The Cartographers(94)

“All right, my dear,” Swann replied placatingly. His gaze fell to the map in her hands. “So, what now?”

Nell ran her hand tentatively over the faded cover.

“Are you sure you want to go?” Eve asked her, as gently as she could. “All this time . . .”

“The whole place may be burned down by now,” Francis added grimly. “There might not even be anything left.”

Nell knew what they were trying to warn her about. That even if they could evade Wally and make it to the phantom settlement, all they would find in Agloe of her mother was ash, if even that. It had been decades, and the blaze had been strong enough to burn the whole town to nothing.

But something still didn’t add up. Something she’d realized when she’d come to in the hidden room in the NYPL, when she finally realized Francis had been telling the truth that Agloe was real, and was still trying to puzzle out.

She was a Young—she could not let go until she’d pursued something all the way to the end.

She had to be certain.

“Tell me how you know for sure,” Nell finally said to them. “How you know she’s really gone. I need to hear the rest of the story. I need to hear about the day of the fire.”

In response, Humphrey hung his head, ashamed.

“It was my fault,” he told her softly.

“It was all of our faults,” Eve said. “We all went into the town. We all were responsible for what happened that summer.”

Humphrey shook his head. “Maybe. But my lie was what sent Wally over the edge that day. I’m the reason there was a fire.” He looked down. “The reason Tam died.”

Nell stared at him. “How?” she managed to say.

Her boss wrung his hands. His nickname was obvious in the slope of his broad shoulders, the way his dark hair drooped over his eyes as he slouched.

“First, let me give you something,” he said. He went back into his office, where he opened his desk drawer and took out a small lockbox. Not the one they used for petty cash during the day—she had never seen this one before. It had been shoved far back in his mess, covered in old receipts and who knew what else. He fished around in his pocket for his key ring and unlocked the little rusted lock.

“This is for you,” he said when he came back.

It was a fountain pen, a deep crimson lacquered shaft with a gold head and a white University of Wisconsin logo.

“This is the one from Eve’s story,” Nell said, realization dawning. She turned to Humphrey. “The one my mother made me.”

He nodded.

She smiled as she took it, and her fingers felt the roughness of an uneven texture along the side of it. It took her a moment to get the angle right so that the scratches would catch the light, but she already knew what they would form anyway.

A simple, slightly jagged eight-point compass rose, with a C in the center.

Her mother’s symbol for the Cartographers.

“I guess the map wasn’t the only thing we thought was lost in the fire,” Ramona said at last.

Humphrey nodded. “I managed to save it. I just couldn’t bear that Nell might not have anything of Tam’s, once she grew up.”

Nell ran her finger slowly over the etched markings again, entranced.

“I wanted to give it to you so much sooner, but I had promised your father—” He sighed. “So, I decided I’d give it to you when you finally quit working for me.”

Nell smiled. “I was never going to quit working for you, Humphrey. Not really.”

Humphrey smiled back, a little sadly. “Yes, you were—your father’s ridiculous scandal be damned. You’re too talented to stay at Classic forever. I wouldn’t have let you.”

Nell rolled her eyes at him in mock frustration the way she always did, hoping it hid the sudden hot, wet prickle in them from the rest of the group. She took the cap off the pen and ran its nib along the back of her hand. The ink came out dark and rich like oil against her skin, even after all this time.

“I had it restored,” he added. “I clean the piston and refill the cartridge every few years.”

“Thank you, Humphrey.”

But Humphrey shook his head. “Please don’t.” His broad, heavy shoulders sagged even farther. “It doesn’t even begin to make up for what I did.”

Nell put a hand on his shoulder. She knew him so well—even when she hadn’t realized it. After everything he’d done for her, both as a kind older brother type when she was a child, and professionally and financially as her boss at Classic, she couldn’t believe he was guilty of something as truly terrible as he thought he was. “Whatever you lied about that night, I’m sure it can’t be as bad as you think.”

Humphrey’s despair only seemed to deepen at her words.

“It wasn’t just that night. I’d been lying to them all for the whole summer,” he finally said.

He looked up at her at last, his eyes big and deep, and welling with shame. But before he could start his story, Francis cleared his throat, interrupting them.

“You’ll have to tell Nell on the way to Agloe,” he said.

Nell turned to him, surprised. “What?”

But Francis wasn’t looking at her. He was leaning against the wall, peering out one of the windows nervously. “We have company. The police are surrounding the building.”