Mapmaker

  I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, five minutes, twenty, an hour, when I heard the distant purr of an engine. The speck that appeared in the distance became a forest-green Range Rover speeding toward me. It pulled up in front of the station, and there she was: a vision with that wild blonde-streaked mane and that freckled face I remembered so clearly, shaded by round brown sunglasses and a cowboy hat. The radio blasted some old classic rock song; it was one my father loved, about a woman named Maggie.

  “Get in,” Cleo commanded over the music.

  I hesitated, but then she flashed a smile. It was wide and easygoing, with a little trace of impishness, just as I remembered, too. Her tanned, toned arms gripped the steering wheel. She had on a white tank top and a silver chain with a turquoise star. I stared as I limped toward her, not because I realized then that she was one of the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen—something that had always eluded me about her before—but because I still couldn’t believe she was really here, in front of me, waiting.

  There were so many questions I wanted to ask.

  “I am so happy you did what I’d hoped you’d do,” Cleo murmured before I could utter a word. I crawled in beside her, slamming the door. She lifted her sunglasses and her nose wrinkled. A look of worry set in her eyes. “I want to hear it all. I’ll feed you, too. And I’ll get you in the shower first thing.”

  “Cleo …” I started to speak.

  “Shush.” She took me in her arms, holding me to her. I felt myself sigh, and the sigh turned to tears. “You’re gonna be okay,” she whispered.

  Her eyes went to a flat computer screen on her lap, glowing purple. It was about the size of an iPad but four inches thicker. She held her finger over her lip and I knew not to say another word. I looked behind me, but no one was there.

  “Buckle up.” She clasped the wheel, cranking the radio.

  The car went from zero to forty to seventy. The wind whipped my hair straight out behind me. The Bears hat flew off my head and tumbled back behind us, down the desolate road. She put the computer on my lap.

  “Raise your hand if you see orange or red.”

  “It’s just purple now,” I yelled over the wind and music. I gripped the handle, forcing a smile, even though I felt queasy. I didn’t want Cleo to see me weak, or know that I was afraid of being in a speeding car. Finally, after ten-plus miles, she slowed a little so I wouldn’t have to shout over the wind and music.

  “Now tell me what happened,” she said. “But remember if you see orange or red, stop talking.”

  I took a deep breath. “So what happened was I had a summer job working at MapOut with Harrison’s son, Connor. One night we broke into my dad’s computer to look at his emails. He had three security gates set up but I figured out his code.”

  Cleo smiled. “Good work.”

  “But the next day, Connor wasn’t at work. Harrison found out what we’d done and threatened me. He told me Connor had decided to suddenly go back to Stanford.”

  Her eyes flashed to the computer screen, then back to the road. “Did you hear from Connor again?”

  “Just one weird text saying what his dad said, minus the Stanford part. I guess MapOut is going west, too.”

  “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 …

  I thought of Piri Reis. Maybe it was hearing my dad’s voice. “Can you pull up the satellite image and superimpose it over this map?”

  Cleo took the keyboard and pulled up the satellite imagery, then dropped the map from 1940 over it. The place my father found existed in 1940, but not today. I rolled over the topography in 1940 to 1986. Everything matched up.

  “Okay, let’s get the satellite view from 1987 to today.” Was this a place so remote it had been forgotten? Impossible. Had the climate changed so drastically in the last twenty years it had disappeared into the water, and then resurfaced? Highly unlikely. From 1917 to 1987, the place my father found was clearly marked on the map: a five-mile-by-seven-mile swath of land. There was nothing particularly outstanding about the topography, nothing that I could make out. I squinted, practically putting my nose to the screen, examining every rock, every tree.

  “Sweetie, you’ll ruin your eyes. Lemme help you.” Cleo took the keyboard from me. “Try this one.”

  What appeared on the screen was a perfectly defined, moving image of Denali National Park. Red spots appeared dotted around the glaciers. I knew what they were: body heat from animals and the human visitors.

  I turned to Cleo, finally asking the one question that had been burning inside me since she’d picked me up at the train station. “What do you do?”

  She shrugged.

  “I mean, who do you work for? The government?”

  Cleo cocked her head. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.”