Page 83 of The Librarians
Ryan chortles.
Conrad picks up one of the remaining glasses of prosecco from the island and turns to Hazel. “Can I show you the alcove, Hazel?”
He speaks to her in the same low, gentle tone, but Jonathan remembers the stupendous door slam from earlier.
“You’ll love the alcove,” Ryan says immediately. “And oh, Jonathan, I think the second half of our game probably already started.”
The alcove turns out to be right off the room where Ryan and Jonathan have been watching basketball, a glass-enclosed balcony accessed through a pair of French doors. With its lights turned on, the ribs between the glass panes of the alcove make Jonathan think of a large, beautiful birdcage.
From his spot before the TV, the alcove is visible, but at an oblique angle that doesn’t let him see much of anything. The second half of the game has indeed started. Jonathan can’t concentrate on the playmaking at all. He can’t even pretend to pay attention: His gaze strays to the alcove every few seconds.
Ryan glances at him occasionally. After a while it dawns on Jonathan that even if Ryan has no idea what’s going on, he must wonder whether Jonathan is there for Hazel rather than him.
He must wonder how much of what Jonathan said is true.
It’s all true, but it hasn’t really mattered, any of it. So maybe in the end, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter either.
There is no traffic on the dark expanse of the river-turned-lake. A sprinkle of illuminated houses dots the hills of the far shore. Hazel wonders whether anyone can see the two of them, suspended in this glass aerie, lit like a sky lantern drifting aloft.
And if anyone does, would they marvel at the Instagram-worthiness of the scene, the woman seated on the thickly cushioned bench, the man standing opposite her? They are looking at the wineglasses in their hands and not at each other. Still, the unspoken awareness pulsates, a physical sensation upon Hazel’s skin.
He sets down his stemware on a wall shelf by the doors, alongside a line of small potted succulents. Next he pulls the semiautomatic from the back of his waistband, drops out the clip, and racks a bullet from the chamber.
She does the same, except the magazine she drops out is empty, and the chamber too—unloaded, as he told her.
“Can people own guns in Singapore?” he asks abruptly.
“You can’t keep firearms at home, but you can belong to a shooting club.”
Hand-to-hand combat was not the only type of self-defense in which Hazel received training.
Conrad pushes his Glock and magazine onto the shelf, picks up his wineglass again, and sits down. “I’m sure you have an excellent reason for breaking into my house tonight. I’m all ears.”
Human memory is unreliable.Write everything down, her mother used to tell her,if you want a more accurate record. But under her pen, he became a stick figure with none of the ineffable allure of a winsome adolescent on the cusp of manhood.
She gave up the endeavor around the time she gave up any realistic hope of finding him again. But always she was sure of one thing. As the finer details of his words and even his features faded, as she drifted further in a life propelled more by inertia than anything else, she remained convinced that he was adorable.
Or maybe “adorable” was simply a synonym for “safe.” His youth, hisfrankness, his bright-eyed admiration of her—everything her memory embroidered and embellished—had made him ever safer and ever more adorable.
“Adorable” is not the first, second, or tenth descriptor that comes to mind now. As she watches him play with the cartridge he extracted from the chamber, “safe” is so far down the list that she’d have to scroll a whole minute to reach its vicinity.
He waits, patiently, lightly whirling the rosé in his other hand. And then he glances at her and sensation rampages through her like a violent weather system.
She swallows half of the contents of her glass, trying to tamp down that inconvenient shock of awareness. “I assume you know about the recent deaths connected to the library where Jonathan and I work?”
He frowns at his wineglass, but nods.
“Another librarian is currently implicated in Perry Bathurst’s death. We found out that you and he were in business together. I also found out, last time I was in this house, that you took Ryan’s car out the night of Perry’s death.” She takes a deep breath. “I was interested in who drove it because I saw it at the library at a time that would be of interest to the police.”
For two seconds his expression remains unchanged. Then he again looks up. “You thinkImight have killed Perry?”
This time his gaze is sustained. It is not hostile, not even adversarial, only sharp and demanding. She has said something outlandish at a meeting, and he, the CEO, is waiting to see how she will justify that position.
His reaction is exactly right for someone who hadn’t the least inkling that he could be a suspect. Or he might be a fantastic actor.
She never thought of the boy from Madeira as a good actor. But Valerian de Villiers comes from a wealthy family on his mother’s side.Successionis not a bad introduction to the internal dynamics of enormous family fortunes, which are cutthroat and dispiriting at the same time. The constant jockeying for position, for the patriarch’s or matriarch’s favor, turns family gatherings into theater, and siblings and cousins into trained thespians.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I suspect you personally,” she answers. Butshe does, doesn’t she? That was exactly the conclusion she leaped to when she first learned his full name. “But right now you’re the only lead we have.”
