was there. A lot of open space, and the whitewashed furniture with denim upholstery that looked as if he’d stolen it from some WASP’s vacation home. He’d always laughed and shrugged; he liked to confound expectations, although he’d never admitted it.
If the super had poked around, he’d not disturbed anything.
The apartment was also weirdly silent. She couldn’t remember it ever being that quiet. Tyler always made noise, muttering to himself as he worked, occasionally singing under his breath, in constant movement. She would sit, her legs crossed under her, and not move for hours, while he buzzed around the space, the activity in his brain echoed in his actions.
Nothing moved. Even the two of them, once inside the threshold, seemed frozen, as though something held them back.
“All right. Where would his tech be?” The security guy’s voice was too loud; it didn’t belong in this quiet space, and Jan shuddered in reaction, as though he’d said something vile.
“In the office.” She led the way across the floor to the small room in the back that, for someone else, would have been the bedroom. Two glass-topped desks filled the space; one laden with monitors and decks, the other at a right angle to it, holding only a laptop and a three-level filing box that was stuffed to overflowing with papers.
The security guy went over to the first table and started unplugging one of the decks from the monitor. She watched him, making sure that he only was interested in the ones with the university’s name stenciled on the side, and then went over to the laptop.
The rest of the tech was for work. The laptop was where he’d done all of his personal stuff. If there was a message for her, or some clue she was supposed to follow, it would be here. She put her pack down on the floor and sat down in his chair. And then she didn’t move, staring at the fifteen-inch silvery square in front of her.
“All right, that’s it. Thanks for your help.” The guy had the deck under his arm and was having trouble meeting her gaze. “I...hope everything works out.”
She stared at him, not quite able to parse his comment, and then just nodded absently. “Yeah, thanks.”
She heard him leave, the door closing firmly behind him, while she stared at the laptop. Taking a deep breath, she lifted the lid and woke it up.
The wallpaper was the same it had been the last time she’d seen it: the two of them, heads together, trying to fit in front of the webcam while he hit the button, smiles bright and about to break into giggles. If he was going to break up with her, he would have changed his wallpaper, right?
“Dammit, Ty....” The security guy’s pity was like salt in the wound she’d been trying to ignore, and her worry ignited into anger again. “What the hell are you up to? If you’re secretly working for the CIA or something and went off on a top-duper-secret mission, I’m so going to kill you myself.”
The idea of Tyler—gawky, geeky, gentle Tyler—as a CIA anything made her close her eyes against sudden tears.
“You’ve been reading too many thrillers, Jan,” she said, trying to channel some of Glory’s tartness into the scold. “This is real life. In real life, the CIA doesn’t recruit quality assurance tech-heads who can barely handle English, much less any other languages.”
Although, yeah, he could have been hiding a facility for Arabic and French and Chinese from her...but she didn’t believe it. Tyler could strip down a webpage and rebuild it to be fabulous, and put together a gourmet three-course dinner out of whatever was in his kitchen, and he was pretty damn inventive in bed. But sneaky? Sneaky wasn’t in him.
“So, then, where is he?” He wouldn’t have gone without a word, unless he was hurt, maybe had been injured somewhere else? But he always carried his ID with him, his photo ID and emergency contact, ever since he’d gotten hit on a bike when he was a kid, he’d said, so if he were in a hospital the cops would have known....
She was dithering. Jan straightened her back, aware that she’d fallen into an uncomfortable slump over the laptop—she was five-six, he was five-ten, so his desk was the wrong height for her comfort—and opened the most obvious place to look: his personal calendar.
Typical organized Tyler: work events in blue tabs, social in green, and their dates were in red. Her finger traced the weeks, stopping when she came to the day he disappeared. Then she backtracked one. There was a yellow tab.
A doctor’s visit, maybe? Tyler didn’t like doctors, hated going to the dentist.... Maybe he’d not told her because he was trying to avoid thinking about it, and something had gone wrong....
No. If he walked away from his job, that wasn’t...
The thought stopped her again, as if someone punched her in the stomach. He’d left his job. Without a new one being offered? Another thing that wasn’t like Tyler: he worked remotely because that’s how the job was, but he liked the familiar aspects of it, the steady paycheck and security. He wouldn’t just walk away without a new job in-hand.
Had he gotten another job and not told her?
Thoughts of the CIA surfaced again, and to push them away, she clicked on the yellow tab.
Stjerne, 10pm, l’coffeehouse
She didn’t know any Stjerne. She hadn’t known he’d known any Stjerne, either. Not that that meant anything. It was an odd name—Norwegian, maybe?
“Steh-gerne,” she said out loud, and shook he
r head. She didn’t remember Tyler mentioning anyone like that, either.
Still, working remotely the way they both did in the tech field, they met a lot of people from around the world; maybe it was a coworker who was in town, and they’d met up for a late-night coffee when he’d gone off-shift? That would be the kind of thing he wouldn’t mention until after the fact. “Oh, met this guy, Stjerne, works for an outfit in Holland. Drinks beer for breakfast...” Yes. That made sense. And maybe...
What had happened, when he’d had coffee with this guy? What if this Stjerne was a serial killer? Had other people gone missing recently? Had the cops been alerted? Would they even notice, or care?
Even in her worried state, that was too much for Jan. “If there was a serial anything in town, the cops would have paid more attention when you called about someone going missing—and every local newsfeed would be screaming, and the university would have held a press conference, or something. Get a grip. Losing your boyfriend is no reason to become an idiot.”
Switching tabs, she went into his email program, scanning for anything from someone named Stjerne. A contact point, she needed a contact point. Who was Stjerne?
There. A dozen or so of them, all recent, the past week or so. Probably a coworker then, arranging a meeting while he was in town...she clicked on one at random, calling it onto the screen.
I want to feel your hands on my skin, gripping me, pulling me, holding me like you’ll never let me go. Your mouth on me, moving lower, until my legs open, helpless, as you lap at me, tongue and fingers making me writhe and moan, calling your name to stop, never stop, Tyler, oh Tyler, until I fall over the edge...and then come back to return the favor for you, my mouth red and wet against the darkness of your skin, taking the length of your....
Laura Anne Gilman Page 2
