Page 61 of The Librarians
Even on that day sixteen years ago, standing in the hospital, feeling as if someone had strapped a hundred-pound backpack to her shoulders, she didn’t feel quite so alone as she does now.
She still had her mother, then. And she had Eileen Su, Jo-Ann’s best friend from law school—Eileen had cousins who knew people and those connections netted a birth certificate for Elise with Sophie as her birth mother.
But Aubrey Claremont passed away four years ago. And Sophie did not contact Eileen again after she and Elise moved to Austin—she was still terrified of being found out in those early years and the last thing she wanted to do was to bring down Eileen too, while she was at it.
Since then she’s kept Elise and herself safe by not getting too close toanyone—or at least that was what she thought she was doing. Only to end up not safe, and without allies.
Waking up at two thirty in the morning sucks.
Astrid reaches toward her nightstand and groans: She forgot to bring a glass of water. She closes her eyes. Maybe she’ll fall asleep again. Then she won’t care that she’s thirsty.
But now she notices she’s also cold. Wait a minute, did she fall asleep on top of the covers? Yes, she did. After the library closed, she came home, ate a sandwich, and then settled down on her bed to do French-language searches.
She worried about swimming in a sea of Google-translated gobbledygook, but machine translation—at least for straightforward, journalistic language—has become more or less readable. Her problem remained the same: the scarcity of usable results. All she has to show for her detective work—which literally put her to sleep—are some biographical details of an old, dead French diplomat named Valerian de Villiers. He led an interesting, globe-trotting life but breathed his last twenty years ago, so he couldn’t have been Perry’s business partner.
Astrid yawns and rolls off her bed. She might as well tidy away her laptop and get some water, and then take off her clothes and crawl under the covers.
After she plugs in the laptop on her dining table, she turns around. The front of her condo features a large window to either side of the door. By falling asleep unceremoniously, she neglected to draw the curtains shut.
A silhouette appears against the sheers. Astrid starts. The silhouette moves and disappears behind the door. After a brief silence, she hears faint but distinctly metallic scratches.
The situation is so irregular that she simply stares. Only then does alarm slam into her. Someone is trying to break into her house!
She covers her mouth. Her phone. Where is her phone?
She can’t think, but her body takes over. Her feet march to the utilityroom deeper inside the condo; her hands reach up and yank down the attic ladder. She climbs up, draws the ladder back up and pulls the entire hatch door shut as tight as possible.
When she was a little girl, she was traumatized by the first zombie movie she saw. The idea of her parents becoming the undead and coming to devour her made her demand that they always speak in full sentences as soon as they saw her. And then she spent days figuring out where she would be safest in the event the house was overrun.
In the end, she decided on the attic, because zombies didn’t seem to look up very much. What she would do after she’d shut herself off in the attic, she didn’t quite think through. But wherever she stayed from then on she always knew the way to the attic or the roof.
The wooden beams she lies on, spaced six inches apart, dig into all the wrong places on her body. The house is eerily quiet. The silence makes her think of that movie in which aliens pounce on anyone who makes the least sound.
Her heart thumps. She doesn’t dare move, except to cover her face with her sleeve so she won’t breathe in dust and sneeze at the worst possible moment.
Wait, but why did she come up here in the first place? Now she’s stuck. Her condo doesn’t have a garage, but it does have a back door, accessible right through the utility room. She should have just gone out. And if she had any presence of mind, she could have even put on the old sneakers she keeps next to the dryer.
In the darkness, it becomes impossible to draw enough air through the fabric over her nose and mouth. She’s chilled to the bone—andperspiring freely. She can’t breathe and yet she breathes all too loudly, sibilant whooshes ricocheting against the unimproved interior of the attic.
Just when she thinks she can’t take it anymore, the door to the utility room opens. Fear seizes her. Whimpers gurgle in her throat; she swallows them, sick to her stomach.
Now fear is a shriek rising from her lungs. She grits her teeth together. Her hands grip rough wood. Her knees shake. She lifts them up so they won’t knock against the beams, and her calves scream with strain.
The door closes. Heavy tears spill down her cheeks, but not tears of relief. The intruder could still be in the utility room, simply with the door closed. And that would mean he has homed in on her location. What would he do? Would he come up or simply wait for her adrenal response to overthrow her self-control?
How much time has passed? Whereisher phone? At least wherever it is, it cannot ring on her person and betray her whereabouts.
She begins to count. Is there any use to her hiding? If the intruder finds her phone and her car keys, they will know that she has to be here somewhere.
But seconds pass—she counts past one hundred, two hundred, three hundred. When the count hits three thousand she decides that she’s been in the attic long enough.
No one attacks her as she descends the ladder. Nor is anyone waiting for her outside the utility room. The condo is silent. Standing with her back against the utility room door, she realizes that, as she didn’t change out of her pants, her car keys are in her pocket. And her phone—she remembers now—she forgot the device inside the center console of her car. She meant to go and retrieve it after dinner, but it was chilly and she’d parked some distance away because the neighbors were having a party. So she didn’t bother in the end—the phone isn’t visible to passersby and she could do without it for the night.
Did the intruder, finding no phone, no key, a still-made bed, and her car not anywhere nearby, conclude that she wasn’t home after all?
Her head spins at the thought of her lucky escape.
But why was there an intruder in the first place?
