by Nova Jacobs
“It’s funny,” Hazel said. “I never thought to ask him, why cars? I mean, no one likes traffic, but if that kind of prediction is actually possible—and not just sci-fi nuttiness—why not predict the next meteor impact or terrorist attack? At least something more dangerous than whether someone’s going to have a fender bender on the 405.”
Alex gave her a knowing look, one that a teacher might give a clever student. “Yes, but for Isaac, there was safety in studying something as mundane as vehicle gridlock. It’s ongoing, it’s local, it was a starting point.” Alex fell back against the seat. “But then he gave up.”
“I thought the city yanked his funding.”
Alex looked out the window as they left the traffic of Franklin Avenue and turned onto Beachwood Drive. “You’re right. He never entirely gave up on things.”
Hazel thought of the map, of all the dots that seemed to ignore the freeways. “What if his traffic project just evolved into something else?”
He turned to her. “You know, of course, that even if we crack this, we might find nothing but demented grandpa mathematics. Good-natured numerical oatmeal.”
Good, she thought. If his work is oatmeal, I can destroy it without guilt.
As the SUV wound up the canyon, Hazel realized these were their last few moments together. “So what’s our next move?” she asked in an oddly spunky tone, as if she were the sidekick in a teen mystery. But Alex didn’t have a chance to respond, because at that moment, as they turned a corner on Durand Drive, the driver shouted something that made his passengers lean forward. Through the windshield, they could see three police cars and an ambulance filed along the shoulder. At the bottom of the steps leading up the hill to the Severy house stood a small crowd.
The first person Hazel noticed was a neighbor from down the road, sitting on the ground in his gray jogging suit. He was bent over, the hood of his sweatshirt twisted around and held to his face. She knew it was illogical, but her first panicked thought was of Gregory.
“Stop the car,” she said.
As the driver hit the brakes, she was already climbing out. A group of Beachwood residents and police were blocking her view of the hillside. As she moved toward them, she was vaguely aware of her costume, a visible morning-after aura clinging to it. But no one seemed to notice or care.
“Poor thing,” someone said.
“It was far too dangerous. I don’t know how many times I said so.”
Hazel nearly cried out with relief when she spotted her brother. She headed through the crowd and threw her arms around him. He turned to embrace her without taking his eyes from the hill. He looked exhausted, his expression one of restrained misery.
“A neighbor found her on his run,” he said.
Hazel pulled away and pushed herself toward the scene. Near the bottom of the concrete steps leading up the bluff to the house lay a woman’s body, turned upward, head pointed downhill. Her arms and legs were bent in a gruesome imitation of the cardinal directions, her neck twisted in such a way that her face was hidden from the crowd. But the hair was unmistakable: the pre-Raphaelite locks of Sybil Severy-Oliver. Instead of her hair tumbling down her shoulders, it was spilling away down the slope. She wore some kind of robe or coat, which was only half on, and her silk nightgown rode up her thighs, exposing the elastic of her underwear. One foot wore a satiny bedroom slipper. The slipper’s mate, in the echo of a fairy tale, sat several steps up the hillside.
Police suspended yellow tape between the trees. A detective snapped pictures. The paramedics took their time readying a stretcher. Hazel found everyone strangely calm, except for Jack. He was a few yards off, weaving back and forth through a cluster of oaks, motioning with his hands and shouting unintelligible insults at the greenery. Without warning, he turned and screamed at the crowd, “Would somebody cover up my wife? For fuck’s sake, somebody cover her!”
Hazel returned to her brother’s side and pushed her face into his shoulder.
“They’re saying she was asleep,” he muttered.
“I don’t understand,” she said, glancing toward the hill, where the sight of Sybil collided with a night of junk food and no sleep to form a wave of nausea. “I thought she was in Pasadena with her parents.”
He nodded. “Apparently she had another fight, with Jack this time. So she packed up and left.”
Hazel forced herself to step away from Gregory and look for Alex, but he was suddenly standing right beside her, his hand encircling her wrist. The thrill of his closeness was hard to ignore. “Stay at your brother’s tonight and don’t come back here. I’d get as far away from this place as possible.”
In that instant, with Alex’s breath warm in her ear, something occurred to her. Don’t stay in or visit the house past the end of October. She pulled her hand free and checked her phone, as if needing outside confirmation of the date. It was, of course, one day after Halloween. November 1, 2015, or 110115.
She opened her mouth to tell Alex what the numbers on the map meant, that they were, in fact, painfully commonplace. Month, day, year—then what—hour, minute? But he’d already figured that out, hadn’t he? She was about to ask him, but when she turned around, both he and the SUV were gone.
PART 2
* * *
What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two!
A thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.
We’ll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two
a rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat-a-tattoo
and the dragon will come when he hears the drum
at a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.
—EDWARD GERMAN & BASIL HOOD,
MERRIE ENGLAND, 1902
– 15 –
The Professor
Twelve days after Isaac’s funeral and five days after Sybil’s death, Hazel found herself again at the Resurrection Cemetery surrounded by family. She had never been particularly close to her cousin, yet she felt sucked down by a swift undertow of misery along with the rest of the Severys. The final image of Sybil sat hard in her gut, and thinking back to that morning in the canyon, she was struck by how brutally emptied of life a corpse really was—as if Sybil’s tumble down those steps had transformed her into a discarded object or a sack of garbage for all that her body resembled a moving, breathing person.
