Despite still recovering from his shock, the words brought a faint, proud smile to Humphrey’s lips. “You were always going to be the best one of the bunch, if you ask me. You blow them both out of the water.”
“Humphrey, please,” Nell replied, a little flush rising to her cheeks. “And don’t you start, either,” she said to Swann, who was nodding in agreement with Humphrey.
“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.”