It was the day of the Junk Box Incident—but I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew something terrible had happened. I could see it in his face.
How old that face was. How creased, and sad, and tired. It had been at least twenty-five years since he’d driven away from our motel with you. I had wondered, in the intervening decades, if I would even recognize any of the others if I ever passed them on the street. Grief can raze a face far worse than ten times as many years. It was one of the things that worried me about Wally the most—by that metric, I would never see him coming for me, if he ever did.
But Daniel I did recognize, somehow. Or maybe I could feel that it was him more than I could see. For the briefest moment when he’d come inside, it had felt as though two people had been there, instead of just one. That Tam was there, too.
We stared at each other in silence.
“Something happened,” I said finally, studying him warily.
He nodded.
I waited for him to tell me what was going on, but he didn’t say anything. I thought he was trying to find the right words, but then I realized as my heart faltered that it was because there were no words. He didn’t need any. There was only one reason he would be here, so many years later.
“You still have it, don’t you?” I whispered. Horrified. Amazed.
Somehow, impossibly, he did.
The last copy of the map.
Your mother had saved it at the same time she’d saved you, he told me once I’d calmed down. She’d tucked it into your clothing before she’d handed you to your father and succumbed to her wounds. He didn’t find it until much later, when he was at the hospital letting the nurses examine your burns. How surprised he must have been.
Your mother managed to save the town after all, with her dying breath—and your father had decided to protect her last secret.
“And Nell found it, didn’t she?” I finally asked.
He closed his eyes and nodded again.
I was dizzy, barely able to feel the ground under me, the way I’d been when I’d seen them all returning to the house, soot-stained, crying, without Tam. Despite everything we’d done to be free of that map and that place, it was going to happen all over again. “What does she know?”
“Nothing,” he insisted. “She was so young. She didn’t recognize it at all. Not it, and not the other maps from our old project I buried it with.” He held the Agloe map out to me like it was hot, still on fire itself. “I tried to convince her it was worthless. I—”
“What did you do?”
“What I had to,” he said. “But I can’t keep it now. If she ever tells anyone, even in passing . . . If Wally ever catches wind of it . . .”
He held it out to me, pleading.
But instead of helping him, I took a step back.
I was just as afraid of Wally as he was—perhaps even more, because I had been the last one to see him that night at the motel. I knew he’d never give up. And I knew the only thing keeping all of us safe from him was the fact that if there was even a single remaining copy of the map out there, it was not with us.
Except it was.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said. “Why did you keep it in the first place?”
I couldn’t figure that out, even years later. That map was the key to an impossible place, and the last thing that had belonged to Tam, but even so, it was not worth the danger, to him or to you. Not with Wally lurking out there. Daniel was the one who had said that in the first place. He was the one who left Agloe, and Rockland, first.
“That’s why I came to see you,” Daniel replied. “I thought out of everyone, you might understand.”