The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(19)

She gave him a sideways glance, wanting more than ever to tell him about the letter, to bring him into the fold.

“Remember Isaac’s typewriter?” she blurted.

Gregory was focused on making the next exit. “Of course.”

“The one with the sticky keys?”

“Sure, not that it ever stopped him from using it.”

“Isaac had it fixed.”

“I know.”

Hazel turned. “You know?”

“I fixed it.”

“When?”

“A couple years ago. I tried to fix it long before that, actually, when I was at Claremont. An engineering professor asked us to repair a broken machine for our final exam. The math thing wasn’t working out, and I wanted to impress Isaac, I guess.” Her brother’s expression soured, as it often did when he hit on the topic of mathematics. “I took the whole thing apart but only made it worse and almost failed the class. So about two years ago, I thought I’d redeem myself.”

After a pause, he asked, “Why?”

“No, it’s just . . . nothing.” An idea was forming in her mind.

“I guess I’ve never really lived down those four years,” he continued. “It only made things worse that my name was Severy. May as well have been Hawking or Kepler.”

“Please, Eggs,” she said, invoking her old nickname for him, chosen for the bratty reason that her brother disliked eggs, and it vaguely rhymed with his name. “You have to be a genetic freak to be a Severy. A person has the same chances of being born a Bolshoi ballerina or an albino—”

“Not all mathematicians are freaks,” he interrupted. This was an old argument of his. “Some just have a head start in life.”

“Well, you’ve turned into a fine detective,” she said, changing the subject. “Not to mention an excellent typewriter repairman—it works perfectly now.”

He frowned. “So you were using it?”

“Oh,” she said, stalling. “I was poking around his office and took it out to play with. Nostalgia, I guess.”

“Anything else of interest?”

But his question seemed far away, muffled, because a more compelling question now demanded her attention: If Gregory fixed the typewriter years ago, why were there mistakes in Isaac’s letter? The answer came to her in an instant, as if Isaac had whispered it into her ear. “Because the mistakes were intentional, my dear.”

Hazel tapped at her window urgently. “Can you pull over here? Bathroom break.”

“We’re blocks from the airport.”

“I really have to go.”

Gregory sighed and cut across a lane. He pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot while Hazel searched for Isaac’s letter through the pockets of a ridiculous rolling bag that Bennet had given her, her initials stamped conspicuously across the front. Tucking the letter in her purse, she made her way to the overcooled McDonald’s bathroom. She unfolded the note on top of a hand dryer and, with a pen, examined the lines carefully, underlining all words with redundant letters, including the stuttering comma:

,,,

theeee

Cottte d’Azurrr

onn

pleassantt

offf (of)

ttthe

SSShore

“The C?te d’Azur on pleasant of the shore,” she muttered. It was almost a sentence, but it didn’t sound like much of a clue or directive. C?te d’Azur—“coast of blue”—the French Riviera. She hoped he wasn’t sending her on a European treasure hunt. He couldn’t expect her to go jetting around, digging holes along the Mediterranean. She tried rearranging the words: “On the shore of the pleasant C?te d’Azur . . .”

Hazel startled herself by setting off the hand dryer, and it was at that moment that something about the words clicked. A smile spread across her face, and she laughed out loud. She refolded the paper, slid it into her purse, and practically ran back to the car.

“Everything all right?” Gregory asked. But she could see that his concern was forced, the muscles of his jaw working to contain his irritation. “It’s been, like, fifteen minutes.”

“I know. Sorry.”

She climbed in, rapidly thinking of an excuse not to get on that plane. She apologized again and found herself saying that she’d left her wallet at the house. She would have to reschedule her flight.

“Brilliant. You have a ride tomorrow?”

“I’ll figure something out. I’m really sorry.”

Gregory made several sharp turns until they were headed back north on La Cienega Boulevard. Hazel adopted the frustrated expression of a traveler who’s just left her ID at home, but to herself, she silently recited the first line to one of her favorite books, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night—the first eight words of which Isaac had planted in his note expressly for her to find:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

Almost immediately, her shiver of delight at having cracked her grandfather’s puzzle turned to a small, quaking fear. Now that she could see Isaac was leading her somewhere, how could she let go of his hand?

*

As they eased their way up the switchbacks of the canyon, their cousin Alex came into view, striding long-legged down the hill, cuffs in the dust, camera slung across his chest.