The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The sudden death of her father left Simone feeling more bereft and alone in the world than words could ever express. She had known that such a day was bound to come — lately, she had seen the shadow of death steal across his brow more than once — but to have it happen here, in a place where she already felt so alien and alone, only made matters worse.

If that was even possible.

As she walked to the end of the dock, with Lucas and Delaney supporting her between them, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other and not get the heels of her shoes caught in the gap between the wooden boards. She wondered how long it would be before she stopped feeling the void every hour of every day. She wondered, in fact, if that time would ever come.

In her hands, she held the urn carrying her father’s cremated remains. It was heavier than she’d thought it would be.

The afternoon was a crisp and sunny one, and the leaves of the trees around Lake Carnegie had turned bright crimson and gold. As if to complete the postcard view, a small blue boat with a yellow sail drifted along the far shore. Her father couldn’t have wished for more — apart, perhaps, from having his ashes scattered in the dunes of the Sahara. The desert, curiously, was always where he had felt most alive. But it would have been reckless for Simone to attempt another transatlantic crossing in the midst of the ongoing naval warfare, and she knew that her father would have wanted this business disposed of in as expeditious a manner as possible. In his view, a corpse was merely an empty vessel for the spirit it had housed.

“The soul,” he’d said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, “is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that’s where it will go.”

Although she had found such thoughts morbid, her father had not. He was reconciled to his place in the cosmic scheme — if scheme it was — and could face even the worst fear, as he had in the tomb of Saint Anthony, with courage and dignity. She wondered if she would be able to do the same.

When they arrived at the end of the pier, she closed her eyes and let herself feel the breeze blowing her hair over her shoulders. Delaney stepped, respectfully, a few feet back, but Lucas remained at her side. Without him, she could not imagine how she would have made it through all that had happened. After walking her back to the hotel on the night the film had gone up in flame, it was Lucas who had found her father’s body in the bathtub. Lucas who had called the ambulance. Lucas who had handled the police and the coroner’s inquiry. As for the cause of death, it was ruled accidental — an old man had slipped getting out of the tub, cracked his head, and drowned.

Even Simone would have believed it, were it not for the fact that everything in the room was where it had been, except for one thing — the blue folder. The folder, the one thing her father never let out of his sight, was nowhere to be found.

“Do you want to tell the police about it?” Lucas had asked.

She’d said no. What good would it do? They’d think she was crazy, and there was a risk that the work she and Lucas were doing on the ossuary would be compromised during the investigation. Besides, who could she suggest as the culprit?

“What about that man in the taproom, the one you said had given you the creeps?”

“If I had sixpence for every man who’d ever given me the creeps in a barroom…” she said, and he’d let it drop.

What she didn’t say was that the thought had occurred to her, too.

Hovering close beside her now, the wooden planks of the pier creaking beneath his feet, Lucas asked, “What would you like to do?” His voice was as gentle as the breeze off the water. How long, she wondered, had she been standing there, urn in hand and lost in thought? “Would you like me to say a few words?”

“No, that’s all right,” she said, opening her eyes to the brilliant sunshine again. The sailboat, though still far off, was tacking toward the boathouse pier on which they were standing.

“Would you like to say something yourself?”

But what could she say at this moment that she hadn’t said already, a hundred times, in her heart? Good-bye? She’d said that. I love you? I will miss you every day of my life? If the dead could hear the living, then he had heard her.

“You might want to do this,” Delaney suggested softly from the rear, “before that boat gets any closer.”

Simone looked down at the urn in her hands. True, it was heavier than she’d expected, but considering all that it held, lighter than it should have been, too. An entire life was contained inside it. A life now reduced to ash and bone. Bone and ash. An ossuary of its own.

Unable to budge the lid, she handed it to Lucas, who twisted off the top, then gave it back to her. Gauging the direction of the wind, she held the urn over the end of the pier, and then turned it upside down. A light powder filtered out, but nothing more, and she had to shake it several times before the bottleneck was loosened and a full cascade — bits of bone, gray cinders, white ash — tumbled out, the larger pieces, some the size of acorns, dropping into the water, the rest snatched up by the wind and carried off. She shook it until it was empty.

What, she wondered, had she truly released?

As if its captain had become aware of what was happening and elected to give them their privacy, the little boat with the yellow sail veered off in the opposite direction.

Were they merely mortal remains? she thought, as the air cleared and a billowy white cloud momentarily obscured the sunbeams. Was that all she’d let go, or had she, as her father promised, allowed a falcon to take flight?