The Cartographer's Second Map

Tracie found out about the money on a Thursday. Two days before the wedding.

She hadn't been looking. That was the sick part. She'd logged into the joint savings account to check the caterer's final payment, and the balance just wasn't there. Not low. Gone. Forty-one thousand dollars, gone, and a string of withdrawals she never made.

She sat on the kitchen floor with her laptop and clicked through three months of statements. Eddie's name on every transfer. His startup, the one he talked about at dinner like other men talked about sports. It hadn't been running on investor money. It had been running on her wedding fund.

And her signature was on two loan documents she had never signed. The handwriting was good. Not good enough. She'd signed her name maybe a hundred thousand times in her life and she knew her own loop on the T.

"Tracie?" Eddie's voice came from the doorway. He was thirty-four and handsome in a way that photographed well. "Why are you on the floor?"

"Where's the money, Eddie?"

He didn't ask what money. That told her everything before he opened his mouth.

"It's a bridge," he said. "It's temporary. The Series A closes in March and I'll put it all back plus interest. You're making this weird."

"Weird." She stood up. Her legs worked, which surprised her. "You forged my name. On loans. With my social security number."

"It's our wedding. It's basically our money anyway."

She laughed. She couldn't help it. It came out of her like a cough.

"The wedding was paid for, Eddie. The deposits cleared in October. You took a wedding fund that was already spent and you spent it again."

He looked at the counter instead of at her. "You were going to say no to the second round of funding. I know you. You'd have talked me out of it."

"You didn't ask."

"No. I didn't ask!"

She'd been with him four years. Engaged for one. She kept waiting for the other shoe, the affair, the telltale lipstick or hotel receipt, because that at least she'd have understood. This was worse. This was quieter. He'd looked at her for four years and seen a line of credit.

"Is there anything else?" she asked. "Before I find it myself. Anything else I should know."

He thought about lying. She watched him think about it.

"There might be a card," he said.

The wedding was Saturday. It was Thursday morning. She called the venue at seven in the morning and canceled it herself, before he could get there and charm them into a postponement. The woman on the phone was kind about it. Then Tracie called her sister.

"You canceled it?" Her sister's voice went up half an octave. "Without a scene? Without throwing cake?"

"There's no cake yet!"

"Tracie. Hon. You are allowed to make a scene. I would make a scene. I'd make two scenes."

"I don't want a scene. I want to not be there."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

That was mostly true. She had a gig lined up, sort of. A publisher had emailed three weeks earlier about a rush job. A memoir, ghostwritten, for some photographer who'd gone quiet after a famous career and wouldn't come to the city for interviews. Remote location, coastal, the kind of place with one road in. The pay was good and the deadline was brutal and she'd said maybe. Then Eddie's money made the decision for her.

So she said yes to the publisher from a motel parking lot, on the phone, at eleven at night, and packed the Subaru in the morning while Eddie was at the office pretending everything was normal.

She left a note. It said one sentence. She'd rewritten it six times and the sentence won: You should have asked.

Then she drove north. And north. And more north.

The coast road was supposed to be two lanes the whole way. It was, mostly. Then it wasn't. Then it turned to gravel, then to gravel with potholes, and the Subaru started making a noise she'd never heard before, a grinding knock from somewhere low and left.

"No," she told the dashboard. "No, no, not today!"

The dashboard did not care. The knock became a clatter, the clatter became a bang, and the engine died with a shudder somewhere between mile marker signs she couldn't read. She coasted onto the shoulder and sat there with her hands on the wheel.

Fog. Trees. A gray ocean somewhere off to the left, she could hear it. No houses. One road. Her phone had one bar, flickering.

"Okay," she said out loud. "Okay. Walk."

She locked the car, took her bag, and walked. Twenty minutes. Then a sign appeared out of the fog like a gift. COSTA'S AUTO, it said. OPEN. Under that, hand-painted, TOWING AND MORE.

"And more," she read. "Great. I need all of it."

