The Cartographers(107)

Because I knew that if Eve and Bear had also figured out what I had—that there were other places out there like Agloe, hidden from the world—that wherever he was, Wally probably also had. And he could use them like we could.

And that was when I received the news about Professor Johansson’s memorial at the university.

I worried I was being paranoid, when my first thought upon seeing the card was that something had happened to him, that it had not been a natural death. But I couldn’t help it. I found myself combing through city records online again, this time for Madison, Wisconsin, looking at blueprints and municipal service plans of the university. I hoped I was wrong, but after everything that had happened, I feared the worst.

And then I found it.

There was a trap room in the science building at our old university, on an 1886 construction map. A utility closet that had been planned, but never built, because the classrooms had expanded in a later draft. It was one floor down from the faculty offices.

The rest was not hard to find. I knew what to look for.

It turned out that even though Wally hadn’t been seen since that summer, his ghost had been haunting us all along. The private castle in New Jersey, where General Drafting Corporation had kept all their records and past editions, had been burned to the ground in yet another accidental fire some years after we all left Rockland—everything destroyed. When I asked, my clients told me rumors they’d heard within their amateur collecting circles about a private buyer somewhere, part of a group called the Cartographers, who had resurfaced after a few years of silence and would pay impossible money for some seemingly worthless map—except as hard as they tried, they couldn’t find one anywhere. Perhaps I could help them locate a copy, for a split commission? And online, I saw scattered reports of threats and disappearances, and even deaths, of scholars and dealers, of hobbyist geocachers and local librarians, of museum administrators and teachers. They had happened over so many years and across so many states, that police had not been able to put the pattern together.

It was Wally. Hunting another final copy of our map—and removing anyone who might spread the word or get there first.

I didn’t know if he would be waiting for us at the memorial in Madison, laying some plan to blackmail us into helping him steal something else he thought would help him get back to the town, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

I decided to disappear.

I massacred my reputation on purpose. Every terrible rumor you’ve heard about me in the field, about how I sold counterfeit maps or couldn’t provide provenance papers to private collectors, was all on purpose. I had to make it so that no one would want to come looking for me. I thought if I had no connection to the industry anymore, Wally would not see me as a target.

If he could even find me in the first place.



It wasn’t Wally who eventually found me, though. It was Daniel.

He used my business card, one I’d given him a long time ago, when I’d gone underground—the same one you found after he’d died. It was a day much like the one when you came. I was alone, going through inventory, searching for more impossible places. Escape routes, hiding places I could save to use later if I needed to.

It was the day of the Junk Box Incident—but I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew something terrible had happened. I could see it in his face.

How old that face was. How creased, and sad, and tired. It had been at least twenty-five years since he’d driven away from our motel with you. I had wondered, in the intervening decades, if I would even recognize any of the others if I ever passed them on the street. Grief can raze a face far worse than ten times as many years. It was one of the things that worried me about Wally the most—by that metric, I would never see him coming for me, if he ever did.

But Daniel I did recognize, somehow. Or maybe I could feel that it was him more than I could see. For the briefest moment when he’d come inside, it had felt as though two people had been there, instead of just one. That Tam was there, too.

We stared at each other in silence.

“Something happened,” I said finally, studying him warily.

He nodded.

I waited for him to tell me what was going on, but he didn’t say anything. I thought he was trying to find the right words, but then I realized as my heart faltered that it was because there were no words. He didn’t need any. There was only one reason he would be here, so many years later.

“You still have it, don’t you?” I whispered. Horrified. Amazed.

Somehow, impossibly, he did.

The last copy of the map.



Your mother had saved it at the same time she’d saved you, he told me once I’d calmed down. She’d tucked it into your clothing before she’d handed you to your father and succumbed to her wounds. He didn’t find it until much later, when he was at the hospital letting the nurses examine your burns. How surprised he must have been.

Your mother managed to save the town after all, with her dying breath—and your father had decided to protect her last secret.

“And Nell found it, didn’t she?” I finally asked.

He closed his eyes and nodded again.

I was dizzy, barely able to feel the ground under me, the way I’d been when I’d seen them all returning to the house, soot-stained, crying, without Tam. Despite everything we’d done to be free of that map and that place, it was going to happen all over again. “What does she know?”