The Cartographers(87)

“It cannot be true,” he murmured. He looked up at her. “I know Nell, Naomi. I know her.”

William cleared his throat gently. “Sometimes, people can be not what they seem.”

Felix shook his head, refusing to believe it. His phone buzzed in his hand at the same moment, catching his attention. “Look,” he said, relieved. “That’s her now.”

But when he held up the screen, the notification wasn’t a reply from Nell. It was an alert that his messages had been kicked back to him, a little red X next to each one, indicating they hadn’t been delivered to her phone, because it was unreachable.

Huh?

Had Nell . . . had she . . .

Had she blocked his number to avoid him?

There’s no “we” anymore, he’d said to her, in the heat of the moment. He’d wanted out of everything—her investigation, her obsession with the map, her life.

You got what you asked for.

Hadn’t he?

“Did she reply?” Naomi asked.

He shook his head, the dread at the pit of his stomach growing.

“I’m sorry, Felix,” William finally said. “But I think we should call the police now. For your own sake.”

Felix shook his head in frustration. “If she’s not answering, it’s not because she’s guilty. It’s because she’s in danger herself now. She’s the target.”

“That’s what the map is saying,” William said.

“No,” he replied. “I mean, she’s not the burglar. She’s who the burglar is after.”

“What?” Priya cried.

“Why, Felix?” William asked. “Tell us what’s going on.”

Felix grimaced nervously. Nell would probably kill him for revealing what he knew, but he didn’t see any other choice anymore.

“It’s because of a map,” he finally said.

Naomi rolled her eyes gently at him. Every crime had been centered around the Map Division, after all. “But which one? Because during every one of these crimes, not a single thing has been taken out of the library.” She pointed at her computer. “Even more than that, if you reorder our database so their inventory goes by value, not one of the top fifty biggest specimens was even touched tonight. The Buell, or anything from the Ford Collection, or Cassini’s Carte de France . . . not so much as a jostle of their cases. It doesn’t add up. Not a single item is missing.”

“The map the burglar’s after is not in the collection,” Felix replied.

All three of them looked up at that. Naomi and Priya looked surprised, and William was studying him curiously.

“Because Nell has it.”





Romi




The last days of August descended on us like a summer storm, dark and heavy. Tam spent almost all of her time in the printing factory. It was so swelteringly hot inside my ice cream parlor, the big window would fog up—and outside, the air was so muggy and mosquito-filled, even you didn’t want to play, Nell. We all worked with a feverishness that matched the cloying weather, coming back from Agloe each day parched and exhausted, our clothes streaked with salt from sweating. As miserable as we were, the intensity of our work only increased. We could feel the end of summer bearing down on us, just weeks left, and we were desperate to finish our project before we were supposed to be back at the University of Wisconsin to triumphantly show off our creation.

The stress of our deadline only made things worse between Tam and me. The two maps of our Dreamer’s Atlas could not have been more different, in every way. Mine was nearly finished, each measurement double-checked and drafted in pencil, ready to be inked, but Tam’s map was still a chaotic concept, fragments laid down and then erased, and then laid down and erased again. She said she couldn’t explain what was blocking her, but whenever I asked to see her drafts, she refused. She insisted she was on the verge of understanding, and then everything would work itself out from there, if only I could give her a little more time. If only I could trust her.

But trust was becoming our rarest commodity—for all seven of us.

Eve had become even more shy and distant than she’d been before we left campus, Bear seemed sick with worry over something, although he refused to tell any of us what it was, and Daniel was still tense after admitting that he’d tried to send Professor Johansson a letter, unsure if he had truly been forgiven or not. So far, our instructor hadn’t written to us or called the house—I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d heard the sole, old phone in the corner of the living room ring—but we still weren’t sure if we could trust that Daniel had told the truth, that he’d really only attempted to send that one letter. That there hadn’t been others. The last time Tam and I had gone to the pharmacy in Rockland, she’d called the university to see if she could feel out the situation, but the department secretary said Professor Johansson wasn’t in and had hardly been in that summer. We took some comfort in that, trying to believe that perhaps it had been only that one letter, or even if there had been another, maybe Professor Johansson hadn’t checked his faculty mailbox yet, if he’d barely stopped by—but there was no way to know.

And Wally was gone even more often, if that could be possible. He was not at the house or in Agloe with us more days than he was—and when he was there, he seemed agitated, lost in thought. A haunted, pursued look clung to him, which he couldn’t shake, even when you tried to draw him out of his brooding and into a game, Nell. Like he couldn’t wait to get back on the road, conducting his mysterious, essential research.