The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

by Nova Jacobs

  “Something the matter?” Nellie asked.

  He stood up. “I need to make a call.”

  A minute later, he was back upstairs in her study. As he headed past the lioness, he couldn’t help but glance again at the rifle case. He’d always had a visceral reaction to guns, but at that moment they held a particular dread or a kind of warning: hurry, hurry, hurry. Philip pulled his eyes from the weapons and left the room.

  In the waiting area, he hunted for a signal. He found a couple of bars near the window, and as he looked out over the water, the sky threatening rain, he dialed Faye.

  She picked up immediately. “Is Jane with you?”

  “Why would she be with me?” he asked.

  “It’s just that after dropping the twins off at their lesson, she never came back. We were supposed to go to yoga an hour ago. She’s not picking up her phone.”

  “Did you two fight?”

  A sigh. “She said I was smothering her, but it’s nothing she hasn’t said before.”

  “Maybe she’s at her therapist.”

  “No, that was yesterday. I didn’t want to panic you, but—”

  “Start looking.”

  “I don’t have the car.”

  “Do what you can, Faye. I’m coming home.” He hung up.

  After trying Jane several times and getting no answer, Philip went to the front door to leave. He was met by Cavet, who stood there like a butler, in shoes this time.

  “Leaving without good-bye?”

  “Something’s come up.”

  As Cavet opened the door, he simultaneously passed Philip a square envelope, stamped with the brain-spiral. “She was afraid you’d run off before she had a chance to give you the details of the offer. It’s all there.” Cavet slapped a chummy hand on his back. “I’m looking forward to working with a Severy.”

  Without a reply, Philip slipped the envelope into his pocket and left.

  He knew what he needed to do. He needed to drive quickly toward that red dot on the border of the Angeles National Forest. It seemed an odd place for a murder, at the very edge of the park, south of Mount Wilson. A tiny circle nestled just inside the green expanse . . . Eaton Canyon. Yes, he was sure of it now: that familiar twist of trail that he and Jane knew so well. The time code had read November 15, and then—he closed his eyes, summoning the rest—171126, 5:11 p.m. and 26 seconds. He checked his watch. That was 90 minutes from now.

  Starting the car, Philip remembered with growing alarm the discussion he’d last had with his wife in the canyon. He floored the gas and drove as fast as he dared down the hill, casting a swift, paranoid glance in the rearview mirror to make sure Nellie wasn’t having him tailed. When he pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway, his chest was pounding. And soon the pounding beneath his ribs was echoed by a far-off drumbeat in his brain.

  – 23 –

  The Station

  Hazel parked the Cadillac in Chinatown and proceeded to Union Station on foot, arriving thirty-five minutes ahead of the time indicated on the map. It wasn’t until she neared the station entrance that she realized there was more at stake here than just finding Alex. Someone, presumably, was going to die in a half hour. She wondered if an anonymous tip to the police might be in order, but what would she say? Instead, she called her brother. She was now ready to spill everything to Gregory in one long breath, no longer caring that Isaac had warned her not to. But he didn’t pick up. Considering the condition she’d seen him in yesterday, this didn’t exactly surprise her. Could he be embarrassed? Hazel left a message asking him to call her, that it was urgent.

  She paused to look up at the clock tower: ten minutes to nine. The tower was a familiar sight from childhood trips to the station. Her transportation-obsessed grandfather had considered such visits an essential part of her and Gregory’s education. But aside from a few novelty train rides, Hazel had rarely taken the railroad as an adult. A pity, because she had always been a sucker for the majesty of the place. While the building’s Mission Revival exterior informed passersby that they were squarely in the Southwest, the interior’s Deco typefaces and Streamline Moderne embellishments ushered commuters through the modern age of travel, stylishly directing them to railway platforms, ticket sales, and baggage claim. As she passed beneath the sentinel palms on either side of the arched entrance, she wished for a moment that she had a valise dangling from one hand and a first-class sleeper ticket in the other. The urge to disappear was overpowering.

