Page 23 of The Librarians
Saturday
Elise and Ana Maria are in the middle of making their buttermilk pancakes when Detective Hagerty and Detective Gonzalez knock on the door. Sophie, out for a jog to clear her head, sprints back after she receives Elise’s text.
When she arrives, her fingers cold and numb despite her hard run, Elise is seated in one of the two lawn chairs on Sophie’s tiny front porch, talking to the cops. Hagerty has taken the other chair, Gonzalez standing behind him.
Sophie has no legal objections to raise—in Texas, cops do not need a parent’s permission or presence to question minors. After a stilted greeting, Sophie moves closer to Elise and lets the police continue with their official business.
Elise must have told the cops that she conversed briefly with Jeannette Obermann in the library the Saturday before Game Night. They ask her whether she paid any special attention to Jeannette Obermann on Game Night itself.
Elise shakes her head. “Not after I put her at a table with the couple that also came late. Clue is a fairly straightforward game and I think Miss Hazel, the librarian who sat with them, knew the game well enough to help out. I didn’t have to guide them or give any extra explanations.”
Hagerty asks a number of other questions. Elise displays a steadiness that almost dispels Sophie’s terror at this near home invasion. Almost, but not quite. She starts out standing immediately next to Elise but quickly moves six feet away, so that the cops—and Elise—cannot see that she’s shaking.
They are back so soon. On a Saturday morning. At Sophie’s house. Are they just eager to do their job or have they already found a trail of clues that led them directly to her door?
But at least Elise is not giving them any reason to pay extra attention to her, and that’s—
From inside the house Ana Maria yowls. Elise springs to her feet. Sophie places a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go see what’s going on.”
In the kitchen Ana Maria is sucking on her finger—she nicked herself while trying to slice some fruits to go with the pancakes she’s just finished making. Sophie hauls out her first aid kit, disinfects Ana Maria’s small cut, dabs it with a bit of ointment, and wraps a bandage around it.
“Thank you, Miss Sophie,” says Ana Maria. “Are they treating Elise okay out there?”
As if she summoned the cops, the door opens. Detective Hagerty lets Elise back into the house but asks, “Ms. Claremont, can I also have a few minutes of your time?”
Elise looks apologetic.
Sophie’s gut twists. What did the child say? But she puts on the deflective shield that she forged during an adolescence spent at a private school full of rich WASP kids. Hopefully the shield still works; hopefully it will still convince people she belongs and make her fly under the radar.
“Of course, Detective. Elise, don’t let Ana Maria do any washing up. Her bandage should stay dry.”
She goes outside to the porch and sits in the same chair Elise occupied earlier.
Across from her Hagerty takes up her entire field of vision.
There is a window to his right, a tall, dark-stained wooden fence just behind his head, and beyond his left shoulder, trees and an open field—yet all she can see is the keen gleam in his eyes and the pores on his nose.
He asks the same questions he asked earlier—or at least, very similar questions.
Sophie gives similar but slightly different answers—she doesn’t want her testimony to sound copied and pasted from one occasion to the next.
Human recollection is unreliable. People forget details; they recall new details; they fabricate details that they then convince themselves have always been the details.
She is so caught up in the give-and-take of the interview, going over completely inconsequential events, that her pulse slows, her nerves settle.
They’ve reviewed the evening. They are now in the parking lot of the library. And Sophie repeats her story of how she stepped aside to speak to Jeannette Obermann, who, God rest her soul, was interested in volunteering at the library.
Because Elise had been there with her in the parking lot, Sophie made sure to confess that encounter the first time Hagerty interviewed her. She also informed him that it was the last she saw of Jeannette Obermann.
But this is a lie and Hazel knows it.
Last night, Sophie fled from Hazel in a panic. It wasn’t until she was behind her own front door, perspiring despite the coolness of the night, that she was able to reassure herself that if Hazel didn’t rat her out when she was face-to-face with Hagerty, then she wasn’t going to rat on her now.
But there’s still the matter of what Hagerty might have found in Jeannette Obermann’s apartment. If that woman conducted any internet searches on a device that wasn’t her phone…
“Ms. Claremont?”