The shop was a wide metal building with two bay doors, one open. Inside, a radio played something with a fiddle in it, and a big man in coveralls was under the hood of a pickup. He was maybe fifty-five, gray beard, arms like bridge cable.

"Hello?" she called. "Hi. Hello?"

He slid out and looked at her. "You the one with the Subaru? Blue one, about a mile back?"

"How did you know that?"

"Wasn't hard. You're the first car that's come through since Tuesday." He wiped his hands on a rag that was already hopeless. "Heard you coast in, or heard you stop, anyway. Sound carries in the fog. What's it doing?"

"It made a noise and then it made a worse noise and then it stopped making noise entirely."

He snorted. "That's a honest description. Come on, I'll take a look. I'm Costa."

"Tracie."

She followed him back in his flatbed truck, which smelled like diesel and old coffee, and they found her Subaru sitting forlorn on the shoulder like a dog that knew it had done something wrong. Costa popped the hood, listened to her describe the noises, and did things she didn't understand with a flashlight.

"Timing belt let go," he said finally. "And when a belt lets go on one of these, it takes valves with it. Maybe just valves. Maybe worse."

"Is it days or weeks?"

"Parts. This far out, parts is the whole game. I can have one here in three days if the warehouse in the city has it, four if it doesn't." He straightened up. "You got somewhere to be?"

"I have somewhere to be in four days. A cabin, up the coast. Past here."

"Whose cabin?"

"A writer. A photographer, I mean. I'm writing his book. Or I'm going to. That was the plan before my car staged a protest."

Costa gave her a look. "You wouldn't be talking about Tilly. Up past the point?"

She blinked. "You know him?"

"Everybody knows him. Or knew him. Nobody sees him much now. Used to be his pictures in every magazine at the gas station. War stuff. Then his wife got sick and, well." He shrugged. "He's been up there alone three years. Dog, cabin, fog. That's the whole story as far as we get."

"He has a dog?"

"Golden retriever. Big goofy thing. Comes down to the store sometimes, walks himself back, which is a trick, but that dog's smarter than half the town." Costa closed the hood. "Three days, best case. Where you staying tonight? There's the motel in town, if you call it a motel. Six rooms, one of them's decent."

"Is yours the decent one?"

"Nope. Mine's got the leaky faucet. That's Kimmy's." He grinned. "I'll tow you in, no charge for the tow, and you can sleep on it."

"Costa. Thank you. Genuinely. My whole life just detonated yesterday and my car picked today to join in."

"That so?" He looked at her with something like sympathy, careful not to ask. "Well. Fog lifts eventually. Mostly."

He hooked up the Subaru and they rode back into town in the cab of his truck, the radio fiddling away, and Tracie watched the gray buildings come up out of the fog and thought about four days in a place with one road, with her bank account drained and her wedding called off and a book to write about a man nobody saw.

Her phone buzzed. Her sister.

"How's the road?" her sister asked. "Did you make it to the middle of nowhere yet?"

"The car died in the middle of the middle of nowhere."

"Of course it did. Of course. Is there a mechanic? Please tell me there's a mechanic and not just a man with a hammer."

"There's Costa. There's a shop. Three or four days."

"Four days. Alone. In a fog town." A pause. "You know what, that might be exactly what you need. Or a horror movie. Fifty-fifty."

Tracie laughed, a real one this time. "That's about how it feels."

The motel was six rooms in an L shape, and the office was also somebody's living room. Kimmy took Tracie's cash without much ceremony and handed over a key on a fob shaped like a fish.

"Costa called ahead," Kimmy said. "You get the good shower. Don't use the good towel for your hair."

"Understood," Tracie said, because it felt like the kind of order you followed.

The room was small and clean and smelled like nothing, which after a night of motel coffee and panic felt like luxury. She unpacked the one bag that mattered, the one with her laptop and the folder of Tilly's press clippings, and set it on the desk like a dare. Then she sat on the bed and didn't write anything.

