Page 32 of The Librarians
Sunday
Nobody is ever prepared for the worst.
Especially not those preparing the most assiduously: They are the ones most desperate to avoid that particular outcome.
Hazel feels as if she’s just opened the door to a battalion of cops again.
Could the young man she met on Madeira have turned into a killer? Could she have conceived, when she tossed the confetti of his phone number to the wind, determined to make him the sweetest memory of her life, that someday she might ask this question?
Her phone buzzes. A text.
Hi, Hazel, it’s Conrad. I apologize for yesterday. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll be out of town until the end of the week. Would it be possible for us to meet again when I’m back in Austin? Please say yes.
She yelps.
“You okay?” comes Nainai’s creaky morning voice.
Hazel glances at the atomic clock on the wall. It’s almost eight—she has no idea when the night ended and the sun rose.
“I’m fine,” she calls out. “I just won the lottery!”
Nainai cackles. “There’s no one more deserving. You want some baozi for breakfast?”
Hazel closes her laptop and stands up. “I’ll do it.”
She puts a trio of small frozen bao to steam in one Instant Pot and sets a batch of rice porridge to pressure-cook in another. While breakfast takes care of itself, she goes back to her room and parses Conrad’s text again.
If she hadn’t gone to his house last night, she wouldn’t be just saying yes: She’d ask if she could fly out to meet him wherever he happens to be. But now she’s spooked.
Is he sending a conciliatory note because he sincerely regrets not giving them another chance—or because he learned from Ryan that she saw Ryan’s car when she shouldn’t have?
She stares at the message for ten minutes before she types, It’s a lot to decide. Why don’t you text me when you’re back in town? That’ll give me some time to think.
She doesn’t want to give the impression that she’s had a sudden change of heart. But after his brusque rejection, it would seem reasonable for her to hesitate before committing herself.
Her phone buzzes right away. She flinches.
Hi, Hazel. So sorry to impose, but I really need to speak to you. Could you meet me at the library? I’m available any time you are.
Two seconds pass before Hazel sees that the text is not from Conrad, but Sophie.
It’s eight twenty-five.
Hazel frowns, then taps, I can be there at 9am. Will that work?
Sophie can only pray that she’s made the right call in reaching out to Hazel.
Hazel, who knows that Sophie met with Jeannette Obermann well after the end of Game Night, has kept that from the police and not asked for anything in return.
And Sophie has no choice but to gamble that it will prove enough of a foundation for a crisis alliance.
When she reaches the library at five minutes to nine, Hazel is already there, standing by her Miata.
Before Sophie can thank her, she says, “I could be wrong, but is that Astrid’s car?”
Sophie has certainly never seen another Prius with a bumper sticker that says My book boyfriend is a billionaire archaeologist astronaut vampire.
What is Astrid doing at the library three hours before it opens?
Another vehicle enters the parking lot. Sophie recognizes Jonathan’s ten-year-old pickup truck.
He sees them as well and rolls down his window. “What are you guys doing here?”
“You’re early, too,” answers Hazel.
Jonathan shrugs. “It’s the time change. I got up and didn’t have anything I wanted to do at home, so I thought I’d put in some work on those donated books.”
That could have been Sophie’s excuse if she’d been quicker on the jump. She points at her tracksuit. “I’m going downtown to run. Just stopped here cuz I couldn’t find my lunch tote at home.”
“I went out for breakfast tacos and thought I saw Astrid’s car,” says Hazel smoothly.
Jonathan frowns. “Astrid?”
He and Sophie exchange a look. Astrid is always on time and enthusiastic about her work, but she isn’t even on the schedule today.
“Let’s go inside, shall we?” says Jonathan. “Maybe she can give me a hand.”
The couch in the storage room looks like a Garfield plushy left outside too long, but the cushions under the pilling upholstery still have some support to offer.
Astrid, her feet pulled up, her arms around herself, wonders if it was a dream, what took place in the middle of the night.
Can she go home and pretend that none of it happened?
She scrambles off the couch at sounds coming from the Den of Calories. “Who’s that?”
The door to the storage room opens and Jonathan pokes in his head. “Astrid? Are you okay?”
“Jonathan!” She rushes over, nearly knocking over two stacks of books, and throws her arms around him. He is huge and solid, like a mountain. “I’m so scared. There was somebody in my condo last night.”
“What?!” exclaims Jonathan.
As well as two other voices behind him.
