“Seriously?” Nell gasped, nearly bouncing off her stool.
He turned the phone to her. “See for yourself.”
Nell stared at the screen. “Historical preservationists from Pennsylvania State University will give the keynote lecture on the value of Sanborn maps from a genealogical, urban planning, and political perspective on the first day of the fair,” she read. “Felix, this is it!”
He couldn’t fight down the grin that had spread across his face. “It’s tomorrow, which is really short notice, but—”
“No, it’s perfect!” she said. “I’m sure Swann has a complimentary ticket, like every year. He can just transfer it to me for the day!”
Felix abruptly swallowed the next thing he’d been about to say.
He’d been assuming she wanted to go to the fair together, like old times. He felt the blush creep up under his collar.
“Well, maybe you can’t get Francis to talk to you, but if you show the map he’d intended for Dr. Young to the preservationists, maybe they can tell you why it’s significant,” he finally said, as casually as possible. “Maybe even better than Francis can.”
“Maybe it’s where Francis got the map in the first place,” Nell replied, her eyes still fixed on his screen.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the first scholar in the list of Penn State preservationists.
“Dr. Eve C. Moore?” Felix read.
Nell looked back at him. “One of the other friends in Ramona’s story—along with her and Francis—was named Eve.”
XI
The Park Avenue Armory towered before Nell, a great redbrick behemoth that took up the entire block between Sixty-Sixth and Sixty-Seventh Streets. It had originally been built to function as storage for the Seventh New York Militia Regiment back in 1880, also known as the Silk Stocking Regiment, because so many of its members were from aristocratic families, but as long as Nell had known it, it had been the site of the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair—the biggest and most exciting holiday in her and her father’s little household. The first time Nell attended, she’d been no more than a kindergartner, her tiny hand completely engulfed in her father’s as he led her slowly around the booths, pointing at especially rare or old specimens and explaining how the fair worked in hushed tones. All her life, they’d barely marked birthdays, her father almost always forgot Christmas, and they never participated in Thanksgiving, Halloween, or Easter at all—but every year, they would put on their finest clothes and set out for three excruciatingly long days in the dark pits of the Gothic Revival building, peering closely through magnifying glasses under protectively dimmed light at dusty manuscripts and rare texts and maps until she thought she might go blind.
How she had cherished those trips.
Nell pushed away the memory fiercely and tugged on the hem of her ill-fitting blazer. She’d worn it in the hope of looking more professional, but now she worried that she looked even more out of place.
Or perhaps that was only her looking for an excuse to back out.
No, she told herself. Her heart beat quicker. Her father’s event at the NYPL, when she needed to tell Irene what she’d found, was tomorrow night. She didn’t have time to lose her nerve now.
It was almost as strange and painful to be standing outside the armory, about to enter the annual rare books and manuscripts fair after all this time, as it was to stand outside the NYPL a few days ago, about to enter the Map Division again. When she’d been fired from the library and summarily banished from the cartography field, that excommunication had also included industry events like this. She’d known the day she stumbled out of the NYPL’s huge wooden doors for the last time what would happen if she ever did try to mingle again—at the first mention of her name, researchers would be late for meetings, dealers would suddenly have customers to see, specimens would all become on reserve and no longer available for sale or perusal. She’d seen it happen before to other fallen scholars. Nell had even, regrettably, avoided those people herself, the way her father and Swann had gently instructed her to do, for her own professional protection. She’d never imagined then that one day she’d be on the receiving end.