Page 43 of The Librarians

Tuesday

Two evenings later

Come on , she implores herself, you already slept in your own bed for the past two nights, so it’s not as if you’re walking in for the first time after you hid from the intruder .

But what they will be attempting tonight…

Astrid casts a glance over her shoulder. Behind her, Sophie is opening and clenching her left hand. Hazel looks grave but calm—as calm as the eye of a storm.

They both nod at Astrid. Now Astrid has no choice but to open the door to her condo. “Come on in.”

In her own ears, her voice quavers, like a guitar string plucked too hard.

Sophie’s attention immediately goes to the five sixteen-by-twenty-inch framed blackboards on the two walls around the dining table. “But that is gorgeous lettering, Astrid! Are those your own fonts? I don’t recognize them—and I window-shop fonts all the time.”

Some of the boards are occupied by a large single letter—a particularly swishy capital Y , a capital T that looks like it’s built of steel beams—but a couple of other boards have whole lowercase alphabets written out, one in an angular script font, another a rotund, friendly sans serif.

Sophie’s compliment makes Astrid feel as if she’s just seen the first snowdrop emerge from, well, under the snow. “I didn’t know you liked fonts,” she says, trying not to preen.

“I love fonts—always have.” Sophie turns halfway around, a rueful expression on her face. “There’s too much we don’t know about each other.”

“I know,” Astrid murmurs, a pang in her heart.

“I cannot pick out Comic Sans in a lineup,” says Hazel.

Astrid pivots toward her in horror. “Comic Sans is—I’m sure calling it a crime against humanity would be too much but…”

“But it deserves to be known as the typographical equivalent of failing upward,” Sophie says authoritatively.

“Yes, omigod, yes!” Astrid cries—and high-fives Sophie.

Hazel chortles and walks over to the board that declares Live, Laugh, Love in a font that was Gothic horror except listless, practically comatose—Astrid wrote the slogan after Perry’s desertion in spring.

“At least I can tell that this combination of text and font is ironic,” Hazel says, tracing a finger over the first L , which is melting into a puddle of despair.

The relief and camaraderie Astrid feels at the discussion of fonts evaporate and she almost has a heart attack.

Is Hazel doing too much? Will she give them away?

And when Hazel turns around, there is a feverish gleam in her eyes, which could denote either a wild hope or an equally untrammeled panic—and does nothing to soothe Astrid’s agitation.

Astrid pinches the back of her neck and clears her throat. “Let me get something for us to drink.”

A few minutes later, she has a bottle of red wine uncorked and a half-decent cheese board—grapes, olives, and a few slices of salami in addition to the last of the Hush?llsost from her fridge—on the table.

Sophie’s glass of wine is almost full to the brim. But she doesn’t drink, only hangs on to its stem, her thumb pressed hard into her knuckles. “So…you said you need our help, Hazel?”

Hazel takes a swig of her club soda—the ice cubes in her glass clink loudly. “I do. You know that I’m a widow.”

“I still can’t believe it,” says Sophie.

Hazel’s lips curve into the sort of smile women give when they want to reassure those around them that things are all right, an expression more determined than sanguine.

“The day my husband died I found out he embezzled a lot of money. Twenty million pounds, to be exact. More recently I learned that he also took three million pounds from Perry.”

“What?!” Astrid’s cry echoes sharply against the walls.

“That’s…so much money,” murmurs Sophie. “When our library was remodeled, it only cost one point eight million dollars. Twenty million pounds—how much is that in dollars?”

“Between twenty-five and twenty-six million, I’d say.”

Astrid rubs her hand over her thumping heart. “That would have been enough to open a couple of whole new branches.”

“It’s too bad Kit wasn’t more public-minded.” Hazel picks up a grape from the cheese board and peels it, a look of blank concentration on her face. “We thought that was it—he played his cards wrong, he got in trouble, he ran, he died in a plane crash.”

The peeled grape looks exposed and vulnerable. Is that how Hazel must feel, someone so self-contained forced to share so much that is painful and humiliating?

“The thing is, he’d accumulated a good deal of Bitcoin—the reason he embezzled was to meet a margin call so that the exchange wouldn’t start liquidating his Bitcoin positions. But when he died, no one could find his Bitcoin.

“The current belief is that he took them offline, so that they couldn’t be discovered or hacked. People have been looking for his cold storage, which can be a flash drive or even a piece of paper with his private key written on it.”

Astrid covers the lower half of her face with her hands. “Perry, too?”

“Perry, too.”

Astrid breaks out in goose bumps, even though this is not the first time she’s heard this. “Was that why he came to Austin time and again? But why Austin?”

“In March of this year, my grandmother got COVID for the first time. I came and stayed with her for three weeks. Kit joined me for a few days.” Hazel picks up another grape.

Sliver by sliver, more pale green grape skin drifts onto the small white plate before her.

“It was a strange thing for him to do. We’d already discussed a trial separation; my grandmother’s illness hastened its implementation, but not by that much.

Yet after two weeks, Kit showed up. He said he didn’t want Nainai to think that anything was the matter—not yet. ”

Her lips crook in an ironic smile.

“He left before I did. By the time I reached Singapore, he’d already departed on a trip to the UK.

So our goodbye, when he left in an Uber for the airport from my grandmother’s house, was the last time I saw him.

Recently, however, I was made aware of footage that showed him at the library, several days running. ”

“At our library?” asks Sophie. Her hands have come up to her upper arms, her wrists crossed defensively over her rib cage.

Astrid looks down and sees that she herself is holding almost the exact same position.

At this point, some details are new to her, but not the gist of the story.

Yet the potency of the whole is amplified by the all too close wall behind her and the ever so slightly sinister light from the ceiling fixture above.

