Page 118 of The Librarians
“Wow, just like that?”
He smiles. “I’ve invited your colleagues and my roommate for dinner—to celebrate the relative success of Entrapment Night. Hazel’s grandmother actually instructed me to trash the place by having a legendary party—she is going to be disappointed.”
Conrad studies her a moment. “You are, of course, invited too. But if you’d prefer to be by yourself…”
For a moment Astrid thinks seriously of declining. But she recalls her red-rimmed eyes in the powder-room mirror. She’s been alone so much already—why choose more seclusion when she finally has friends, wonderful friends?
“I’ll stay,” she tells him.
She is glad to see Ryan when he saunters in. And when Jonathan and Sophie arrive together, she runs to greet them, wallowing in Jonathan’s mountainlike hug and then glorying in an equally sustained embrace from Sophie.
“You all right?” asks Sophie.
“I will be,” Astrid whispers back. “I can feel it.”
While Conrad finishes things up in the kitchen, Ryan entertains them with an account of a blue-black bruise on Conrad’s chest that Ryan is sure resulted from a physical altercation between Conrad and Hazel the night Hazel stole into Conrad’s house.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” says Ryan. “Take a look at this.”
The guests gather around the dining table.Thisis infrared footage from the night of the firefight. The camera was placed on a tree near the front of the library, at a perfect angle to capture Hazel sneaking up on the fake Ayesha Khan.
Astrid heard from Jonathan about the unexpected but crucial role Hazel played, but even Jonathan is surprised to see that after the fake AyeshaKhan went down the first time, there was a vicious bout of hand-to-hand combat behind the CRV. Astrid feels as if her own skull is cracking as she watches the two women slug it out before Hazel emerges victorious.
“You’re lucky she didn’t break a few of your ribs last Sunday!” Ryan calls to Conrad, still in the kitchen.
“What can I say, she loves me too much,” replies Conrad, walking into the dining room with a large salad bowl and the enviable confidence of a man who has decided on his path.
Dinner is green salad in vinaigrette, a rib-sticking cassoulet with crusty bread—perfect for the first real cold front of the year—and rich, silky ramekins of crème brûlée that Astrid torched under Conrad’s supervision.
After they clear all the dishes and load the dishwasher, the company returns to the dining room with coffee and cocktails and talk about everything under the sun. Astrid has never been so sad in the midst of such a wonderful evening, and never so glad to be alive.
When Ryan asks if anyone wants to play a board game, she is the first one to say yes.
She decides, at the same moment, that when she returns home, she will watch the movie version of “Story of Your Life” again.
That from now on, it will always be their movie, hers and Perry’s.
Chapter Thirty-two
The summons that Sophie has been waiting for—and dreading—comes the next day.
Jonathan and Astrid drive downtown with Sophie, all three quiet. Sophie holds on to the steering wheel in a death grip; her stomach feels as if an alien creature is clawing its way out.
She can see clearly how Jeannette Obermann must have been killed. Perry Bathurst was not found at Twin Courtyards but at an apartment complex less than a mile to the north. Sophie, however, is almost one hundred percent sure he had parked his rental car at Twin Courtyards, across the street from Astrid’s gated condo community.
The mercenaries, who must have planted a tracer on Perry Bathurst’s car or his person, tracked him down after Game Night to make sure that he was dead and to remove the fentanyl patch and the tracer.
Jeannette Obermann arrived back at Twin Courtyards. And whom did she see when she got out of her car? The nice couple who had been at the game of Clue with her that very evening. Extremely curious person that she was, she went up to them to say, “Hey, fancy seeing you two again so soon” or “Oh my goodness, do you guys live here too?”
With Perry Bathurst’s dead body right there in the car they were all standing next to. Did she see the body? Did she have questions? Did she realize the danger she was in and turn to run?
Whatever happened, with her final bit of clarity and strength, she senther location to the last number she texted. And her killers, after unlocking her phone with her thumb, must have decided to leave the phone behind because it would confuse the police to see that she’d contacted someone else right before she died.
But they did drive her car elsewhere—they didn’t want her body discovered right away if the person she contacted came looking. And then they must have decided to move Perry’s body, too, just in case.
Yes,Sophiecan see it all with diamond-bright clarity. And the firefight at the library—her heart still aches for her library, caught in a hail of bullets—exposed the murder weapon used on Jeannette Obermann, the tranquilizer gun with its deadly load of carfentanil.
But how willDetective Hagertyview everything? Like Hazel, Conrad, Jonathan, and Astrid, Sophie was interviewed extensively in the wake of the firefight—but only concerning the events leading up to the entrapment. That she’s been called in again, this time by Hagerty, means that Hagerty has obtained Jeannette Obermann’s phone records and now knows that she reached out to Sophie repeatedly right before she died.
