“Wait,” he muttered.
He couldn’t find it.
“What was that name?”
“Agloe,” Nell repeated. “A-G-L-O-E.”
He checked the list again.
It wasn’t there.
Nell was hovering even closer to him now, breathless. “Felix,” she said.
“It’s not there.” He looked up and tilted the paper more, so she could see the index better. “There’s no town by that name.”
But there it was, on the map.
A town named Agloe, where no town was supposed to be.
Excerpt, General Drafting Corporation highway map of New York State
They found it.
They really found it.
They stared at the nonexistent place for a few more seconds.
Gently, Nell put her finger over the little white dot, as if she could feel it.
This was the reason Dr. Young had kept this map, all these years, Felix thought. This little phantom town was the secret hidden on it.
“Felix,” Nell said. Her voice was barely a whisper.
He knew what she was looking at.
It was not five miles from where Nell’s mother had died.
Rockland was the last town, real town, that one would pass through going north before they reached Agloe.
Could that be right? How was it possible?
“What does this mean?” she asked. “That over thirty years ago, my father, and mother, and I . . . we lived just a few minutes from Agloe?”
The desperation in her eyes—the need to understand, for him to help her do it—reached right inside and gripped Felix by the heart. He barely resisted the urge to pull her into another hug.
“He tried to call me, Irene said,” Nell finally stammered. “The night he died.”
Felix blinked. “What?”
She touched the map hesitantly again. “It had to be about this.”
Felix didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter. She was up, pacing now. “You don’t want to take a midnight road trip, do you?” she asked. “It would only take a couple hours to get there. If we left now, we could be back in time for a late breakfast.”
Felix frowned. “There wouldn’t be anything there, because it’s not a real place. It’s just countryside.”
“I know. But don’t you want to go anyway? Just to be sure?”
“Nell. Wally broke into the library because of this map, and possibly killed your father, there’s that car you keep seeing, and now Ramona’s one more missing person to add to this list.” He looked back at the map. “The last thing you want to do is head out to some rural field in the middle of the night without a plan. You need the police’s help.”
“But they’ll just—”
“Okay, well then you need the library’s help, at the very least,” he compromised, before she could continue. “Even if this map didn’t originally belong to the NYPL, they can still take it as a private donation from your father, through you.”
“But what if Wally goes after Irene, then?” Nell asked. “He already got to my father.”
“This time, he won’t be able to get in,” Felix replied, suddenly feeling hopeful. “The press release hasn’t gone out yet, but after the break-in, the library board agreed to let Haberson take over database and inventory security there.”