  As this romantic notion subsided, an image of Alex rushed to take its place. Hazel’s ears burned with humiliation and anger at the idea of seeing him. Then again, there were dots all over the city. She could see only a fragment of the map on her phone, and he could very well be in Inglewood or Compton or Carson, or wherever else people die. Or, more precisely, where they are murdered. Isn’t that what Raspanti had been trying to tell her?

  Ordinarily, Union Station would have been deserted that time of night, with only a few desultory travelers among the rows of imitation leather chairs. Or an odd commuter catching a local back to Pasadena or North Hollywood. But the station was remarkably lively. A wedding party had rented out the now-defunct ticketing area, an enormous room off the lobby. The space featured a row of intimidating oak counters designed to imbue the act of buying a train ticket with the gravity of going to a bank. The wedding, which was evidently Old Hollywood–themed, was entering its phase of sloppy abandon. The female guests shrieked and shimmied in their bias-cut dresses, and heavy-lidded men with martini glasses and vape pens leaned on ticket counters.

  Hazel hesitated at the information booth, entranced momentarily by the beauty of the celebration. She turned and followed a glamorous couple across the marble floor and past the station’s cocktail lounge, which was filled with the moody, antisocial spillover from the wedding. Her breath stopped when she spotted Alex sitting among a clutch of tables just outside the bar. He wore a wrinkled blazer and was nursing a bright-red cocktail. He stared at her, a quizzical expression on his face.

  She strode in his direction, trying her best to appear as if she knew what she was doing, as if she had a plan.

  He spoke first. “Can I get you a drink?”

  She pulled out a chair, but didn’t sit. “Whatever you’re having is fine,” she said coldly, but there was a tremor in her voice.

  He glanced around for the waiter. “You shouldn’t be here, you know. It’s not safe.”

  “Oh, really. Why’s that?”

  “After this drink, you should leave. I mean it, Hazel.”

  There was an arrogance in the way he held up his hand for the waiter’s attention. She had gotten Alex all wrong, of course. She had mistaken him for one of her own kind, a geek, all rumpled clothes and bashful witticisms, a romantic at heart who was just waiting for the right person to come along. But now she saw him as a much odder creature: a disheveled playboy who could toy easily with women’s hearts because his true love was mathematics. Math may have betrayed him years ago, may have given up her secrets to another man, but he still pined for her, and no one would ever measure up.

  “Another Campari and soda, please,” he told the passing waiter. “Make that two.”

  “How international of you,” Hazel said. “You pick that up in Europe?”

  He turned back to her. His gaze was intense. “From my mother, actually. She’s an alcoholic.”

  Hazel sat down, locking her eyes on his. “I found your wig and mustache.”

  “Oh, did I leave them somewhere?” He made a show of checking his pockets.

  “I assume you also erased the photos on my phone. When did you manage that? When I was answering the door?”

  Alex finished what was left in his glass. “All right, I give up. If I erased the photos, how are you here?”

  She was furious with him, but she couldn’t help return some of his coolness. “I’m here for the party.”

  He smiled. “Bride’s side or groom’s?”

  Their drinks arrived before she
could craft a response. “Do you think the ‘event’ will happen here?” she asked.

  He adjusted himself on his chair. “I know as much about it as you do.”

  That’s when she noticed a camera around his neck, a Leica, half hidden by his jacket.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Documentation.”

  She glanced at the nearest Deco clock, which read 9:07. “Shouldn’t we be calling the police or something?”

  “And what do you suggest we tell them? ‘You don’t understand, Officer, it’s mathematics!’ ” Alex laughed into his drink.

  “I’m sure we could come up with something smarter than that.”

  He shook his head. “No police. We need the system to play out without interference.”

  “So these people—they’re just a mathematical system to you? You just observe, snap your picture, and walk away?”