“Sorry, I was trying to recall some more details. But I’m afraid I’ve already told you everything. Ms. Obermann looked and acted completely normal when we talked about her interest in volunteering at the library. Then my daughter and I went home.”
“But when I spoke to your daughter just now,” Hagerty says innocently, “she told me that after you came home, you left again and didn’t return until pretty late in the evening.”
Sophie stands at the edge of a caldera and the erupting magma threatens to melt her whole.
“That’s right,” she hears herself say. “I believe I mentioned it last time we spoke. I belong to a running group and we had a Halloween cookie swap the next morning, but I was so busy getting Game Night off the ground that I forgot about it until we got home from the library. So I had to go and get some cookies from the store.”
This is the weakness in their defense. Sophie would never make Elise fudge the timeline for Sophie. And because she didn’t want Elise asking about what she was doing that night, their preparation had ended at the point Elise returned home.
“You told me that you were back from the grocery store at ten-ish. But your daughter said you got in right before eleven.”
The muscles in Sophie’s back spasm. “Was it that late? I experienced a huge adrenaline rush from the success of Game Night. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep right away. Since I was already out, I drove around for a bit.”
Sophie already checked. On that night, during the most critical window of time, she didn’t pass by any of the city’s listed traffic cams. Which supposedly do not make recordings unless the city is doing a traffic study.
But what if the city is doing one? And what if there are hidden, unlisted cameras?
Hagerty leans forward, blocking the sky, blocking everything. “You’re sure you never saw Jeannette Obermann again, Ms. Claremont?”
Sophie’s blood vessels constrict—her head pounds from a lack of oxygen. “I am sure,” she insists. “I never saw the poor woman again.”
When Astrid walks into the library, Jonathan looks up from the patron he’s helping. “Hey, Astrid. How did it go at the dentist’s?”
But before she can reply in an American accent— her American accent—he adds, “I’ll get the answer from you later,” and returns his attention to the patron.
So much for her jangling nerves.
All the tables in the work gallery are taken. Astrid sits down in the reading area by the periodicals and brings out her laptop.
Right after she learned about Perry’s death, terror muddied her reaction—she was convinced the police would somehow pin the responsibility on her. She wanted to bar her condo and insulate herself from the case—as if that would somehow minimize her problem.
Denial, writ large.
But as she lay trapped on the dentist’s chair this morning, cursing him for being open on Saturdays, unable to even grit her teeth at the sound of the diabolical drill because of the device that held her mouth open, she was suddenly desperate to find out what happened.
She wants to know why Perry died. And maybe who he was. In that order.
But the internet, which loves to speculate, has no theories on Perry’s death—it doesn’t even seem to have learned of his overdose. On the other hand, it knows all too well his romantic history.
Most images online showed him escorting one of two slim, beautiful women to various fancy occasions.
One woman was apparently his college sweetheart, someone whose appellation starts with the word “Lady.” The other one looks weirdly familiar until the caption informs Astrid that she was on an extremely popular show—not one Astrid watched but very much in the zeitgeist for nearly a decade.
For Perry wasn’t just Perry but the Honorable Heneage Pericles Bathurst. Although, contrary to what she’d first supposed when faced with a name like that, the family title—his father is Baron Bathurst—isn’t that old.
It was granted only after WWII, among the last hereditary peerages ever created in the United Kingdom.
She wonders whether he was saddled with a try-hard name to make the other aristocrats forget how recently the family arrived at the party.
But it wasn’t as if they held it against him, since he went everywhere and dated women with marquesses for fathers and former prime ministers for grandfathers—the actress appears to be from a family both older and posher than his.
Mortification sears Astrid. Would she have bared her soul to him had she known about the kind of life he’d led and the confident, sophisticated women in his past? What could he possibly have thought when she prattled on about how happy she was not faking being Swedish?
She forces herself to browse on and reads an article about his parents’ separation. She remembers his bewilderment. Four children and almost thirty-five years together—down the drain.