It was the same with the general store at the next stoplight. There was a counter with a cash register, stacks of menus, and a few tables and chairs in the far corner. Even the lights were on.
Nell just stared.
“You see why we had to keep this place a secret?” Wally asked her, hungry, obsessive. “Why we couldn’t let it go?”
He seemed to almost be encouraging her to explore, as long as she didn’t try to make a break for it—he knew she wouldn’t leave Felix anyway. At the diner, Nell went all the way up to the door, and when he made no move to stop her, she nervously pulled it open.
She held her breath and listened. There were no sounds coming from the back kitchen, through the thin swinging doors. No dishes being washed, no pop of oil on a pan, no clinking of dishes or cutlery. But there was a board on the wall listing weekly specials, and a pad and pencil for taking orders beside the phone, as there would have been at a real restaurant in the real world.
Everything was so full of potential—the shops waiting for customers, the traffic lights over the intersections changing from green to yellow to red—it seemed like at any moment, someone would push open the door of the convenience store across the street and walk out carrying a sandwich and a can of soda, or someone else might pull into the parking lot and head into the gas station to pay to fill up their tank.
But there was no one. There hadn’t been since the night the town had swallowed her mother up, and they all believed the last map had been lost with her.
Nell waited until Wally wasn’t looking and turned over the top page on the pad of paper at the hostess stand, mystified.
How was it possible?
Had Wally realized yet? she wondered as she darted back out of the diner to the street. Had he also noticed all the things that were somehow now here, that shouldn’t be?
“Nell,” Felix whispered to her at the next corner.
She turned to see him looking across the road, where there was a gap in the buildings. A space where there should have been something built, but instead there was just sunny, unbroken sky. The exteriors of the two shops on either side were feathered with faint black marks along their corners. And between them, a scorched floor, a foundation peeking through, and blackened walls.
Wally’s vault.
There were the skeletons of shelves, some still upright, some sprawled across the ground, but they were all bare, the delicate maps they once held all burned completely in the blaze. There was nothing left. Not even bones.
Wally, however, was not looking at the vault at all.
He was staring straight ahead, down the road they were heading, every fiber of his being avoiding the ruin of ash, as if that would mean it wasn’t there, and the fire had never happened. But even though he refused to look, Nell could still tell that he was in the grip of that horrible, inescapable memory. She could almost see the reflection of the flames still dancing in his eyes.
He marched them stiffly on, past more empty streets and more empty buildings. Nell caught sight of a bookshop with books in it, lonely on the shelves, and a drugstore, with an advertisement for toothpaste on a sign outside. As they passed the main square and the sunlight glinted off a large pane of glass across the park, she thought she recognized another place.
“The ice cream parlor,” she said, pointing.
Wally stalled in his tracks, surprised. He looked at the ice cream parlor and then back at her. “You remember it?” he asked.
She didn’t. She only knew it from Ramona’s, Francis’s, and Eve’s stories. But she nodded anyway.
Wally seemed both saddened and pleased by that. After a moment, he let them go up to the big front window.
“All our maps used to hang here,” he whispered. He touched the glass, hesitantly at first, as if he was afraid there would be nothing there. But the glass was real. He left little dots of fingerprints across its face.