Page 108 of The Librarians
Nainai sighs. “Okay, go look at your evidence.”
Her veiny hand settles on Hazel’s, a papery warmth. “But be careful. Be very, very careful.”
Conrad seems to sense that Hazel doesn’t want to study the evidence he brought with Nainai nearby, now that Nainai knows the purpose of his visit. “You want to go to my place?”
In his house, Hazel stands before the two-story window of the library. Knowing what is to come, she is barely aware of the rippling lake outside or the green hills on the far shore.
Conrad offers her a palm-size device. “The complete footage, which is mostly ocean floor and dispersed wreckage, is more than six hours long. Kit’s part is about twenty minutes. You can start roughly five hours and ten minutes in.”
“Thanks,” she murmurs, the device smooth and heavy in her hand.
“I’ll be around if you need me.”
He leaves quietly. She sits down and plugs the drive into her laptop. With fingertips that don’t seem to feel anything, she puts in her earphones, drags the time marker to 5:10:00, and hits play.
She expects darkness, eeriness, water pressure so palpable that steel creaks and pops. But the footage is unexpectedly bright and completely silent—the underwater vehicle must have been equipped with powerful search lights and perhaps no microphone.
The ocean floor sprawls, desolate and moonlike—a desert. A ribbon-shaped fish wriggles across the screen, its shiny scales surprisingly orange. Ahead, wreckage looms. She can make out letters and numbers to the side of the fuselage. The camera navigates around wires and sharp, broken edges to enter the fragmented core of the plane, a three-row section, two seats to a row. The first body that comes into view is that of a woman in her sixties; in the same row, a man of about the same age.
An empty row.
Has someone poured mercury into Hazel’s trachea? Dread infiltrates her lungs, branching coral-like over her rib cage.
The camera crawls over a small hill of spilled carry-ons and tilts up. And Kit is there, his features graven, as if he has been chiseled from blue marble. He does not look dead, but as restful as she’s ever seen him. Only the movement of his hair, a testament to the shifting currents, acts as a reminder of his watery grave.
When the camera swims away from the wreckage she blinks, as if she’s been yanked out of a strange yet consuming dream, and her real life is, for the moment, distant and gray.
She watches Kit’s part of the footage again, closes her laptop, and sits for some time, her brain heavy but blank. Then she gets up, steps out to the terrace beyond the library’s windows, and descends into a garden with bright mosaic planters that hold sages and cornflowers.
“You want some hot cocoa?” asks Conrad, standing on the terrace, a mug in each hand. He’s changed out of the grandmother-visiting suit into a dark blue tracksuit. Earlier he looked like a producer attending the premiere of his own film; now, a trophy husband even someone as wealthy as her mom might not be able to afford.
Does she want hot cocoa? She supposes it can’t hurt. “Sure.”
He comes down into the garden and hands her a cup, piled high with whipped cream. She takes a sip and is momentarily jolted out of her funk—this is seriously luxe hot cocoa, not from a powder, or even a bomb, but made the old-fashioned way with milk, cream, and freshly grated chocolate.
She searches for something to say. “I thought you only drank black coffee.”
“To impress you, I guess,” he answers, smiling a little to himself, and she is struck anew by the lyrical timbre of his voice. “I’m pretty sure I never drank black coffee before Madeira.”
He leans against the edge of a raised flower bed, looking up. It is a crisp autumn day, puffs of cloud drifting across a high blue sky.
I don’t seem to care whether I’m happy today, but I worry over whether I’ll be happy when I’m forty-five or fifty.
He’d sensed, hadn’t he, well before his father’s suicide, that Hubert de Villiers’s life had become profoundly misguided? His stint as a mariner hadn’t been just a young man’s thirst for adventure but an escape, however temporary, from the ultimately ineluctable.
He turns toward her, once again looking serious. “You okay?”
She sighs.Isshe okay? “Kit is the one who will never be okay again. I will be, eventually.”
He only gazes at her.
She hesitates, holding tight to the mug in her hands, the heat it emanates. “But now I’m forced to acknowledge how angry I’ve been at times. And not even for what Kit did but because I imagined him hiding out in some remote, beautiful place, enjoying his stolen riches with a local girlfriend while I endured the pity and ridicule of my peers.”
Even a criminal deserved a little grace from those closest to him. But she, once betrayed, dealt exclusively in the worst possibilities.
Conrad continues to gaze at her. She is reminded of their time on Madeira, of his curiosity that felt embracing but never intrusive. “At least now you can be angry with him, if you still wish to, for what he did do.”
The image of Kit’s seemingly sleeping form comes back, embalmed by the deep sea. She doesn’t feel anger, only a leaden sadness. “Why was everyone still strapped in their seats? Why didn’t they try to swim out before the fuselage sank?”
