The Cartographers(4)
A jolt of electricity went through her as she entered the Map Division. It was like resurfacing from a dark, cold lake into life. The air became warmer, the colors brighter, the sounds sharper. The reading tables waited, waxed wooden surfaces gleaming, and the shelves around the walls beckoned, bursting with relics. Sunlight, nearly blinding, streamed in through the huge windows. It took a moment for Nell to get ahold of herself.
It was so strange to be back again, after so many years. She had almost managed to block it out. To stop missing it so acutely. Every detail, every moment.
Just beyond the main reference desk, the unobtrusive side door marked Staff Only waited. She paused with her hand on the knob.
Just do it, she admonished herself. Her hand wavered. Get it over with.
Nell didn’t really know what to prepare herself for, but the scene on the other side of the threshold was not it. She’d been bracing for chaos and shouting, like the day of the Junk Box Incident, she realized as she waited awkwardly in the quiet, half in and half out of the door.
It wasn’t just quiet, it was utterly silent, she thought. She’d never seen the back offices this deserted.
After a few seconds, the door started to slowly close on her before she snapped back to life and leapt clear.
“Hello?” she called softly.
“Oh,” another voice answered. “Just a moment!” A librarian not much older than Nell poked her head out of the first office, surprised.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m trying to find Swann,” Nell said. She didn’t recognize the woman, which meant she must have been hired after Nell had left. “Do you know what’s going on?” The police hadn’t told her anything on the phone, just ordered her to come.
“There’s been—” the woman paused. “Well, we don’t quite know yet. But it looks bad.”
“Ma’am?” Nell looked up to see a police officer appear out of the conference room partway down the hall, and his partner behind him. “Are you an employee here?”
The librarian was staring at Nell more intently now. “Oh my,” she said. “You . . . you’re Dr. Young’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Nell admitted. “Helen Young. Nell.”
Her face darkened. “I’m so sorry, but all this”—she gestured to the stillness—“this is about Dr. Young.”
Nell stared for what felt like an eternity, trying to discern the answer in the woman’s face.
What had he done now?
Her father had always been an uncompromising, unstoppable force. It was what made him the best at what he did while also making him impossible to love. Had he attacked a colleague’s work? Disagreed over the provenance of a new specimen? Quarreled with the board, even?
“Whose life did he ruin this time?” she finally managed.
“If you could come with me,” the first officer replied.
From within the conference room, a familiar figure burst into the hall behind the other policeman. “Nell!”
“Swann!” she cried.
Her heart clenched. She had missed him! He’d been the director of the Map Division for decades, but he had been so much more than that to her, too. An uncle, a mentor, a friend. And he looked the same, even seven years later—tall, impossibly slender, wispy white hair—just like an actual swan. The sight of him brought tears to her eyes.
“Ma’am, please—” the officer near him started, but Swann had crossed the hall in three steps on his long legs and swept her up into a bony hug before she could move.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he said as he released her, his hands still on her shoulders. “I was hoping to pull you aside before you got here and tell you privately.”
The first officer beckoned, and they fell into step behind him, past the conference room, to where her father’s office waited. Nell tried to stay calm, but her heart was racing. She hadn’t set foot in that place since the day she’d run out, pathetically cliché cardboard box full of her things in hand, her life ruined, because of that man. And now not only did she have to go back in, but she didn’t know what waited there.
“Tell me now, then,” she whispered. “Fast.”
She could see that Swann wanted to say more than he was going to, to soften the blow of the news, but he knew her well and knew that she would just want it straight. She finally noticed, with a flutter of panic, just how red and puffy his eyes were, and how hoarse his voice seemed.
“I’m so sorry to say this,” Swann said shakily. “Your father passed away at his desk early this morning.”
What?
Nell blinked, not understanding at first.
“He’s—he’s dead, Nell.”
II
A long time ago, the room in which Nell was now standing had been her favorite place in the whole city. The public areas of the library were breathtaking—she could not deny the almost otherworldly beauty of the rich wood-paneled walls, the gleaming chandeliers overhead, the old windows that loomed from floor to ceiling—but it was the simple, endless archives of the back offices of the Map Division that had secretly kept her heart. The library had been built in 1898, a year that had seemed impossibly long ago when Nell had learned the fact as a child, and contained tens of thousands of books and atlases, and almost half a million sheet maps, in its vast archives. If she had ever believed in magic, here would have been the place where she would have gone looking for it. Even now, it was hard not to imagine that there could be some secret tucked between the pages of an unassuming text, as she ran her hands over the back of her father’s leather office chair and breathed in the musty scent of ancient paper and wood. Every time he’d brought her with him to work in her youth, he’d sat her on its well-worn cushion and promised her in his deep, solemn voice that this office would be hers one day.