Page 60 of The Librarians
Jonathan walks into his living room, puts his phone to charge, and falls on the couch. Chimney, his tabby, tiptoes onto his stomach and makes himself comfortable.
“Hey, big fella,” he says absently, caressing Chimney’s head.
Chimney, his eyes wide, stares at Jonathan.
“Must you gaze into the depths of my soul?” Jonathan murmurs. “Why can’t you just be my superior overlord?”
Most cats regard humans with varying degrees of condescension. Chimney, for some reason, has world-weary eyes that seem to say,I’ve been there too, buddy, and I know how you feel.
Jonathan sighs. “I feel sad. There, I can admit it, my feline counselor—I feel sad.”
Maybe this sadness is easier to acknowledge because it’s about Hazel. He remembers her euphoria this afternoon. A moment of such deep, intense,transparentemotion that he has to believe it was a glimpse into her real self, beneath all that ingrained low-keyness.
But this evening she was again a kindly observer, rather than a participant, of life.
And the pain that coiled around his heart was completely out of proportion to his recent and very slight connection to her.
“We all need fairy tales,” he tells Chimney.
Okay, maybe not everyone. Some people are perfectly fine believingthat the world is going to hell in a Wi-Fi-enabled handbasket. But everyone else, or at least Jonathan, still wants some reassurance that there is a point to all this striving, all this confusion, all this existential melancholy.
And if not for himself, then for someone more deserving—after all, happy endings are never given out willy-nilly, but only to the select few, the unimpeachably worthy.
It hurts to be reminded so bluntly that life is hard and love near nigh impossible. It shakes him to the core that all the hopes Hazel has carried over the years could extinguish in the blink of the eye. There was a moment, in that almost mythically beautiful library of a living room, when Hazel caressed a glass jar of ticket stubs and a lump formed in his throat at the longing in her simple gesture.
He knows, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, that much of the sadness is for himself too. For his impossible dream with Ryan.
Chimney climbs up and nestles his head in the crook of Jonathan’s shoulder. Jonathan rubs his cheek against Chimney’s warm, smooth fur. “At least I have you,” he says, his voice thick. “At least I have you.”
A sheriff’s car is parked outside Twin Courtyards Apartments.
Sophie curses under her breath.
Jeannette Obermann’s case is being handled by city police, not the county sheriff. So the sheriff’s car, which doesn’t have its light bar on, could be anything from an off-duty officer visiting a friend to an off-duty car parked there specifically to deter crime.
But still, Sophie drives away without going inside.
If she were white, would she have simply walked into the management office and said that she was Jeannette Obermann’s friend/colleague/sister, and could she please have access to Jeannette’s apartment to sort out her things?
She doesn’t know.
All she knows is that she has no idea whether she ought to try something desperate that could get her arrested today, or to keep her head down until Hagerty comes for her with the deceased’s phone records.
She drives back home.
Elise is at a birthday party sleepover. Sophie gives herself a matte burgundy manicure, with a thin strip of gold above each lunula. Normally she enjoys having her house to herself once in a while, and she dearly loves a well-executed manicure. But tonight, as she stares at her newly perfect nails, she can’t help but feel that she’s just visited the spa on theTitanic.
She still has several months before the police get their hands on Jeannette Obermann’s phone records, right?
She fishes the reformatted Chromebook out from the bottom of her closet, turns it on, and ignores nagging questions in her head about the wisdom of using it on her own Wi-Fi. She’s deleted her browsing history at the end of every session on this notebook, but it doesn’t take long before she finds the article she’s looking for.
She taps the article open, scans the lines, and freezes.
The key sentence doesn’t say it takes “months” for the phone companies to cough up records. It says “several days to several months, depending on the circumstances.”
How many days has it been since Jeannette Obermann’s body was discovered? The police may already have her phone records. Or, if not yet, they will obtain them any day now.
What is Sophie going to do the next time Detective Hagerty demands to see her?
