“Anything for you, my dear,” he said. “Now, we need somewhere safe to keep it in the meantime. Bring the map back here, and—”
“No!” she cried. “The library is the least safe place for it.”
“But security will be double for weeks!”
“Yes, double. Which means just barely inadequate instead of woefully inadequate,” Nell said. “And now the burglars will be watching like hawks for any change. The minute I bring you the map, they’ll strike again.”
“So, you want to keep it . . . at your apartment? In a completely unsecure location, with no security whatsoever?” Swann fretted.
“I want to keep it in a place the burglars would never think to search, because they have no idea it’s there,” she replied.
“Are you not the most logical assumption though?” Swann asked. “‘Dr. Daniel Young’ entered the item into the NYPL database, and now he’s dead, and you’re his daughter . . .”
“It actually might be the perfect cover,” she said. “Anyone who knew my father well enough to know he had a daughter also knows about the Junk Box Incident. Knows that the two of us hadn’t spoken a single word to each other since.”
And now we never will, she thought.
Swann frowned. “You do have a point,” he admitted. “It might be a good hiding place for now. But if the burglars do figure out you have the map . . .”
“We better work quickly, then,” Nell said.
II
The Map
V
It was almost too dark to see, but Nell kept the curtains drawn and all the lamps turned off anyway, hoping to hide the fact that she was home.
She triple-checked the door lock, and then returned to where the map was spread across her coffee table. Outside, on the street below, she could hear the faint sound of a kid on a skateboard rattling by. The clock read seven thirty in the evening.
After finishing her discussion with Swann, Nell had wandered out of the NYPL in a daze, nearly bumping into a black Audi sedan oddly parked along the same curb where taxis pulled up to let passengers out for the library. It stuck out darkly in a river of yellow, pristine except for the paint slightly rusting around the edges of the wheel wells, an odd blemish given the luxury brand of the car.
On her way home, anyone who had stepped too close or paused too long as she passed sent a bolt of fear through her—followed by an equal bolt of embarrassment. She was not in danger. No one was following her. No one knew she had the map. Despite the coincidences so far, she technically didn’t even know for sure if that was really the reason for the NYPL breakin. In the moment, standing amid the chaos, seeing the librarians huddled nervously together and hearing the chatter and blare from police radios, everything had seemed so dangerous, so urgent. But in the fresh evening air, kicking stray leaves on the sidewalk as she made her way to her apartment, it all seemed less certain and more circumstantial, at best.
Then Nell had seen another black Audi, idling at a stop sign on the street before her own. She had no idea if it was the same one—could that be rust on the wheel wells, if she squinted?—but it didn’t matter. The next thing she knew, she was upstairs in the dark, trying to figure out if her landlord would evict her for prying up a floorboard to hide her map beneath.
Her map. She was thinking of it as hers already.
Nell turned on the flashlight in her phone to see it better. Cold light crept across the pale, weathered paper, seeming to make the roads come alive. The thin lines danced, shifting one way and then another.
If the burglars had taken the Buell, or the Bingham Early Brooklyn map, which hung on the adjacent wall above the colonial artifacts, or even one of the atlases from the rare books shelf collection, Nell would have understood. The last time one of the Buell’s seven other precious copies had come up for auction at Christie’s upon the death of its private owner, generating a bidding war so frenzied it had come to blows in the gallery, was twenty years ago. The Chatham family’s copy hanging in the NYPL could be worth almost two million on the market, now. Maybe even a little more.