The Cartographers(5)

She had believed him.

“Heart attack,” the officer said, to draw her attention back. “Or stroke, maybe. It looks like he fell and hit his head on the way down.”

It was an open-and-shut case, they’d determined. Dr. Young had been alone—the security cameras in the Map Division didn’t turn on until the last employee in the department had clocked out, but they had already been running in the lobby since closing time the night before. The only reported movement was from the security guard on patrol, who had been the one to find him when he’d peeked in on his last loop around the library, sometime in the early hours of dawn.

“Age catches up to us all, unfortunately,” the officer concluded.

“Sixty-five?” Swann replied beside her, his voice hitching for a moment. As the director of the Map Division, he’d been not just her father’s boss, but his closest friend as well.

“Pardon?”

“He was sixty-five, I think.”

Nell tried to summon the will to do the calculation. Her father had been thirty when she’d been born, and her own thirty-fifth birthday was just months away. “Yes,” she finally confirmed. Swann squeezed her arm gently.

“Oh. Well.” The officer frowned. It wasn’t old, but it wasn’t so young that tragic accidents like this couldn’t happen either. It could have been any number of things. He had been at his desk late, probably tired, and he’d been having a little Scotch while he worked. He might have lost his balance when he went to stand. Or maybe it had been a stroke or heart attack, like the officer had suggested. He was smiling sympathetically at Nell now, as if waiting for her to burst into tears. Lieutenant Cabe, his name tag said. His utility belt jingled with all of his tools—handcuffs, radio, flashlight, holstered pistol.

“But where”—Nell hesitated—“where is he?”

“Heavens, Nell,” Swann cried. “Did you think you were going to have to identify him here at his desk?”

She shrugged and cleared her throat awkwardly. “I guess I did. I didn’t really know what to expect.”

“We wouldn’t make you do that,” Lieutenant Cabe said. “We try to prepare the remains first. Lay him comfortably, fix his clothes.”

Nell nodded, not knowing what else to say. All she could think was, It’s not like he cares. Or I do, either. She was grateful he hadn’t passed violently, she guessed, but now that he was gone, she didn’t think it would be any more traumatic to have seen him for the first time in nearly a decade slumped next to his desk than laid out on a cold, stainless-steel table. In fact, the desk probably would have been better. More natural. How many times had she peeked into his office and seen him napping in nearly the same way, leaned over in his chair, with his forehead against the polished wooden surface? She thought he would have preferred it, too.

Or would he? She hadn’t been back to the library in a long time, but this was not the way she remembered the esteemed Dr. Young’s office. Her father thought of himself as an artist, but not in the chaotic, inconsistent way of tormented painters and musicians. The study and making of maps demanded an organization and precision in line with the most technical of fields: the meticulous record keeping, the endless research, the calculations to ensure absolute accuracy. He had always kept his space so pristine, it sometimes reminded Nell more of a science lab than a museum curator’s office.

Today, however, it looked like the ruins of a building ravaged by a tornado.

Dr. Young had always kept his records filed neatly in the cabinet behind his leather chair, but they were open now, their contents dumped around the room. Aside from the corner of his heavy oak desk where the police had stacked their evidence bags, every surface was covered in papers—flying loose, wadded up, torn apart, scattered out of order—so much so that it was impossible to walk through the room without stepping on one. The texts in the bookcase had been similarly yanked from their shelves and strewn about with a carelessness that stunned Nell. For her father to treat an atlas like this, especially ones as old and rare as these, was unthinkable.

“You’re also in the field?” Lieutenant Cabe interrupted her quiet study of the office at last.

Nell tore her eyes away and turned to him. “I work as . . .” She paused. “I reproduce maps.” It was as far into it as she wanted to go.

He smiled. “Like father, like daughter.”

She tried to smile back and failed. Nothing like that at all. If one had been able to ask him, Dr. Young would have said that nothing could have been further from cartography than Classic. It pained Nell that she had to agree.

But now whose fault was that, that she’d ended up there, after such a promising start to her short-lived career?

“We were hoping to ask you some background questions,” Lieutenant Cabe continued, oblivious. “Just for the official file.”

“I won’t be much help,” she mumbled.

“Sure you will,” he replied encouragingly. “You’re family.”

“I haven’t seen him for seven years.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.” But the notepad was still out in his hand, the pen still poised. She heard the implication in what he’d said. You’re family. His only family.

Nell sighed.

If there was anything more tragic than the disgraceful demise of Nell’s career, it had been the untimely end to her mother’s: Dr. Tamara Jasper-Young.