Einstein's Secret Read online

  That thought led me to the idea of applying one of my preferred tactics, the tactic I used whenever I couldn’t find any new facts. Revise history by reinterpreting the facts I did have.

  “Can I search for something?” I said.

  “Sure.” Eddie handed me his laptop.

  “I want to go back to Van Doran’s connection to Einstein.” And that meant going back to the photo where I’d first seen Van Doran. A photo I’d found many years ago. I easily tracked it down. It was a photo of a group of men taken at the Princeton Club in 1954.

  Einstein was easy to pick out, and so was Van Doran. But another man caught my attention. In an otherwise straightforward photo of men in dark suits, this man stood out because his tie flashed a spark of color.

  “Look at this guy,” I said, and pointed to a man with a round face and sad, intelligent eyes. “Check out his tie.” His tie had an orange bird on it, a species of bird I recognized. “That’s an Oriole, as in the Baltimore Orioles, the baseball team—”

  “As in the state bird of Maryland, right?” Eddie said.

  I nodded. “Maryland, again.”

  I then started searching for more information about this man, listed in the photo as Harold Weldon. There wasn’t much about him online. His obituary provided the most information. He’d been a very wealthy man, who’d done quite well for himself in the stock market. A kind of mini Warren Buffet, he then went on to run a couple of investment funds. He’d lived on an estate in Cumberland, Maryland, and died there in 1975.

  “Van Doran was working on something in Maryland, and that’s where Weldon’s estate was,” I said.

  “And Clavin was a Maryland man,” Eddie said. “I think we’re headed to Cumberland.” Going to Cumberland seemed like a wild goose chase, and my doubt must have been written on my face, because Eddie added, “Listen, Maryland is the connective tissue right now. I mean, you made the Oriole connection yourself.”

  “And what about Clavin’s visitor? What about following up on him?”

  “We’re doing that, too.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll explain in the car.”

  “Last time you told me you’d explain in the car, you didn’t.”

  “This time I will. I think you’re ready.”

  Chapter Eight

  We left the hospital without making any arrangements for Clavin. I didn’t bring it up with Eddie and he didn’t bring it up with me. As we headed up to Cumberland, which was less than a two-hour drive from Rockville, I tried not to think about Henry Clavin.

  “Mr. Harold Weldon, the man with the Oriole tie,” Eddie said. “Ever hear of him before today?”

  “Nope.”

  “He wasn’t a friend of Einstein’s?”

  “Not that I know of. But it’s possible. I only followed up on people who I thought might be connected to the secret.”

  “Do you remember Weldon in that photo? I mean the first time you saw that photo.”

  I’d been thinking about that myself. “It was a long time ago.”

  “You don’t think you would’ve remembered that splash of orange on his tie?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You were sure that Clavin died in that car accident, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then I showed you he didn’t.”

  “And?”

  “Do you ever think that you’re right about something? I mean positively sure that you’re right. But when you check back on that something, it’s changed?”

  “You mean that I made a mistake? So what?”

  “No—I mean that something has actually changed. Of course, you can’t be sure. And you can never be sure. Because once something changes, you can’t find out how it was before.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” Was he a nut, after all?

  “Look up Clavin’s death. His car accident.”

  I pulled out my iPhone, but he motioned toward his laptop in the back seat. “It’s got 4G.”

  I reached back, scooped up the computer, and after two minutes of checking, I could already tell that anything referring to Clavin’s death had disappeared. The obituary, the newspaper account of the car accident, and the funeral announcement.

  My face felt flushed and my mind suddenly ached. It was literally hurting with confusion. “I don’t get it…”

  “It blazes tiny trails at first,” Eddie said. “Then, as a different history gains strength, facts change.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” It was time to end this wild goose chase and head back to Charlottesville to start looking for a job. Alex’s warning had been legit, after all. Stay away from Eddie. I was angry with myself for not heeding that advice.

  “I’m talking about Van Doran,” Eddie said. “You were stunned when you saw his photo in the paper. He looked exactly like the visitor we saw at the hospital.”

  “So what? Van Doran has relatives. Not a big surprise.”

  “He doesn’t have any living relatives.”

  “You said yourself that you were probably wrong.”

  “I lied.” Eddie looked over at me. “You saw yourself that it was more than just a resemblance.”

  I let out a nervous chuckle. “So you’re saying it’s the same man?”

  “Yep.”

  Well, I knew that he’d been reluctant to tell me something. But I never would’ve guessed it’d be something as absurd as this. “And how do you explain that?”

  “Time travel.”

  I took a deep breath. He was interpreting the facts in a more twisted way than I’d ever dare to do. “You know that’s insane.”

  “You’re going to help me prove it’s not.”

  “Is that why you wanted my help in the first place?”

  “Yep.”

  “You think Einstein’s secret is about time travel.”

  “More so than ever, after seeing Van Doran.”

  “So he’s a time traveler?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how do Clavin and Einstein and Weldon fit in?”

  “I don’t know yet, but my bet is that Einstein’s confession ties them all together.”

