“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Felix said. “If there really is a phantom settlement on this map, maybe it’ll tell us something.”
Nell grinned. She scooted over a little more and carefully angled the map so that it was shared between them. Together, they leaned over it.
“We’re going to have to do this the old-school way,” Felix said, suddenly realizing how big the page actually was. It wasn’t wall-size, but it was still much bigger and more detailed than he’d remembered. It covered all of New York State, and some of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, a dense web of highways and county roads and mountains and rivers, dotted with a million places in between.
“They really spoil you at Haberson, don’t they?” Nell teased.
He smiled sheepishly, because she was right. If only he could just scan this into his Haberson Map. All he’d have to do was run a search, and they’d be finished. It had been a long time since he’d worked like this, completely on paper.
But Nell looked unfazed. “The fastest way will be to go grid square by grid square. One of us will read out every marked town and road, and the other person will check each name against the index,” she said, pointing to the staggering list of towns. “If there’s really a phantom settlement, eventually we should come across something plotted here that isn’t on the list, because it’s not a real place.”
“Eventually,” Felix said, still a little overwhelmed.
“I know,” she replied. She put a tentative hand on his arm—he tried to ignore the tiny thrill in his chest at the feeling of her fingers on his sleeve. “We can do this. It’ll be like old times. All-nighter research binges.”
“We were kids then,” he laughed, but he was already lifting the top corner of the page and hunching over, so he could see the index while keeping the map mostly flat for her. “Ready?”
Nell nodded, and looked at the first grid square. “Damascus. Cochecton.”
“All listed.”
“Fosterdale. Bethel. Kauneonga Lake.”
“All listed, too.”
They worked like that for nearly half an hour, moving swiftly through the grid, falling into old shorthand and remembering how to almost anticipate each other’s next thought. Felix worked well with his team at Haberson, but there was something different about the work when it was all on computers. This was more intimate, more connected.
“Livingston Manor?”
“Listed.”
The wine bottle was long empty by now. He had no idea what time it was. They’d reached section M12, and were almost 80 percent done with the map. They were searching the Catskills area in upstate New York, exploring a huge green diamond of rural landscape and scattered towns. His eyes were exhausted from squinting at the tiny words, but part of him hoped they’d never actually find this phantom settlement—so that they could go on investigating, together.
“Roscoe,” Nell said, pointing at a tiny dot hovering just south of the diagonal line dividing the mountains, along a red ribbon of Highway 17.
“Listed.”
She glanced up at him for a second. “Rockland,” she said softly. The next dot along County Road 206. That was where the fire had happened, Felix knew. The name of the town where the house had been where her mother died.
“It’s listed,” he said, urging her on before she could dwell.
Her finger trailed north. Just before the protected forest lands, another tiny white dot waited right at the intersection of County Road 206 and Beaverkill Valley Road.
“Agloe,” she said.
Felix scanned the list obediently—