The Cartographers(16)

Swann glanced at the phone, then back at her, chewing on his lip.

“Please, Swann,” she said. “I ran into Irene out there. I let slip that I knew about the library’s financial situation, and she told me she thought my father might have been obsessively working on something just before he died. Something she hoped could save the library. Maybe it was this.”

“What?” Swann choked. “I can’t even imagine—”

“It has to be this map,” she insisted. “It all adds up. The big fight, all those years ago. Then the secrecy—he didn’t even tell you he still had it. And the robbery last night. And maybe, even . . .” Suddenly, it was much more real to entertain this theory than it had been before. “What if he didn’t die of natural causes?”

Nell watched Swann try to reject what she’d just said, but she could tell from his expression he was finding the idea hard to dismiss completely.

She pushed on, encouraged. “I just . . . I want to try to make things right. This is my only chance. At the very least, it might help me understand him, since I clearly didn’t before. And if I also could help the library . . .” She hesitated, almost too nervous to say the words out loud. “Maybe Irene would even consider overturning my old file. Wouldn’t that be worth it?”

Swann frowned, but Nell could see the hope flare in his old eyes at the idea. “But even if this map could be what Irene’s after . . .” He paused. “The danger, Nell. I don’t want you to do this on your own.”

She leaned closer, desperate. “I have to. It’s my only chance.”

Swann looked down at his wrinkled knuckles. “What’s the purpose of a map?” he asked softly.

Nell sighed. She knew the question well. Her father used to ask it all the time when she was too caught up in the academic minutiae of a specimen, to the point of accidentally offending other researchers she was supposed to be cooperating with as she forced a project off course to follow her own vision. The answer was “to bring people together,” but the older she’d gotten, she’d found his saying more and more odd, considering that he could never learn his own lesson. After a while, she’d begun to suspect that perhaps it was really her mother’s old saying, and he’d adopted it more as a way to remember her than to actually abide by the words’ advice.

“I know, I know,” Swann said, seeing her exasperated expression. “But he was right, even if he could never put it into practice himself. I just want you to be careful. To do this for the right reason.” He looked at her. “This place isn’t everything.”

Nell managed a smile. He would never understand. “It’s not everything.”

It was more than everything.

Swann stared at her for a long moment. Finally, he sighed, surrendering. “All right. I’ll get started on the job part—if anyone can convince Irene to set aside your record and hire you again, it’s me. You get to work figuring out what on earth your father might have been doing with this map after so long.”

Nell reached over the desk and squeezed his hand gratefully. “Thank you, Swann. You’re the best.”

“Anything for you, my dear,” he said. “Now, we need somewhere safe to keep it in the meantime. Bring the map back here, and—”

“No!” she cried. “The library is the least safe place for it.”

“But security will be double for weeks!”

“Yes, double. Which means just barely inadequate instead of woefully inadequate,” Nell said. “And now the burglars will be watching like hawks for any change. The minute I bring you the map, they’ll strike again.”

“So, you want to keep it . . . at your apartment? In a completely unsecure location, with no security whatsoever?” Swann fretted.

“I want to keep it in a place the burglars would never think to search, because they have no idea it’s there,” she replied.

“Are you not the most logical assumption though?” Swann asked. “‘Dr. Daniel Young’ entered the item into the NYPL database, and now he’s dead, and you’re his daughter . . .”

“It actually might be the perfect cover,” she said. “Anyone who knew my father well enough to know he had a daughter also knows about the Junk Box Incident. Knows that the two of us hadn’t spoken a single word to each other since.”

And now we never will, she thought.

Swann frowned. “You do have a point,” he admitted. “It might be a good hiding place for now. But if the burglars do figure out you have the map . . .”

“We better work quickly, then,” Nell said.





II

The Map





V




It was almost too dark to see, but Nell kept the curtains drawn and all the lamps turned off anyway, hoping to hide the fact that she was home.

She triple-checked the door lock, and then returned to where the map was spread across her coffee table. Outside, on the street below, she could hear the faint sound of a kid on a skateboard rattling by. The clock read seven thirty in the evening.

After finishing her discussion with Swann, Nell had wandered out of the NYPL in a daze, nearly bumping into a black Audi sedan oddly parked along the same curb where taxis pulled up to let passengers out for the library. It stuck out darkly in a river of yellow, pristine except for the paint slightly rusting around the edges of the wheel wells, an odd blemish given the luxury brand of the car.