Felix set his plate on the coffee table and leaned back into the couch cushions, trying to put all the pieces together in his mind, but Nell moved in the opposite direction, hopping up and returning to the bigger table in the kitchen, where the gas station map lay, fully unfurled. She waited, her arms crossed, clearly believing she didn’t look as intense as she always did. She was practically levitating, she was so excited.
“Okay, okay,” He laughed, rolling out of his seat.
The night was going a lot better than he’d even dared hope. It was almost just like the old times.
At first, it had taken a Herculean effort to get her to sit down and have some food before they examined the map for whatever she wanted to show him, but Felix had managed to convince her she had to catch him up on the book fair first, and they might as well do that over the meal. It had taken her all of three minutes to eat her pad kee mao, seemingly in one single forkful, as she talked. The only way he’d been able to drag the dinner out to ten minutes so he didn’t get a stomachache was by putting bite after bite from his own plate onto hers to try, until the heat from the chilis finally registered.
“This is good,” she’d said after his fourth or fifth offering, noticing at last. She reached to open the bottle of white wine he’d also brought. “Really good.”
“It’s from a little lunch spot by work,” Felix had replied, smiling. He remembered well how much she liked Thai food, the spicier the better. They’d gone out for it or cooked it at least once a week when they’d lived together. “Office favorite.”
But the food was long gone now. And Nell was so impatient she was shifting from foot to foot beside the map. “Bring our glasses,” she said as Felix sidestepped the coffee table on his way to her, and he obediently grabbed them both by their stems.
“So,” he said, looking down at the all-too-familiar piece of paper. “Setting aside whatever happened with Ramona’s shop, you weren’t able to ask her to confirm Eve’s story, but you think there’s a phantom settlement on this map.”
“There has to be,” she said. “After telling me about how they all came together after so long to get this one to my father . . .”
“Where was the one on the Sanborn copy?” he asked.
“Actually, it was in the Map Division.” She smiled. “There was a little room drawn where there definitely wasn’t one in real life.”
Felix arched a brow. “What are the odds,” he mused.
She shrugged. “It is funny. But you and I both know that main reading room. It’s a perfect square.”
“Yeah. But if that’s the connection, why would a harmless inaccuracy make this one so valuable, and not the Sanborn?” he asked, gesturing at the gas station map.
“I don’t know,” Nell said, but the glint in her eye hadn’t diminished in the slightest. “But maybe figuring out where the phantom settlement is on it might tell us.”
They looked down again and studied the baffling artifact in silence. Slowly, Felix’s eyes drifted back over to Nell, who was twirling a strand of her curls the way she always did when deep in thought. He’d been watching her do it for a long time already, he realized, lost in the familiar, comforting motion.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, before she noticed.
“Eve denied it, but I still can’t shake the feeling that this all had something to do with my mother’s death,” she finally admitted.
Felix frowned. “It was an accident, wasn’t it? The fire?”
“That’s what my father always said, and the newspapers and the old police report. And Eve insisted it was, too. But then why will none of them talk about it? All seven of them were there that summer, in that same house upstate. Why are they all so afraid of this map? And why does this Wally guy want it back so badly? Enough to do these terrible things?”