“But where”—Nell hesitated—“where is he?”
“Heavens, Nell,” Swann cried. “Did you think you were going to have to identify him here at his desk?”
She shrugged and cleared her throat awkwardly. “I guess I did. I didn’t really know what to expect.”
“We wouldn’t make you do that,” Lieutenant Cabe said. “We try to prepare the remains first. Lay him comfortably, fix his clothes.”
Nell nodded, not knowing what else to say. All she could think was, It’s not like he cares. Or I do, either. She was grateful he hadn’t passed violently, she guessed, but now that he was gone, she didn’t think it would be any more traumatic to have seen him for the first time in nearly a decade slumped next to his desk than laid out on a cold, stainless-steel table. In fact, the desk probably would have been better. More natural. How many times had she peeked into his office and seen him napping in nearly the same way, leaned over in his chair, with his forehead against the polished wooden surface? She thought he would have preferred it, too.
Or would he? She hadn’t been back to the library in a long time, but this was not the way she remembered the esteemed Dr. Young’s office. Her father thought of himself as an artist, but not in the chaotic, inconsistent way of tormented painters and musicians. The study and making of maps demanded an organization and precision in line with the most technical of fields: the meticulous record keeping, the endless research, the calculations to ensure absolute accuracy. He had always kept his space so pristine, it sometimes reminded Nell more of a science lab than a museum curator’s office.
Today, however, it looked like the ruins of a building ravaged by a tornado.
Dr. Young had always kept his records filed neatly in the cabinet behind his leather chair, but they were open now, their contents dumped around the room. Aside from the corner of his heavy oak desk where the police had stacked their evidence bags, every surface was covered in papers—flying loose, wadded up, torn apart, scattered out of order—so much so that it was impossible to walk through the room without stepping on one. The texts in the bookcase had been similarly yanked from their shelves and strewn about with a carelessness that stunned Nell. For her father to treat an atlas like this, especially ones as old and rare as these, was unthinkable.
“You’re also in the field?” Lieutenant Cabe interrupted her quiet study of the office at last.
Nell tore her eyes away and turned to him. “I work as . . .” She paused. “I reproduce maps.” It was as far into it as she wanted to go.
He smiled. “Like father, like daughter.”
She tried to smile back and failed. Nothing like that at all. If one had been able to ask him, Dr. Young would have said that nothing could have been further from cartography than Classic. It pained Nell that she had to agree.
But now whose fault was that, that she’d ended up there, after such a promising start to her short-lived career?
“We were hoping to ask you some background questions,” Lieutenant Cabe continued, oblivious. “Just for the official file.”
“I won’t be much help,” she mumbled.
“Sure you will,” he replied encouragingly. “You’re family.”
“I haven’t seen him for seven years.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.” But the notepad was still out in his hand, the pen still poised. She heard the implication in what he’d said. You’re family. His only family.
Nell sighed.
If there was anything more tragic than the disgraceful demise of Nell’s career, it had been the untimely end to her mother’s: Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young.
She had died when Nell was no more than a toddler, and it had been Nell and her father ever since. Nell did not remember her, not beyond just a flickering moment or two, but she hardly needed to—Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young had been even more famous than her father in their world, and had done it in such a short time. Words like visionary and peerless were always placed before her name in articles about her, and the list of awards and honors bestowed upon her, and the places where her work continued to be cited, even so long after her death, was dizzying.