The Cartographers(88)

But to me the strangest change was that he’d somehow convinced Francis, of all people, to go with him on these excursions.

Perhaps they were searching for a specific piece of data, I figured at first. Perhaps Francis needed some historical context for the area, for his and Eve’s survey. Sullivan County had once been part of neighboring Ulster County until the early 1800s, when it was split off—maybe he wanted to go through even older records for the land, to find what previous colonial settlements might have been there, or perhaps the Indigenous tribe that had lived on the land before the colonists took it, the Esopus, had ever mentioned anything strange about the hills in their history. He was nearly as detailed in his work as Wally and always liked to do things himself, if he could.

But when I asked him about it, Francis was brusque. He refused to talk about it and made up some excuse to leave dinner early. By the time I got up to the room, he was already asleep, or faking it, and when I woke up the next morning, he was already gone again with Wally.

Something was going on with him, I could tell, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. We’d been together for a decade by that point—I’d seen him stressed out, angry, or sad plenty of times. But I’d never known him to be withdrawn. Yet somehow, there was now a huge gulf between us, one that I couldn’t bridge, no matter what I tried to do.

“Has Daniel ever been distant?” I finally asked Tam one day when she’d come to see my progress at the ice cream parlor, in a rare moment that we weren’t fighting over her own. We hardly ever talked anymore, not about anything but our impossible project, but I was desperate.

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking up from my notes.

“Become secretive,” I said, fumbling. “That’s not it. It’s not like it’s something specific—Francis just seems aloof, and tense, all the time. Has Daniel ever been like that?”

As soon as I asked, I felt foolish. Daniel was never any of those things. He wore his heart on his sleeve, as the saying goes. You could always tell what Daniel was thinking, even before he could.

But to my surprise, Tam smiled. “Actually, yes,” she said. “There was one time. It went on for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t draw him out of it, or get him to talk about it, no matter what.”

“What did you do?” I asked, my hope buoyed. If they’d survived it, perhaps so could we, I thought.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Then what changed?”

Her smile had grown into a full-fledged grin by that point. “He proposed.”

It felt so good to laugh, after so long. We laughed and laughed until our cheeks hurt, and we could hardly breathe.

“Do you really think so?” I finally asked, wiping my eyes. “We’ve been together forever, but it doesn’t seem like the right time. None of us have thought about anything but this town for months now. I can’t remember the last time we even went on a date.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything,” Tam replied, backtracking. “We’re coming to the end of our sabbatical, and maybe he’s stressed out. I just meant, there isn’t necessarily always a bad reason for things.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s probably not a proposal, but I should go easier on him. This project has been hard on all of us.”

“It has,” Tam said. “But you never know. It is almost over, and maybe he’s looking forward. To what comes after this.”

The idea was so unexpected, and so wonderful, I was afraid to get my hopes up. But despite my best efforts, the excitement still caught me. For the rest of the week, while I waited for Francis and Wally to return, I felt lighter and more tender toward everyone than I had in a long time. Tam and I didn’t argue as much, and I didn’t feel as trapped, as claustrophobic, inside of empty, mysterious Agloe as before. Little accidents like burning dinner on the stove barely bothered me, and even bad news seemed less dire.

That is, until I was tidying up our bedroom one evening and found a little scribbled note. It was in Francis’s pocket, but the words were in Wally’s handwriting: Abram’s Books and Stationery. Closes 5 p.m.

Doubt flickered in my mind as I stood there, staring at it.

Why would someone need to know not when a shop opened, but when it closed?

The next morning, I asked around at the grocery store and the antiques shop in Rockland if there was a bookstore called Abram’s nearby, but no one had heard of it. Eventually, I ended up at the bank of phone books in the post office, combing each one for that name. Finally, a few towns over, I found it.

The owner picked up on the tenth or eleventh ring, right before I gave up. He apologized for the delay—the local police were there, asking him questions, he said.

His shop had been robbed a few days ago.

Someone had broken in during the middle of the night and rifled through the travel section.

“I know what they were after,” he said to me. “But we’ve been out of stock of road maps for months, ever since this run on them started. Doesn’t matter which company, or which area. Can’t keep them on the shelves.”

“‘This run on them’?” I repeated, confused and full of dread.

“It’s all the antiques hunters are talking about these days. Some mysterious collector is willing to pay big money.” He sighed. “What could make a little thing like that so popular? I just hope I can afford a better security system, in case this happens again.”