Mapmaker (18 page)

“And it was weird, you say? Weird how?”

“The way it was written, it was off. It was …” That word floated back through the recesses of my memory, the word Beth had used, the word that had come back to me in the coffee shop while waiting for a boy I’d never see again. “Unhinged.”

Cleo nodded. “Okay, we’ll come back to that.” She chewed her lip, staring out at the highway. “What else?”

The rest tumbled out in a confused jumble: the last night at MapOut, Alison and the men who drugged me; Harrison saying “Alaska” over the computer; finding my way to her. I checked the computer screen. Still purple.

“What’s Alaska?” I asked, once I could catch my breath. Cleo hadn’t interrupted once. “What’s it code for?”

“It’s not code.”

“Oh.” I swallowed. My face felt hot even with the wind blasting. I wasn’t sure if I were embarrassed or just frustrated. How many miles had I spent trying to decode it? On the other hand, those hundreds of meaningless acronyms probably saved what was left of my sanity. I would have succumbed to panic if I hadn’t kept occupied. I would have probably attacked that creepy guy with the leather jacket, even though that’s probably all he was: a creepy guy with a leather jacket.

“Your dad discovered a ‘black spot’ in Alaska,” Cleo explained. “A place that doesn’t appear on any maps or any satellite imagery. There’s a reason it can’t be mapped, and that’s what your dad was trying to figure out.”

“I thought he was working on something in Cambodia. I thought, you know, that’s why he had to go there. On the work trip when he died.”

“Cambodia?” She flashed a bitter smile. “That was all a smoke screen, a lie. Tanya, he never even went there for work. He disappeared. The same way you would have disappeared if you hadn’t escaped.”

The blue sky and grey road blurred together. My vision
felt as if it were dimming. Something rose in my throat. “Can you slow down, please?”

“Sorry, sweetie, of course.”

Cleo eased back on the gas. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but the nausea passed, leaving something less than emptiness. It was the same hollow, numb sensation I’d felt when I first heard the news of his death. It was worse. It was as if he’d died all over again, just now. I stared out at the flat desert.
How had they killed him? Was it Alison or the smoker? Did they shoot him point-blank? Did he beg for his life? Did he think about me?
I squeezed my eyes shut.

I felt Cleo’s hand on my shoulder.

“Why did you take my call this time?” I breathed. “I mean, why didn’t you take it when I called you last week?”

She hugged me close as she drove. “You called from MapOut last week. This week, you called from my local train station. Big difference. Not to mention, there’s an APB out for your arrest.”

“Right. Harrison.” I spat the word. “He’s behind all of this, isn’t he? He’s the one who wanted my dad dead.”

Cleo shrugged, placing both hands back on the wheel. “I’m not so sure it’s that simple. There was a time in his life when Harrison loved your dad. I don’t think he’s calling the shots. I think they have him by the balls. They have something he wants or needs and he’s their puppet.”

“Who are
they
?” I asked, baffled.

“That’s what your dad and I were trying to find out, sweetie.”

Something didn’t fit. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Harrison was just someone else’s stooge. He was too smart, too cunning. “Do you know if my dad and Harrison ever fought over anything?” I asked. “I mean, did he tell you?”

She flashed a brief, sad smile. “Boots.”

I frowned. “What?”

“The winter before last, Harrison bought the exact same kind of hiking boots as your dad. I don’t know why, but your dad lost it. That was when your dad and I really started digging. I’d never heard him so pissed off. It was like the final straw, working with this slick guy who slipped on a different personality to suit whatever occasion. He wanted the new investors to think he and Michael were peas in a pod, these rugged outdoorsmen, like he was just as passionate as Michael about mapping the land with his own eyes …”

I’d stopped listening.
Boots
.

It all came flooding back. I saw a bird’s-eye view of a trail of boot prints in the snow behind our house. Rage flashed through me, rage at Harrison for fooling me into forgetting that my father was dead that awful winter’s day. It was Harrison who’d snuck onto our property, Harrison who’d broken into my dad’s shed looking for something, Harrison who’d played that cruel trick. Of course it was.