  I looked down at the computer and brought up the Van Doran photo from the newspaper article. Then I pictured the man I’d just seen in the hospital. Without Eddie’s influence, before he’d even said a word about time travel, I’d thought that these two men looked exactly alike. And what about the fact that Clavin’s death in that car accident had vanished from the historical record? What explained that? And then I thought about the coincidences that had come my way since moving to Charlottesville.

  It all added up to something peculiar, but how could it add up to time travel? It couldn’t.

  Eddie didn’t press his point, and I was sure that he was counting on my getting acclimated to the new worldview he’d just presented. And for right now, I was a captive audience. Stuck in his car in the middle of a wild goose chase.

  I started checking other facts about Einstein’s secret to see if anything else had changed. As far as I could tell nothing else had.

  Eddie glanced over at me. “You’re looking for other trails.”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘trails.’”

  “I mean that a ‘different’ history, a new one, grows slowly at first. Then exponentially. But it starts with these little trails blazing into the current history.”

  “And by trails, you’re talking about little changes in history.”

  “Yeah. Kind of. I mean they’re fluid. At least, I think they’re fluid.”

  “You mean they’re not permanent.”

  “I can’t say for sure. But that’s what I mean.”

  “So why doesn’t everyone notice these changes?”

  “Because they’re not looking for them. And by the time a new trail takes root, they—and we—think that’s the way it’s always been.”

  “Sounds like a tough theory to prove.” Not to mention crazier than a Philip K. D
ick novel.

  “Not really. Do you know what reconstructed memories are?”

  “No, but I have a feeling I’m going to find out.”

  He laughed. “Our minds don’t record things accurately. There are dozens of tests proving that we just make up a good chunk of what we ‘remember.’ That’s why eyewitness accounts don’t count for much in a court of law. And we also doubt our own memories. We actually realize that we don’t remember things too well.”

  “And that’s what this alternative history is counting on?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not an ‘alternative’ history. It’s more like history is changing.”

  “Because of time travel.”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “Eddie—come on. Why are you the only one who sees this?”

  “I’m not the only one.” He looked at me. “Take a look at that Princeton Club photo again.”

  I found the photo, glanced at it, and my heart started thumping wildly. Van Doran was gone from the photo. That couldn’t be.

  I calmed myself, took a deep breath, and leaned in close to the computer screen, but that didn’t change a damn thing.

  “How did you know?” I said, in a tiny voice.

  “I didn’t. It was just a guess. I figured he was going to cover his tracks.”

  “This isn’t a tiny trail,” I said.

  “It is to the rest of the world.”

  He was right.

  Chapter Nine

  I didn’t talk for the rest of the trip, and Eddie didn’t try to sell me on anything more. It wasn’t until we were about ten minutes outside of Cumberland that he spoke up. “Got an address for the estate?”

  I looked it up, told him, and he plugged it into his GPS.

  “Listen, I know Weldon’s been dead for thirty years,” he said, “but this is one of those trails, and we’ve got to follow it to get anywhere.”

  “Clavin was one of those trails,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  Well, I can’t say that I really believed that Clavin was one of those trails, the kind of trails that Eddie was talking about, the kind that blaze a new history into our existing history, but I did believe one thing. I had followed the Clavin trail and it had proved its worth. It had confirmed that Einstein’s secret was real. And that was Eddie’s point.

  “So somewhere in Weldon’s estate is the next clue to finding Einstein’s confession,” I said.

  “That’s my bet.”

  Neither of us said anything about time travel or about Van Doran being a time traveler. And that was fine by me.

  Eddie skirted the town of Cumberland to get to the two-lane road that led to the estate, which was a few miles farther west. Cumberland had been a big manufacturing center, but it had long since fallen on hard times and was now part of one of the poorest counties in the country.

  We passed a few houses, almost all of them run-down clapboard homes in disrepair. Then we hit a long stretch of forest, broken up only by an abandoned drive-in movie theater. And judging by how large the parking area and screen were, it must’ve been quite the attraction in its day.

  A mile later, a tall iron fence appeared on the other side of the road. It penned in the woods that made up part of the Weldon estate. The fence eventually gave way to a large gate.

  Eddie pulled up to the gate, and behind it, at the end of a garishly long driveway, I saw a sprawling Georgian mansion. It needed a paint job and cosmetic work, but it clearly had once boasted great wealth. Next to it was a much smaller structure, either a large garage or stable, or combination thereof.

  Eddie scanned the side of the gate for a call box. “So we keep this simple. We tell whoever’s home that we’re doing a story on Cumberland’s most famous residents, and that we’d like to talk to one of Weldon’s relatives.”

  “Good plan, except we have to get through the gate.” There wasn’t a call box.

  “We need to track down the phone number.” He pulled out his laptop and started his search. It didn’t take long for him to pass judgment. “The Weldons of Cumberland like their privacy.”

  “No number?”

  “Not even an unlisted number.” He closed the laptop. “We’re going to have to go in there unannounced.”

