Page 53 of The Librarians

“Okay,” says Nainai, setting down her spoon. “I’ll leave you young people alone in a bit. But what are you two doing getting together first thing Monday morning? Not exactly a conventional hour for a hot date.”

Hazel has been wondering whether she ought to come clean to Nainai. Now that Nainai has asked a direct question, she answers—at least about Perry and Kit’s connection, and how Conrad came across her wedding photos because of that connection.

“This morning I asked to see some more of the evidence concerning Kit, and I assume Conrad has brought it?”

Conrad nods gravely.

Nainai sighs. “Okay, go look at your evidence.”

Her veiny hand settles on Hazel’s, a papery warmth. “But be careful. Be very, very careful.”

Conrad seems to sense that Hazel doesn’t want to study the evidence he brought with Nainai nearby, now that Nainai knows the purpose of his visit. “You want to go to my place?”

In his house, Hazel stands before the two-story window of the library. Knowing what is to come, she is barely aware of the rippling lake outside or the green hills on the far shore.

Conrad offers her a palm-size device. “The complete footage, which is mostly ocean floor and dispersed wreckage, is more than six hours long. Kit’s part is about twenty minutes. You can start roughly five hours and ten minutes in.”

“Thanks,” she murmurs, the device smooth and heavy in her hand.

“I’ll be around if you need me.”

He leaves quietly. She sits down and plugs the drive into her laptop. With fingertips that don’t seem to feel anything, she puts in her earphones, drags the time marker to 5:10:00, and hits play.

She expects darkness, eeriness, water pressure so palpable that steel creaks and pops. But the footage is unexpectedly bright and completely silent—the underwater vehicle must have been equipped with powerful search lights and perhaps no microphone.

The ocean floor sprawls, desolate and moonlike—a desert.

A ribbon-shaped fish wriggles across the screen, its shiny scales surprisingly orange.

Ahead, wreckage looms. She can make out letters and numbers to the side of the fuselage.

The camera navigates around wires and sharp, broken edges to enter the fragmented core of the plane, a three-row section, two seats to a row.

The first body that comes into view is that of a woman in her sixties; in the same row, a man of about the same age.

An empty row.

Has someone poured mercury into Hazel’s trachea? Dread infiltrates her lungs, branching coral-like over her rib cage.

The camera crawls over a small hill of spilled carry-ons and tilts up.

And Kit is there, his features graven, as if he has been chiseled from blue marble.

He does not look dead, but as restful as she’s ever seen him.

Only the movement of his hair, a testament to the shifting currents, acts as a reminder of his watery grave.

When the camera swims away from the wreckage she blinks, as if she’s been yanked out of a strange yet consuming dream, and her real life is, for the moment, distant and gray.

She watches Kit’s part of the footage again, closes her laptop, and sits for some time, her brain heavy but blank. Then she gets up, steps out to the terrace beyond the library’s windows, and descends into a garden with bright mosaic planters that hold sages and cornflowers.

“You want some hot cocoa?” asks Conrad, standing on the terrace, a mug in each hand.

He’s changed out of the grandmother-visiting suit into a dark blue tracksuit.

Earlier he looked like a producer attending the premiere of his own film; now, a trophy husband even someone as wealthy as her mom might not be able to afford.

Does she want hot cocoa? She supposes it can’t hurt. “Sure.”

He comes down into the garden and hands her a cup, piled high with whipped cream. She takes a sip and is momentarily jolted out of her funk— this is seriously luxe hot cocoa, not from a powder, or even a bomb, but made the old-fashioned way with milk, cream, and freshly grated chocolate.

She searches for something to say. “I thought you only drank black coffee.”

“To impress you, I guess,” he answers, smiling a little to himself, and she is struck anew by the lyrical timbre of his voice. “I’m pretty sure I never drank black coffee before Madeira.”

He leans against the edge of a raised flower bed, looking up. It is a crisp autumn day, puffs of cloud drifting across a high blue sky.

I don’t seem to care whether I’m happy today, but I worry over whether I’ll be happy when I’m forty-five or fifty.

He’d sensed, hadn’t he, well before his father’s suicide, that Hubert de Villiers’s life had become profoundly misguided? His stint as a mariner hadn’t been just a young man’s thirst for adventure but an escape, however temporary, from the ultimately ineluctable.

He turns toward her, once again looking serious. “You okay?”

