The Cartographers(42)

“Uh, thanks,” she managed.

They clinked rims, and Felix took his time with the beer, not sure what he should say. Nell was clearly feeling the same way. She wet her lips, only pretending to drink, so she could seem occupied.

The charade gave them a few seconds of acceptable silence, but eventually he was going to have to set his glass back down on the counter and come up with more conversation.

“Well, I still have two days until I have to meet Irene,” she finally said. “I can at least keep working on it until then.”

Felix was about to argue about the potential danger again—but then she took a sip. A real one.

“Well, how did it go with Ramona?” he asked, encouraged.

Nell turned to him slowly on her stool, and he was surprised at the expression on her face. She was so lost in the question that all of her guardedness had temporarily fallen away.

“It was the strangest thing,” she said. “She recognized me immediately when I came in. She said—she said that she’d known my father since his college days. And my mother, too.”

“What?” Felix cried. “Ramona Wu and your father, and mother, were old friends?”

“And a couple others, all from their university days. There were seven of them in total,” Nell answered. “I couldn’t believe it either.”

“Did she tell you anything useful about the map?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t let on that I actually have it, given what we found online, but she didn’t want to tell me anything anyway. She was terrified, Felix. She kept trying to get me out of her shop, and then told me not to come back.”

“Well, I guess she wasn’t trying to sell it for your father, then,” Felix said.

Nell shook her head. “The opposite. He wanted her help to find a map, using her shadowy network. I think she ended up sourcing it from one of their other friends from back then.”

“Why do you say that?”

She dug through her tote bag and held up a large manila envelope.

“He was at the funeral,” Nell said, pointing at a name, Francis, at the end of a note scribbled across the front of it.

“Today?” Felix asked, surprised.

Nell nodded. “I tried to talk to him, but he was just as afraid as Ramona. When I pressed him, he practically ran away. I chased him down the hall toward Swann’s study.” She paused, as if what she was going to say next was impossible. “Only when I got there, he was gone. Just, poof. Gone.”

Felix frowned, confused. He’d been to Swann’s only once or twice with Nell to have dinner, back when they were still interns at the library, but he didn’t remember there being a way out to the street from the study.

“Yeah, exactly,” she said, reading his expression. “I must have missed something. Maybe Swann did some renovations since I’ve been gone, and there was another door somewhere I didn’t notice. There were so many people there, all trying to talk to me.” She sighed. “But Francis definitely knows something. I just don’t know what.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Felix said.

We, he realized too late. He’d said we.

“Yeah.” Nell toyed with her glass, too deep in thought to notice.

He relaxed. He let his gaze follow hers, where it had wandered out the front window to watch passersby. Beyond the sidewalk, the intersection ahead was full of idling cars, all waiting for the light to turn green for them. At first, it seemed like too many lanes of vehicles, but then Felix realized that the far right one was not in fact a lane, but a line of cars parallel parked along the curb, nearly fading into the evening background.

Then Felix saw Nell’s eyes catch on one car in particular against the curb. It was at the front of the line of parked cars, the first one before the intersection. It was black, and Felix wouldn’t have noticed it if Nell hadn’t been so fixated. Its headlights were off , but the car was on. The exhaust from its tailpipe was barely visible in the coolish night air.

The longer he watched her, the more the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Why was she staring so intently?

“Nell? Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine,” she said abruptly. Ahead, the traffic light turned green. A fraction of a second later, the first cars began to roll into the intersection. Red flashes flickered off as row after row of brake lights went out, and gas pedals were gently pressed. The drone of asphalt beneath tires began to pick up. “It’s nothing.”

Felix eyed her suspiciously. “You look spooked.”

“I just . . .” She paused. “This is going to sound silly, but it’s almost like that car is . . . following me.”

Felix glanced at the slowly accelerating vehicles, his eyes jumping between them. The car that had been parked was moving now, halfway into the intersection, having pulled quickly into the right lane as soon as the light had turned green. “Which one? The black one?”

“I’ve seen it a couple times this week. Outside the library, near Ramona’s, and now here, at the bar.”

“You’re sure it’s the same one?”

He could see the tension in her shoulders as they inched up closer to her ears, as if she was about to let go of something she had wanted to tell him but had been holding back. She hesitated.