Page 97 of The Librarians
She accelerates to beat a yellow light. “And nothing. Every British and European art dealer worth their salt has Russian clients. Besides, he didn’t steal from his clients—he embezzled from his employer, a British establishment.”
Does she feel a hint of warmth just above her right hand on the gear shift? Is he about to take her hand? But he only leans more toward the window and says, “But?”
They are on a local highway now and the illumination is adequate. Yet she feels as if she’s driving into fog and shadows. She bites the inside of her cheek. “What if we find Kit at the end of it?”
There, she has named her fear. But the fear does not lessen, it only coils tighter around her, a python bent on suffocation.
“Kit is dead, Hazel,” Conrad says quietly.
Or so she—and everyone else—has been told.
But is it the truth, or is it just something they are supposed to accept at face value?
Chapter Twenty-six
About half an hour after Sophie gives the army medic’s name to Jonathan, he calls—and asks her to say nothing until she is out of her house.
Standing at the very edge of the golf course, a sea of darkness before her, she nearly screams when a herd of deer sprint past her. But she repeats the directions Jonathan gives her, then goes back inside and gathers up Astrid, who is nonplussed to be asked whether she knows not just her home Wi-Fi network’s name and password but also the IP address of her router. And by the way, could she pass along the code to her condo community’s gate too?
They drive Sophie’s Cooper to a park halfway to Jonathan’s house. There they stop and perform a thorough inspection of the car before continuing on their way.
Sophie’s never been to Jonathan’s house, which sits nearly at the doorstep of Elise’s high school—Jonathan’s too, back in the day. The subdivision, built in the ’70s, features smallish—for Texas—cookie-cutter structures that in less topsy-turvy times would have been perfect starter homes. Now they list for prices that make Sophie’s head spin.
On the driveway, they are met by the handsome and charming Dr. Ryan Kaneshiro. Sophie likes him right away: He greets them with cheer and delight even though the occasion is sadly lacking in both; he relinquishes his bug scanner immediately when Sophie asks for it and gives her the time—and the illumination—to figure it out for herself; and he does nothesitate to get down on the concrete and shine more light on the undercarriage of her car.
She also can’t help but feel a stab of anxiety that he will hurt Jonathan without even trying to.
“We should also take apart the dashboard to look behind it,” says Astrid. “In case there’s something hardwired to the battery.”
“Wow,” says Ryan, “you know how to do that?”
Astrid shrugs, even as she smiles with pleasure. “I grew up in the country. My parents taught us all these things. My mom used to fix tractors, back when her family had a farm.”
“My mom was just thrifty—didn’t believe in paying anyone to do anything,” says Sophie. “Changed her own oil until a few months before she died.”
Jonathan comes out of the house. “Thanks for coming on such short notice.”
Astrid goes up and hugs him. Sophie does the same, but she has to first imagine herself as Elise to open her arms wide and not end up with a fist bump or some such. But ah, Jonathan gives five-star hugs—she feels completely enfolded, completely embraced.
“You okay?” Jonathan murmurs in her ear.
“Hanging on,” she tells him.
“That’s all any of us can do,” he says before letting her go.
“Your house is clean?” asks Astrid, biting her lower lip.
“I think so. No unauthorized devices hitching a ride on my Wi-Fi network. We shut off power and I did a sweep inside with this phone app for anything that emits radio or infrared frequencies and didn’t find anything suspicious there either.”
Sophie shakes her head. “How did this becomeMission: Impossible, all of a sudden?”
“At this point, better safe than sorry,” chips in Ryan.
They walk into Jonathan’s house and Sophie feels as if she’s boarded the DeLorean and gone back in time. The dark paneling, the shag carpet, the framed covers ofLifemagazines—she hasn’t visited a house this ’80s since January 1, 1990.
“Wow, is this a set forStranger Things?” marvels Ryan.
Sophie agrees. She half expects to see a first-gen Apple Macintosh on a desk, and maybe an empty pouch of Capri-Sun behind the floral-patterned couch.
