Einstein's Secret Page 15

“Well, let me throw something else your way,” Eddie said. “Maybe you can make sense of it. I noticed it when I was looking through Alex’s stuff—”

  “How’d you get to look at his stuff?”

  “When his parents came, they weren’t too good about cleaning out his place.” Knowing how little they cared about their son, that didn’t surprise me. “I went through what they left behind, thinking I might find out how the portal worked. Instead, I found out who his next biography was going to be about—”

  “Einstein.” That piece fell into place right then.

  “Yep. And he’d already done a lot of work on it. But he needed more information. So he enlisted us.”

  He went back to my sophomore year and took me to that yard sale. Now I was sure about that.

  “From his notes,” Eddie said, “I saw that he was going to focus on answering the one question that’d make his book a bestseller.”

  “He was going to solve the mystery of Einstein’s disappearance,” I said, and as soon as I’d said it, the new history fell neatly into place as naturally as if it had been the correct history all along.

  Einstein had always disappeared, and there’d always been hundreds of theories about what had happened to him. The history with the confession was the wrong history. It was the result of too much time travel. It was the phony history.

  I looked down at the short story in Eddie’s hands, and seeing it stopped that freight train of thoughts. There was still a part of me that knew those facts were wrong. Those facts were the new facts, not the original ones.

  But the new history was crushing the original one, and this short story could help the original fight back. This short story contained a clue. What was that clue?

  “The soldier’s the clue,” I suddenly blurted out.

  “What?”

  “The soldier recognizes the time traveler, the foreigner, even though he hasn’t traveled through time himself.”

  “And…”

  “John realizes the soldier could’ve helped him.”

  “But the soldier doesn’t help him.”

  “He can’t. Once he goes through the portal, he’s tainted.

  He can’t help anymore.”

  “And how does that help us?”

  “We need to find the soldier.”

  “Okay…”

  “And the soldier is someone who recognizes the time traveler, or the trails—”

  “But who hasn’t traveled through time themselves.” Eddie was catching on.

  “Exactly,” I said. “And there’s only one person who fits the bill—Laura.”

  “Are you kidding? First you blame me for sucking her into this. And now you want to suck her into it?”

  I didn’t want to. But I had to.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I found Laura ensconced in a hospital room on the third floor. She had a fresh cast on the lower part of her leg and a frown on her face. Before I could say anything, she asked, “Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s not safe yet.”

  “But you need my help, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then it sounds to me like you can’t wait until it’s safe. You’re going to have put your cards on the table now.”

  She was right. But I’d still start slow, leaving the part about the wormhole out of the equation for now.

  “There’s someone out there who wants to keep something that Einstein wrote a secret. And that someone tried to kill me at the cabin.”

  “And what’s the secret?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Back to that again.”

  “No, I honestly don’t know.” That part was true.

  “You’re going to have to tell me more if you want my help.”

  “It’ll sound ridiculous.”

  “That’s my call, isn’t it?”

  As soon as she said that, I remembered the suspicion I’d had right before the fire broke out. “You’ve seen something ridiculous yourself.” Something that frightened you.

  “Good work, detective.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “I think we were in the middle of you doing the telling.”

  “Okay. How’s this for starters? Einstein was murdered.”

  “So you’re a conspiracy nut? Let me guess: sixty years later, Einstein’s killer is tracking you down?”

  “The murder didn’t happen sixty years ago.”

  “I was rounding off.”

  “I know you were. And I mean it didn’t happen that way originally.”

  She was about to counter when a nurse came into the room. I looked at the nurse’s nametag, saw that her name wasn’t familiar, and felt relief. Even though I was in a hospital, again, with a patient, again, and a nurse, the coincidences stopped there.

  The nurse stepped up to Laura. “How you doing, honey?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Good enough to fill out some paperwork?”

  “Sure.”

  The nurse handed Laura a clipboard and pen. “I’ll be back in twenty to pick it up.”

  She exited, and Laura reached over to the table next to her bed, opened the drawer, and pulled out her purse. She fished her wallet out of her purse, and I thought she was going take out her insurance card. Instead, she pulled out her smartphone.

  “I want to show you one of my favorite pictures,” she said. “It’s a picture of my mom when she was a kid. It was taken in the fifties. My mom gave it to me when I was a kid, and I’d stare at it, imagining the world that she grew up in. I’d try to will myself into that world.”

  Laura handed me her phone and I looked at the picture. A young girl, around ten years old, was standing at a distance, smiling at the camera. Off to her left, barely in frame, was a concession stand, where a few patrons waited in line. Behind her were bloated cars, in a tidy row, with their trunks to the camera. In front of those cars were more rows of cars, leading up to the far end of the photo, which was dominated by a huge movie screen.

  Laura’s mom was at a drive-in theater.

  I felt the blood pumping through my veins at warp speed.

