Disclaimer: I own nothing recognisable.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea
Emerson Cod was a Private Investigator, and he specialised in solving murders.
It seemed a fairly simple job description.
And yet, at his office door, stood a young woman presenting a case for him to solve, but the case was not murder. It was a missing person.
This had happened before, around the time when his partner, Ned, had met his half-brothers. A young girl had run away from home, and Emerson had been hired to find her.
Emerson grunted at the girl, still standing just inside his office door. "I specialise in murder cases, not missing persons. I ain't got no body to question!"
The girl started, then calmed herself down, reasoning that she must have imagine the slight gap between 'no' and 'body', and that the P.I.'s accent had fooled her ears for a moment. She wasn't just any girl, and to her, 'no body to question' would indeed have a different meaning to 'nobody to question'.
"Please, Mr Cod," she renewed her begging. "I need to know where my father is."
Emerson sighed. "How you plan on payin' for my services?"
"I just turned eighteen," she immediately declared, perhaps a little too proudly. "And I am my father's sole beneficiary. If you find him alive, he'll pay you. If you find him dead, I'll have access to his bank accounts and I'll pay you."
Slamming his pop-up book onto his desk, Emerson conceded. "I'll give the case a go. Who am I looking for?"
The name which the young woman then said would cause Emerson's nicely ordered world to suddenly start spinning off in the wrong direction.
"What did you say?"
.
An hour later and a mile to the east, at a charming little delicatessen called the Pie Hole, Emerson Cod sat in a booth, cradling his warm cherry pie as if it was the only thing in this world he could count on. The perky waitress, Olive Snook, bustled over and sat across from him, a grin on her lips and a sparkle in her eye.
"Well? What's the scoop?" she demanded.
"I've got another case. Where's Ned?" he shifted in order to look past Olive, towards the kitchen.
Olive rolled her eyes. "Oh, I'm not Itty-Bitty anymore? Fine then. Ned's out back." She abruptly stood up and left, strutting into the kitchen to tell Ned to go cheer up his surly business partner.
A minute later, Ned sat down across from Emerson, flour dusting his face and clothes with an uneven whiteness.
"Olive said you have a new case. Who's dead?"
"Ain't nobody dead," Emerson answered, gazing down at the last of his pie. "Yet," he added ominously.
The facts were these: A young woman by the name of Kel had commissioned Emerson Cod for a missing persons case. The missing person was her father, but Emerson and Ned were familiar with this particular man's ways – for he was none other than Ned's own father. Kel had woken up on her eighteenth birthday, full of excitement, and her father had dropped her off at the theatre, only to never arrive when the time came to pick the girl up.
Kel suspected that he had been kidnapped, or murdered, because her reliable Daddy had never, ever, been anywhere except there for her, and it just wasn't like him to simply leave.
"My father." Ned, it seemed, had heard none of Emerson's briefing, becoming stuck on one simple fact: his father had not just abandoned three sons, he had abandoned a daughter as well.
Ned suddenly looked up from his clasped hands, into Emerson's eye, a wild look about him. "We have to talk to her. That man left her, just like he left me, and the twins. Where is she?"
.
Leaving Chuck and Olive at the Pie-Hole, Ned and Emerson paid Kel a visit at the motel where she had rented a room while the P.I. investigated her father's disappearance.
Knock-knock-knock. The door opened, and Kel waved Emerson and his friend inside.
"Kel, this is Ned, my business partner," Emerson introduced the half-siblings, as Ned awkwardly folded his arms into his chest, trying to vanish into the wallpaper.
"Have you found any leads on my father yet?" Kel bubbled, and Ned noticed that this girl had the same thick eyebrows as himself and the twins, but must have got her height (much like Ned and the twins) from her own mother, for Kel was neither tall nor short, but rather somewhere in between. She bounced on her toes as she waited for a response to her query.
"Ned here has some things to tell you," Emerson said, and abruptly wandered out into the kitchenette to fix himself a coffee.
"Ned?" Kel asked hesitantly, taking a slow step towards the tall Pie-Maker.
Ned retreated, hit the wall, and decided it was time to start talking.
"You're father ran away. He left you. He's done it before – twice – to his other children."
"You're wrong, my Daddy never had any other children."
"He did, and he never was good at sticking around. You lasted the longest - eighteen years is pretty impressive. The twins were thirteen when he left them, by pulling a disappearing act at a magic show. He dropped his first son off to boarding school and never returned."
