The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(83)

I won’t go into detail about how I stumbled upon your particular murderous streak among all the homicides of Los Angeles, but I can say that I was hoping it was some grave mistake, some miscalculation on my part. I was devastated to find that my calculations were, in fact, accurate.

Grieved by my own mathematics, imagine!

Why didn’t I turn you in? Maybe knowing too much about your unkind upbringing has been my weakness—my own son is the reason for so much of your pain, and for that I feel responsible. Though how your lovely sister was able to rise from the ashes of her youth without vengeance, I do not know.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t stop you myself—after all, my foreknowledge of these events did allow me to stake out the scenes of your “accidents”—my only defense is this: I dare not tamper with chaotic predestination. We don’t yet know the consequences of doing so.

The mathematics must be obeyed, whatever its end.

I will, however, indulge in this mild tampering: I have included newspaper clippings—proof for your records of what you have done. Perhaps seeing them all in one place will convince you to rethink this peculiar habit of yours.

In other news: my own death has no doubt come as a surprise. I’m sorry if I’ve given you and the family a shock, but it was my time to go. The math has told me so, and I go willingly at the time and place given me.

So after enjoying my favorite breakfast and the pleasures of my morning bath, I will wait patiently for my assassin. If one doesn’t arrive as expected—guns blazing—I will proceed to plan B. I call it Christmas in October.

Don’t bother looking for my work—you won’t find it. The equation itself, I entrust to the one they will least suspect.

I wish you and this murderous city—whose only saving grace, perhaps, is its mathematical grace—my best regards, whatever that’s worth.

Much love,

Isaac

Hazel’s eyes fogged over. They had been right about her grandfather’s death after all. The police—everyone—had been right. The angel of death had appeared to Isaac in the form of an equation, and he had followed it to his own demise.

She felt a strange relief in knowing the truth, however painful it was to see on the page. But this feeling was followed quickly by something else: fear that all her efforts had meant nothing. If she compared the letter Isaac had written her with the one she now held in her hands, his sanity would be difficult to defend. His letter to Gregory was, in fact, a suicide note. There had been no assassin; he had not been killed for his equation. So what about his letter to her? Had it been merely a paranoid entreaty she had been foolish to take seriously? Was the death map some kind of clever mirage? Had she, Alex, and Raspanti been trying to decipher the raving semaphore of a lunatic?

There was, however, one strange similarity between the letters: a nearly identical phrase that gave her a kind of hope. Hazel reread the letter’s final paragraphs, focusing on the sentence: The equation itself, I entrust to the one they will least suspect. She had always assumed that she was the one he had been referring to, but then little with Isaac could be taken at face value. As Alex had suggested, the hotel room and its contents had been a devious misdirect to keep those like him occupied. Isaac had intentionally misled her. She had merely been a decoy, and the equation—the true equation—was still out there, safely concealed. But if Hazel wasn’t the one they would least suspect, who was?

*

Hazel pulled Tender Is the Night from its place on the shelf, where she had returned it on Halloween. She flipped it open, though she didn’t know what she could be looking for that she hadn’t found already. The Polaroid bookmark was still in place: the playful image of Isaac scribbling a series of prime numbers on a mirror. She wondered idly who had taken the picture, and when. She had been so focused on her grandfather’s eyes the first time she looked at the photo that she’d failed to notice the reflection of a camera and tripod at the edge of the mirror, but with no visible cameraman behind it. Perhaps it had been on a timer.

Then she spotted something else. Between the red-inked numbers 59 and 61, in a fragment of reflected silver, was a second pair of eyes staring back. They belonged to a face she knew well, and Hazel now saw that Isaac had been writing the numbers for this face to see—a lesson in primes. The eyes stared at the mirror with the intense interest of someone absorbed in memorization.





–?28?–


The Brother


When Philip finally awoke, nearly his entire family was waiting for him, even his sister Paige. He blinked, reached out for Jane, their eyes both filling up.

Whatever the reason for Philip having lived and his brother having not—spooky mathematics, determinism, or just the stupidity of chance—Philip had only very narrowly survived ingesting an entire bottle of migraine medication. His wife, having found him that night at the falls after spotting his discarded clothing along the trail, had tried and failed to get cell phone reception in the canyon. So she sprinted back to the nature center, broke a window, and phoned an ambulance. Jane then recruited two hikers—who, as it happened, had passed Philip on the trail earlier—to help carry his limp body back to the trailhead. When the paramedics arrived, they went to work on him immediately. Jane’s speed had saved his life.

“I’m sorry,” he managed to croak.

“Don’t be. You were coming to find me.” Jane insisted it was all her fault for dropping out of communication that day and making everybody panic.