The Cartographers(6)

She had died when Nell was no more than a toddler, and it had been Nell and her father ever since. Nell did not remember her, not beyond just a flickering moment or two, but she hardly needed to—Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young had been even more famous than her father in their world, and had done it in such a short time. Words like visionary and peerless were always placed before her name in articles about her, and the list of awards and honors bestowed upon her, and the places where her work continued to be cited, even so long after her death, was dizzying.

It had been an accident, Nell knew. There had been a fire in the house where they were living in upstate New York when she was just a baby, and her mother died rescuing her from the blaze. She didn’t remember that either, but knew it was true. There had been a short obituary in the local paper she’d once found using the library’s old microfilm machines, with accompanying news headlines like “Tragedy Strikes Visiting Scholar Family” and “Mother Heroically Gives Her Life to Save Daughter from Fire.” Her own left arm even bore the faint ghost of that night. The scars were no trouble at all, and most days she forgot about them—but she felt herself absently rubbing the flesh through the fabric of her sleeve now, as she sat there in her father’s office.

Nell had always planned to ask her father more about her mother at some point, but every time even the hint of her came up, she could see the pain in his eyes, still just as raw as it must have been the first day. There had always been a gulf between them—he had been a protective, doting father when she was a child, but the older she grew, the wider the gap became, Dr. Young growing more gruffly formal and more distant, until he treated her more like one of his junior researchers than his daughter. Nell hadn’t wanted to do even more damage to what was left of their relationship by causing him more agony. She could always talk to him about it later, she’d reasoned. Maybe after she’d proven herself, when she was an equal to him, another distinguished Dr. Young in her own right, and not just a bright, potential promise.

That secretly had become her life’s goal, as soon as she was old enough to realize how passionate about maps she also was. Other than her mother, who also had been a cartographer, there was nothing Dr. Young loved more than maps, and so Nell had always hoped that if she could only impress him as a cartographer in her own right, that gulf might somehow be bridged, and they might finally, finally be able to open up to each other.

She had been well on the way to someday accomplishing that.

Until the Junk Box Incident, anyway.

Nell glanced around again, listening to the buzz and jabber of the police walkie-talkies as the other officer moved about the room. She wasn’t getting out of the interview, she knew. “I’ll try my best,” she finally said.

“Do you know what he was working on lately? Any special projects or a new focus?” Lieutenant Cabe asked.

Nell shook her head. They hadn’t spoken even once since the day she left the NYPL—she had no idea.

“I can answer that, if that’s okay,” Swann replied, to which the officer nodded. “Daniel worked primarily in early American colonial and post–Revolutionary War maps of the East Coast. We have an extensive collection of Dutch, French, and English naval maps, but Daniel . . .”

Lieutenant Cabe bravely tried to appreciate the extraneous details of Swann’s explanation. Swann had always been like that—even at a time like this, he simply couldn’t contain his passion for the field. He loved his work so much, and did his job with such dedication, that Nell sometimes wondered if he didn’t also secretly live in the department’s back rooms. Once, during one of her many summer internships as a teenager, she and her father had sneakily moved something small in a rare moment of levity between them—one of the antique green glass lamps in the main reading hall, no more than a few feet—just to see if Swann would catch it when he next came into the room.

The old man rushed so desperately to correct the error, it was as if it had caused him physical pain. In his panic, he’d nearly tripped over himself and gone sailing into one of the glass display cases. Nell and her father had laughed so hard they cried, but she never pulled something like that again. Pranks were much funnier without blood.

“Are early American colonial and post–Revolutionary War maps a . . .” Lieutenant Cabe paused. “A controversial area of study?”

Nell snorted, despite the grim setting.

“Sorry,” Swann said. “Sometimes I just . . . I get carried away.”

“It’s all right. We’re interested in any information that might be relevant.”

Nell looked at Lieutenant Cabe again, and the realization hit her all of a sudden, a cold knife through the fog of her shock.

Oh.

Was that why she was there? Because the police were considering her father’s death suspicious?

She could hardly fathom it. This was academia, for crying out loud. Rivals wrote counterarguments and published rebuttal papers. They didn’t kill.

“Do you think there was foul play?” she asked.

Swann gasped. “You mean because of the angle of the questions?”

“And the mess,” she said.

“Is Dr. Young ordinarily very tidy?” Lieutenant Cabe asked, his gaze landing on each pile of papers with much more focus now.

“Yes,” Nell said, at the same time that Swann said, “No.”