Page 8 of The Librarians

At six thirty, Jonathan announces the imminent Game Night event over the PA system. Elise texts Sophie to say she’s arrived.

Sophie rushes out to the parking lot. Before the girl can complete her “Hi, Mom,” Sophie wraps her in a bear hug.

Elise laughs but good-naturedly endures the embrace. “I’m touched, Mom. You last saw me this morning.”

So tolerant of her crazy mother, this child. “That’s too long to go without seeing you,” Sophie mumbles.

But she pulls herself together and helps Elise carry two huge boxes of board games into the library. “We still only have three people registered and they might not all show up.”

The weather, as Jonathan predicted, has cleared. But it’s the day before Halloween; there are plenty of other ways for people to amuse themselves.

Elise spares a hand and rubs Sophie on the back. “That’s okay, Mom. I brought my homework in case nobody comes.”

The girl is so reasonable and all-around fantastic that Sophie’s feelings shot past wonder and smugness years ago to land squarely in panic.

She cannot think about it too much, or she invariably becomes terrified that Elise is too lovely for this world, and that the world will somehow find a way to punish her kindness and crush her spirit.

Has that day come?

“Let me.” Jonathan comes out of the circulation area and relieves Sophie of her burden. “Hi, Elise.”

“Hi, Jonathan.” Elise beams at him. “You get more daddy every time I see you.”

“Elise!” cries Sophie.

She knows Elise would not say anything of the sort to Jonathan if he weren’t queer. But that’s still inappropriate.

Elise chortles. She does enjoy getting a rise out of her mother from time to time. And being reminded that Elise is still a teenager and not truly perfect is unexpectedly reassuring.

“Sorry, Jonathan,” Elise laughs. “It’s just that guys from school suck and you can’t say anything nice to them without them thinking it’s the equivalent of a right swipe.”

Jonathan smiles and opens one of the meeting room’s doors to let Sophie and Elise through. “You can say all the nice things to me, Elise, as long as my boss here approves.”

Good. Sophie approves entirely of this kind yet firmly limit-setting statement.

“Wow, creepy,” says Elise.

The meeting room has long been the most boring part of the library. It’s a blank box with no books and only stacks of folding tables and folding chairs lined up along the walls.

But tonight its fluorescent fixtures bathe the room in a reddish light, thanks to filters inside their covers.

The movie posters, which Sophie thought would be placed around the room in a perfectly equidistant and symmetrical fashion, are instead thrown up crooked.

Some are torn; others have been slashed through; a few even drip blood.

In the dim, scarlet illumination, the effect is straight-up spooky. Sophie rushes over to one poster and sighs in relief: It is indeed visual trickery, the slashes and the blood splatters both large adhesive stickers printed on clear plastic backing.

“Wow,” Elise exclaims again. She spins around, wallowing in the atmosphere. “Hey, Astrid! Is everything here yours?”

Sophie didn’t even notice that Astrid had come into the meeting room.

“Yeah,” answers Astrid quietly. “I had all these props and decorations hoarded. I decided I might as well use them here, for Game Night.”

Might as well use them here, for Game Night? What is the elsewhere and other occasion that didn’t work out?

“I love your costume, by the way,” murmurs Astrid. “Nakia, right?”

“The one and only.” Elise preens. “But I think my mom looks even cooler. I mean, how can anyone be cooler than Nick Fury?”

“That’s what all the old, half-blind brothers out there tell themselves,” says Sophie. But she can’t help smiling a little.

They set the games up on bookstands so that they can be better admired.

Elise hops over to the refreshments table to give herself a sugar high—Sophie is still surprised that food and drinks are now allowed in the library.

Only in the meeting room, true, but all the same. Welcome to the library of the future.

Just then Hazel walks in. She sports a long beige coat, a T-shirt with a rainbow stripe over her chest, and culottes—really, culottes?

—worn with suspenders over a pair of brown boots.

How the woman manages to look breezy and stylish in this odd getup Sophie has no idea.

She also has no idea who in the world Hazel is supposed to be.

“You’re the Thirteenth Doctor!” cries Elise.

Sophie mentally slaps herself on the forehead. Of course. Of course . The first female Doctor Who.

“Hey, the Thirteenth Doctor!” Ana Maria, Elise’s BFF, comes in, a heavy-looking backpack over one shoulder.

Elise squeals as if she doesn’t see Ana Maria every weekday and most weekends. “Hey, you made it.”

“Of course I was going to make it. You’re auditioning new friends. As your OG friend, I have to be the Simon Cowell of this reality show. I have to reject everyone except a select few.”

“There may not be anyone to reject.”

“That’s why I brought my APUSH homework.”

“Me too—minus the AP part.”

The girls break into peals of laughter. They’re still bemoaning the fact that they can’t watch Hamilton without having to write an essay about it when a pair of actual attendees arrive—Sophie recognizes the two as the kids who spoke to Astrid a few hours earlier, in this very meeting room.

And then more patrons come. By the time seven o’clock rolls around, there are twelve attendees who are not library employees or Elise or Ana Maria.

Sophie can’t believe it. The program is a success. The attendees skew younger, they skew female, and they do not skew entirely white. Maybe there is indeed an overlooked need the library can continue to serve in the future.

“We’d better bring out more snacks,” she says to no one in particular.

And decides to seize the hour. Who knows what will happen after tonight? She’d better enjoy every moment with Elise while she still can.

Elise takes on the role of the host for the evening. The attendees divide into two equal groups, one tackling a more involved game, the other trying out several faster games.

Elise helps the group that chooses the deep dive of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective with a summary of the rules.