  “I’d imagine myself at that drive-in with my friends,” Laura said. “Of course, I’d never been to a drive-in, but I thought it’d be fun to see movies there instead of at the multiplex where I usually went.”

  Laura stopped there, and I thought it was because she’d noticed the look of incredulity on my face. It wasn’t.

  “But there’s something new in the picture,” she said, her voice starting to tremble. “I don’t know when it appeared. I mean, you know how you walk by something so many times that you don’t even see it anymore? I had that picture in a frame on my sideboard, and I’d glanced at it now and then, but I hadn’t really looked at it for a long, long time. And I might have never noticed a change at all, except that I got a Groupon for ninety percent off on digitizing pictures.

  “So I collected some pictures, and I took that one out of the frame, and that’s when I noticed it. One of the men waiting in line at the concession stand—” Laura’s eyes filled with tears. “He’s looking back at the camera. He was never looking back before. No one was looking at the camera except my mom.”

  There were four people waiting in front of the concession stand, and the second one from the front had his head turned back, looking at the camera. His face was visible, and though it wasn’t in perfect focus, it was easy enough for me to recognize him.

  Henry Clavin.

  My stomach clenched. This was a small trail, one that only Laura, alone, could’ve recognized. And the only way it could’ve ever had any significance would be if she showed it to me. I was the one who knew the role that Clavin played in Einstein’s confession. This photo was meant for me.

  Laura was the soldier.

  Clavin stared at the camera with a haunted expression on his face, as if he were looking out at me personally, pleading with me. Can you bring me back to life?

 
“You know who it is?” Laura said.

  “…Yeah.”

  “But you don’t want to tell me.”

  “You sure he wasn’t looking at the camera before?” I knew she was sure, but I asked anyway.

  “I know everything about that picture. The number of cars, where they’re parked, the number of people in line, what they’re wearing, every shadow and reflection, and I know that man was never looking into the camera.”

  “Did your mom grow up in Maryland or Pennsylvania?”

  “In Maryland—how did you know?”

  “That’s where this man lived.” I didn’t want to say much more about Clavin. What I wanted to do was track him down. “Can I google something on your phone?”

  She nodded, and I immediately googled Clavin.

  I whipped through as much information as I could find. In this version of history, he wasn’t connected to Einstein. At least, as far as I could tell from my perfunctory search. But he was similar to the Clavin that I’d left back in my original history. Though I couldn’t tell if he’d lived in Princeton, New Jersey, he had definitely lived in Frostburg, Maryland, a small town fifteen miles from Cumberland.

  In this version of history, he’d died in the fifties. He hadn’t died in Rockville just a few weeks ago. And I knew how he’d died. Van Doran had murdered him. So what I couldn’t figure out was why Clavin’s death had been recorded, if he’d “disappeared” like Einstein.

  After digging deeper, my question was answered by a small announcement, dated August 17, 1957, in the notices section of a Western Maryland paper. Allegany County had declared Henry Clavin dead. He had actually disappeared, but once the legally required amount of time had passed, the County had officially pronounced him dead.

  Unlike Einstein’s disappearance, Clavin’s disappearance was an open-and-shut case—because no one cared to keep it open. There weren’t millions of Internet pages dedicated to speculation about his disappearance.

  My stomach tightened as my spirits sank. This search had literally concluded with a dead end. So why was Clavin in that photo if he was a dead end? Just as I’d resigned myself to the idea that the photo wasn’t the right path to follow, I saw a weird hit on the fifth page of my Google search. A Henry Clavin, from Frostburg, Maryland, had been interviewed on a radio show.

  I clicked through and found a site that had digitized a variety of radio shows from the fifties, including a show entitled What Will Tomorrow Bring. The show consisted of interviews with everyday folk who tried to predict what changes the future would bring.

  Clavin had been a guest on one of the episodes.

  I glanced up at Laura and weighed whether to play that episode in front of her.

  “No comment on your research?” she said.

  “I found something that I’d like to listen to. It’s an interview with the man in the picture.”

  “You ready to tell me who he is?”

  “He was a friend of Einstein’s.”

  “So what the hell is he doing in my mom’s photo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many times are you going to use that line?”

  “I’m hoping not many more.”

  “Bullshit. Why are you so afraid to tell me the whole story? Would you have to kill me if you did, like in a movie?” Her cheeks were rosy with anger. “Well, guess what? Someone already tried to kill me. That’s why they waited until we were both in that cabin.”

  I didn’t want to argue with her. Not now. “I’m in way over my head, and the only way out is to listen to this interview.”

  She waved her hand at me dismissively. “Then go ahead.”

  I clicked on the episode, which was called “Mind Over Matter,” and read the description. There was nothing there that suggested a connection to Einstein, at least not that I could see. I clicked the play button.

  The first interview was with a young woman who believed that in the future we’d be able to move objects with our minds. The host led her into a speculative discussion in which she theorized that someday we’d learn to control the electrons in our minds and use them like a laser tractor beam to move objects.