Sybil had been cremated (no stately coffin draped in roses for her), and the mourners numbered far fewer than at Isaac’s burial, yet the whole day felt like a hideous rerun of grief. A stubborn marine layer sapped the morning of light, and a silence pervaded that seemed unsettling even for a funeral. Philip and Jane, standing above their daughter’s breadbox plot, appeared blank, as if they had resolved never to open their mouths or express another emotion again. Jack looked catatonic. His eyes were dry, but his face had puffed and reddened to an alarming degree. Drew was nowhere to be seen. When Hazel mentioned this to her sister-in-law, Goldie whispered that Drew was in the care of Jane’s sister until Jack was “in the right place” to explain where Mommy went. Hazel didn’t think Jack was in the right place to be doing anything outside of assuming a fetal position on the grass.
Apart from Drew (and Lily, whom the family wished to spare from unnecessary confusion), there were two family members conspicuously absent from Sybil’s burial. Gregory had left the house at six that morning claiming there was an emergency at work. Though he apologized to all for having to bow out, Hazel worried that he might be hiding something, if only his feelings. She wondered if her brother’s absence wasn’t a kind of avoidance or denial. He had always been intensely attached to Sybil, despite adulthood having pushed the cousins apart.
The second absence was less surprising. Since that morning in the canyon, after Alex had vanished, she kept hearing his hushed words to her: “Stay at your brother’s tonight and don’t come back here.” Now she wondered if he hadn’t followed his own advice and left the city entirely. She had considered tracking him down to tell him she knew what the numbers meant,
as he had no doubt already figured out, but Sybil’s death seemed to trivialize her every thought about finding Alex. Still, the idea that he was gone for good, back to whatever mathematicians do in Paris, made recent events more awful. When she had doubled back to the room at the Hotel d’Antibes the night after Sybil was found, it was as much to see if Alex would show up as it was to confront the now terrifying map on the wall.
Alex did not show up at the hotel, nor did he leave any messages at the front desk. She was left to reexamine the contents of the room alone, now with the certainty that the map held a cache of terrible predictions—or at least the knowledge that something would happen Halloween night in Beachwood Canyon. Isaac, the map seemed to say, had not left behind numerical oatmeal but portentous mathematics. Her eyes zeroed in on the twisted veins of Beachwood Canyon and on the three dots pasted there. She could now see from their numbers—date, hour, minute—that not only was Sybil’s death represented but also Isaac’s: 101715055531. If these numbers were accurate, Sybil had died at eleven minutes past midnight; Isaac, at precisely 5:55 a.m. and 31 seconds.
Three will die.
So what about the third dot? Isaac had suggested in his letter that there was nothing to be done about it, that fate could not be stopped. Still, Hazel desperately needed to see the date and time on that final sticker. But when she tried to peel off Sybil’s dot to reveal the one beneath, she couldn’t pull them apart. She would end up tearing them both, so on instinct, she took both dots from the wall for safekeeping until a solution presented itself.
She turned back to the computer, the events of the previous night drifting back to her like some distant historical event, as if Sybil’s fall had opened up a rip in time and separated Hazel forever from that night with Alex. Yet it seemed more urgent than ever that she get into her grandfather’s computer. But if Alex couldn’t crack it in the course of an entire night, how could she? She took one last look at the map. There were, of course, other dots scattered around the city, scribbled with future dates and times, but what could she do? The knowledge of other deaths would only distract her from her task of protecting the family, of making sure no one stayed in Beachwood Canyon.
That same night, the shock of Sybil’s death and the grim revelation of the map were complicated by another, lesser disaster: a water main had ruptured that day in Pioneer Square directly beneath her store. Chet called to inform her that although her merchandise was still dry, her store had gotten the worst of it. They would need to shut the doors indefinitely.
“Seriously, this may be one of the worst Pioneer Square floods since the eighteen hundreds,” he told her. “Do you want me to wait for you?”
“No, just shut it down. Put a fun sign in the window.”
“When are you back?”
“Way things are going, maybe never.”
After a delicate pause, he informed her that he was writing a piece about the flood for Seattle Weekly, for which he was a stringer.
“I hate to ask, but do you have a quote for me?”
She had, in fact, hired Chet after he’d interviewed her for a somewhat embarrassing portrait in the weekly, titled “Amazon Warrior: Young Book Dealer Defends Lost Art of Reading,” though the more accurate title would have been: “Impulsive Woman Defends Own Laziness, Amasses Staggering Debt, Repeatedly Drowns in Water-Themed Nightmares.”
At last, she said, “Just because you love books doesn’t mean you should sell them,” and hung up.
