her hide from Cal. When Cal came to the Pommeroy house looking for Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy would tell him she was with Senator Simon, and when Cal asked for Ruth over at the Senator’s, he was told she was at Mrs. Pommeroy’s place. But the island was only four miles long; how long could that game last? Ruth knew that when Cal really wanted to catch her, he would. And he did catch her, one morning at the end of August, at the Ellis Granite Company Store building, where she was helping the Senator build display cases for his museum.
The inside of the Ellis Granite Company Store was dark and unpleasant. When the store was closed, almost fifty years earlier, everything had been stripped from the place, and now it was a gutted, dry building with boards over the windows. Still, Senator Simon couldn’t have been happier with Ruth’s strange gift to him, after the Wishnell wedding, of the key to the padlock that had kept him out of the place so long. He couldn’t believe his fortune. He was so excited about creating the museum, in fact, that he temporarily abandoned Webster Pommeroy. He was willing to leave Webster down at Potter Beach alone to scour the mud for the last elephant tusk. He had no energy these days to worry about Webster. All his energy was devoted to fixing up the building.
“This is going to be a splendid museum, Ruth.”
“I’m sure it will be.”
“Mr. Ellis really said it was fine to make the place into a museum?”
“He didn’t say that in so many words, but after I told him what you wanted, he gave me the key.”
“So it must be fine with him.”
“We’ll see.”
“He’ll be delighted when he sees the museum,” Senator Simon said. “He will feel like a patron.”
Ruth was beginning to understand that a major part of Senator Simon’s museum was going to be a library for his vast collection of books—books for which he had no more room in his house. The Senator had more books than artifacts. So the Senator had to build bookshelves. He’d already planned it. There was to be a section for books on shipbuilding, a section for books on piracy, a section for books on exploration. He was going to devote the entire downstairs for his museum. The storefront would be a gallery of sorts, for rotating exhibits. The old office rooms and storage rooms would have books and permanent displays. The basement would be for storage. (“Archives,” he called it.) He had no plans for the top floor of the building, which was an abandoned three-room apartment where the manager of the general store had lived with his family. But the downstairs was all accounted for. The Senator was planning to dedicate an entire room to the “display and discussion” of maps. As far as Ruth could see, the display itself was not coming along very quickly. The discussion, though, was well advanced.
“What I wouldn’t give,” Senator Simon told Ruth that afternoon in August, “to see an original copy of the Mercator-Hondius map.” He showed her a reproduction of that very map in a volume he’d ordered years earlier from an antiquarian book dealer in Seattle. This insistence of the Senator’s to show Ruth every book he handled, to talk over every interesting illustration, was slowing down considerably the preparation of the museum. “Sixteen thirty-three. You can see they’ve got the Faroe Islands right, and Greenland. But what is this? Oh, dear. What could that land mass possibly be? Do you know, Ruth?”
“Iceland?”
“No, no. That’s Iceland, Ruth. Right where it should be. This is a mythical island, called Frislant. It shows up on all kinds of old maps. There’s no such place. Isn’t that the strangest thing? It is drawn so distinctly, as if the cartographers were certain of it. It was probably a mistake in a sailor’s report. That’s where the mapmakers got their information, Ruth. They never left home. That’s the remarkable thing, Ruth. They were just like me.”
The Senator fingered his nose. “But they did get it wrong sometimes. You can see Gerhardus Mercator is still convinced that there’s a Northeast Passage to the Orient. He obviously had no idea of the polar ice factor! Do you think the mapmakers were heroes, Ruth? I do.”
“Oh, sure, Senator.”
“I think they were. Look how they shaped a continent from the outside in. North Africa’s sixteenth-century maps, for instance, are correct around the edges. They knew how to chart