The Cartographers(112)

“William—”

But William continued, unperturbed. “And if that’s true, if we could just take it one step further . . .” His eyes were distant, focused on something that wasn’t there, rapt with wonder. “If we could just assimilate the final piece of data . . . our map would truly be perfect.”

Felix took a step back.

“All of it,” he whispered. Dr. Young. Irene. Even the library security contract. “It was you. You did all of it.”

But how was that possible?

“That’s the wrong way,” William said calmly. “We want to go south from here.”

Felix looked at his car. He had to get away. As far as he could, as fast as he could.

“If you leave now, you’ll miss Nell,” William added, almost an afterthought. He shifted his umbrella and reached into his suit jacket to retrieve something—a photograph. He held it out to Felix.

Felix hesitated. But if William somehow really knew where Nell was, Felix couldn’t leave now. He couldn’t let William do the same thing to her that he’d done to everyone else in his path, standing in his way of the map.

“How did you even begin to suspect she was the one who had it?” Felix asked. “How did you know Dr. Young had owned it before that and hidden it at the library?”

In response, William simply held the photo out farther.

Finally, Felix gave up and took it. He leaned over slightly, so he could study the image without letting the rain touch it.

It was an old picture, slightly faded, one of the corners creased where it had been accidentally bent at some point. Felix lifted it up to examine it closer and froze.

But how . . .

It was an image of a couple standing in front of a packed car, on a driveway that looked just like this one. In the man’s arms was a small child in a pair of purple overalls, mid-squirm. They all smiled back at him through the aging glossy paper, their eyes sparkling.

Felix recognized the man as a youthful Dr. Daniel Young.

A gust of wind slithered through the grass, and a pair of birds sheltering in the dripping trees somewhere began to sing, a rush of sound.

His gaze jumped quickly to the young woman’s face. If the man was Dr. Young, that meant that she was Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young.

And that meant that the little girl in Dr. Young’s arms . . . was Nell.

“Why do you have this?” Felix asked, voice shaking.

William looked down, to the puddle he was standing in. His shoes were already soaked to the bone, but he didn’t seem to be able to feel it at all.

“William,” Felix repeated. “Why do you have this picture?”

“Because I’m the one who took it,” he finally said.





IV

The Cartographers





XXIII




They drove in tense silence after Ramona finished her story.

All six of them were crammed into Humphrey’s old Toyota, him at the wheel, Ramona beside him, and Francis, Eve, and Swann in back—with Nell awkwardly perched half against the inside of the door and half on Swann’s lap. It would have been more comfortable to be split into two groups, but with the police swarming the building, there had been no time for half of them to sneak across the street to Francis’s car.

But even more than that, now that they were all back together, none of them wanted to be separated anymore. Wally had struck Nell’s father and Irene when they were alone—there was safety in numbers, Nell hoped.

After escaping the police, who were busy breaking through the front door of Classic’s building, they’d sped through the still-chaotic, crowded streets of nighttime Manhattan, up the West Street viaduct along the western edge of the island toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Nell had watched nervously as the overhead lights along the interior of the concrete tube flashed past them one after the other, the car flickering like someone was playing with a light switch, willing them to go faster.

When they emerged safely on the other side of the river, in Weehawken, New Jersey, she thought someone might say something, but it wasn’t until they were clear of the urban streets and traveling north on I-95 for hours, when the buildings and cars had given way to trees and slowly brightening sunrise, that Ramona finally did.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Nell. Even as softly as she spoke, her voice seemed to echo in the car.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nell replied. “It was like my father told me all along. The fire was a terrible, terrible accident.”

“But we should have stopped it. We should have known where it was heading. But we did nothing.”

Nell looked down. “I could say the same thing about myself.”

His stubbornness and fiery temper aside, her father had been the head curator of the New York Public Library—who had she thought she was to believe she was going to win an argument against him, in his own office? She knew better than anyone that he would never back down, and yet she’d kept pushing, attracting more of their colleagues, backing him further into a corner. Instead of giving him a chance to let her in, she’d forced his hand. And even still, he’d protected her. He’d died to keep the map, and Wally, away from her.

What’s the purpose of a map? Swann had asked her in the very beginning, when she had stumbled back into the NYPL after so long, clueless to the danger she was walking into. She had brushed it off then the same way she had a hundred times before, believing it a sentimental oversimplification. It turned out to have been true all along.