  He leaned across the table. “Actually, you’re making my job as disinterested observer more difficult. See, in this system here”—he indicated the station with a wave of his hand—“you and I are the contamination.”

  “But you just interacted with a waiter.”

  “Hey, I can’t remove myself from the system entirely. Plus, this is one of the few ‘events,’ as you say, where one can get a drink.”

  “You’ve witnessed others then.”

  He nodded. “There were a couple of nasty ones on the east side two days ago. Gang related. I watched from a safe enough distance, with a long lens. I have yet to figure out if Isaac’s calculations are total in their omniscience, but I need to be sure that I am not, even as a witness, part of the system somehow. Then again, it’s likely someone dies no matter what we do. Even if we try to stop it, we can’t cheat the inevitable.”

  “So the math somehow knows we’re here, has already figured that in?”

  “Yes. It could be that the equation is, in fact, aware of itself.”

  Hazel took this in. This idea that the equation knew—that the universe knew—what she would do before she did it made her head ache. It was as if someone had just told her that every second of her life had been monitored on surveillance tape. She forced herself to look at the clock again. Fifteen minutes now. She needed to get to the point. “So did you crack the password?”

  “With some help.” He looked up at her quickly, realizing what he had just said.

  Was Alex working for someone? Could Raspanti be right about this they? Operating on the assumption that you find out more when you appear to know the answer already, she asked, “Are you at least expensing the drinks to the people you work for?”

  “The people I work for. Where’d you dig up that phrase?”

  She quickly changed tacks. “Okay. Did you steal the equation for your own benefit? Because some Russian beat you to your precious proof? And now it’s your turn to take the credit you so deserve?”

  Alex blanched. “You’ve been speaking to my mother.”

  “She’s pretty chatty when you corner her.”

  “God, does she love that story. The story of my epic failure.” He took a long drink and said, “I don’t steal other people’s mathematics.”

  “What do you call breaking into Isaac’s hotel room? Or ransacking his office? On the day of the funeral, that was you in his study, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled tightly. “His work doesn’t belong to you, Hazel. You wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it. Isn’t that why you let me in the room in the first place?”

  “It doesn’t belong to you, either.”

  Alex was about to take another drink, but stopped. “It hardly matters. The equation doesn’t work.”

  She sat back in her chair. “I don’t understand.”

  “It doesn’t work.”

  “You wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.”

  “The equation is junk, Hazel. The map is a tease. Isaac left behind just enough information to suggest the real thing. Sure, the map’s predictions are accurate: Isaac’s own death, numerous violent deaths around the city. But the dots stop: Union Station is one of the last . . . Do you know what Isaac left on that computer?”

  “How would I know?”

  “A phony equation. Trompe l’oeil math—get up close enough, and it completely loses its dimension. Beautiful, sure, and real enough to fool most people, but not me.”

  She wondered if Alex was making this up to get rid of her. “But if the map works,” she reasoned, “the real math behind it must be somewhere.”

  “Yes, but where? You were obviously the decoy.”

  She shook her head. “Isaac wouldn’t do that to me,” she said, trying to swallow back a tightness in her throat. “He wouldn’t make me go through all this trouble just to throw somebody off the trail.”

  “Are you sure about that? The password was numerical, by the way, hidden in that silly game of checkers that was staring at us all night. Designed for someone like me to solve.”

  She looked away, thinking of her grandfather’s letter, of the riddles he had crafted just for her. But she would never have decoded a checkers game. So Isaac didn’t trust her after all? Was that the ultimate answer to the riddle? “Ha-ha, you thought I meant you?”

  She laughed sadly. “So I’m just a sucker, is that it? Played not only by you but also by my own grandfather?” It stung to say these things out loud.

  “I didn’t play you, Hazel.”

  “No?” She could feel her face getting hot. “You bait me at the Halloween party. You manipulate your way into the hotel room.” She cursed her quavering voice, but continued. “You play the adoring Isaac fan—the poor little rich orphan abandoned by his parents—all the while biding your time until you could steal what you wanted.”

