“General Drafting suspected that the bigger companies were stealing their data?” Nell asked.
“Yes,” he said. “They were convinced that Rand McNally and H.M. Gousha were simply copying their maps instead of conducting their own land surveys, so they could catch up and put out their own editions faster. General Drafting was desperate, and at a loss as to how to prove it.”
Hide a lie inside the truth, Eve had said.
“Agloe,” Nell prompted.
Francis nodded. “The founder, Otto G. Lindberg, and his assistant Ernest Alpers, invented and hid, within their map, an entire town that didn’t exist. They placed it deep in the Catskills, at the empty intersection of two deserted roads, and told no one. It’s a combination of their initials—A-G-L-O-E—Wally was the one who figured that out.”
Nell nodded, seeing it was true. “What happened then?”
“Soon after General Drafting’s map was released, someone saw a draft of Rand McNally’s own edition of the same area, about to go to print—and Lindberg and Alpers were stunned to find Agloe on their rival’s map in the same place. Their copyright trap had worked. Lindberg and Alpers called their lawyers and told them to file the suit, ready to accuse Rand McNally of stealing their data instead of conducting their own research, because Agloe wasn’t real. Then, wanting to waste no time gathering evidence, they hired a photographer and drove out to that empty county road intersection in the wild Catskills where they’d planted their phantom settlement, ready to claim their victory.”
Nell waited, expecting him to continue, but Francis fell silent.
“What happened?” she finally asked.
“The case was filed, but then it disappeared just as quickly. Dropped, or settled. The files were hidden, records erased.”
She blinked. “That’s . . . that’s it? That’s the end of your story?”
But Francis shook his head. “That’s the beginning.”
Nell watched her father’s old friend intently, struggling to understand what he was saying. He seemed to be trying to figure something out about her as well, based on her reaction.
“You didn’t go there, did you,” he said. “To Agloe.” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact.
She paused. “Well, no,” she admitted. “I had wanted to when I figured it out, but it was already dark, almost midnight. The drive would have taken hours. But it’s just a phantom settlement. There would have been nothing there but a road, or a field, anyway.”
Francis nodded slowly. “That is how the place appears to most people, yes.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘most people’？”
“Locals who know the area well or any travelers passing through using the GPS in their phones to navigate,” he replied. “Basically, anyone not using a copy of the 1930 highway map that Tam and Wally found—which is almost everyone.”
Nell stared at him, confused, her suspicion rising. “I think I understand even less now,” she said.
“Before the internet, rumors didn’t get passed around as quickly as they do now, and little drive-through towns don’t normally get much attention to begin with,” Francis continued. “But eventually, and despite Wally’s desperate, obsessive attempts to crush any mention of the map, cartography enthusiasts started realizing that there was rare, scattered chatter about a little town in that same area of the Catskills, by the same name—Agloe. Some said they were sure they’d passed that place as they’d driven through on their holidays, seen it from the road as clear as day, and the rest, including longtime residents of nearby towns, insisted that there was nothing but an empty field when they drove by every day, as it had always been.”