“You took this photo?” Nell asked.
“No,” Eve replied. “Wally did. He was always carrying that fancy camera around. Spent more time looking at everything through that lens than through his eyes—we used to tease him endlessly about it. But it was just how he was. He liked precision, detail. Photographs were just another kind of measurement, he said. Proof that things were real.”
“Like your friendship?”
Eve didn’t look at her. “Among other things.”
Nell was about to press her for more, but Eve had turned to the Sanborn map. Even though it had come with the photograph, which proved that the map could have come only from Francis, she still expected the woman to study it carefully first—double-check the paper and the ink, compare its individual aging signs to the notes Penn State must have for each specimen—but Eve barely had to glance at it before she was sure.
“Yes,” she pronounced. “This is the one I loaned to Francis, to give to your father.”
Nell watched her as she picked the map up, to put it back in its folder and envelope. As she did so, her eyes passed over the little compass rose sketch on the back of the cardboard—and lingered.
“I didn’t see that before,” she finally said.
“Do you know what it means?” Nell asked, hopeful.
Slowly, Eve nodded. “It’s a symbol for a group called the Cartographers.”
The Cartographers.
Ramona’s and Francis’s warnings rang in Nell’s ears as her mind raced.
The mark was on both maps—the back corner of the gas station map and the folder of the Sanborn. Was it because the Cartographers had owned the gas station map before her father had found it, and this Sanborn map before Eve had loaned it out? Were they much closer on her heels than she’d thought?
“Is it . . . a threat?” she asked.
To her surprise, Eve smiled. “A threat? Not at all. It’s more like a greeting.”
“A greeting?” Nell paused. “From whom?”
“Francis.”
Nell took a step back, alarmed. “Francis is a Cartographer?”
Eve nodded. “So am I,” she said. “The Cartographers were us. All seven of us.”
Nell stared, stunned.
“It was what we called ourselves, back then,” Eve continued. “Like a little club. Your mother made it up.”
“My mother?”
“Yes—and Wally. They invented it sometime in their freshman year, long before I met them all, along with this little symbol. They put it on everything we worked on. Hid it on the backs of our essay pages or in the corners of our drafts. It was cheesy, but we all loved it. We were so young.”
Everything Nell had found out about the Cartographers seemed exactly the opposite of what Eve was saying. How could it be the same group to which her parents had belonged?
“But the Cartographers . . .” She hesitated.
“Broke into the NYPL?” Eve finished for her.
Nell looked up to see the older woman staring evenly at her.
“And attacked your father?”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because it’s true,” Eve said. “Or rather, partially true.”
She looked at the Sanborn map again, and Nell waited for her to continue.
“After the fire that summer, there was no group anymore,” Eve finally said. “We didn’t see each other, didn’t talk. That was how your father wanted it—that was how we all wanted it, really. We thought we had to put it behind us to survive the grief of losing your mother. But Wally couldn’t.”