The Cartographers(72)

“Nell, thank goodness,” one of them said, and Nell’s eyes focused enough to recognize Eve’s face, and Ramona’s beside it. “I thought we were too late.”

“How . . .” Nell managed to whisper. Had they also been at the event? Had they come to try to help Francis dissuade her as well?

The attack came back to her in snatches, then. The fight with Felix, running into the Map Division to hide, the sound of the alarms, Swann telling her the police had stormed in, Irene’s murder, and clutching her tote bag to her in terror as something—someone—overwhelmed her.

Her tote bag.

“My . . . my . . . ,” she whispered. Her fingers grasped uselessly at her shoulder, where the bag’s straps should have been.

“Oh, my dear, it’s gone,” Swann said. “Stolen.”

No. Nell’s head fell back against the cushion. No. Her eyes burned, hot and wet.

Her father’s portfolio. Her precious, only belonging of her mother’s that she owned. And the photograph that Francis had sent her father of the three of them that she’d been keeping inside of it—the only one she’d ever seen of her whole family together.

Gone.

The tears prickled as they slid down her cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,” Swann said gently. He was crying a little as well now, not for the portfolio, but for her, at how close he’d come to losing her.

“It was Wally, wasn’t it?” Nell finally whispered.

“You saw him?” he asked.

Nell shook her head. She had sensed a vague shadow of a man and felt his iron grip on her arm as she tipped off balance, but it had all happened too fast. “But it had to be him,” she managed to choke out before her eyes grew hot and flooded again.

Eve nodded. “There’s no one else but us who knows how to do what he did.”

Knows how to do what? Nell wondered through the tears.

The rest of the room beyond them finally swam into focus. It was small, with the same fabric pattern on the couch and the same green paint on the walls, the same lights that she was used to, but somehow everything was also unfamiliar.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Swann looked at Francis hesitantly. “Ah,” he began, haltingly, as if he didn’t entirely believe what he was saying. “Well, we’re in . . . the Map Division.”

Nell looked around again. It did look like the Map Division, but it couldn’t be. She knew the place inside and out—there was no room like this. She tried to sit up fully, but a wave of dizziness so strong it made her queasy forced her to lie back down.

“Nell! You need rest!” Swann cried, reaching to steady her.

“I don’t know this room,” she said. “My head—”

“It’s not your head,” Francis cut her off gently.

Slowly, he reached his hand back, and Eve handed him a single sheet of paper. He gave it to Nell.

It took her a moment to see through the dizziness what she was looking at.

“This is the Sanborn map of the library you tried to give my father,” Nell said. “The one I gave back to Eve at the book fair.”

Eve nodded. “I brought it tonight, just in case we needed it.”

Francis pointed, and her eyes drifted down the page, to the room Eve had shown her leading off from the main reading room in the Map Division. A room where in reality there wasn’t one, she well knew.

“If you have the map . . . you can go there,” Francis had whispered to her.

They were inside of it.

Inside of a room that didn’t exist.

Nell looked up at him, thunderstruck.

“It’s also how I disappeared on you the first time,” he said.

“Apparently, my home is quite historical,” Swann added, dazed. “Historical enough that there are several old maps of it from earlier centuries still in existence. Someone drew a secret room into it at some point.”

“A phantom settlement,” she said.

“Yes,” Francis said.

“Because they’re real. Real real,” she stammered.

“Yes.”

She looked past him, to Ramona. “Your shop . . . I went there the first time using the map my father had drawn on your business card . . .” She swallowed. “That’s why I couldn’t find it again.”

Ramona nodded. “I just wish we could have gotten the Sanborn to him in time.” She closed her eyes and gave a shaky sigh. “I don’t know how your father realized that Wally suspected he still had the Agloe map all this time and had come back to take it, but when he called me to ask me to find a Sanborn, I knew it had to be the truth. Wally was never going to really give up.”

“It was his escape route,” Nell said, finally understanding. “If Wally came for him in the library . . .”

Ramona nodded again. “Although it’s clear now that Wally found a seventh edition Sanborn of his own at some point. It was how he got into the library the first time—all three times.”

Dr. Young’s murder, the break-in, and tonight.

“Where’s Wally now?” Nell asked.

Francis sighed. “Who knows. He pulled you into the room here, but he didn’t realize that Swann, or all of us, would be with you. You dropped your bag as you fell, and he took it and ran before we could stop him.” Francis pointed at another door in the wall, one that must lead outside, onto the street.