  Alex closed his eyes briefly. “I won’t deny that I took what didn’t belong to me.” He leaned across the table. “But you have to understand: I never hid the fact that I wanted to see the equation. I didn’t hide that I’ve had a less-than-ideal childhood and that I’ve clung to Isaac and his work as a result. I didn’t hide that I was hoping to draw somebody out, somebody who had the information I wanted. I was glad that person was you. But now I’m sorry it was.”

  Hazel listened, not wanting to believe any of what he said but also knowing that he no longer had any reason to lie to her. Hadn’t he gotten what he’d been after? Even if it ended up being a fake? She thought back to the moment she had first seen him at the funeral: the awkward academic at the podium.

  “That equation you read out loud,” she said. “What was that?”

  “It’s exactly what I said it was, Hazel, a scrap of his math I found long ago.” He leaned back, his voice dropping dramatically but his eyes still fixed on hers. “I thought someone might recognize it. If it turned out to be a piece of the equation I was looking for, I figured I could get a reaction from the person who had the rest.”

  He was talking so quietly now that Hazel had to lean forward to hear him.

  “But the scrap was just that, a scrap of nothing, and all I ended up doing was looking like a fool.”

  “I can barely hear you. Why are you talking so softly?”

  “Because,” he said, “I want your face nearer to mine.”

  Alex leaned across the table and, eyes zeroed in on her mouth, kissed her. Her immediate impulse was to pull away, but when she didn’t—when she realized that she’d wanted this since the first time she saw him—a heady current surged through her.

  After a few seconds, she sat back in her seat. “What was that for?”

  “For the hallway, at the hotel. When I wanted to kiss you but couldn’t because I knew I was about to betray you.”

  “I wish you’d picked the kiss.”

  “I really wanted to, Hazel.”

  Her face and neck still burned with the memory of his lips on hers. She wondered if they might do it again, but Alex set his chin in his palm and just looked at her, his eyes taking her in. There was, in fact, a look of regret in his face, mixed with something else: admiration, ad
oration? It wasn’t conspicuous, as if he were trying to convince her of it, but buried, mingled with other emotions and loyalties that were bearing down on him. The arrogance she thought she had detected earlier had disappeared, as had her own anger.

  She wondered where this left them, if anywhere. Was the kiss a one-time thing, or might they do a great deal of it in the future? Alex’s expression suggested the latter, but then his brow transformed rapidly into a frown. He appeared to be focusing on something just past her shoulder.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Did you tell anyone you were here?”

  “No.”

  “No one?”

  “Why?”

  Hazel turned. On the other side of the lobby, a man in sunglasses and a threadbare jacket—who clearly wasn’t here for any wedding—was walking unevenly in the direction of the trains. He appeared to have a limp.

  Not far behind the man, walking more purposefully, was her brother.

  Hazel didn’t call out, but just stared. Her hand involuntarily sought Alex’s. There was something strange about Gregory, something she had noticed to a lesser degree since Sybil’s death but hadn’t been able to name. It was as if she were suddenly looking at a person whose body bore the outward shape of a man but had left the sad, wronged child inside, peering out the husk of adulthood.

  – 24 –

  The Canyon

  Philip drove as quickly as traffic would permit back to Pasadena, where, just north of the city, two hundred acres of hiking trails and steep gorges carved themselves into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. In the early days of their marriage, when funds had been tight and entertainment options limited, Eaton Canyon had been a frequent destination for him and Jane. Aside from a shared love of science, being out in the open space of the natural world had always united them. But after a wildfire in the 1990s destroyed much of the canyon’s beauty, their hiking tapered off, and in recent years, they had enjoyed the park separately—Jane in order to maintain her daily runner’s high, and Philip to walk off a particularly stubborn piece of physics. It was only their daughter’s death that had brought them there together in recent days.