Page 44 of The Librarians

Conrad’s house

Two nights earlier

With three minutes left in the fourth quarter and with the visiting team having already given up, Ryan turns off the TV.

Jonathan, once again looking in the direction of the alcove, turns his head at the ensuing silence.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Ryan murmurs. “You never lost your wallet tracker here.”

Jonathan flushes, even though it’s far from the worst thing Ryan can say. “I—it’s possible.”

“Did Hazel come with you , and not with Conrad?”

“That—is also a possibility.”

Ryan perks up. “So there could have been a shoot-out between you and Conrad tonight?”

“I didn’t bring a firearm—it would have been a one-sided gunfight, if Conrad wanted one.”

Ryan snickers. Then he looks at Jonathan for a long moment. Jonathan stops breathing. Is he going to ask whether Jonathan was also lying about the apology?

The click of a doorknob turning: Hazel and Conrad drift in from the alcove. Hazel appears dazed, as if a sinkhole had cracked open and she’d driven right into it.

Jonathan stands up.

“Coffee, anyone?” says Conrad. He looks a little better than Hazel, but not by much. Whatever shocked and dismayed her got to him too.

As everyone follows Conrad into the kitchen, Jonathan sidles up to Hazel. She smiles wanly at him. Conrad opens a cabinet and pulls out a barista machine that looks a little banged up. Ryan takes everyone’s coffee orders and retrieves a ceramic canister from the pantry.

“Ryan,” says Hazel, her voice low but steady, “I already apologized to Conrad, but I owe you an apology too, for intruding on you tonight.”

For a moment, Ryan looks surprised that someone is actually addressing the elephant in the room. Then he says, rather seriously for him, “Not gonna lie—I love apologies. But I’d like an explanation too, if you’re in the mood to offer one.”

Jonathan fidgets—Ryan has been very patient in not demanding that explanation from him.

Conrad takes the canister from Ryan and glances in Hazel’s direction—he looks at her as if he can’t help himself, not because he means to.

“Of course,” says Hazel, speaking to Ryan, seemingly unaware of Conrad’s attention. “I believe Jonathan consulted you on the death of one Mr. Perry Bathurst?”

“That’s right. One of the librarians was tangled up in it, but I didn’t think that was you.”

“No. Or at least, at the time, none of it seemed to have anything to do with me. But I recently learned that my late husband owed Perry three million pounds, and Perry died while trying to recoup that sum.”

Ryan has been pulling out coffee cups from a glass-front cupboard; Jonathan, trying to be useful, has been rinsing some of the dishes Ryan brought back from the TV room. Now they both go still. Only Conrad remains in motion, pouring roasted beans into the grinder at the top of the espresso machine.

The rich, nutty aroma of freshly ground coffee fills the kitchen.

Hazel stands with her back to the shelf of old cookbooks and carries on with her narrative.

Jonathan is sure she has trimmed it down to bare bones, but still he is overwhelmed.

He scarcely notices Conrad bustling about the kitchen, except when Hazel asks him to provide a missing piece of the picture, or when she relates how she found out about his connection to Perry.

After Hazel describes Astrid’s ordeal the night before, Conrad hands her a cup of mocha and Jonathan a cappuccino. Jonathan belatedly realizes that they are at the beginning of a possibly sleepless night and that coffee is being offered out of not just hospitality but necessity.

Hazel swirls a spoon in the thick foam atop her mocha and finishes her account, which includes the events of the past couple of hours.

“I am beyond grateful nobody shot anybody,” says Ryan, sipping his own cappuccino. “I’m not the sort of doctor you’d want in an emergency.”

Everyone chuckles, but the underlying tension in the room remains unbroken.

“I’m also grateful to be included in your confidence,” Ryan continues, his expression now grave. “But as much as I’m always telling everyone to spill the tea, this is way more tea than I can handle. So…I’m guessing you need something from me?”

“We do,” says Conrad. He turns around from the stove, flips a beautifully golden-brown quesadilla from the pan in his hand onto a plate, and then cuts it with a few rolls of a pizza knife—while Jonathan and Ryan have stood in place, transfixed by Hazel’s account, Conrad has not only made four cups of espresso-based coffee, but cooked up a meal besides.

“We need to know how Perry Bathurst and Jeannette Obermann died.”

Ryan nods. “Let me go double-check everything for you guys.”

Jonathan watches Ryan until he disappears. When he looks back, both Hazel and Conrad are studying him, the former sipping her mocha, the latter biting into a wedge of quesadilla.

Jonathan vows to work on his chill.