  “They’re not going to be too receptive to us if we surprise them.”

  “We can’t wait.”

  “Why not?”

  “Facts are changing. If we don’t follow this trail now, we’ll lose it.”

  Again, I couldn’t help but think that this was the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel. Except this time it felt like I was living that plot, because I had the weirdest epiphany: I doubted that Clavin had ever died in that car accident. Didn’t it make more sense that he’d died today, at the hospital? After all, I’d seen him there with my own eyes, and that was a fact.

  Had I ever actually seen his obituary? Or his funeral announcement? No, I hadn’t. There was no evidence that he’d died in a car accident.

  I made myself stop this chain of thoughts. The new history was playing on my doubts. Reconstructing my memory. Just as Eddie had said it would. But I wouldn’t let it. As long as I had this strange awareness of facts competing for reality, for the historical record, I thought I could control my memories.

  Eddie got out of the car and tried to fit through the spaces between the gate’s iron railings. He couldn’t. Then he looked to the top of the iron gate, but I could see that climbing over it would be impossible.

  He got back in the car. “We’re going to have to walk the length of the gate and find a way in.”

  *

  We continued down the road until the fence ended. Then we pulled off onto the dirt shoulder. Eddie opened the car hood, as if we’d had car problems, but that wasn’t our problem. Our problem was that the iron fence ran all the way into the woods, not just along the road.

  So we started walking its length, into the woods, hoping it would end soon enough. It didn’t. A few trees on our side had limbs growing over onto the other side, and those limbs were increasingly looking like our way in, though not an easy one.

  The iron fence finally gave way to a wooden split-rail fence, three feet high, that ran along the back of the Weston property. We walked along it until we were behind the mansion, then climbed over it. As we approached the back of the mansion, the forest thinned out, and it ended at the edge of what must’ve once been an expansive lawn. It was now overgrown with wild grass and weeds.

  At the other end of the lawn was a patio that ran along the back of the house. Eddie started toward it, fearless, but when he saw me hanging back, he stopped. “I can check it out alone. It’s up to you.”

  “You planning on breaking and entering? Or going around to the front and knocking?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  As I weighed whether I wanted to add breaking and entering to my resume, Eddie ran across the weedy lawn as fast as he could, minimizing the chance of being spotted from the house. At the back of the house, he positioned himself against the wall, between two of the five sets of French doors that bordered the patio.

  He looked back at me, waiting for my next move.

  I scanned the marble patio. It was weather-beaten, cracked, and barren of furniture, matching the desolate look of house.

  No one lives here, I thought, and used that rationalization to sprint across the lawn.

  I joined Eddie, and he leaned over and peered into the French doors. “Hard to tell, but it might be abandoned,” he said. “Let’s check some of the other windows.”

  Each window told the same story. The rooms were furnished with grandiose pieces, in keeping with the Georgian design of the house, but all the opulence looked dull and defeated, as if no one lived there. Either the house had been abandoned, or Harold Weldon’s descendants were terrible housekeepers.

  We checked the windows and doors to see if any of them had been left unlocked. None had. At that point, I thought Eddie—the treasure hunter, the commercial archeologist—
would come up with a clever way of breaking in. But he went with the old standby.

  He took a loose brick from a pathway that ran behind the smaller structure, which turned out to be a combination garage and storage building, wrapped the brick in his T-shirt, and with one quick hit, smashed through a window on the east side of the house.

  We waited to see if someone emerged from the bowels of the house in response to the shattering glass. No one did. Eddie unlocked the window, slid it open, and we climbed into Harold Weldon’s mansion.

  We were in a sitting room furnished with antique couches, high-backed chairs, and a grand piano. The paintings on the walls depicted lush rolling hills, like the hills you’d find around Cumberland.

  I felt uneasy about this whole endeavor and wanted to quickly find a clue that would make sense of this morphing quagmire, then get out. A document, a photo, some kind of record—anything that would put us one step closer to Einstein’s confession.

  “I’ll check upstairs,” Eddie said, as he headed out of the sitting room. “You take the downstairs.”

  I scanned the room, and at first, nothing caught my eye. Then I saw that the piano bench had a hinge on it, so I walked over to it and opened it.

  It was empty.

  Then I checked inside the piano itself and saw nothing but the strings and hammers.

  I turned to the door and my breath caught in my throat—

  Van Doran was standing in the doorway, holding a gun to Eddie’s head. “What did Clavin tell you?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said, barely able to get that out because my heart was thumping so wildly, once again, that my entire body was shaking.

  Van Doran jammed the barrel of the gun into Eddie’s temple. “You want me to kill your friend?”

  “Clavin didn’t say anything.” I sounded weak.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Van Doran started to squeeze the trigger, and I spoke loudly and confidently. “I’m not lying. Clavin was incoherent. I couldn’t get him to tell us anything.”

  Van Doran stared at me with a punishing glare. It turned into a condescending smirk before he said, “I didn’t think you were talented enough to put it together.” He nodded at Eddie. “No doubt this man played a role.”