Cleo slowed the car, turning south off the highway onto a gravel road. The sun was high overhead. “Tanya, what is it?”

“Just trying to figure things out,” I said, my jaw clenched.

“Tell me about the email that Connor sent. The weird one.”

I recited it word for word; I knew it by heart. “ ‘Sorry I didn’t get a chance to say bye in person. Going back to California was a last-minute decision. MapOut needs a West Coast office space and they needed me to find it. I might not be exactly where I want to be but I’ll keep looking. Your dad was an inspiration to me the way Perry Reese was to him. I know you understand. Hope the rest of your summer goes well.’”

Cleo nodded. “What struck you as weird?”

“All of it. He spelled Piri Reis wrong, for starters. And the thing about not being exactly where he wanted to be—he made this huge point of telling me on my first day at MapOut that he would make sure he’d be exactly where he wanted to be for the rest of his life, because my dad inspired him. Which was why he wanted to go to Tanzania,
not
California. Which I would have known. The whole thing … it was just
fake
.”

“Yup. I agree,” Cleo said without missing a beat.

I glanced at her. My hand gripped the armrest as we bumped along the increasingly rough road. “You do?”

“Connor isn’t in California. He’s being held against his will. His captors told him to contact you, either to assuage your concerns or to suss you out, or both. He was clever enough to send a hidden message. My guess is that he knows what happened to your father now, too. It’s all in there: he’s not where he wants to be, and something is wrong.”

For some reason, I wanted to hug her. Where was this freakish hope and happiness coming from? This was the worst possible news. But then it occurred to me: I’d first suspected as much. Connor wasn’t a creep. Connor was a victim, like me. And something else also hit me then, too: Harrison
was
too smart to be a stooge. And too strong. Whoever “they” were, they couldn’t influence or control him with money. For all of Harrison’s middle-aged, Porsche-driving, Armani-suited, second-tier model-dating persona, the one real thing in his life was his love for Connor. That was their weapon.

“I think that they frightened Harrison when they killed your dad,” Cleo continued as if reading my mind. “But it wasn’t enough. They needed to find his Achilles’ heel.”

“Connor,” I breathed.

“So, did you text him back?”

I nodded, more ashamed than ever of what I’d written. “I pretty much told him to screw off.”

“Then the kidnappers showed up?” Cleo asked.

“Yeah. Fifteen minutes later.”

She whistled and her lips curved downward. “You are a very brave girl, you know that? But right then, you let them know your position. You were expendable at that point and a confirmed threat. My guess is that they wanted to interrogate you at a secure location, just to make sure exactly what you knew, and then dispose of you. I’m sure they were planning to use that as more ammunition against Harrison, too.”

Dispose of me?
The words left me numb. In Cleo’s world this probably happened all the time … People were disposed of, like garbage.

I didn’t want her to see my face as I turned away. What had I gotten into? My hands felt cold. I squeezed my eyes shut. I wished I could just be whisked away to my home, my
true
home. I wanted to be in my room with Bootsy, my mom downstairs in the kitchen, my dad in his office. I wanted to go back in time and stay there.

Cleo spun left off the gravel onto a dirt road, where a group of houses were clustered together around a communal vegetable garden. Sunburned half-naked children played between the houses. Chickens roamed inside a large coop; wet laundry hung from yards of clothesline. Fifty feet of southward-facing solar panels reflected the noonday sun. Her house was the last one in the cul-de-sac: white clay with a red-tiled terra-cotta roof.

We jerked to a stop. She rushed around to my side to help me out.

Two large mutts greeted us with barks and wagging tails.

“Good boys,” Cleo cooed as they followed us into the house.

It felt cool inside. I slumped down at the kitchen table, while Cleo heated up a pot of soup on the stove. She stepped outside to pour me a glass of water from a pump well. It tasted so pure, so clean. Back in the kitchen, she took a small brown bottle from the shelf.

