But there was definitely no shop here.
“What . . . ,” she murmured, stunned.
It was not just that the shop had closed or moved—the door locked and the window darkened, or boarded up—the shop just wasn’t there. Instead a smooth, old concrete wall abutted Nom Wah Tea Parlor on one side and a Western Union bank on the other.
It was as if Ramona’s shop had never been there at all.
You can’t find a place that doesn’t exist.
That was the last thing Ramona had said to her.
“This can’t be happening,” Nell stammered. “It doesn’t make sense.”
She had just been here. Been inside. She had spoken to Ramona and taken the Sanborn map from her. She still had the photo of her family that had come with it in her bag—proof that it had all been real.
With shaking hands, she pulled out her phone, and typed RW Rare Maps into HabSearch. There had to be some explanation. A commercial listing for her company, with contact information, or something.
As the results loaded, Nell began to scroll, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Finally, when she reached the end, she let the hand holding her phone fall to her side as she stared at the old concrete wall again, lost.
HabSearch had plenty of articles about the dealer, opinion pieces about her shady reputation and reports of suspicious sales she’d made, but just one listing for her business, as Ramona worked alone, and thus had only one shop.
It had been marked as closed for years—with no address listed.
XIII
It had started raining in the late afternoon, and the subways were a mess of slick platforms and humid cars by the time Felix left home. As he stood under the awning on the sidewalk, his shirt still a little damp from the drizzle that had caught him as he’d run from the station, he checked his watch and grimaced.
His heart was hammering so nervously, he wondered if it was audible outside his chest.
The buzzer on the building’s entry panel sounded in response to his call, snarling urgently several times before he shoved the door open to make it stop.
This was too much, he thought as he hurried up the stairs. He was overdoing it. This was something he definitely could have let Nell tell him about on the phone, or at the library, or even at another bar. He definitely had not needed to suggest going all the way back over to her apartment again to ask what she’d learned at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. Ahead, he could hear her scrabbling at her lock, probably already halfway through whatever she wanted to tell him, as impatient as ever.
“Come on! I have so much to ask you about modern era copyright. You won’t believe what—” Nell called through her open doorway, almost before he’d even reached the landing of her floor, but she trailed off as she caught sight of him.
Her eyes drifted down, to the umbrella he had in one hand and the giant paper bag in his other, the Thai restaurant’s order receipt still stapled crookedly to the top.
“Oh.”
Felix sighed, embarrassed.
And he also definitely had not needed to bring dinner.
“I still can’t believe it,” Felix said at last, after listening to Nell’s story about Ramona’s missing shop. He was looking at his phone, having found the same baffling information in his cloaked search as she had on the public HabSearch—that the dealer’s shop had actually been closed for years, and there was no record of an address anywhere—especially not at the location Nell described. “And you’re sure the wall wasn’t new, right? Like she’d had the shopfront plastered over?”
“No, it was grimy and graffitied, like it had been there forever,” she replied, flustered. “There has to be an explanation. I must have gotten something wrong, even though I don’t know how that’s possible.”