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.
“You should have gone after him,” she said.
“You were bleeding, and unconscious,” Eve said softly. “You’re our little Nell. We couldn’t leave you.”
Something passed through the three of them—Francis, Ramona, and Eve—in the silence. They were standing a little bit apart from each other, at a distance strangers would keep—which perhaps they were, after all these years—but the longer they talked, the more the stiffness of their shoulders and the tenseness in their faces began to slowly ebb. There was an undercurrent to their fear now that Nell could just barely see. They were still clearly afraid, but the heart of it, the soil the seed of the fear had grown from, was made of something more like guilt, or shame.
And love, maybe. Trampled and withered.
As she watched them, Nell thought she was finally, truly beginning to understand why things had always been so difficult between her father and her. Why he had seemed to both love her and push her away at the same time.
It was because the closer she got to him, the closer she got to uncovering this secret.
And then when she finally did, that terrible day, the fight they’d had over the Junk Box hadn’t been what she’d believed it to be—the cruel retaliation of a powerful, selfish man who didn’t want his daughter to someday eclipse his reputation. His reaction was not because she’d stumbled onto simple treasure, but something very dangerous. A curse that had stolen her mother and plagued her father for most of his adult life, and the entirety of hers, as well.
He had not been trying to ruin her, but rather to protect her from Wally, in his own clumsy, rough way. And she had been too stubborn to listen.
But the most important question still remained.
She couldn’t say it out loud. Not yet.
She was almost afraid to even think it, as if just the hope alone could dispel its possibility.
“What happened after my mother and Wally found the town?” Nell asked instead.
Francis, Ramona, and Eve all looked down again, and the distance between them grew once more.
Nell waited, resolute. She finally knew the truth about Agloe. There was no reason for them to hide the rest of the secrets from her anymore.
At last, Eve looked up, and cleared her throat.
Eve
Everything fell apart, is what happened. Slowly at first, and then all at once, before any of us could stop it.
That first morning, I was awoken by a commotion in the kitchen. I sat up in bed, listening as several voices echoed from downstairs, frantic, excited. Then the door slammed and a spray of gravel pattered across the driveway as tires peeled out.