Could it be . . .
All of a sudden, the emergency alarm began to clang.
The door to the Map Division slammed open as the room was pitched into a flashing red and white kaleidoscope of light, causing Nell to jump at the sudden glare.
“Nell!” Swann cried, rushing for her. “There you are!”
“What’s going on?” she shouted back. His eyes were wide and terrified—she had never seen him like this. Not even after the break-in. “Is someone trying to rob the library again?”
“It’s the police,” he said. He grabbed her as if to shield her from something with his own frail body. The alarms wailed, deafening. “One of the donors went looking for Irene, and they found her in her office. She’s, she’s—”
Nell thought she was going to faint.
“She’s been murdered.”
“NYPD!” a loudspeaker in the lobby blared suddenly. The squeak of so many pairs of shoes on the marble floor pierced through the moments in between the alarm’s repeating scream. “Everyone stay where you are! No one leaves this building!”
“We have to get you out of here,” Swann said.
Nell blinked, still in shock. “Why?”
His grip on her arm grew even tighter, more desperate. “I heard one of the officers as they came in—you’re the prime suspect, Nell.”
What?
Swann went to the door, urging her to follow him, but she couldn’t make her feet cooperate. “How . . .”
“I don’t know! Maybe you were the last person the other guests saw speaking to her. But Lieutenant Cabe was here before the event even started. I saw him parked down the street in a black undercover car—”
“A black car?” she gasped. “That car has been following me for days!”
Swann looked horrified. “Maybe someone put an idea in their heads, to throw suspicion on to you. Told them that you’d come back after all this time, right after your father died, and then the break-in happened just after—”
Nell faltered.
It was Wally who had cast suspicion on her, somehow. It had to be—who else knew that the Agloe map even existed?
He was here.
Swann was right, they had to run, but where could they go? There was only one door out of the room, and the hallway led right back to the lobby, where the NYPD was swarming. She’d be spotted for sure. Everyone knew who she was.
Including Wally.
“Nell. Oh my God.”
He was no longer looking at her, but just over her shoulder, at the back wall of the room.
“Look.”
Just then, the door to the Map Division burst open again right next to Swann, and Nell braced, expecting the police, but it wasn’t officers. Felix? she hoped—but it was Francis, with two other people following him. Too much was happening for her to think clearly. Irene, the police, Swann panicking, the blaring alarm.
“Nell!” Francis called. He was lunging for her. “Look out!”
Swann was shouting for her to run too, but Nell could hardly move. Faintly, she realized that she was standing near the place on Eve’s Sanborn map where its drafter had long, long ago hidden his secret little room in the floor plan.
Something blurred in the corner of her vision as she turned. A shifting, an opening. A door appearing in the wall where there should have been nothing but smooth paint.
Suddenly, someone else was standing behind her.
Finally, Nell did open her mouth to scream—but no sound came out before the blow.