Page 19 of The Librarians
“Y-yes, of course.”
“I’ll take the detectives to our meeting room,” says Sophie. “Why don’t you log out of your session, Astrid? Detectives, this way, please.”
“Do you need a lawyer?” asks Jonathan urgently, as soon as the cops are gone. “If you aren’t comfortable, you don’t have to answer questions without legal representation.”
Astrid dry-cackles from sheer astonishment: He thinks she might be in trouble. Is that why Sophie guided the cops ahead to the meeting room? To give her a minute or two to gather herself and form a strategy?
“I’m fine,” she declares. “Let me go see what they want.”
All the same, her mind becomes a swarm of whirling thoughts. Maybe the police want to know about Jeannette Obermann, but Astrid doesn’t know anything about her. She doesn’t have any late bills or outstanding traffic tickets. She’s never even abandoned a shopping cart in a grocery store parking lot.
Sophie stands in the passage leading to the meeting room. She raises a brow in question. Astrid smiles in reassurance, but her cheeks feel rigid.
Inside the meeting room, a table and three chairs have been set up, but not in a confrontational configuration of two chairs on one side of the table and one chair on the other side. Instead, the chairs are placed all around the table, looking haphazard, as if three buddies who are working on a project together have deserted their station at lunchtime.
The detectives ask if she is all right with being recorded. Astrid, after a moment, nods. Detective Shariati motions her to a seat. Detective Jones turns on the equipment. And Astrid states, when prompted, her name, age, address, and occupation.
“Do you recognize this person?” begins Detective Shariati and shows Astrid a picture on a piece of printer paper.
Perry! In the not terribly sharp image he sports the kind of formal attire people wear to English society weddings, and there is a church looming up behind him.
Astrid’s confusion congeals into dread. “Is—is he okay?”
“Can you identify him for us?”
Why won’t they answer her question? “He told me his name is Perry. I don’t know his last name.”
“Can you tell us what you do know about him?”
Whatdoesshe know about him? That is her entire problem, isn’t it? “Can you tell me if he’s okay?”
“Please answer the question,” says Detective Jones in a kind but implacable tone.
Detective Shariati merely waits.
Will they tell her what they know if she tells them what she knows? “I met him in April when he was in town on business. We had a fling that lasted all of one week. I never heard from him again until he showed up at the library two days before Halloween.”
“What business?”
“I asked him one time and he said it was tedious business, so I didn’t ask anymore.”
“You didn’t dig around a little?”
Astrid shrugs, a stab of futility in her heart. “We were a hookup, plain and simple. I didn’t know his surname—I can’t even be sure Perry is his realname. I would havelikedto know what he was doing in town—and a lot of other things besides. But I didn’t have the means to find out—or the standing, really.”
“When he came back, you didn’t take the opportunity to ask questions?”
She realizes belatedly that they last spoke in this very space, she and Perry. They were standing near the doors, the stacks of brown folding chairs behind him. “Frankly, I was trying not to have anything to do with him.”
“But then you changed your mind?”
Her heart drops straight into a vat of nuclear waste.
How? How do they know she changed her mind? And why does it matter, in the greater scheme of things, that she ended up sending a few more texts to a man who clearly didn’t care enough about her?
Yet for the police to ask, it must matter to some degree. Also, they would need access to his phone or phone records to know that she’d messaged him.
If everything were okay, they wouldn’t have either and they wouldn’t be here.
