The Cartographers(89)

I hung up with shaking hands. Outside, Bear, Eve, Tam, Daniel, and you were waiting in the car, ready to take us all to Agloe, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.

The door opened, and Tam poked her head in. “It still hasn’t arrived?” she asked when she spotted me by the pay phones on the wall. That had been my excuse to stop in here—that my parents had mailed me a book, and I needed to pick it up.

“The highway is going to get busy if we don’t get moving. It’s going to get harder to make the turn onto that road unseen,” Bear said from behind her.

“You all go ahead today,” I said to them. “I need to go to the library. Do a little research of my own.”

The Rockland Library was not large by any means, but what it lacked in reference texts, it made up for in local newspapers—hundreds of them, every day for every edition in the county and its surrounding neighbors, all stored in rolling drawers. I spent the entire day there, desperate to disprove my growing suspicions.

What I found made my blood run cold.

There had been more robberies over that summer. Many more.

A string of breakins across the whole county, and even farther than that. Schools, travel agencies, local museums, gas stations, long-term storage facilities, car junkyards, even some houses. To an outsider, there would have appeared to be no connection between them—but to someone like me, who knew what the burglar might have been looking for, the pattern stood out as bright as day.

Someone was hunting copies of the same map we’d found.

And I was terrified that it was Wally—and maybe even Francis.



The library’s newspapers weren’t available to be loaned out the way books were, so I made photocopies of every single article I found about the breakins. I walked back to the house, all five miles, and spread everything out on the living room table, like some kind of horrible exhibit.

I didn’t really have much of a plan, other than simply to get the truth. Part of me still didn’t fully believe it or didn’t want to. I held out hope that there would be some explanation that would magically make it all better. That I’d been mistaken, and it was all just a huge, weird coincidence. That none of this was really Wally. Or if it was, that we could convince him to stop, before something truly terrible happened.

Of course, it was already far too late. By that point, news of Wally’s fervent collecting had spread all over the East Coast, through the amateur hobbyist network. He’d spent months seeking out copies, honestly or otherwise, but now, invitations and offers came to him, to that post box he kept in Rockland. News spread quickly about the kind of money this strange, obsessive collector who called himself part of the Cartographers would pay for a copy of such a seemingly worthless little map—or even a rumor about one. He’d created a web of eager, oblivious informers, everyone from retired schoolteachers to mischievous teenagers to antique-book sellers, and was using them to scour the countryside for every last copy of the Agloe map, so that he could have them all.

But at the time, overwhelmed by the evidence I’d only started to find, and the phone call I’d had with the bookstore owner, I scarcely had the first inklings of how far it had really gone. None of us really knew just how deep this obsession of his really went. We didn’t know what he was truly capable of.

The car from Agloe reached home first. I heard you laughing as someone carried you up the front steps, Nell, and then Tam was through the door, calling for me.

“Romi, we’re so sorry! We went back to the Rockland Library to pick you up, but they said you’d left two hours ago!” Tam apologized as she came into the living room and spotted me.

“You should have waited, it’s way too hot to walk,” Bear said, with you on his shoulders. Eve and Daniel were behind him, lugging our research books back inside, and he let you down to run to your mother so he could help them.

Finally, as the bustle settled down, they all noticed everything spread out on the table.

“What’s going on?” Tam asked.

“Sit,” I said. “And wait.”

“What are we waiting for?” Bear asked.

“Just sit,” I repeated. “It can’t be long now.”

It wasn’t. Just a few minutes passed in uncomfortable silence before we all heard Wally’s car crunching up the gravel driveway. Then the engine faded out, and doors slammed, and the scrape of a key echoed in the lock.

“We’re back,” Francis called from the door.

I could see that the others wanted to call out to them, but I fixed them all with a glare.

Francis and Wally drew closer, footsteps going from mudroom to kitchen to where we were waiting for them in the living room.

“There you all are,” Francis said, at the same moment that he realized something strange was going on. “Guys?”

In the meantime, Wally’s eyes had drifted to me and then to the table behind me, where all the photocopies waited. “What’s this?” he asked.

“You tell me,” I said.

Francis and Wally looked at each other and then back at me. Finally, they both came up to the table and began to look through the articles.

Only a few seconds passed before I saw their faces shift from confusion to something else.

Panic, I thought. Or guilt.

“I can explain,” Francis said.

“Okay, that’s it. What is going on?” Tam asked, and went to snatch up a bunch of the papers. “What are these . . .”