Page 104 of The Librarians
Perhaps her response is too cheerful, or perhaps she is peering at him with too much unabashed interest—he looks away. The half-lit signs on a nearby wall cast neon shadows across his features, a chiaroscuro of copper and electric blue.
He tugs at the corners of a tiny napkin, situating it exactly flush with the edge of the table. “At one point, I was doing everything to find out what I could about you, with Kit’s misdeeds as a cover. And then news came that Kit’s plane went down. I didn’t believe he perished in the incident any more than you did. So I hired yet another PI, this one based in the UK, to audit every second of that flight, from whether Kit boarded, to whether the plane followed its scheduled flight path, to what exactly happened weatherwise along that flight path.”
All things she should have done but didn’t, because she was convinced that it was all a lie.
“When His Majesty’s Coastguard declared that they would halt search efforts, I booked a remotely operated underwater vehicle and carried out a search based on our own analysis. It took five days to find the debris field in the Rockall Trough, at a depth of more than five thousand feet, about as deep as the ROV could go. We weren’t able to perform recovery, but we managed a detailed survey.”
The tightness in his voice. The tension in his shoulders. The careful blankness in his eyes as his gaze meets hers again. All at once she feels as ifshe’s been plonked down back in her apartment in Singapore, on the day of the raid, with her mother at the door, ringing the bell with all her might. “What are you saying?”
“Bodies decompose more slowly in water, because of the anaerobic environment. Water that far down is cold, right above zero centigrade. And salt water will further delay decomposition.” Conrad watches her closely, as if she’s a hothouse flower that will wither after ten seconds in real nature. “Therefore, even though by the time we found the debris field, nine days had passed since the flight’s last communication, the footage we obtained clearly showed your late husband in the wreckage, still strapped to his seat.”
Hazel has just taken a sip of her mocktail. At his words, like Cinderella’s coach at midnight, the magical concoction on her tongue turns back into nothing more than high fructose syrup and artificial flavoring.
“Are you sure?” Her question is barely audible.
“One hundred percent, unfortunately. If you’d managed to hack into my desktop, you’d have found the footage. I also have it on an external drive.”
A Boeing 747 takes off inside her skull, 140 decibels of jet engine roar. And then deathly quiet, all her cerebral functions stunned into inertness.
“Are you okay?”
A quarter century of being a major heiress makes her pick up a tortilla chip and eat—the first rule of appearing okay is movement; nobody will believe you’re okay if you’re frozen in place. But all she tastes is the whey protein concentrate in the queso.
And why is she pretending to be okay in front of Conrad? He is the one who has been crushing her illusions left and right. Even if she were one hundred percent normal yesterday, she’d have become fucked-up by now.
“I’m…” She rubs her forehead. “I feel…”
It takes an endless moment to recognize the awful sensation inside. “I feel guilty. He’s already dead. Yet here I was, suspecting him of having perhaps killed his friend—and a pair of strangers besides.”
Conrad takes a sip of his own mocktail, grimaces, and sets it aside. “Kit’s crimes managed to outdo your imagination. Of course your imagination had to kick into high gear, to prevent you from being caught unawares again.”
She twists her lips. “Groundless suspicion as self-defense.”
“I didn’t believe Kit died until I was watching feedback from the wreckage in real time. Perry didn’t believe it either. The only person who believed it might have been Kit’s mum—Perry was convinced even Kit’s dad secretly thought he’d run off somewhere that didn’t extradite to Commonwealth countries.”
Hazel breaks a chip in half, then into quarters. She was so convinced that Kit would crop up again, she’d practically taken it for gospel.
Silence, or what passes for silence with classic rock coming out of the bar’s speakers.
“Do you want to collect his remains?” comes Conrad’s abrupt question. “It will be tricky, but not impossible.”
Dear God, she hasn’t even given any thought to that. “I don’t know. I suppose I should—since I never did anything else for him.”
Conrad’s expression sharpens. “Your love—had you loved him—would not have fixed him.”
She sets her elbows on the table and drops her head into her hands. “I know. That doesn’t mean I won’t feel guilty for not having loved him. I should’ve at least been at the edge of the precipice, trying to keep him from falling in.”
“And what would that have accomplished? The love of a good woman amounts to nil when a man’s problem is that he doesn’t feel validated by the world. When there’s an insecurity in him that no validation can erase.”
Slowly she raises her head. “Who are you talking about?”
He isn’t speaking of some hypothetical example—there’s too much aversion in his tone.
The neon lights on the wall flash and now flicker a reddish tinge across his cheeks. His voice turns heavy. “You’ve tried to find me online, haven’t you? And it’s as if I don’t exist—or as if I’ve deliberately deleted all traces of myself?”
She doesn’t understand why he is changing the subject—and that sends a chill down her spine. “It has felt like that at times,” she says carefully.
“It’s because of a French law that allows for certain personal information to be suppressed. The information is still there, at the original sites ofpublication; it just doesn’t show up in search results. If it wasn’t for that and you searched for my name, for pages on end you’d have news articles about my father. He was a former diplomat and he killed himself when an investigation began as to whether he’d accepted bribes from countries that did not have France’s best interest at heart.”
