The first officer beckoned, and they fell into step behind him, past the conference room, to where her father’s office waited. Nell tried to stay calm, but her heart was racing. She hadn’t set foot in that place since the day she’d run out, pathetically cliché cardboard box full of her things in hand, her life ruined, because of that man. And now not only did she have to go back in, but she didn’t know what waited there.
“Tell me now, then,” she whispered. “Fast.”
She could see that Swann wanted to say more than he was going to, to soften the blow of the news, but he knew her well and knew that she would just want it straight. She finally noticed, with a flutter of panic, just how red and puffy his eyes were, and how hoarse his voice seemed.
“I’m so sorry to say this,” Swann said shakily. “Your father passed away at his desk early this morning.”
What?
Nell blinked, not understanding at first.
“He’s—he’s dead, Nell.”
II
A long time ago, the room in which Nell was now standing had been her favorite place in the whole city. The public areas of the library were breathtaking—she could not deny the almost otherworldly beauty of the rich wood-paneled walls, the gleaming chandeliers overhead, the old windows that loomed from floor to ceiling—but it was the simple, endless archives of the back offices of the Map Division that had secretly kept her heart. The library had been built in 1898, a year that had seemed impossibly long ago when Nell had learned the fact as a child, and contained tens of thousands of books and atlases, and almost half a million sheet maps, in its vast archives. If she had ever believed in magic, here would have been the place where she would have gone looking for it. Even now, it was hard not to imagine that there could be some secret tucked between the pages of an unassuming text, as she ran her hands over the back of her father’s leather office chair and breathed in the musty scent of ancient paper and wood. Every time he’d brought her with him to work in her youth, he’d sat her on its well-worn cushion and promised her in his deep, solemn voice that this office would be hers one day.
She had believed him.
“Heart attack,” the officer said, to draw her attention back. “Or stroke, maybe. It looks like he fell and hit his head on the way down.”
It was an open-and-shut case, they’d determined. Dr. Young had been alone—the security cameras in the Map Division didn’t turn on until the last employee in the department had clocked out, but they had already been running in the lobby since closing time the night before. The only reported movement was from the security guard on patrol, who had been the one to find him when he’d peeked in on his last loop around the library, sometime in the early hours of dawn.
“Age catches up to us all, unfortunately,” the officer concluded.
“Sixty-five?” Swann replied beside her, his voice hitching for a moment. As the director of the Map Division, he’d been not just her father’s boss, but his closest friend as well.
“Pardon?”
“He was sixty-five, I think.”
Nell tried to summon the will to do the calculation. Her father had been thirty when she’d been born, and her own thirty-fifth birthday was just months away. “Yes,” she finally confirmed. Swann squeezed her arm gently.
“Oh. Well.” The officer frowned. It wasn’t old, but it wasn’t so young that tragic accidents like this couldn’t happen either. It could have been any number of things. He had been at his desk late, probably tired, and he’d been having a little Scotch while he worked. He might have lost his balance when he went to stand. Or maybe it had been a stroke or heart attack, like the officer had suggested. He was smiling sympathetically at Nell now, as if waiting for her to burst into tears. Lieutenant Cabe, his name tag said. His utility belt jingled with all of his tools—handcuffs, radio, flashlight, holstered pistol.