In the meanwhile, he clears his throat and casts about for something to take the focus off his unrequited sentiments. “We’re lucky you happen to live in Austin, Conrad. There’s so much stuff we never would’ve learned if it weren’t for you.”

Conrad washes down his quesadilla with half a cup of black coffee. “I didn’t happen to be in town. My cousin left this house to my mum. My mom was going to sell it, but I asked to have it for a few years—Hazel once told me that she lived in Austin.”

The walls of Jonathan’s chest expand in an oddly painful yet oddly gratifying way.

He’s been worried that Hazel had invested too much in Conrad—the way she looked at this house on their first visit, it was as if she stood before a magic mirror that had lost its ability to transport and was now only a beautiful piece of furniture, nothing more.

But this confession from Conrad? The man basically said, When I had no realistic chance of ever seeing you again, I still planned and prepared, in the hope that miracles might happen.

Jonathan glances at Hazel, who seems to have eyes only for her mocha.

“Did I?” she responds after a few seconds. “I don’t remember mentioning Austin at all.”

“You also said your name was Meimei,” says Conrad drily.

“That’s right,” says Hazel. “Meimei Pickfair is my porn name.”

Conrad reverses another round of quesadilla onto a plate and aims a half-incredulous, half-resigned look at Hazel. “What was Meimei, your hamster?”

“My mom’s cockatoo.” Hazel gives her mocha another stir. “She’s still alive, actually, forty going on fourteen. Very moody and has an opinion on everything.”

Conrad is silent a long moment. And then he says, “I have a copy of Trails to Table . According to the box, it’s designed by a company named Monte Unlimited.”

Hazel slowly sets down her cup. “How long have you had it?”

“For a few months. It’s still in its shrink-wrap.”

No one speaks after that. Jonathan has no idea what this last exchange concerns, but the unfinished business between these two thrums and percusses, drowning out everything else.

Ryan returns with his laptop. He props it open on the kitchen island, grabs a wedge from the latest batch of quesadillas, and says, “Okay, I already looked up Perry’s cause of death before I met with Jonathan. Jonathan, do you remember what we said at the time?”

Jonathan is relieved by the resumption of normal conversation, despite the morbid subject. “You said it wasn’t natural causes but also that there was no reason to suspect that it might have been homicide.”

“Because he died of a fentanyl overdose, which I still see far too often.”

Conrad rinses out the bowl in which he’s beaten eggs. “And his family said no, absolutely not.”

“That’s what I understand,” concurs Ryan.

Conrad wipes his hands with a dish towel.

“It might sound contradictory, given that Perry has done his share of stupid things, but he was scared of hard drugs—never wanted to try any. In fact, after his house curfew for driving under the influence, he gave up alcohol too. Last few times I saw him, he drank only soda water. He was not someone who decided to acquire a cocaine habit one day and then proceeded to buy the bad shit.”

“That was the reason his case was eventually assigned to homicide,” says Ryan. “That and the fact that he didn’t have any other substances in him, not even alcohol or marijuana.”

Jonathan rubs his arm—it’s spooky, a man who didn’t use drugs dying of an overdose. “How, then, did the fentanyl get into his system?”

Ryan shrugs. “His nose was completely clean and there were no puncture marks on his body made by needles.”

“What about Jeannette Obermann?” asks Hazel. “How did she die?”

“Carfentanil.”

Hazel and Conrad both suck in a breath.

“Is that the synthetic one that’s a million times more potent than regular fentanyl?” asks Jonathan.

“Fentanyl is synthetic too,” Ryan points out.

“It’s fifty times stronger than morphine.

Carfentanil may not be a million times more potent, but it’s unbelievably powerful stuff.

You only need thirteen milligrams to sedate a literal one-ton elephant.

One milligram of the stuff will kill an adult human—that’s a milligram, one thousandth of a gram.

And Jeannette Obermann did have a tiny but rather deep puncture on her gluteus maximus. ”

Silence.

Jonathan has never been less inclined to die of unnatural causes than at that moment. He is sure the last thing Jeannette Obermann wanted was to have her ice-cold skin examined inch by inch on an autopsy table.

“Ryan, you listed how fentanyl didn’t get into Perry. Any ideas on how it did get in?” asks Conrad.

“He could have ingested it or come into contact by touch. But there was no sign that he was forced to swallow anything, nor was trace fentanyl found on his hands.”

“My grandmother enjoys a bit of alarmist news from time to time,” says Hazel. “She told me once about children dying from picking up their caretakers’ fentanyl patches.”