Heart of Briar

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....