Nell ran her finger slowly over the etched markings again, entranced.
“I wanted to give it to you so much sooner, but I had promised your father—” He sighed. “So, I decided I’d give it to you when you finally quit working for me.”
Nell smiled. “I was never going to quit working for you, Humphrey. Not really.”
Humphrey smiled back, a little sadly. “Yes, you were—your father’s ridiculous scandal be damned. You’re too talented to stay at Classic forever. I wouldn’t have let you.”
Nell rolled her eyes at him in mock frustration the way she always did, hoping it hid the sudden hot, wet prickle in them from the rest of the group. She took the cap off the pen and ran its nib along the back of her hand. The ink came out dark and rich like oil against her skin, even after all this time.
“I had it restored,” he added. “I clean the piston and refill the cartridge every few years.”
“Thank you, Humphrey.”
But Humphrey shook his head. “Please don’t.” His broad, heavy shoulders sagged even farther. “It doesn’t even begin to make up for what I did.”
Nell put a hand on his shoulder. She knew him so well—even when she hadn’t realized it. After everything he’d done for her, both as a kind older brother type when she was a child, and professionally and financially as her boss at Classic, she couldn’t believe he was guilty of something as truly terrible as he thought he was. “Whatever you lied about that night, I’m sure it can’t be as bad as you think.”
Humphrey’s despair only seemed to deepen at her words.
“It wasn’t just that night. I’d been lying to them all for the whole summer,” he finally said.
He looked up at her at last, his eyes big and deep, and welling with shame. But before he could start his story, Francis cleared his throat, interrupting them.
“You’ll have to tell Nell on the way to Agloe,” he said.
Nell turned to him, surprised. “What?”
But Francis wasn’t looking at her. He was leaning against the wall, peering out one of the windows nervously. “We have company. The police are surrounding the building.”
Lieutenant Cabe! His officers must have run her records and figured out where she worked after they found no sign of her at the library or her apartment. “We have to get out of here,” she said.
Just then, a storm of flashing red-and-blue lights and the keening wail of sirens overwhelmed the office.
“How?” Swann asked. “There’s only the front door and the fire escape, but that ladder would put you right down in front of their cars!”
“Helen Young!” a megaphone boomed. “This is the police. We have you surrounded!”
They all leapt into action, ducking away from the windows. Humphrey ran for his office, and Nell spun around, scanning the room for any possibility. Could she use the big vent in the bathroom to escape? Or should she hide in the closet? Or maybe go to the roof? And then what?
The sirens peaked. “Come out with your hands up!”
The sound of paper rustling startled her, and she turned around.
“Here,” Humphrey said, coming back out of his office. He held up the single sheet he’d pulled out from a notebook that had been in his office. “This will get us out.”
It was another map—a zoning diagram of Crown Heights from the 1970s done in a city planner’s clean, shaded lines, with Classic and its adjoining buildings visible.
“These other stairs will take us straight out to the back, where there will be a parking lot,” he said, pointing at their office.