Her sister texted a thumbs up, a car on fire, and a shrug. Tracie sent back a fish.

In the morning the fog was so thick the window might have been painted gray. She walked to Costa's shop with her laptop bag because it felt safer than leaving it in the room. Costa looked at the bag, then at her.

"You planning to work here?"

"I'm planning to not write in a room with a good towel I'm not allowed to use. Do you have a chair?"

He had a chair. It was an office chair with one armrest, parked in the corner of the office next to a parts catalog from some year she didn't ask about. She sat down and opened her laptop and wrote nothing again, but with better posture.

Around ten a customer came in for wiper blades and a conversation. Around eleven Costa asked her to read him a part number off the screen because his glasses were in the truck. Around noon he said, "You going to sit there all week?"

"Probably."

"Huh." He went back under the pickup.

By Tuesday, and she was fairly sure it was Tuesday, she had answered the phone eleven times, written down four appointments, and talked one man out of replacing a fuel pump that was, per Costa's grunted verdict, fine. The man had wanted to be talked out of it. Everybody wanted to fix things, out here. It was the only thing to do in the fog.

Costa didn't thank her, exactly. He started making two cups of coffee instead of one.

"Your Subaru's parts come tomorrow if the truck runs," he said Wednesday afternoon. "Which it might not, in this."

The truck did run. But the fog that came with it was something else, a gray so thick the streetlights came on at two in the afternoon and the store's sign glowed like a landing strip. Tracie was alphabetizing invoices, a job nobody had asked for, when the dog walked in.

Not through the door, exactly. Through the open bay, big and yellow and wet, with his tail going like a metronome. He crossed the whole shop, put his enormous head on her knee, and sighed.

"Oh," Tracie said. "Hello."

"That's the famous one," Costa said from under a car. "He comes down when the store lady's got day-olds. Must've smelled the donuts on your jacket."

"I had one donut. Two days ago."

"Well. He's an optimist."

She gave the dog nothing, because she had nothing, and he forgave her instantly, which was more than her ex-fiancé had managed. She scratched his ears. His fur was cold and damp and he leaned into her hand with his whole weight, which was considerable.

Then the bell over the door rang and a man came in, and the dog's tail stopped, and so did she.

He was tall and weathered and looked like he hadn't slept properly in a while. Forty-three, maybe. Gray at the temples. A flannel jacket with salt stiff in the seams. He had the dog's leash looped over his shoulder, unused, which told her the walk-to-town thing was a joint performance the dog tolerated.

"You got him," the man said to Costa. Then he saw Tracie and stopped, the way people stop when they walk into a room they thought was empty.

"He's not mine," Costa said. "He adopted your author there."

"My author," the man repeated.

"You'd be Tilly," Tracie said, and stood up, and put out her hand, and realized too late she'd been alphabetizing invoices all day and her hand smelled like pen. He took it anyway. His grip was careful, like she was something he'd photographed before and didn't trust to still be there.

"You're the one the publisher sent," he said. "I told them I wasn't doing it."

"They told me you told them that. I came anyway. I'd apologize, but my car's in your mechanic's bay, so I can't even leave."

He looked at her for a second, and she braced for the dismissal. She'd been getting a lot of those lately and had developed a tolerance, like for cilantro.

Instead he said, "The Subaru?"

"Timing belt. And valves. And possibly a personal grudge."

"Costa's good," Tilly said. "She'll live." He looked down at the dog, who had transferred his devotion to Tracie with embarrassing speed. "Traitor," he told him mildly. "Fine. Come up Thursday. If the car's ready Friday, you can drive it up and stay however long you told them you would. If it's not, you'll figure out the bus, which runs Saturday, if it runs."

"That's it?" she said. "You're just agreeing? I had a whole speech."

"I could hear you practicing it through the door. It needed work."

Costa laughed under the car, a hollow boom off the metal. Tracie decided she liked Tilly against her better judgment, the way you like a cold swim. Uncomfortable but bracing.