Sophie would have loved to stand by and listen to her—the girl speaks with such conciseness and authority.

And joy too. But instead Sophie explains the rules of a shorter game to the second table to get them started.

A woman asks Sophie if Elise is her daughter and then compliments her on that terrific young woman. Sophie basks.

A similar sense of pleasure and relaxation unfurls in the meeting room.

When the very atmospheric lighting proves a little too dim to study maps and other clues by, the players turn on the flashlights on their phones.

And when someone mentions that it feels as if they are up at night at summer camp after the counselors have gone to sleep, half of the attendees chime in, expressing agreement.

To Sophie’s surprise, even more people arrive around seven thirty: first a South Asian–looking couple, both in tunic and trousers. On their heels, a white woman at the sight of whom Sophie takes an actual step backward.

The woman, costumed in a brown vest over a floral peasant dress, is clearly meant to be a fortune teller. A glittering orange scarf covers her hair and frames her slightly oversized forehead, from which gazes a large third eye.

The eye is nearly photorealistic, each lash distinct, and stares at Sophie with something between pity and malice.

Sophie is thrown back to a documentary she saw long ago about the aftermath of Chernobyl. Without warning, the camera panned to a fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde, cyclops-like, its one eye directly above its nose.

The woman’s third eye, a mere artistic flourish, can never achieve the impact of a tragic deformity. But nevertheless, in the hazy red light, it jars.

“Wow, what an entrance,” pronounces Elise.

Everyone laughs and the tension breaks.

The new arrivals considerately do not demand to join the games already in progress. Instead they decide to try Clue: Two out of the three have seen the movie.

“I’m pretty sure I saw it on a bootleg DVD when I lived in Karachi,” says the woman of the South Asian couple. “It was weird, but good.”

Three players suffice to start the game, but Elise feels that four would be more fun. Sophie thinks of Astrid first—Astrid is likely to find the third eye cool. And being at a table with other people might take her mind off the young man who should have known better than to come around again.

But Astrid is still on the clock and needed at the checkout station.

Whereas Hazel, who is attending on her own time, has been busy as a beaver, getting extra snacks and napkins from the supply closet and fresh pitchers of ice from the Den of Calories.

Not to mention, she seems familiar with the games on hand, helping out the players when Elise is engaged with another table.

The third-eye woman issues an invitation to Sophie. “You are most welcome to join us.”

“Let me find you someone better,” says Sophie—and beckons Hazel over.

Soon the foursome at the table is busy unmasking the killer of Mr. Boddy. Outside Jonathan and Astrid are holding down the fort; inside the meeting room Elise handles it all with aplomb.

If only there weren’t that stupid note under her door…Sophie would have felt the spheres of the universe sliding into alignment, the Venn diagram of professional success and personal happiness merging into a perfect circle.

However briefly.

Twenty minutes after the late arrivals sit down, the fast table finish their first game.

Over at the Sherlock Holmes table, still digging into the details of the case, someone remarks, with satisfaction, “Aha, we have ourselves a Mata Hari.” And the younger players need that reference explained to them.

Sophie, her Nick Fury eyepatch now in her pocket, tries not to think about the fact that the note writer could be among the attendees.

That potential blackmailer probably isn’t someone Elise’s age or younger.

But eliminating the underage crowd still leaves six full-grown adults, without counting Hazel.

After her earlier frenzy of doubt concerning her longtime colleagues, and after those colleagues persist in not coming forward to extort her, Sophie now wonders whether the person threatening the foundation of her existence is instead a relative stranger.

She can’t be sure why any stranger would know or care about the distant past of an anonymous librarian, but all the same, she finds herself drifting repeatedly toward the Clue table, occupied by four such strangers.

It so happens that at the Clue table, players are furnishing one another with their life facts.

The couple and the fortune teller are all new to town: The former are relocated techies from California; the latter used to live in North Carolina.

Hazel, who does not seem to be interested in talking about herself, merely says, when she is asked by the South Asian couple, that she hasn’t lived in too many places besides Austin, which is a bit brazen as deflections go, considering that Singapore is halfway around the world.

“I really wanted to move to Austin—I loved it when I came here on work trips,” says the fortune teller. “But now that I’m finally here, home prices have gone through the roof. You guys are lucky, coming from California.”

The wife of the South Asian couple waves both hands in vigorous denial. “No, no, we are definitely not those Californians buying up everything when they come to town. We were in Silicon Valley only for a short time and were renters, so we didn’t have any home equity.”

The not-so-illuminating conversation continues, with no one saying anything that immediately makes them out to be a prime suspect.

By eight thirty-five, players at the fast table finish another game. Players at the Sherlock Holmes table correctly deduce their killer. They congratulate one another, pack up their games, and place tables and chairs back along the walls.

Folks at the Clue table, seeing the commotion, abandon their game, given that they will not be able to finish before the library closes at nine. Hazel confesses that she is in fact the killer and gets a laugh from her tablemates.

The patrons leave happily. After an orderly cleanup, Sophie locks up the building for the night; Elise side-hugs her as they make their way to Sophie’s car.

“Thanks, Mom. This was elite .”

Sophie kisses her on the cheek. “Anything for you, nugget. Anything .”

They pass a black Audi in the parking lot. Elise’s head whips around. “Look at those bumper stickers. Perfect for Halloween.”

Maybe too perfect. The two stickers declare It’s okay to decay and The dead know how to speak, if you know how to listen.

Sophie shivers, looks away, and says, “You know, we can have another Game Night in January. And—”

From behind her, someone calls out. “Ms. Claremont, can I have a word with you?”