He offered her a wry smile. “I guess we should be getting back. How did you like the pie? Homemade. Momma Scott’s old family recipe.”

“Magnificent,” Nina said. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

“I remember you couldn’t, back when I knew every freckle on you.”

She felt a blush creeping up her neck, which she tried to stop by thinking of cool things, green trees, the ocean, the Truckee River splashing. “When Bob came along I had to learn. I’m good with macaroni and cheese. Someday, when this is all over, I’ll cook for you.”

“Or maybe I’ll cook for you. Frog legs in aspic. Something yummy like that. Sans noodles.”

“Or we’ll order food from people who know their food.”

“From a Moroccan waiter. And if you flirt with him, I’ll follow him into the kitchen and kick his butt.”

25

NIGHT ON THE PACIFIC, MOONLIGHT ON cloud-tops. A painted torpedo toy streaking through the vault of sky, stuffed with human beings ignoring their precarious situation.

Most people were sleeping. Elliott had purchased an airplane pillow at the airport. He slouched in his seat, pulled the inadequate blanket to his chest, leaned his head back, and let his mouth fall with gravity. His breath was sour with the wine he had drunk, and shaving had not been on the agenda.

Nina, in the window seat, waited until he had not moved for almost an hour. Then she carefully lifted the blanket away from his chest. He wore his parka, unzipped, over a striped shirt, the top buttons undone. His naked Adam’s apple moved regularly up and down and she could see scanty chest hair.

She inserted a hand inside the parka, just above his heart. He seemed to heave a sigh as she slowly removed the notebook, as though his heart noticed and regretted the theft. No jerky movements, she told herself as the hand snaked back home with its prize.

The seat light sent its focused beam onto a thick black leather-covered notebook, about four inches square, held shut with a laughable silver lock like the one on the pink diary Nina had kept in seventh grade.

The toothpick from the dinner plate worked, though she had several other possible tools ready. She wondered how this thing that Elliott protected like a dragon could have been locked so flimsily.

But it wasn’t the lock, of course, it was where he kept it, right next to his heart. She squeezed the ends of the lock and it clicked open. Reading glasses! They were gone, no, they were on her head. Don’t get excited, she told herself. If he woke up, she would calmly hand it back and admit it.

The inside of Elliott’s universe was as neat as the toothpick that had opened it, no loose scraps of paper, no cross-outs and scrawls. Obviously this was where he kept results, not work in progress. Flipping through it, she estimated that there were three hundred pages of neatly written notes and calculations and beautiful graphs. Each page was dated.

She turned back to the beginning. The cover page said, “Elliott Wakefield’s Theory of Everything. Do Not Enter. Or you are Cursed.” There was also a boy’s drawing of a skull and crossbones, and a curlicued “EW.” On the next page, the first date showed that Elliott had been keeping this same mathematical diary for ten years. He must have been in about eighth grade when he started it.

She flipped through it again. A doodle or two, no blank pages interspersed. Elliott had been rigorous with himself, amazingly so for the boy who had begun this venture. She glanced at him, at the boy in the man this time, and realized that she really, really wanted it all to be true-that he had solved the mystery of the prime numbers.

If it was true, what she held in her sneaky hands would be immortality. Prizes and honors would only be the beginning. This book would go to a museum.

She turned back to the first pages, where the writing was bigger. He had used a fine-tipped mechanical pencil throughout. The pages had gold edges. Water had stained the tops of some of them. The notebook itself was pliant, the cover soft.

The book began with the harmonic series, in some form she could barely recognize. Even at thirteen, Elliott was ahead of her. She saw signs she recognized as calculus, and some infinity symbols and ellipses, and knew he was working with series of numbers and their limits. That pi sign meant “prime number.” “Let something be the something of something something.”

If only Mick were on this flight. If only a copy machine were back there with the chatting flight attendants, right next to the microwave. Could she copy any of it on her napkin? What should she copy? She turned to the last page and did copy the equations as well as she could, though most of the symbols were new to her. The folded napkin went down her blouse, near her own heart.

Yet she couldn’t bring herself to give it back yet. She was touching the dragon’s jewel, running her fingers over the leather, feasting her eyes on page after page of the dragon’s magic formulae. Elliott’s universe.

She wanted to keep it. But he would miss it immediately, and this was no cave she could flee.

Please be true. She wished it passionately for him, because his grief for his friends was real and deep and she might have had a hand in causing their deaths.

After a while she lifted the blue blanket again and opened the parka, slipping the book home again. Elliott dreamed on while Nina watched and wondered. Thirty thousand feet down within the still ocean, whales swam through the night, singular, extraordinary.

26

FIRST SNOW FELL OUTSIDE THE WINDOW. Betty Jo Puckett, Elliott, Sandy, Nina, and a transcriber sat around Nina’s conference table. The espresso machine coughed on the counter nearest the door, and the lamp was lit in honor of winter’s arrival.

Elliott had already told his story, changing nothing from his talk with Nina in Germany.

Betty Jo had caused no trouble about the lack of notice regarding the changed deposition. Nina suspected that she had had second thoughts about not attending and was relieved to be able to do so at Tahoe. She wasn’t her flippant self, though; she said little and listened carefully, making occasional notes.

Elliott stared at the table in front of him. He had been asked about the Heddesheim shooting, but Nina had made it as merciful as possible. Getting him out of bed this morning had been difficult. She was afraid that jet lag and grief were turning into depression.

But he did his duty, and at last an eyewitness account of Sarah Hanna’s death had been given.

“Do you have any questions to ask the witness?” she asked Betty Jo. Though it was Nina’s show, Betty Jo had every right to go over whatever she wanted. She had taken notes throughout Nina’s questioning, and as the story poured out, the card counting, the money, the shooting, the primes, XYC, she never blinked. She was on a mission and she had her own theory, that was obvious.

She regarded Elliott with her head cocked as if taking his measure. She had worn a tweed suit and UGG boots to the deposition, which did not make her look ridiculous, as she had long toned legs, and her fluff of silver hair was set off by the silver of the suit. With her steady eyes and dark eyebrows, the slight shadow of a mustache, she was formidable behind the down-home facade.

“Well, Elliott, you’ve been avoiding having to do this for a long time, haven’t you? I mean, you could have contacted Mr. Hanna a long time ago and shared this information with him, couldn’t you?”

“As I said, I was afraid. I didn’t see how I could help.”

“You were afraid to tell the truth?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you agree with Ms. Reilly here that the motel should have done more to protect you?”

“I-I-don’t know.”

“Ms. Reilly must have explained to you that you’re a straw defendant, that she used a legal trick that required callin’ you a defendant. You know that, don’t you?”