The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(54)
He looked back at the note, which now made him ill. Gregory had been in love with Sybil for as long as he’d known her, since they were children. He had been in immediate awe of this fairy-tale girl, who looked as if she’d just emerged from a haunted wood yet walked around Los Angeles as if she were just another person. It was only after she’d gone away, gotten pregnant, and married Jack—“a massive mistake,” she confided to him—that she realized she loved Gregory, too. She was supposed to have left her husband, just as he was to have left Goldie. That was the plan. She had concerns, naturally, about breaking up their families and about Gregory’s short temper, but for that brief moment in time, she had wanted to be with him.
She had been right, of course. He was an angry man. When exactly had he become this way? When had he become the person who held rage so perilously close to the surface? Gregory looked back at the house, his eyes singling out a window near the ground. It was a small, miserly pane of glass that allowed only a spear of light to pierce the darkness below. He wished he could set fire to that space, with Tom locked inside. He could imagine the resident cockroaches skittering across Tom’s skin to escape the flames. Yes, Gregory’s life would have looked very different if it hadn’t been for the germ planted so early, a seed nurtured with a steady compost of maltreatment and indifference. It was Tom, not Sybil, who deserved to die.
Gregory held the lighter to the note until it caught fire. He dropped it into the pit and watched spirals of smoke pull themselves up and up, turning paper and rope into anonymous airborne particles. When the flame died and the smoke straightened, he stirred the ashes with the bolt cutter until there was no evidence that these objects had existed at all.
–?18?–
The Dead Man
On the Saturday she was to meet the man with the dead professor’s name, Hazel could hardly sit still or hold a conversation. This was a problem, as in the days since Sybil’s funeral, Goldie had become increasingly attached to her. Wherever Hazel was in the house, her sister-in-law sought out her company, desperate for dialogue with someone other than a two-year-old.
Gregory was gone every day, slipping out for work before Hazel got up and returning home close to midnight. This was just the way of things, Goldie explained over daily cocktail-hour therapy. “He’s so overworked.” Her sister-in-law’s frustration at having married someone who couldn’t talk about his job came out in ever-increasing doses. “And who could expect him to after what he does all day?” Goldie asked. “But where does that leave me and Lew? This is the life I chose, I guess.” Hazel listened and tried to appear sympathetic, not letting on that the deep furrow between her brows was for her brother, not Goldie.
What surprised Hazel most was just how much she enjoyed spending time with her nephew. With each passing day, as she learned to play Lewis’s games and decode his peculiar chatter, her protective feelings toward him magnified. But she suspected these were less maternal instincts and more a creeping fear connected to that fatal dot on the map.
During the first week of her stay, Hazel had woken up in the middle of the night with a deep anxiety about that third dot. She hadn’t remembered dreaming about it, but she had the sudden need to see it. Slipping into the laundry room, she found the iron and began to gently steam the two stubborn paper dots apart. When they started to loosen, she pulled up an edge with a pair of tweezers. Slowly, the figures beneath revealed themselves through bits of adhesive: 110115001146. Though the ink was a bit smudged, these numbers were clearly identical to the first dot: November 1, just after midnight, the time of Sybil’s death. At first Hazel felt relief, taking comfort in the idea that Isaac had simply pasted over the smeared digits with a more legible version—in which case, there was no danger of another Beachwood Canyon death. But if this dot was redundant, where was the third death promised by her grandfather?
Hazel wasn’t about to monitor the entire family’s movements, but she felt a supreme unease stalking up on her, like the growing momentum of a sinister machine. Besides this, she felt completely snared by indecision. She knew that if she didn’t get back to Seattle soon to pick up the sodden pieces of her business, the Guttersnipe was done. But what about this invitation from a self-described friend of Isaac’s? What about the hotel room? Having already visited room 137 again, there seemed nothing left for her to do there, though the front desk called her daily. Having given the hotel her phone number, she received multiple voice messages inquiring how they might contact Mr. Diver now that his phone had been disconnected. A clerk claimed there was new demand for the space and requested an early deposit for December of $2,700. Well, that certainly explained Isaac’s bank statements. “Will he be paying in cash as usual?” the clerk asked. She didn’t know what else to do but stall with false promises to pay.
At two o’clock on Saturday, an hour before Professor L. F. Richardson would be waiting for Hazel at the La Brea Tar Pits, Goldie suggested they take Lewis to the beach. Hazel begged off the trip, making a lame excuse about having to meet an old friend.
“Oh,” Goldie said, visibly disappointed. “Can I drop you somewhere?”
“No, no. I’ll drive,” Hazel said, grateful that she’d had the foresight to take Isaac’s Cadillac on the day she fled the Beachwood house.
When Goldie’s Prius was gone, Hazel locked up and started in the direction of the Cadillac. Competition for street parking had been fierce, and she’d had to leave it under the shade of a magnolia two blocks from the house. As she was about to cross the street, she stopped short. A man sat in the driver’s seat, his face obscured by the reflection of trees and sky. She stepped behind a streetlamp, her heartbeat increasing. Had this L. F. Richardson found her? But when she took a second look, she recognized the hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. It was her brother.