"Why would you say such a horrible thing? My Daddy is a good man, and I'm his only child!"
Ned shrugged. "When the twins were born, his first son – and her mother – knew nothing, and were abandoned a few years later. The twins and their mother never knew about you. And now you 've been abandoned."
"You're lying!"
"Just tell her, you fool!" Emerson interjected from the kitchen.
Ned took a deep breath, feeling on the wall for any clue as to a way out of being backed into a corner – figuratively and literally. "I know this because he was my father, too. I was abandoned when I was nine."
Kel was taken aback, took a step back, and then flopped down onto the edge of the bed. "I don't believe you," she sulked.
Ned, in a rare moment on tenderness, sat down beside her, folding his long limbs awkwardly, and hesitantly considered wrapping the girl in a hug. "I'm sorry," he said instead. "It must be hard for you to hear this. I was nearly ten when I found out about the twins. The only thing I ever got from him after he abandoned me was a postal address."
Kel abruptly broke down in tears, and Emerson made exaggerated signals at Ned from the kitchenette, ordering him to comfort her.
Ned lifted his arms, and gently placed them about Kel's shoulders, noting that her sweater was unusually dull coloured compared to the women he usually spent time around. As Kel's tears turned to sobs, she tucked her head into her half-brother's neck, and her forehead touched Ned's neck.
With a jolt, blue sparks crackled across their skin, and Ned leapt up, nearly dropping his sister on the floor. "What was that!" he blurted, looking at Kel in horror.
Kel, eyes wide with surprise, backed away from Ned, retreating into the corner of the room, while Ned stared at her in shock.
"Why'd you go all crackly-spark on me now? Ain't nobody dead!" Emerson shouted, while Ned and Kel stared at each other.
.
It was evening, and Olive was closing up the Pie-Hole when Ned, Emerson and Kel walked in.
"We're closed," she said automatically, before double-taking and saying instead, "Oh! Hi, Ned."
"Olive, can we have some pie? There's a blueberry one in the fridge with my name on it."
"I'll have rhubarb," Emerson interjected.
"What do you want, New Girl?" Olive asked, assuming correctly that it would be rude to not include her.
"Uhm," the brunette hesitated.
"She'll have the blueberry, too," Ned told Olive, who smiled sickly-sweetly and turned to find Ned's special pie. She wondered what was so special about it, but did as she was asked.
Over in the booth, Ned and Kel were sharing childhood stories. It was uncanny, how similarly their father had treated them – or not treated them, as it turned out. He had always been around when Kel was a teenager, but only after her mother mysteriously died. When she had been a child, her father had been living with and raising the twins, until that magic show. Shortly after, he had turned up on Kel's doorstep, with a smile and a hug, and he had raised Kel from that moment on.
"Yeah, yeah, the man screwed you both over." Emerson wasn't interested in this conversation. He wanted to know about the crackles and sparks. "What's with the crackle-pop?"
Kel looked down, and shovelled a piece of pie into her mouth. Ned, taking a bite of his own piece, decided that he would do this regularly – the cooking a truly fresh pie thing – because, by Jove, he loved pie!
Kel finally sighed, and answered Emerson. "I don't really know. When I touch dead plants, they come back to life. Frog dissection was traumatic in high school, because my frog started moving. I never told Daddy, or anyone else."
Emerson and Ned froze, staring at Ned's half-sister. She had the magic finger, too?
"Don't all talk at once. It's never happened when I've touched someone alive, though, just today."
"Kel, you can make dead things come back to life?" Ned asked urgently.
"Yes," she shrugged. "I try to pretend it doesn't happen, but, well, sometimes it just happens."
"Sometimes?"
"All the time," she confided, not really knowing why she was suddenly so trusting and confiding in her never-before-known half-brother.
Meanwhile, upstairs, Chuck was silently congratulating herself on the cleverness of putting a homeopathic mood-enhancing drug in Ned's only actually-fresh pie – the only pie in the store he could eat without it returning to rotten fruit.
Chuck had a plan, and she intended for it to work. She wanted to hug Ned, properly, and to do that, she had bought a long-sleeved, long-legged unitard, which even covered most of her hands. She added a pair of latex gloves and some socks, and pulled the lycra balaclava on over her head. Smirking, she took her position, lurking near the door in wait for Ned to arrive home.
What she didn't know, was that Ned and his half-sister had both eaten the pie, and were feeling particularly trusting, downstairs in the Pie Hole.
