Part 4 (1/2)

Again, I took a step back. ”How did you-”

”It's a small town.”

I still wasn't ready for the conversation to end. There was so much more I wanted to know. I remembered something that I had confided to Thorpe and which he had quoted in his book. ”I hope it wasn't someone she knew and trusted,” I said to him more than once. What McConnell seemed to be offering me, all these years later, was an alternative version of the story, one in which Lila's murderer wasn't also her lover. Whatever the truth was, I needed to know.

I felt a warm drop of water on my hand, and another. McConnell looked up at the sky.

”Can we talk again tomorrow?” I asked.

He toed the dirt with his shoe. ”You won't see me again. I just wanted to meet you and have my say. It's been a long time. I'm not sure what you think happened, I'm not sure what you think about me, or that awful book. I'm not even sure if you think about it at all. But it's important to me to tell you this, Ellie-I didn't do it, I never could have done it. I loved your sister. I loved her more than you, or she, will ever know. It all happened so long ago, it hardly matters to me now what people think. But your opinion does matter, because Lila talked about you all the time, you're the person she was closest to in the world.”

He was wrong about that. I loved her, but we weren't as close as I would like to have been. She hadn't told me about him. She hadn't been willing to tell me, that morning, why she was crying. I suspected that Peter McConnell, not me, was the one person with whom she hadn't held back.

The rain began in earnest now, slapping the leaves of the trees, pitting the dirt road. Impulsively, I said, ”Don't go yet.” I stepped under the awning of the hotel and McConnell followed.

”Are you inviting me inside?”

”Yes.”

Jose, the owner of the pension, always locked the door at midnight. Accustomed to my late-night walks, he had given me a key. I made some unnecessary racket as I opened the door, just to let him know I was there. We pa.s.sed through the empty lobby. In an alcove behind the desk was a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The candles had burned out. McConnell walked behind me, his long shadow preceding me up the single flight of stairs. As we pa.s.sed Jose's room I talked loudly. If anything happened to me, I wanted someone to know I wasn't alone that night. I heard bedsprings creaking in Jose's apartment, feet shuffling toward the door, the cover of the peephole sliding open.

At the end of the hall I slid my key into the lock, opened the door of my room, and waited for McConnell to follow me inside. There was no overhead light, just a single lamp with an ancient shade that gave off a dingy yellow glow.

Nine.

MY ROOM WAS SIMPLY FURNISHED: A BED, a hardback chair, a cupboard, and a small table. A narrow doorway opened onto the tiny bathroom. The room was hot. I turned on the overhead fan, and it began to click and hum.

”I have rum,” I said. ”Drink?”

”Just a little, please.”

I took out the bottle and two gla.s.ses and poured some for both of us. I still had my satchel over my shoulder, the tryer easily accessible.

”Have a seat,” I said, gesturing toward the chair. The furniture was small by any standards, and when McConnell sat, his knees jutted absurdly in the air. He laid the hat and book beside him on the floor. I sat on the edge of the bed directly across from him, the bag on the mattress beside me.

He took a sip of his rum, closing his eyes when he swallowed. ”This is very good.”

My mother was always giving me bits of advice gleaned from her experience as an attorney. One point she frequently came back to was that, if you wanted someone to tell you anything of significance, you had to build trust by offering them some personal information about yourself first. ”It was a gift,” I said. ”From a local coffee farmer. That's why I'm here. There will be a cupping tomorrow, and I fly back to San Francisco day after that. I always stay here when I visit the farm, and there's always a bottle of rum waiting for me when I get here.” I took a sip, felt the warmth slide down my throat.

”A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems,” McConnell said. Then, noticing my look of confusion, ”Paul Erdos. There's some truth in it. I go through nine or ten cups a day.”

”The book,” I said, glancing at the small volume on the floor beside him. ”The Chemical History of a Candle. What is it?”

”It's from a series of lectures delivered during Christmas at London's Royal Inst.i.tution in 1860. Faraday writes that 'there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.' Faraday delivered the lectures to schoolchildren, but there's quite a lot to them. A great essay is like a mathematical proof in that its argument is elegant, its truth universal.” He took another sip of his rum.

”You read a lot?” I asked.

”It pa.s.ses the time. As you've probably noticed, this is a rather quiet little corner of the universe.”

”You were telling me why you're in Diriomo.”

”After my wife kicked me out, I didn't know where to go. I couldn't go back to San Francisco, because I'd been vilified there, a walking pariah. I couldn't go back to Stanford. For several months, I drifted around Ohio, working as a house painter. I figured that if I stayed in the area, then maybe, every now and then, I'd get to see Thomas. But Margaret convinced a judge to give her sole custody, I didn't even get visitation rights-it all came back to the book. I was devastated. First I lost Lila, and then I lost my son. My work had ground to a halt, and my career was over. At that point it was difficult for me to imagine any reason that I ought to continue living.”

”Why did you?”

”Have you heard of Alan Turing?” he asked.

”Rings a bell.”

”In 1950 he devised the Turing Test, to determine a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence. A human judge engages simultaneously in natural language conversation with a machine and another human being.”