Before she knows it, Astrid is ushered to the old Mod-Podged table in the Den of Calories. Sophie fills a mug at the hot water dispenser, Jonathan ventures back into the storage room to fetch Astrid’s sneakers, and Hazel empties foil-wrapped breakfast tacos onto a melamine plate.
“I have eggs and potato, eggs and bacon, brisket, and beans. Two of each kind.”
“You brought enough to feed a party,” Sophie says quietly.
Hazel turns to her and smiles. “The Chinese diaspora believe in shoving food at trouble. That way at least we’re facing problems with a full stomach.”
This sounds like a general statement to Astrid, yet somehow it also feels like reassurance aimed specifically at Sophie.
“I guess I could use some food too, since you’re sharing,” Sophie murmurs.
Hazel smiles again and sets out small containers of salsa. “Help yourself.”
But Sophie doesn’t sit down to eat yet. Instead she brings Astrid a Tazo English breakfast tea bag and a Republic of Tea Asian jasmine one. These are Astrid’s two favorite teas to have at work. She had no idea Sophie ever took notice of her tea selections.
Jonathan comes back with Astrid’s sneakers. Now her feet are no longer cold.
Astrid’s eyes swim with tears. They are all so wonderful to her, despite her stupid fake life.
She takes a deep breath and begins her account.
Sophie was already wound up tight. She nearly vibrates listening to Astrid’s ordeal.
Even though the young woman is sitting right in front of her, safe and sound, she still can’t breathe until the Astrid in the narrative puts on her sneakers, slips out through the back door, and drives to the library for refuge.
She grips Astrid’s hand. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
Keeping her distance from everyone means Sophie doesn’t always let herself think about how much she cares about her colleagues. She would be devastated if anything happened to Astrid.
“But are you sure they didn’t take anything?” Jonathan looks puzzled.
“They didn’t take my laptop, the single most valuable item in my house. I can’t imagine what else was there that anyone would have wanted.”
Sophie does not say it aloud but swallows at the possibility that the intruder didn’t come for any objects but for Astrid herself.
The likelihood must have also occurred to Astrid.
“So I’m thinking—based on very incomplete data, of course—that either they came for me or—” She takes several rapid breaths; her fingers clench around the napkin she’s been using to rub out a tiny dot of salsa from her cornflower blue Austin Public Library hoodie. “Or they came because of Perry.”
Perry, Astrid’s situationship. It feels bizarre to be reminded that there is more than one active police investigation involving the library and its staff.
Astrid looks around the room, her eyes wide and beseeching. “I know it sounds outlandish, but is it any more outlandish than that I’m suddenly attracting housebreakers who go through my house and take nothing?”
Vaguely Sophie notes that Astrid seems to have lost her accent. Don’t people’s accents usually become stronger under stress?
Hazel, who has been leaning on the door—there are only three chairs in the Den of Calories—says, “It doesn’t sound outlandish to me.”
She speaks with such solemnity that little centipede feet march up the insides of Sophie’s forearms. Astrid, the one who gave voice to the idea in the first place, stares at Hazel, as if she can’t believe someone agrees with her.
“In my early twenties, I had a—let’s call it a missed connection,” continues Hazel, a hint of wistfulness in her voice. “For a long time I held out hope that our paths might cross again. Yesterday it happened: We ran into each other at Peng’s Noodles.”
Sophie blinks. In her early twenties, Hazel would have been on the other side of the world.
For her missed connection to materialize a decade later, on a different continent, in the most unremarkable, if delicious, of strip mall noodle shops…
But wait, what does this have to do with the intruder at Astrid’s place?
“His name is Conrad. Unfortunately, Conrad was not interested in rekindling anything.” Hazel’s tone remains even, but she does stop for a second, as if the rejection is too monumental to be brought up without creating a momentary void.
“But he happens to be Dr. Ryan Kaneshiro’s roommate—I think we’ve all heard of Ryan? ”
Jonathan spoke to Ryan to find out more about how Perry died—Sophie remembers that. Astrid nods likewise.
“And Ryan was curious enough that with Conrad out of town last night he invited Jonathan and me to their place for dinner.”
Despite Sophie’s panic for herself, anxiety about Astrid, and sorrow over Hazel’s razed-to-the-ground dreams, she can’t help but feel a sliver of envy that Jonathan and Hazel socialized outside of work.
Jonathan, on the other hand, regards Hazel with rising uneasiness.