Ned excused himself when Olive went home, and took a punnet of rotten blueberries from the fridge, before returning to Kel and Emerson.
Tipping the rotten fruit onto the table, Ned picked up a single berry. With a zap and a crackle, it ripened back into its prime.
He placed the berry in Kel's hand, careful not to touch her. It shook as Kel's hand quivered, and she broke into a happy smile, pushing its way past her tears. "You, too?" she asked.
"Me, too," he confirmed, before taking the berry back, and letting it return to being dead.
Kel picked one up, and it burst back into full ripeness, grinning Kel played with the berry for a minute. "Drop it and touch it again!" Ned ordered, and Kel, startled, did exactly that as the berry tumbled from her right hand into her left.
"What did you make me do that for?" she complained.
"First touch, life. Second touch, dead, forever." He said it very seriously, but for some reason, he felt incredibly happy and trusting. "Alive more than a minute and something else dies," he added.
"Oh no," Kel gasped, one hand covering her mouth. "Good thing I didn't do it too often, then," she giggled.
"What is wrong with you two?" Emerson shook his head, wondering if there wasn't something in that pie there shouldn't have been. He never knew how right he was.
Ned took the berry from Kel, and it burst into life again. "Woah!" he shouted, dropping the ripe berry. A single touch returned it to dead.
Breathing hard, Ned stared at his finger. Suddenly, an idea came to him, and his eyes snapped up, first to Emerson and then to Kel.
He picked up a new rotten berry, and put it on his now-empty plate. "Touch it," he requested of Kel. She did, and nothing happened. Ned touched it once again, and it died again. "Again," Ned ordered, excitement rising in his voice.
The berry came back to life, and Ned touched it again, to no effect. Kel's last touch killed it stone dead.
"Ned? What you thinking?" Emerson asked, looking worriedly at the Pie Maker. "You got that crazy-arse look in your eyes again."
A huge grin spread across Ned's face. "Chuck!" he crowed. "Emerson, don't you get it? Chuck!"
"Chuck?" Kel asked. "Do you know where our father is? Is he at Chuck?"
"No," Ned dismissed the man without a second thought. "Charlotte, Chuck, I brought her back from death but now I can't touch her. But with you here, I can!"
"What on earth are you talking about?" Emerson growled dangerously.
"I touch Chuck, she dies. Kel touches Chuck, she comes back and I can touch her!"
With that, Ned hustled his co-conspirators out of the Pie-Hole, locking the door behind him, and leaving the mess for the morning.
Racing up the stairs, Ned had one thought – Chuck. He would touch her, kiss her, and hold her tight.
"Who," Kel puffed as she tried to keep up with the very tall men, "is Chuck?"
"His girlfriend," Emerson growled, trying to catch up to his crazy friend.
"Is he," huff, puff, "always like this?" Kel gasped.
"Never," Emerson confided darkly.
Ned burst through the door of his apartment, and suddenly found himself with an armful of Chuck, dressed in a very revealing – though completely covering – one piece reminiscent of a wetsuit, only thin as togs.
"Chuck! You won't believe it!"
"Ned?" Chuck saw Emerson and the brunette girl standing at the door, "what's up? Oh no, I think I overdosed your pie!"
Ned ignored that last comment, for he was far too excited. "Chuck, Kel, Kel, Chuck!"
"What is that supposed to mean? You're like Olive when she's excited – impossible to understand."
Emerson explained. "Ned's half-sister, got the same magic finger. She can revive you, and then you and Ned here can be normal, and stop driving me crazy."
"What? Is it true?"
Ned nodded emphatically, and spun Chuck around to face Kel again.
Kel waved. "Hi. Apparently I'm the little sister."
"Hi," Chuck answered. "Apparently I put too much mood enhancer in his pie."
"Is that why I feel so good about all this?" Kel replied. "I ate the same pie as Ned. And then I told him my biggest secret."
"And he told you his," Emerson said, bored. "Can we get this over with?"
"You want to kill me right now?" Chuck cried incredulously.
"No," Ned answered honestly. "I want to be able to touch you, like I've always wanted."
"If you're so sure it will work, prove it with Digby," Chuck challenged, and Ned immediately called for the dog.
Digby, who had been peacefully sleeping on Chuck's bed, trotted out happily. Ned immediately threw himself at his beloved dog, kissing the dog on the snout, and Digby, before he knew what had happened, zapped back to being dead.