There were mounting bills she couldn’t pay. On the morning of the service, Hazel received a package from Chet stuffed with them. He also enclosed a list of particularly impatient callers, one of whom he dubbed “Mr. Persistent.” The man had called several times in her absence but refused to leave his name or the company he represented. There was also a note:
Dear Ms. Hazel Severy,
I wish to connect with you on an important matter. Since you have not yet contacted me, I leave you my temporary stateside number. I look forward to speaking very soon.
Regards,
L. F. Richardson
626-344-9592
These bill collectors were certainly getting clever. There was that initialed name evoking someone of refinement, plus an attempt at the offhand, as if he were dashing off a message to a friend of a friend. As Hazel folded up the note, she refused to entertain the idea of Isaac’s estate coming to her rescue, and besides, despite Fritz’s best efforts, her grandfather’s wealth was tied up entirely in the house. After everything was sold off, paid off, and distributed, she sort of doubted there would be much left. Hazel took the note to Goldie’s office, fed it into the shredder, and hurried to iron her funeral outfit, which had been sitting crumpled at the bottom of her suitcase.
Toward the end of the service, as Jane, Philip, and Jack were kneeling down to scoop up handfuls of dirt, Hazel glanced up the hill in the direction of Isaac’s headstone. The unusually heavy marine layer gave one the impression of peering through gauze, but through the gray, she spied a tall man in a dark coat standing above Isaac’s plot. Only his back was visible, his legs shrouded in mist and his bowed head concealed behind an upturned collar. She knew it was Isaac’s grave because of a curious topiary that stood a few feet to the left of his headstone: a shrub that had reminded her of a mushroom cloud. Seconds later, the man turned, revealing an almost regal, aquiline profile, and stared in the direction of their gathering. He stood motionless for some time, though whether he was studying them or merely taking in the atmosphere, she couldn’t tell.
At the sound of dirt hitting metal, Hazel turned back to the service in time to see Sybil’s parents letting handfuls of earth fall dully over the box containing their daughter’s remains. When Hazel looked back toward the man a second later, she could just make out his hunched form as he walked off swiftly into the haze.
* * *
The reception at Philip and Jane’s Pasadena home was quiet and small. Hazel spent much of the time loitering near the piano in the front room, examining framed photographs of Sybil that had been arranged in a formation of unbroken loveliness. As she took in the pictorial record of Sybil’s youth and adulthood—both remarkably absent of any awkwardness or skin disturbances—Hazel’s mind persisted in re-creating her cousin’s fatal fall. Poor Sybil, murdered by gravity. The weakest of all universal forces, wasn’t it? She imagined Sybil moving across the lawn, eyes half closed, stepping to the edge of the concrete flight, reaching out for a nonexistent handrail, encountering only air. She loses her balance, topples . . . Hazel replayed the scene several times, with minor variations. But there was a second scenario, still lacking in definition, now asserting itself: a scene connected to the dots on Isaac’s map. How the map knew that tragedy would strike in the middle of the night at the exact latitude and longitude of Beachwood Canyon’s Durand Drive, she could only guess, but the third dot on the map was inserting itself into Hazel’s mind with increasing menace.
Three will die. I am the first.
She had followed both Isaac’s and Alex’s advice to stay away from the house, immediately moving her things to her brother’s place in Mid-City. This was not before verifying that none of the family would be staying in the canyon, either. No one, it turned out, wanted to be near the place, but Hazel received several puzzled looks for her sudden fixation on family members’ immediate accommodations.
As she continued to examine the photos that populated the living room, she discovered a five-by-seven that made her instantly light-headed. It was of Alex and, judging from the brand-new frame and lack of dust, had only just been placed among the others. He stood at the black mouth of an anonymous cathedral, tanned and darkly handsome, very un-Severy-like, probably looking much like his negligent father. Hazel certainly didn’t need any more prompts to remind herself that Alex existed. Over the past several days, under a mantle of gloom, she had sketched out a vivid picture of him in her mind: the way he spoke, how he could switch from frothy conversation to scholarly clarification and back again with eas
e, and how his troubled brow could transform into a smile in an instant.
She had no idea how she could get in touch with him. Alex’s mother had been at the funeral, hovering at the periphery, but when Hazel approached her afterward, Paige scuttled off to her car, pretending not to see her. Paige did not appear at the reception, leaving Hazel to assume she had retreated back to her hovel in Venice Beach. Alternatively, the thought of asking her aunt Jane for anything other than how she might help in this emotionally eviscerating time struck Hazel as monumentally rude; she may as well ask her if she could borrow twenty bucks to go stock up on some Boone’s Farm. If Alex couldn’t be found or relied upon to help her, she would have to dismantle the computer herself, check out of room 137, and ship everything up to Seattle. But for what? A giant bonfire of melting plastic and hard drives?
The sane thing to do, of course, was to hand off the responsibility to someone Isaac would have trusted, despite his warning that no such person existed in the family. Just as she entertained this thought, she looked up and saw her uncle Philip standing at the window, staring out into the side yard. Hazel realized that she had not spoken to him in any meaningful way since Sybil’s death. As she took a few steps closer, she saw that he was watching the child of one of his and Jane’s friends play on a small slide. The slide had presumably been set up for Drew, though Hazel couldn’t imagine it holding the girl’s interest for long.