AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I slide the folders back into her purse and grab the book. Except the book isn’t a book at all. It’s a planner.
I flip through the monthly and weekly trackers. She writes down meetings and calls she needs to make, and she keeps a running to-do list in the margins. I skim a few of them, but it’s all boring, useless shit.
Pay rent
Lunch with Noelle
Buy stamps
Check in on Ashley
I flick the planner closed, but as the last pages flutter shut, something catches my eye.
I have to thumb through the lined “note” pages at the back to find what I saw. The writing is in the middle of a section of blank pages, almost as if Piper hoped anyone who found her planner would think the end pages were empty. Once I read it, I understand why.
She’s written a series of dates in the left-hand column with shorthand, barely legible writing in the right. Things like “E on Insta” and “R Mos.” It doesn’t click in until I see the date Emily was murdered in the column on the left. Next to it in large, underlined letters are the words “TV IN TOKYO?”
TV.Timofey Viktorov.
I was supposed to be in Tokyo the day Emily died.
The rest of the code cracks easily. E is Emily. R is Rodion. “R in Mos” is “Rodion in Moscow.” Sergey insisted Rodion was out of the country the night Emily died. Apparently, Piper believes it, too.
Piper is looking into Emily’s murder and compiling evidence.
Againstme.
68
TIMOFEY
The shower turns off, and I can hear Piper moving around in the bathroom. Her wet feet slap against the tile floor and she continues humming as she towels off.
When she finally comes out, she yelps in surprise when she sees me sitting on the end of her bed. She scrambles to tighten her towel around her chest. Her auburn hair hangs in a dark, wet tangle over her shoulder.
“Timofey!” she gasps, hand still pressed to her chest. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“I’d like to ask you the same question.”
She frowns in confusion until I lift the planner and wave it in front of her. Her eyes widen. “That is for work.”
“That can’t be right. Because you’re a social worker, not a private investigator.”
She clenches her jaw. I know she knows what I’m talking about. But she isn’t going to reveal anything until I do.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those pathetic, do-it-yourself, true crime sleuths, Piper. A good government gal like you, I figure you would leave the investigative work to the police.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Does that mean you do or don’t want to know why I didn’t go to Tokyo a few months back?” I ask.
Piper stares at me blankly, and I take it all back. Any emotion would be better than the flat way she is staring at me now.
I hurl the planner at the wall, and she jumps in surprise. It’s a second of genuine emotion before she lowers her completely transparent mask of neutrality. Below the surface, she is terrified.
“I have a right to know if a woman was murdered in your house. The house where I am now living.”
“You don’t have a right to anything. Living here is aprivilege.”