Kel shyly came forward. She had not known anything about Digby, but she wasn't a stupid girl. She reached out, under Chuck's watchful eye, and tapped Digby on the paw. The dog immediately bounced right back up and bowled Chuck over, licking her face before moving on the greet Emerson, who remembered that the exchange rate for a dog's life was less than his own.
"Digby," Ned said, kneeling with his arms outstretched, "Come!"
And somehow, with that inexplicable dog-sense, Digby knew that now he could touch his master. Expertly avoiding contact with Kel, Digby launched himself into Ned's arms, and the Pie Maker and his dog shared a hug for the first time since Ned was nine.
"I'll give you two a moment," Chuck said, grabbing Kel by the elbow and dragging her into the bedroom.
The door shut behind them, and Kel, eyes wide, couldn't help but think that she should be terrified, not gloriously joyful.
"I don't know who you are or where you came from," Chuck started, "but if you can do to me what you did to Digby I will be forever in your debt."
Kel's mouth dropped open. "Uhm," she said, "OK. I am Ned's half sister. I found out this afternoon, when I hired Emerson Cod to investigate my father's disappearance."
"Oh," Chuck smiled. "I'm the girl next door, or at least I was when Ned and I were children. Now I'm the no-touch girlfriend. If you can change that, I am very grateful."
Kel smiled, and hugged Chuck, knowing that no matter whether they became best friends or returned to being complete strangers, she would never hug this friendly woman again.
"I think I'll put on some proper clothes," Chuck muttered, and Kel laughed.
"What are you wearing?" she asked.
As Chucked retrieved some more appropriate clothing, jeans and a sweater, she answered, blushing.
"I snapped. I put mood-enhancing homeopathic drugs in Ned's pie, and this is the only way I could think of to allow touch. I'm completely covered, but I can still touch Ned through the gloves, and he can touch me through the leotard. It was stupid and drastic," she laughed as she explained, and struggled with the zip, which Kel undid for her.
"You must really love my brother," Kel observed.
Chuck smiled. "He's a good man. The best there is."
Kel smiled. "I am glad there is someone in my family left."
.
Thirty minutes later, with Emerson a mile away in his safe office, Ned took Chuck in his arms once more. Kel, standing nearby, gave Chuck a thumbs-up.
Chuck looked up at Ned, and got lost in his eyes for a moment. They seemed to get bigger and more beautiful, and then suddenly she realised that Ned was coming closer to her, just as he had been about to do so long ago, when he had changed his mind and kept her alive.
Ned paused, and she sucked in a quick breath, feeling his warm breath waft across her face. Then she rose onto her toes, closing the gap between their lips, and in a flash of snappy blue zapping, she died.
.
Ned held the limp body of Chuck tenderly in his arms, having pulled back a moment too late to chicken out when Chuck had kissed him.
He took a deep breath, and looked to Kel. The young woman smiled gently, stepped forward, and thought about where she wanted her last touch with this near-stranger who would possibly become her sister-in-law to be. Deciding on the cheek, she brushed her finger gently across Chuck's face, and with a gasp Charlotte Charles lived for a third time.
Kel stepped back, smiling happily.
Ned smiled, and said, "Welcome back," and suddenly Chuck pulled him down by the tie, to kiss him properly.
Kel let herself out.
.
The next morning, Olive entered the Pie Hole to find it empty. A few minutes later, Chuck and Ned arrived, arm in arm and grinning from ear to ear.
With a sinking feeling, Olive had an irrational thought, and that irrational thought bubbled out of her in an irrational accusation.
"Oh my God you slept with her!"
Ned and Chuck paused, and then Chuck giggled. Giggled!
Ned ducked past Olive's glare, into the kitchen, where he started baking pies, but this could never be called stress-baking.
Chuck sat down at the bar, a dreamy look in her faraway eyes.
"Well? I thought you were allergic to him. What happened? I highly doubt that you both slept with different people last night. I know you were both home."
"Why are you so convinced there was sleeping?" Chuck asked.
"It's obvious," Olive retorted. "You don't have to be a genius to work out when someone has had the best sex of their life!"
Chuck sighed dreamily. "You wouldn't believe me if I tried."
The door was flung open, and Emerson walked in, far earlier than he would usually, with Kel at his heels.
"My father is dead," Kel pushed past the P.I. to announce.
.
Ned, in the kitchen, did not hear the news. He was frantically baking, putting pies in the ovens, rolling crusts, cutting fruit and setting pies out to cool, trying to be ready for the day to come.