“Stick out your tongue,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Arnica. It’ll help the swelling.”

The drops tasted like alcohol. She told me to prop my foot up on a chair, then wrapped an ice pack around my swollen ankle. The smell of chicken soup filled the kitchen. She poured me a large bowl and carried it over to me. It was steaming hot, full of carrots, potatoes, and kale. After the ice-cold water and the bitter medicine, the hot liquid going down my throat was the best thing ever.

“Did you make this?”

Cleo sneered. “No, I ordered it from FreshDirect.”

“What I meant was … Is this one of your chickens? In the soup?

“What do you think, they’re just pets? Get real, honey.”

I almost smiled. This was the Cleo I knew, the Cleo my dad had fallen in love with—not in a physical way, in a familial way, an eternal way. A thousand more questions gnawed at my brain, but I ignored them for now. I wanted to savor this feeling I’d forgotten, this feeling of being me, of being safe.

After the soup was gone, I took a long nap in a spare bedroom with daisy-print sheets. Then Cleo led me to her outdoor shower, made of cedar wood. I grasped the metal pulley and hot water poured over me. I lathered up with soap, washed my hair twice and rinsed. I felt a thousand times better. Back in the bedroom, Cleo had laid out some clean clothes. A pair of jeans, underwear, and a faded pale green sweatshirt of hers. They fit me, sort of; she was just a little taller so I rolled up the cuffs and sleeves. I never wanted to see the Alton sweatshirt again.

There was something else on the bed: a silver gun. Did she mean to leave it for me? I looked around the room, noticing something else. There were pictures, family pictures, but Cleo wasn’t in any of them. A diploma hung on the wall, not from MIT where Cleo had gone to school with my dad. The diploma was from the University of New Mexico and the name on it was Patricia Jones.

What was Cleo hiding? Who was she hiding from?

The sun was sinking in the west as I walked into the kitchen. Cleo was feeding her dogs a mixture of rice, carrots, and vegetables. I took a pen from a jar on the table and wrote in the corner of a newspaper.

Can we talk?

She shook her head. “How’s your ankle feeling?”

“Better, sort of.” She handed me another ice pack and I wrapped it around my ankle.

“I want to introduce you to my neighbor Bill,” she said with a wink.

Cleo led me to the house next door. From the outside it looked identical to hers. Through the windows I caught a glimpse of a reading chair and a lamp on a table. She didn’t knock or turn the handle on the door. Beneath the window box was a pad; she pressed a series of numbers, and the door opened. The first thing I noticed was the sound, the hum of generators. There was no reading chair, no lamp. The window projected a false image.

In the spare windowless chamber, Cleo sat down in front a large-screen computer. Her fingers moved quickly over the keypad, typing in a series of codes. I sat down on a stool beside her. The smell in the room reminded me of being inside an airplane cabin. Soundproofing material covered the ceiling and walls. An image appeared on the screen: glaciers and rocks. It was a home video; you could hear the sound of footsteps and see the movement of the camera, and then I heard my dad’s voice off screen. It was the first time I’d heard the sound of his voice since he died.

I stared, mesmerized, holding my breath.

“This is what your dad found,” Cleo said.

“I don’t get it. Is it Alaska?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t exist on any satellite imagery or maps. The only way to see it is to physically be there.”

“Maybe it’s so remote that Google Maps hasn’t bothered to get to it yet. I mean, it’s not exactly Times Square.”

Cleo clicked on a second image. Denali National Park, a scene from satellite imagery. She zoomed, uncovering the whole landscape. “See what happens here?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Right. It’s been erased.”

I examined the image of grey-and-blue topography. “Let me see that,” I said. I took the keyboard and googled maps of Denali National Park. It was founded in 1917. I studied the earliest maps. I then superimposed the most defined satellite imagery over it, starting in 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002 …