The Cartographers(119)

She turned to Wally when she reached the wall, then back to the pictures.

“You took these, didn’t you?” she asked.

He nodded.

The photographs were of all of them. The Cartographers.

There they all were, outside the house Humphrey had rented before they’d burned it down to keep the town a secret forever, around the fire pit with their marshmallows. In another, Ramona and Francis were standing outside the grocery store in Rockland, holding up a giant bottle of champagne they’d just bought. And then there were the photos that had been taken in Agloe. Humphrey doing a handstand next to the town’s sign. Ramona and Tamara posing outside of the same ice cream parlor. Nell’s father and mother together, sitting on a roof, looking out over their secret world at sunset.

In almost all of them, whether the photo was of one person or the whole group, Tamara was the focal point, the shining star at the center of every moment—and Wally was invisible. Watching from afar, behind the camera.

“I took that one of you, too,” Wally finally said, pointing.

Nell followed the line of his finger. There was a picture of her father, her mother, and her near the center of the collage.

She pulled the photo from the wall and held it close. The three of them were in the park outside the parlor, sitting on a blanket and having a picnic. Her mother and father were eating sandwiches, and she a hot dog that her father had cut up for her, the fork still in his hand. In front of them on the blanket was a single slice of cake with three candles in it. And behind them, in the background, the unmistakable view of the town.

On the back of the photo, her father had written, in his giant, blocky scrawl: June 1990. Happy third birthday, Nell!

“Come on,” Wally said. “We’re almost there.”

“We’ve done as you asked. This is over,” Felix argued.

“Oh, it’s far from over,” he replied. He waved his gun, as if to say Let’s go.

“Where are you taking us?” Nell asked, before Felix could anger Wally further.

Wally looked at her with an expression that told her she already knew the answer.

“The printing factory,” she realized.

Of course. Her mother’s favorite place in Agloe.

It took only a few more silent streets and a handful more silent houses to get there. Nell could see why it had taken Francis and Eve a long time to find this place on their surveys. The printing factory was small and unassuming, a little square wooden building that seemed to blend in with the scenery rather than stand out, as the two bigger vacant shops on either side of it did. Subtle, intimate. As though it would only appear to whom it wanted. As though it hid something incredible within.

At the entrance, Nell hesitated, but Wally didn’t move.

“You should do it,” he said. “She would have wanted you to.”

Slowly, Nell put a hand on the door and pushed.

Inside, the factory reminded her of Ramona’s shop, in a way. Dark, mysterious, cluttered with shelves and shelves of drafter’s tools and other old-fashioned supplies. As they all stood there taking it in, she wondered if her mother’s friend had subconsciously designed her impossible hideaway after this place. Nell was too nervous to wander deeper, but her eyes roamed every surface, desperate, curious. Finally, they settled on the printing press, glinting dully in the dim light. Even though Nell had heard all of the stories, her heart fluttered at the sight.

It was real. It was here.

“I knew it,” Wally said, breaking the silence.

“Knew what?” she stammered.

But Wally gestured to the Haberson duffel bag in Felix’s hands. “You can bring that here.”

Felix hesitated, but a gentle wave of the gun forced him to comply. He handed the bag to Wally, who went to the press and set the bag on the flat expanse where a roll of paper would feed in. He slowly unzipped it. Inside was a small, sleek-looking device, like a futuristic printer, with the Haberson logo painted on the side of it. Wally tossed the bag out of the way and then pressed a button to wake the machine.

It was a portable scanner, Nell realized, as a sliding motion along the top, a mechanical arm moving across a plate of glass, caught her eye.

“Why do you have that?” she asked warily.

Next to the much larger antique contraption, it looked so strange. Too aerodynamic, too artificial. Compared to the press, which required setting paper and cranking levers by hand, all it took was a button push to make the Haberson scanner work. There was hardly any soul to it. It just copied maps—it didn’t make them.

“I know you’ve also wondered why your father didn’t destroy this map,” Wally continued as he prepared the device, ignoring her question. “Why he kept it all these years, despite the terrible things that had happened here, and despite knowing I was searching for a copy.”

“Because it’s the last thing that belonged to my mother,” Nell said. She wasn’t going to tell him what she really hoped was true.

But Wally was nodding as if reading her mind anyway. A smile had crept onto his face.

“Tear it,” he said, pointing at the Agloe map in her hands.

“What?” Nell and Felix gasped at the same time.

“Tear the map,” Wally repeated. “Right down the middle. Then again, and again, until it’s scraps.”

“Are you serious?” Felix cried, nearly hysterical with anger. “You murdered Swann to stop him from destroying it, and now you want to—”