And so, when he emerged from his floury haven, he was shocked to find Kel crying into a bowl of ice-cream, and Emerson heatedly discussing something with Chuck, while Olive demanded to know what was going on.
"I have had enough of secrets!" Olive yelled. "This girl was a complete stranger yesterday, and now you're all buddy-buddy with her! It's not fair. Why won't you just tell me what is going on? And why is Chuck now not allergic to Ned?"
Ned walked right into Olive's outburst, which Emerson and Chuck completely ignored.
Ned drew a breath to say something, anything, when the door flung open, and two cops entered the Pie Hole.
Ned immediately threw a smile on his lips, while Chuck dived under the table. Kel and Emerson ignored the cops, assuming them to be merely customers on their way to work as cops.
"Welcome to the Pie Hole," Olive greeted the cops, her showgirl smile plastered on her face.
"Yeah," the taller cop grunted. "We are investigating a death. We have reason to believe you lot may know something."
"I'm sorry?" Ned said, his face falling into shock.
"A report was filed, regarding the disappearance of the person. A private investigator was hired by the daughter. Missing person turns up dead outside the Liberty building."
The second cop took over. "So we go looking, and look what we find. The P.I. is regularly seen collaborating with the Pie Maker on cases. The Pie Maker is the son of the missing – now dead – person. The morning after the crime, the P.I. and the daughter are found in the Pie Maker's shop."
Ned's eyes were wide, but this was nothing compared to Olive.
"What?" she shrieked. "Your own father went missing, you lot couldn't find him, and now he turned up dead outside our building? Were you even trying?"
"I have been making pies," Ned insisted. A timer went off, and he attempted to excuse himself. The second cop finally followed him into the kitchen, where Ned took two pies out of the oven, replacing them with two more, and resetting the timer. The delicious scent of Triple Berry Pie and Banana Cream Pie wafted through the kitchen, and Ned carefully set the pies on the stand.
The cop coughed, and Ned followed him back into the main area.
The two cops questioned everyone, even Olive, for a good half hour. Twice, timers went off and Ned had to (under supervision) take pies out of the ovens. Chuck, meanwhile, suffered from being cramped under a table for so long.
The facts were these: Ned had been abandoned at age nine, by a father who already had another family. Six years later, that other family had been abandoned by Ned's father, for a third family. Kel had been raised by their father, until she turned eighteen, and her father left her at a theatre.
When Kel had hired Emerson Cod to find her father, she had also notified the police about the missing person case. The police had immediately checked the twins' residence, in case their father had returned to them, before checking the Pie Maker for his father's presence.
When they learned that Emerson Cod, and his assistant the Pie Maker, were on the case, the police became more interested – after all, how often does someone get hired to find his own father?
At eight twenty-nine the previous evening, Ned's father had indeed been at the Liberty Building, snooping around on the top of a ladder. When Ned and Kel, unknowingly doped up on homeopathic mood enhancers, had edited Chuck's life policy, the cosmic backlash had fallen upon the unsuspecting man peering through a gap in the curtains.
The police, finding no evidence of any bodily harm, were suspicious that the man's death was no mere stroke, though that was the official cause of death.
And so all the evidence suggested that Ned had not only motive (long held abandonment issues) but also opportunity (feet away at the time of death), which meant that Ned was the number one suspect in his father's potential murder. Ned was accused of pushing his father off the ladder, upon finding him spying.
Ned, the previous evening's homeopathic mood enhancers having worn off, fully understood the implications of this accusation.
"I didn't kill my father!" he insisted. "I was in my apartment all evening!"
Kel, sitting at the table with her thankfully loose pants concealing Chuck, hidden under the table beside her, let slip that she had been at Ned's apartment until eight thirty by backing Ned up.
Two minutes and ten seconds later, both half-siblings were handcuffed and frog-marched into the back seat of a police car.
Emerson Cod dropped his head into his hands after the police and their suspects left. "This is not good."
Chuck finally emerged from under the table. "What the hell did you hide for?" Olive demanded.
"They think I'm dead, remember?" Chuck hissed. "I can't afford the police to see me – what if they recognise me?"
"Oh, right, Girl-who-faked-her-own-death," Olive retorted sarcastically. "Do you know anything about Ned's father's death?"
"Everything," Emerson grunted. "His heart stopped beating and he died. End of story. Now we've gotta prove those two didn't kill their father. It's gonna be tough."