Chapter Fifteen

A new week, and a welcome respite from the close quarters and hot-house debates within Cyrus College, or even the petty politics of the library staff.

Library business was taking her to Chicago, where some colleagues at the Newberry Library had ideas for managing archives in digital form that Hazel wanted to hear about with her own ears, see directly what these interfaces and scanning technologies would look like.

Audrey, her senior archivist, had offered to drive her over to the Columbus airport, but -- on the St. Fiacre's side, at least -- there were funds for travel, including for a car service to come and pick her up and drive her directly to the terminal. The savings in parking fees was not really enough to balance the cost, but the net expense was not out of line with what she knew they could afford, and Hazel liked skipping the whole extra set of steps to get into the terminal and on her way.

Looking up from the files on her lap, she was almost startled to see how quickly the wide square bulk of parking garages and terminals had come to her. Thirty minutes was not long enough to really get into a project.

Hastily folding up her work and shoving it into her holdall with tablet and earphones, she was ready when the limo pulled up to her door. Carryon, holdall over one shoulder, into the building, through the ticketing and security and on to the gate, tumbling to a halt at an open seat.

"Delayed" read the gate sign. For the first time, even though they had to have been driving towards it the whole time on the way here, she noticed the dark clouds and heard rumbling through the overhead wide windows, deep and bass and lengthy.

Hazel was not a nervous flyer, and the prospect of turbulence didn't rattle her, but taking off into a thunderstorm certainly made no sense at all. Resignedly, she sat down, arranged her bags at her feet, and pulled out the tablet, tapping it into connectivity with the airport wifi.

Emails, a few messages through other services, posts or tweets or such. One message pointed her back to her phone, and a text message from the college which she quickly handled with a pair of strongly worded text messages herself.

Setting down the phone atop her carryon, she checked the tablet again to see a new email. The address was unfamiliar, but the salutation was from Abigail, a college friend she'd just been mentioning to Susie. Apparently she was working for a cable news network these days, or so the email address would indicate.

And apparently she had a pretty good arrangement going with them, because the email simply said "Would you like to come to London? The network will pay. I need to talk to someone, and you keep coming to mind. If your little library in the Midwest can spare you a week, I've got a big project in mind." Following were the details for making contact if she were interested, and willing.

To some degree, she thought, she was more interested than willing. She was available just now, too, but not indefinitely. This didn't sound open ended, though, and Abby had always been a pretty clear and direct person. What she was asking here was probably what she actually wanted: someone trustworthy to talk to.

For Hazel, another reason to say yes was the opportunity to be that trustworthy person, after so much time in the last year spent with people who never answered honestly even if you asked them what they wanted.