She fed the second key on the ring into the lock, but it was already unlocked.
“Are we too late?” Eve whispered.
Francis peered in first, then shook his head. “It doesn’t look ransacked.”
They stepped inside, leaving the door cracked in case they needed to make a hasty escape. Classic’s office was high enough compared to the bodega, the laundromat, and the row of sagging three-story apartments surrounding it that the moonlight came in through the windows. The pale glow spilled over the silent, cluttered place, a faint blue.
“Here,” Nell whispered, hurrying over. “My desk.”
She watched Swann take it in and then looked at it herself, trying to see it without all its history. It was smaller than her old place at the NYPL, not much more than a little table jammed next to a radiator, with an old computer and a towering pile of paper that had clearly begun in her in-box but had grown to completely overtake half her workspace. Underneath, she could barely see the hint of her huge tablet of grid paper, where she added her flourishes to the map reproductions assigned to her.
Swann picked up the top package from the stack. “Frederik de Wit 1654 Dutch Maritime Atlas: fake creases, water fade, add sea monster version?” he murmured, reading the project title on the envelope.
“Pirate ships are one thing, but you should see my sea monsters.” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want a kraken on their Ptolemy or their Waldseemüller.”
Swann stifled a chuckle—but there was no haughty disdain, no affront at the inaccuracy, in his eyes as he looked at her work. Just love. He touched the little sea monster on the draft affectionately.
Nell found that she was smiling too, to her surprise. For the first time in her life, Classic’s maps only felt sort of funny, not humiliating. They’d just learned about a secret town and maps to places that didn’t exist. What were a few giant squids or some manual crumpling for age effect on a harmless bit of paper that would make someone happy? Their customers were going to look at her artfully exaggerated product in their living room and feel the same sense of wonder and possibility and adventure that she felt when she looked upon any map in the library’s collection—was that really so bad?
Nell scooted closer and began to sift through the towering jumble of paper with him. “I hid it here before I left—shoved it right into the middle of the mess.”
“What does it look like?” Swann asked, as the others joined to help.
“It’s a plain white Classic envelope,” she said. “No writing on the front.”
Please still be here, she prayed as she dug through envelope after envelope, package after package.
“I don’t see any with no writing,” Swann replied tensely.
“Keep looking,” she said. “It has to be here.”
Please don’t let Wally have found it.
Then suddenly, halfway through the mountain of paper, she pulled a thin, plain white piece of mail from the rest.
Her heart fluttered.
The Agloe map.
It was still safe.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
Carefully, she slid her finger under the flap to open the envelope and took out her father’s map.
The others all drew back a step at the sight of it, both horrified and mesmerized.
“I never thought I’d see it again,” Ramona said.
“I hoped I wouldn’t,” Eve added.
Francis was the first one to come forward. He looked at it intently in Nell’s hands, but made no move to touch it. “But I still don’t understand how Daniel ended up with it. That night, the fire, we lost them all.”