She sighs. Is she okay? “Kit is the one who will never be okay again. I will be, eventually.”

He only gazes at her.

She hesitates, holding tight to the mug in her hands, the heat it emanates.

“But now I’m forced to acknowledge how angry I’ve been at times.

And not even for what Kit did but because I imagined him hiding out in some remote, beautiful place, enjoying his stolen riches with a local girlfriend while I endured the pity and ridicule of my peers. ”

Even a criminal deserved a little grace from those closest to him. But she, once betrayed, dealt exclusively in the worst possibilities.

Conrad continues to gaze at her. She is reminded of their time on Madeira, of his curiosity that felt embracing but never intrusive. “At least now you can be angry with him, if you still wish to, for what he did do.”

The image of Kit’s seemingly sleeping form comes back, embalmed by the deep sea. She doesn’t feel anger, only a leaden sadness. “Why was everyone still strapped in their seats? Why didn’t they try to swim out before the fuselage sank?”

“They would have been told to buckle in and hang on while the plane was in free fall. The two forensic pathologists I spoke to in the UK agreed that all the passengers would have died instantly upon impact—at sufficient velocity, hitting water is almost the same as hitting land.”

Everyone wants an instantaneous death, if death must come, but who would have chosen the panic, chaos, and utter loss of control of a plane crash? Had Kit realized what was about to happen? Or had he been too stunned by the sudden development in what should have been a routine small-plane flight?

She clasps a hand around her upper arm. “After my dad died, I had a hard time, because I was convinced that if he’d survived, at some point he and my mom would have reconciled.

His death destroyed that possibility. Kit also has no more possibilities left—he will always be known first and foremost as a financial criminal who died while trying to escape justice. ”

Conrad is silent for some time. “How’s your mum, by the way? On Madeira you said she wanted to protect you from life itself. I imagine she did not take kindly to Kit’s misdeeds.”

This is a rather Asian question, inquiring after the parent of an acquaintance, a parent he’s never met. “She’s still furious at Kit. She’s even angry at her parents because they were the ones who most wanted me to settle down.”

“I must be getting old,” he says. “Of everyone involved, she’s the one I really feel for.”

His comment startles Hazel into laughter, a much-needed release after the oppressive underwater footage.

“I should leave soon,” she murmurs after a minute. “You probably have a lot of work.”

“I do, but I’ve shoved it off to my assistants.” He runs his fingertips along a row of purple asters and peers at her from beneath his eyelashes. “Would you like to stay for lunch?”

After ramping up her heart rate and unleashing a flood of wild sensations in her, Hazel’s dream lover does not proceed to seduce her but instead informs her that he must examine the contents of Perry’s phone—apparently before Perry’s parents sealed the phone for APD, they allowed Conrad’s people to extract its data.

Hazel chooses to go over videos accumulated by Nainai’s DIY security system: Now that she knows she must be of interest to the same person who installed surveillance devices in Astrid’s condo, it behooves her to double check whether Nainai’s cameras might have caught someone lurking.

At first she doesn’t think she’ll get any real work done, with Conrad in the same room. But they settle on the opposite ends of the two extra-long sofas and after a while, she becomes absorbed in her task.

Lunch is country paté sandwiches on good, generously buttered bread, accompanied by a small bowl of crispy cornichons.

Conrad slices two pears for their dessert.

After lunch he simply goes back to his work; Hazel, who is again pondering the question of her departure, hesitates a moment then does the same.

She comes across the video of herself sashaying down Nainai’s catwalk two nights ago, just before the first time she visited Conrad’s house, and smiles a little. Maybe she’ll download the video and send it to her mom at some point, if Nainai hasn’t already done so.

The next one is from the same night, of Nainai voguing as she slides into the camera frame, blue steeling as if she gave birth to not only a doctor and two engineers but also Zoolander himself. This one Hazel will definitely save.

Between spring and autumn of this year, Nainai seems to have shrunk a whole inch in height.

She walks slower, the rims of her eyes are always dry and red, and her hair is so sparse that half of her scalp is visible.

Hazel wants to hang on to every piece of evidence that Nainai’s heart is still as young as ever and her zest for life just as undimmed.

“My God,” exclaims Conrad.

She looks up. “What is it?”

“I went through Perry’s camera roll on my way back from London, but at the time I didn’t even notice this.”