“Right,” Daniel agreed, humoring her, trying to figure out where this was going.
The sun grew brighter as Wally drove, casting everything pale pink instead of gray. Tam alternated between urging him to go faster and trying to explain to us what was going on.
“I had everything in my lap,” she was saying, pointing to the bundle of junk she’d grabbed from the counter before leaving the first time with Wally. Beside me, you were bouncing excitedly in your car seat at the prospect of a field trip. “The other set of car keys, receipts, and this.” She held up the gas station map.
“Tam,” Wally said again, even weaker this time.
She unfolded it and spread it across the steering wheel, so she and Wally were both looking at it. “On the way back from the store, as we were talking, I realized that we were passing right through the same area where we’d found that little phantom settlement on this map the night before. ‘Where had that place been, along this road?’ I asked Wally. ‘Which tree or patch of weeds had it accidentally marked as an entire town?’ We laughed about it, and before I knew it, I was holding the map out like this for both of us, so we could see where exactly this town was supposed to be, and what it really was instead. What if the spot was a huge bush of poison ivy? Or a cow standing in its corral? I thought being able to tell everyone what it was would make another funny story for tonight.”
Suddenly, the car began to slow. Wally, his lips pressed together and his eyes on the paper, flicked on the hazard lights. We edged toward the shoulder of the road.
“I know how this is going to sound—I know!” she cried, anticipating our wary stares. “But if you open this map, and you follow it instead of the road . . .”
She kept it splayed open and pointed out the window as the car finally stopped. Her expression was so full of amazement. So alive. I felt like I could see straight down into her soul through her eyes.
“Just look.”
We looked, expecting to see just pure, unbroken field.
But this time, somehow, just in front of our car—where I’m certain there had been nothing before, or we would have noticed it, it being the only thing we’d seen for miles—there was a tall, thick, wooden pole jutting straight out from the grass, with a big metal sign affixed to it. And just past it, a small turnoff that continued as a dirt road.
“Huh?” I murmured, before I could stop myself. “That wasn’t here before.”
Wally turned off the car, and everyone got out.
“Was it?” Daniel asked, looking at Wally, since they’d come up in the same car yesterday. He looked as baffled as I felt. “Did we just not see it because we were tired?”
Slowly, Wally shook his head.
I stepped forward and inspected the sign. The nails were long rusted, and there was a fine layer of grime on the face of the metal itself that clearly indicated it hadn’t somehow been put up in the single day we’d been at the house.
It was old. It had been there all this time. And it also definitely had not been.
And the name on the sign matched the name on the map.
Welcome to Agloe
Home of the famous Beaverkill Fishing Lodge!
Slowly, we turned to peer beyond the sign, out across the field behind it.
“What the . . . ,” Daniel murmured, transfixed.
“I told you,” Tam said, breathless. “I told you.”
Nell, I know how all this sounds, but I swear it’s true.
The town is real—if you have the map that shows the way. Your mother and Wally discovered it.
And it killed her.
XV