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.”
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.