  I skipped to the next interview. It was with a man who sounded older, much too old to be Clavin. I skipped forward again and landed in the middle of the next interview. This guest was talking about time travel. It had to be Clavin.

  I skipped back until I found the beginning of the interview, then let it roll. The host introduced the guest, Henry Clavin, and bantered with him about H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which Clavin had read, and then Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, which Clavin hadn’t read. Then the host asked Clavin what he thought we’d be capable of controlling with our minds in the future.

  Clavin said we’d be able to control time travel. It wasn’t going to work with knobs and dials like a normal machine. We wouldn’t be plugging in dates. Instead, we’d think about where we wanted to go and that’s where we’d go.

  My stomach relaxed, and I let out a deep breath. My hunch had been right. The soldier, Laura, had led me to a clue with real value. I suddenly felt elated and took a deep, deep breath. I let it out slowly.

  I wanted to run out and tell Eddie that I knew how the wormhole worked. Clavin hadn’t led me to Einstein’s confession, but he’d put me back on the right track. When it came to using the wormhole, mind over matter was the set of instructions. And if I knew how to use the wormhole properly, I could fix all that had gone horribly wrong.

  The interview ran another couple of minutes. The host asked Clavin what the time machine would look like and Clavin said he didn’t know. Then the host asked him when man would invent the time machine, and Clavin’s answer sent a chill down my spine.

  He said, “Maybe man doesn’t invent it, but discovers it.” For me, this was confirmation that Clavin was guiding me in the right direction.

  The host ended the interview, then started to introduce the next guest. I clicked the show off and handed the phone back to Laura.

  “So this is tied to time travel?” she said.

  “Yes.” It was hard not to crack a smile, so I did. Not because I wanted to hide the truth, but because the only preparation she had for that truth was What Will Tomorrow Bring, a kitschy program from the fifties. Not quite the groundwork I wanted to lay.

  “That’s the best lie you could come up with,” she said.

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So the secret is time travel.”

  “Laura, how did a sixty-year-old picture of your mom suddenly change?”

  “Photoshop.”

  “Why would someone break into your place and photoshop some random picture?”

  She stared at me with hard eyes. “Occam’s Razor.”

  Occam’s Razor was a scientific principle that posited that the simplest answer was usually the right one. But Laura had made a mistake by bringing that up. This fell into my corner of history, the history of science.

  “So what’s the simplest answer?” I said.

  She looked down at her phone and brought up the picture of her mom again. She didn’t say anything for a minute or so. I guess she was weighing what the simplest answer was.

  “I never noticed that this man was looking at the camera before. I must’ve always been too focused on my mom.”

  “You really believe that you missed that for all those years?”

  She frowned. “Okay—then it was photoshopped. That’s the simplest answer.”

  “Let me fill you in on Occam’s Razor. It hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s an artifact of medieval science. The examples where it doesn’t work are all over the place. From modern physics with string theory to modern biology. Hundreds of things run counter to Occam’s Razor, including the complexity of DNA. And DNA is life itself.”

  “So you jump from photoshop to time travel?”

  I smiled. “I know it sounds insane, but I can pro
ve it. If you Skyped me in Los Angeles right now, I’d be there. Only it would be the me who belongs to this time, not the me you found in the Caves.” I was sounding like a lunatic.

  She shook her head, then sighed. “I think I need to get some sleep.”

  She was the soldier, so maybe that was a way to get her to believe me. “Laura, you felt it. You knew it. The second you saw me in the Caves, you knew I didn’t belong there.”

  “Yeah, because you didn’t belong there. You don’t have a carrel.”

  “You know that’s not what I’m getting at. You saw me and thought, ‘He’s out of place here.’ You felt that so strongly that you checked to see if Eddie was down there. And you checked to see if there was a job opening.”

  She didn’t say anything. She stared at me for a few seconds, then put her phone in her purse and put her purse back in the drawer. The anger was gone, replaced by pensiveness.

  It was time to back off. “Laura, whether you believe me or not, promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’m not going anywhere. They’re keeping me here for a couple of days.”

  I had no evidence to prove that Van Doran couldn’t march into the hospital and execute her, but I felt that she was safe for the moment. As long as she didn’t travel through the wormhole.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Back to where I came from.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I went back to Eddie’s place and filled him in on What Will Tomorrow Bring. He wasn’t sold on the concept of controlling time travel with your thoughts.

  “So you just have to believe, huh?”

  “I’m going to sound like one of those nuts who tries to justify his crazy theory with quantum mechanics, but I’m doing it anyway.”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  I had to smile. “One of the principles of quantum physics is that the observer affects the outcome.” I’d taught that in my history of science classes. “It’s worth a try.” I wanted to move forward before the original version of history completely disappeared. On my way over to Eddie’s, for about five minutes, I’d believed that Einstein had always disappeared.