Somehow, impossibly, they were standing on the sidewalk outside the library, back in the regular world.
Ramona folded up the Sanborn map and handed it to Eve, and the door they’d just come through was gone. Only the silent, impassive exterior stone wall of the NYPL stared back at them, as if they’d simply phased through it.
“Unbelievable . . . ,” Swann stammered, still staring at the side of the library.
A taxi honked as it passed, seeing potential customers, and Nell jumped at the sound. Francis waved it tensely on.
“Come on,” he’d said. Farther down, too far to make out their features, there were still some guests lingering at the main entrance in between the two giant lion statues, giving interviews to a swarm of news crews. “My car’s around the corner.”
The drive had taken hardly any time at the late hour. Once they reached President Street, Francis parked across the way instead of in Classic’s parking lot and killed the engine and lights. They all waited for a few minutes before climbing out, to see if anything moved in the dark. Lieutenant Cabe’s black undercover police car tailing them—or Wally, perhaps. By now, he’d have gone through Nell’s bag and realized that the Agloe map wasn’t inside. He was probably already out there somewhere, searching for her again.
All the more reason to get away from the library before he returned, and to get away from Classic with the map, before he guessed that might be where she would go next.
“I still can’t believe it,” Swann whispered then, as Nell brushed the dirt from the flowerpot off the key. He looked slightly sick with disbelief that the most valuable map any of them had ever come across was currently stuffed somewhere on Nell’s disorganized desk upstairs, completely unprotected. That of all the places the wayward daughter of scholarly royalty could have hidden something of such immense worth, she’d chosen the junk pile of a shoddy, knockoff home decor shop in Brooklyn.
Just before Nell had left her office earlier that evening to go to her father’s event at the library, she’d taken the Agloe map out of her portfolio, put it in a plain Classic envelope normally reserved for customers’ orders, and hid it in the middle of her in-box’s huge stack of projects.
“I know,” Nell whispered back. “But it worked for my father for decades at the library.” A needle in a haystack of junk. If she hadn’t stumbled upon the Junk Box down in the uncatalogued storage basement completely by accident, the map might have stayed buried there forever, safe from Wally.
“Well, let’s keep up our good luck,” Ramona said. “Classic might be an unlikely hiding place, but Wally has always been very thorough. Bear would do everything he could to stop him if he showed up, but . . .”
The possibility of Humphrey upstairs, hurt and alone, seized Nell’s heart. As quietly as possible, she wiggled the key into its lock and let them inside the darkened building.
They crept across the small ground-floor lobby and up the stairs without turning on a light, in case the glare might attract attention. At the landing, Nell led them over to the door to Classic. The chipped lettering on its glass face glinted dully as they crowded in front of it.
CLASSIC MAPS AND ATLASES?
WE CAN MAKE ANY MAP!
“I’ve never been to your office,” Swann said softly.
“That’s my fault,” Nell replied. Even now, with everything that had happened, and knowing who Humphrey really was, she still felt a twinge of embarrassment that Swann, the Director of Collections for the Map Division of the New York Public Library, as well as a professor from Harvard and a preservationist from Penn State, were about to see the type of maps she’d been working on the last seven years, and the life she’d been living since her expulsion from the library. “I kind of wish you didn’t have to come inside now.”
He put a hand on her arm. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said.