The Cartographers(28)

But Nell refused to give up. “You’re telling me that my father had your card for no reason, and you were not trying to broker a sale for a folding gas station road map made by General Drafting Corporation,” she said defiantly.

The last bit of the sentence had an immediate effect. Instead of another icy comeback, Ramona stopped in her tracks.

I was right, Nell thought triumphantly.

Ramona continued to stare at Nell in silence for a long moment, collecting her thoughts. “So, he did tell you about it after all,” she eventually said.

Not exactly true, but Ramona’s assumption was close enough. “Just a little,” she replied.

“You’re still wrong, though.”

“How so?” Nell asked.

“He didn’t want me to sell it for him. No one can sell it—it doesn’t exist anymore. It was destroyed, a long time ago. And thank goodness it was.”

Nell paused. She couldn’t tell if Ramona believed that herself or was simply trying to get her to believe it. Was this one of her tactics? Feigning ignorance to trick an unsuspecting mark into admitting something?

To prompt Nell to reveal that the map wasn’t destroyed, and that she secretly had it?

“He didn’t tell me that part,” Nell finally said. Until she figured out what was going on, she figured it was better to give Ramona as little information as possible. “How do you know about it, then? If it was destroyed a long time ago?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Isn’t it? He’s gone now, and I’m the one who has to settle his affairs. I need to know why he had your card. I won’t leave until I do.”

Ramona studied her again for a long, hard second. “You’re just like him,” she muttered. “Never, ever give up, on anything.”

She had the same expression that Nell had seen so many times on the faces of her colleagues when they were trapped in academic debates with her—that fear and admiration of the infamous Young determination that ran in their family.

But seeing that familiar look here, in this strange place, and after her father’s passing, made Nell’s throat pinch suddenly, catching her by surprise.

The older woman sighed again. “I suppose I owe it to you.” Her eyes went to the door, and back to Nell. “If I tell you, will you go? Will you let that be the end of it?”

“Yes,” Nell said. “That’s all I want to know.”

Ramona nodded at last. “First, my card.”

“What?”

“My business card,” Ramona repeated. “You must have it with you, if you came here.”

“Oh yes.” Nell took it from her pocket, where she’d slipped it after she’d entered, and handed it to Ramona.

Ramona turned it over to glance at the little scribble on the back, and then slid it quickly into her own pocket.

“Your father didn’t want me to sell something for him. He wanted me to find something for him,” she said. “Quietly, out of the public eye.”

Her father had been trying to buy something through Ramona?

Nell was even more confused than before.

“What was it?” she asked.

“Insurance, of a sort,” Ramona said. “Only it was too late.”

Nell tried to make sense of it, how something a black-market middleman like Ramona could find would be any kind of insurance, but the older woman looked down at her hands before she spoke, as if she were afraid again, or perhaps, ashamed. They were small, the fingers still long and beautiful, just starting to gnarl from age.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Ramona asked. “But why would you.”

Nell blinked. “Remember you?” She was sure that in all her time at the NYPL, Ramona Wu had never once entered those hallowed halls, as a dealer, colleague, or simple patron. Swann and her father would have staged a mutiny at the insult.

“It was a long time ago. You were just a child. A baby, really.”

A baby?

“I don’t understand,” Nell said. “You’re saying . . . you’re saying that you were old friends with my father?”

Ramona shook her head. “Not just with your father. With your mother, too.”





Romi




There were so many secrets between the seven of us, but at the time, none of us knew that. We had no idea how much was hidden. We never could have guessed what was to come.

We all met during undergrad, at the University of Wisconsin. Well, not all of us. Your mother and Wally had known each other since childhood. They were inseparable—more like siblings than friends. They’d applied to all the same schools and chosen Wisconsin together. They were the core of our group, the original two who brought everyone else in, and the most brilliant of all of us. The start, and the end, of everything.

I was the first one they found.

Most freshmen had already been on campus at the University of Wisconsin for a week, preparing for the start of the semester, but I’d been helping take care of my grandmother, who was in the late stages of cancer, and didn’t leave until the day before classes started. The cheapest flight I could get from Los Angeles landed in Milwaukee, and I’d had to huddle with my suitcases for an hour and a half on an intercity bus with a broken window, shivering as the frigid breeze streamed in off the highway. I dumped my things at dormitory reception and ran, still shivering, to the freshman welcome mixer in the science building, where the geography department was housed.