The Cartographers(54)

With shaking hands, she pulled out her phone, and typed RW Rare Maps into HabSearch. There had to be some explanation. A commercial listing for her company, with contact information, or something.

As the results loaded, Nell began to scroll, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Finally, when she reached the end, she let the hand holding her phone fall to her side as she stared at the old concrete wall again, lost.

HabSearch had plenty of articles about the dealer, opinion pieces about her shady reputation and reports of suspicious sales she’d made, but just one listing for her business, as Ramona worked alone, and thus had only one shop.

It had been marked as closed for years—with no address listed.





XIII




It had started raining in the late afternoon, and the subways were a mess of slick platforms and humid cars by the time Felix left home. As he stood under the awning on the sidewalk, his shirt still a little damp from the drizzle that had caught him as he’d run from the station, he checked his watch and grimaced.

His heart was hammering so nervously, he wondered if it was audible outside his chest.

The buzzer on the building’s entry panel sounded in response to his call, snarling urgently several times before he shoved the door open to make it stop.

This was too much, he thought as he hurried up the stairs. He was overdoing it. This was something he definitely could have let Nell tell him about on the phone, or at the library, or even at another bar. He definitely had not needed to suggest going all the way back over to her apartment again to ask what she’d learned at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. Ahead, he could hear her scrabbling at her lock, probably already halfway through whatever she wanted to tell him, as impatient as ever.

“Come on! I have so much to ask you about modern era copyright. You won’t believe what—” Nell called through her open doorway, almost before he’d even reached the landing of her floor, but she trailed off as she caught sight of him.

Her eyes drifted down, to the umbrella he had in one hand and the giant paper bag in his other, the Thai restaurant’s order receipt still stapled crookedly to the top.

“Oh.”

Felix sighed, embarrassed.

And he also definitely had not needed to bring dinner.



“I still can’t believe it,” Felix said at last, after listening to Nell’s story about Ramona’s missing shop. He was looking at his phone, having found the same baffling information in his cloaked search as she had on the public HabSearch—that the dealer’s shop had actually been closed for years, and there was no record of an address anywhere—especially not at the location Nell described. “And you’re sure the wall wasn’t new, right? Like she’d had the shopfront plastered over?”

“No, it was grimy and graffitied, like it had been there forever,” she replied, flustered. “There has to be an explanation. I must have gotten something wrong, even though I don’t know how that’s possible.”

Felix set his plate on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch cushions, trying to put all the pieces together in his mind, but Nell moved in the opposite direction, hopping up and returning to the bigger table in the kitchen, where the gas station map lay, fully unfurled. She waited, her arms crossed, clearly believing she didn’t look as intense as she always did. She was practically levitating, she was so excited.

“Okay, okay,” He laughed, rolling out of his seat.

The night was going a lot better than he’d even dared hope. It was almost just like the old times.

At first, it had taken a Herculean effort to get her to sit down and have some food before they examined the map for whatever she wanted to show him, but Felix had managed to convince her she had to catch him up on the book fair first, and they might as well do that over the meal. It had taken her all of three minutes to eat her pad kee mao, seemingly in one single forkful, as she talked. The only way he’d been able to drag the dinner out to ten minutes so he didn’t get a stomachache was by putting bite after bite from his own plate onto hers to try, until the heat from the chilis finally registered.

“This is good,” she’d said after his fourth or fifth offering, noticing at last. She reached to open the bottle of white wine he’d also brought. “Really good.”

“It’s from a little lunch spot by work,” Felix had replied, smiling. He remembered well how much she liked Thai food, the spicier the better. They’d gone out for it or cooked it at least once a week when they’d lived together. “Office favorite.”

But the food was long gone now. And Nell was so impatient she was shifting from foot to foot beside the map. “Bring our glasses,” she said as Felix sidestepped the coffee table on his way to her, and he obediently grabbed them both by their stems.

“So,” he said, looking down at the all-too-familiar piece of paper. “Setting aside whatever happened with Ramona’s shop, you weren’t able to ask her to confirm Eve’s story, but you think there’s a phantom settlement on this map.”

“There has to be,” she said. “After telling me about how they all came together after so long to get this one to my father . . .”

“Where was the one on the Sanborn copy?” he asked.

“Actually, it was in the Map Division.” She smiled. “There was a little room drawn where there definitely wasn’t one in real life.”