He must have read the confusion on my face, because he smiled and said, ”I apologize. This is exactly why I would make a terrible teacher. When I speak, I follow whatever path my thought processes may be traveling at the moment, but I forget to make the necessary connections for the person I'm speaking to. With Lila, when I went off on a tangent, I always had the feeling that she was following along with me. I never had to write down the steps to a proof; she could connect the dots on her own, as if she were reading my mind. There you go, I'm doing it again.”

I poured him another shot. He didn't hesitate in drinking it down.

”Turing killed himself by biting into an apple laced with cyanide,” he said, ”just a few days shy of his forty-second birthday. The suicide came after he was persecuted by the British government for h.o.m.os.e.xuality. Which leads me to the point I was attempting to make: I've never believed that suicide is a viable action, except in the most extreme cases-by extreme I mean that one is about to be captured by the enemy, or is suffering horrific physical pain from a terminal illness. Although I could see no immediate reason to live, ceasing to live was not a scientifically sound option. While Lila was gone for good, there was always the possibility that I would be reunited with Thomas, or that I would, despite my detachment from the math community, make a significant mathematical discovery.”

There was a noise in the hallway, just outside the door. McConnell heard it, too. He stopped speaking for a moment, we both glanced at the door.

”It's Jose,” I said. ”Probably checking to make sure I'm okay.”

As Jose's footsteps retreated, I realized that I had relaxed somewhat. But I wondered if this was part of the man's talent, part of his charm; perhaps Lila had felt exactly the same way in the hours before she died.

”I'd been separated from my son for almost seven months when my advisor at Stanford told me about his cabin in Nicaragua,” McConnell continued. ”He'd purchased the cabin a few years before, but he'd only used it a handful of times. I had nothing else to do, and nothing to lose, so I came. I instantly felt comfortable here. It was the kind of place a person could start over. I've been here ever since.”

”What about work?”

”I contract for an engineering firm in San Marcos-calculations, figuring out load-bearing weights for bridges, that sort of thing. I do it by hand, with paper and pencil. It's a very satisfying way to work. You can't imagine how much time can flow into a single lengthy calculation. Days and nights pa.s.s when I hardly leave my house-although perhaps it's a stretch to call it a house. So much was subtracted from my life when Lila died, I thought there would never be an addition that could make up for what I had lost, and that's certainly true. But I've tried in the last few years to think of my move to Nicaragua as a kind of gift. Prior to coming here, I relied extensively on computers. Without them, I feel a kins.h.i.+p with Ramanujan, Gauss, even Archimedes. Of course I don't mean to compare myself to them, only to say that there's something pure about approaching mathematics with only the most basic tools-one's own intellect, a blank page, a pencil.”

He eyed the bottle of rum, and I filled his gla.s.s again. This time, he stared at it for several moments, moving his hand in a circle so that the brown liquid swirled in the gla.s.s. The motion of his hand was measured and delicate, the movement of the rum in the lamp's dim yellow light hypnotic. McConnell had been the obvious choice all along, the most likely suspect, but I was beginning to doubt that he could have brought a stone down upon Lila's head, as Thorpe had theorized. The wound was too large, the manner of death and its aftermath too messy for a man of such obvious precision: the blood on her hair, the way her body was only partially covered by leaves. I imagined that, even in the most extreme circ.u.mstances, McConnell was a man who would tie up all the loose ends. The b.u.t.tons of her blouse, for one thing-surely, if it had been him, he would not have left the blouse gaping open. Another thing: her cheap topaz necklace, the gift from me, had been taken. But the opal ring, which must have been a gift from McConnell, was still on her finger when she was found. If it was McConnell, why would he have left the ring but taken the necklace? This detail, like Thorpe's theory that Lila had threatened to tell McConnell's wife about their affair, had always bothered me. But Thorpe's narrative had been so forceful, and so widely accepted as truth, that I had not trusted my own misgivings.

”Here's the funny thing,” McConnell said. ”If you tell me about a bridge you want to build-where you're going to build it, what materials you're going to use, the depth of the river-I can tell you exactly, to the most minute fraction, how much weight it can handle. But I've never been able to apply the same rigor to my own life. I failed to recognize how much Margaret would endure before she took my son from me. I simply counted on her-not her love, but her desire to have a certain kind of life. I believed that there was nothing she wouldn't overlook.”

I listened for a false note in his voice, watched his face and hands for some twitch or subconscious gesture that might indicate that he was lying. There was a part of me, I realized, that wanted to believe everything he said. If Lila had really loved him-and I saw now how she could have, I understood his charm-I did not want him to be the person who had taken her life. Was the very nature of the village itself to blame? I'd never been superst.i.tious, but I was beginning to feel as if I were under the influence of some strange spell.

”Thorpe's book,” I said. ”I read it twice, cover to cover.”

”Really?” McConnell said, looking at me with an unnerving intensity. ”Then you know that Thorpe proved nothing. His accusations against me were purely conjecture. He could not find a single piece of physical evidence linking me to the crime. Not a single eyewitness. When I read it, I was furious. All I could think about was how offensive Lila would have found it-the lack of precision, the leaps in logic dismissed in a single sentence.”

”You were the most probable choice.”