“At our library,” confirms Hazel. “This was before the surveillance cameras broke. On his last visit, Kit walked in with a box of books—and then walked out with what seemed to be the same box. And apparently he looked directly at the camera and did a chin lift, a sort of I see you .”

She pops a grape she’s peeled into her mouth and chews meditatively.

Astrid doesn’t understand how she can eat at a time like this—the woman must have an esophagus of steel.

“Now that I think about it, he mentioned the library to me. He said he found it a good place to work. Had I paid more attention, I’d have found it odd: So much of his work involved talking to artists and clients; a coffee shop would have been a much better spot than a library.

“But at the time his remark barely registered. I was not happy that he arrived at my grandmother’s house without prior notice; I felt that his presence in fact made my grandmother more suspicious about the state of our marriage than she would have been otherwise.”

Sophie, at the head of the table, reaches out and squeezes Hazel’s hand.

Astrid might have done the same if she didn’t feel so paralyzed—even if Hazel no longer loved her husband by the time he perished, she would still have been horrified by his fate, would still have agonized over the lack of closure on their relationship, especially since his criminal offenses came to light at the same time.

Hazel downs some of her club soda and looks up, as if hoping for strength from above.

Astrid’s heart pounds. She dares not follow the line of Hazel’s sight—there is no way she can make it appear natural.

Sophie, more hard-core than Astrid, does glance up, but only fleetingly. She finally takes a sip of her wine. “Are you sure that the cold storage for Kit’s Bitcoin is at the library?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know that it’s ever been there. And even if it was at one point, most likely it’s already been found. Possibly Perry found it—and was killed for his trouble.”

But if the cold storage—and the millions it holds—has been found, then why was there an intruder at Astrid’s place in the middle of the night?

“All the same, I’m going to mount a search,” declares Hazel softly.

She is as beautiful and resolute as Daenerys Targaryen, standing at the bow of her ship, sailing to Westeros—except the khaleesi should have stayed the fuck home!

Astrid sets her knuckles against her lips. Her teeth are chattering. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t think I have a choice. If it can be found, then the money should be used to pay back Perry’s family and everyone else Kit embezzled from or swindled.”

“What are you looking for, exactly?” asks Sophie, leaning forward, her hands on the edge of the table. “A piece of paper, a flash drive hidden in a book, or…”

“It could also be a book with an RFID tracker,” explains Hazel, “the kind that does not emit any signal until it’s been activated.”

Radio-frequency identification is hardly cutting-edge technology at this point—in fact, books in larger library systems often have RFID tags affixed as part of their processing.

But the kind of tracker Hazel is talking about does not make its presence known until it is scanned with a particular frequency.

“Whatever it is, wouldn’t Perry and those others have already tried to find it?” asks Astrid.

Hazel, mirroring Sophie, also leans forward, her hands spread.

But unlike Sophie and her perfect burgundy manicure, Hazel’s unvarnished nails are nearly white from how hard they are digging into the oak veneer of the dining table—the only real sign of tension on her part.

“Perry and whoever else might have searched the stacks. But we have thousands of books that are not out on the shelves or on carts waiting to be shelved.”

Astrid sucks in a breath. “The donations?”

“Precisely. Kit entered the library holding a box and exited holding the same box, apparently. But what was in the box? The library’s CCTV cameras, back when they still worked, covered the public terminals and other areas where patrons gathered.

But they didn’t point toward the corridor where donated books are dropped off. ”

And if Kit’s hoard has been sitting among the donated books all this time…

“This is where I need help from you two.” Hazel looks from Sophie to Astrid, and back again. “I’ve sorted the three huge boxes of donations that came in last Tuesday and have no more reason to be in the storage room during normal hours. Can you lend me your keys so I can go after hours?”

“You mean, at night?” Astrid ventures.

“Tonight, if possible.” There is a hint of lunacy in the brilliance of Hazel’s eyes. “Now that I know Perry’s death is linked to Kit, I can never sleep easy again unless I get to the bottom of it.”

Astrid bites on her knuckles. “Are you sure that’s safe?”

“It’s the library. It doesn’t have any valuables and I won’t be visible to anyone outside when I’m in the storage room.”

“Should I come with you?” Astrid squeaks.

“You two have to work in the morning; my hours don’t kick in until afternoon.” Hazel loads a cracker with cheese but does not eat it. “Will you let me borrow your key?”

Astrid licks her numb lips. “Umm, if it’s okay with Sophie, I can, but I have to make a request, and that’s the reason I want to come with you.

You know that the CCTV cameras haven’t worked for a while at the library, but there are a bunch of other peripheral things that are not working as intended.

The door to the Den of Calories, for example—it doesn’t lock anymore. ”

“I’ll lock the front entrance when I go in. Then it doesn’t matter if the Den of Calories can’t be secured.”

It feels really stupid to be talking about the mundane realities of municipal housekeeping when there are tens of millions of dollars and multiple lives at stake.

“But that’s just it. That’s the problem.

You see, the front entrance used to log when it’s keyed open and locked.

But a few months ago—maybe forty days of one-hundred-ten-degree weather messed it up last summer—it broke so that it no longer logs when you open it, only when you lock it. ”

Hazel looks at Astrid blankly.

“What Astrid means is that if you don’t lock the front door, then nobody will know you’ve been there overnight,” says Sophie.

She takes a deep breath. “Here, I give you executive permission. Go tonight, if you need to. And then just leave. Don’t bother locking up.

I’ll make sure I’m the first person at the library tomorrow morning so nobody else will know it’s been opened at night. ”

“All right.” Hazel rises slowly, as if struggling against a great weight. She once again settles her hands on the table, to steady herself. “Guess I’ll be off, then.”