Einstein's Secret (7 page)

Eddie was already back on his MacBook Air, in search mode. “I’m checking out Van Doran’s relatives.”

While he ripped through hundreds of web pages, Andrea’s words came back to me.
Family is everything
. Clavin had no family, no living relatives that I knew of, so no one was going to be “making arrangements.” When my mom had died, Aunt Jeannie had “made the arrangements,” and tried to do so much more. Her number one priority had been to shelter me from the blow of losing my mom.

She left her own two kids in the care of her husband so she could live with me while I finished out the school year. Then she stayed through the summer until I left for college. Aunt Jeannie stuck to my every move to make sure I didn’t fall apart.

I was angry at life. My mom had died of breast cancer after guaranteeing me that she’d fight through it. I’d believed her, and I needed her to fight through it. But her decline was fast. Within six months of her diagnosis, she was gone, and I was left with the trifecta of anger, numbness, and loneliness. She had tried to prepare me. She’d told me over and over again that she loved me, and that her love would be there even after she died.

It wasn’t.

Everything was hollow and empty and dead. I walked through the halls of my high school and the rooms of my house with no awareness of where I was. I hardly noticed Aunt Jeannie. She didn’t try to overcompensate for the tragedy by acting overly cheery like some people did, and somewhere in the back of my numb state, I appreciated that.

Some nights, before I turned off the lights to go to sleep, she’d knock on my door, come into my room, and ask me how I was doing. I’d always said the same thing.

Okay.

She didn’t follow up with more questions or with any other kinds of talk. She would stand there for few seconds, both of us quiet, and then she’d close the door and head to her bedroom. Those moments of silence were the only respite from my loneliness.

I owed her.

*

“Van Doran doesn’t have any living relatives,” Eddie said.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“So our visitor was
pretending
to be related to Van Doran.” Which meant he
did
know as much about this little corner of history as I did, and, if I was being honest with myself, probably more. After all, he’d connected the confession to Mr. Gregory Van Doran, and I hadn’t.

Eddie looked me in the eye as if he had something to tell me but was reluctant to say it. After a very long three seconds or so, he said, “Let’s check out Van Doran’s disappearance.” But I knew this wasn’t what he’d really wanted to tell me. He was withholding information.

Three minutes later, Eddie was reading from his computer screen, summing up a
New York Times
article about Van Doran’s disappearance, dated April 23, 1955. “Mrs. Eva Van Doran, his wife, reported him missing on April twenty-second—three days after Einstein died. She told the police that she was expecting him to return from a trip the night before. The police checked the local hospitals and came up empty. It also says that the police didn’t find any evidence that he was the victim of a crime.”

“What about the trip? Where did he go?”

“It doesn’t say.”

Eddie found a second article, dated May fifteenth, and this one was much more detailed. It seemed that the disappearance of a Columbia professor had garnered some interest. Eddie and I both started reading the article. Apparently, Mrs. Van Doran had pressed the police to do more. She’d said that her husband wouldn’t just run off. He was responsible and met all his obligations. But the police said they had no leads.

Then Eddie and I must’ve hit the same paragraph at the same time, because I looked at him just before he said, “A connection.” According to a Columbia faculty member, Van Doran had been spending a lot of time in Maryland, working on a project.

“Maryland. Clavin,” I said.

“But what does that mean?”

Eddie scrolled further down the page and I saw something that made my heart skip a beat: a photo of the missing Gregory Van Doran accompanied the article.

He looked exactly like the man who’d just visited Clavin.

I leaned back, waiting for Eddie’s reaction. But he stayed hunched over the computer screen.
No reaction?

“Look at Van Doran—that visitor
has
to be related him,” I said.

“He must’ve had relatives.”

“Maybe I was wrong,” Eddie said. But he said it without conviction, and didn’t even glance at me. What was going on with him?

He continued his search and found a couple more articles from a few weeks later. They just repeated the same information while hyping up the unsolved mystery angle of a Columbia professor’s strange disappearance.

Well, at least now I knew why the visitor had looked familiar. He resembled Van Doran, and I must have seen Van Doran’s photo somewhere in my research, back before I dismissed him as being irrelevant. Like thousands of people I’d gone through, he was only tangentially connected to Einstein, and he wasn’t connected to the secret at all.

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. Dick 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?”