At a narrow staircase that landed in the dining room, Dorothy told me to go up on my own: her legs didn’t like climbing up and down anymore. I smiled sourly: she knew I would find nothing. The climb was payback for disarming her niece. Today my legs didn’t really like stairs, either, but I pretended to be detecting things, examining the risers with a magnifying glass while I was still in Dorothy’s sightlines.
The room at the top was Lily’s: the bed was covered with stuffed animals, the drawers filled with sunsuits and tiny Tshirts. Since I was up here anyway, I pulled down the hatch to the attic crawl space and hoisted myself up, my abdominal muscles protesting mightily, to look at a layer of dusty insulation.
When I was back on the ground floor, Dorothy said, “There’s also the basement. Your young woman is down there.”
She opened the door and turned on a light, a naked forty-watt bulb that dangled from an old wire, but stayed in the kitchen.
I took a deep breath and started down the stairs. My legs were unsteady and I began to sweat. Not muscle fatigue, but terror. I did not want to be underground again. Everything connected to Martin Binder lay underground, his Skokie bedroom, the secrets buried deep within his grandmother’s family, the body in his uncle Julius’s basement.
I tried to sing under my breath, but the only song that came to mind was “O terra, addio,” when Aida is walled up in the tomb to die. Not helpful. I called to Alison instead.
She met me at the bottom of the stairs, shoulders drooping, tears streaking the dust on her cheeks. “Vic, what made you think Martin was here? I’ve looked everywhere!”
“The cameras in the front door,” I said. “They’re the same as the ones in his bedroom door in Skokie. These two women have computers connected to them: they saw us coming. Meg was at the door before we rang the bell.” I spoke loudly enough for Dorothy to hear me up in the kitchen. I was a detective, people should know when I was detecting.
“Then where is he?” Alison said. “Has he disappeared from here, too?”
“He has to be here, or at least, there must be some sign of him besides the cameras.”
I walked around, testing the walls. This was a real basement, not a root cellar. It even had a couple of small windows, so if Dorothy nailed the door shut we’d be able to scream for help. Although who would hear us?
The usual mechanicals were there, furnace, water heater, a washer and dryer. The floor was made of rough-poured concrete. Since the only lighting was the naked bulb at the top of the stairs and another over the washer, both Alison and I stumbled on the uneven surface.
Dorothy, or perhaps Ada, had put up cheap white shelves that covered the walls next to the washer and dryer. They held gardening tools and enough screwdrivers and pliers for basic repairs, along with the usual detritus of a home: a Christmas tree stand, remnants of a vacuum cleaner, old gym shoes, a moth-eaten bear’s head. Perhaps the most unnerving object was an urn on a low shelf labeled “Mother’s Ashes.”
I lifted the bear’s head, but the urn didn’t move. I unhooked the latches to the top.
“Vic!” Alison was shocked. “You can’t dig through someone’s ashes.”
I ignored her, inspecting a vase with fine ashes in it. Human remains don’t burn down to the kind of neat pile newspapers make. I lifted the vase out. Underneath was a number pad.
“Your turn,” I said to Alison. “What numbers would someone like Martin use to control a door?”
“Vic! What—is there a secret door?”
“There’s a secret something,” I said. “If Martin programmed it, what numbers did he choose?”
“I don’t know. He told me that Feynman broke into all the safes in Los Alamos because he knew that physicists love the fine-structure constant, so I don’t think—unless—and we don’t even know how many digits.”
“Try something,” I said impatiently. “The fine whatever it is, or pi or anything.”
“You usually only get three tries for something like this.” She typed slowly, nervous about making a mistake. Nothing happened. She tried again, even more slowly, but still nothing happened.
“Think back to what Martin said when he talked about Feynman breaking into people’s safes,” I said. “Take your time. Think if he joked about what constant he—”
“Of course!” Alison’s face lit up. “Only, I don’t know it off the top of my head. Can I turn on my iPhone?”
Another calculated risk. I nodded, and she powered up her device. “Six-six-two, six-oh-seven,” she breathed. I typed in the numbers.
We stared at each other in chagrin, feeling we’d run out of chances, when we heard a grinding, scraping noise. I couldn’t help imagining the ceiling falling on us, but it was the wall behind the white shelves: it was slowly sliding open while the shelves remained oddly in place.
The room behind the shelves was bigger than the basement we were standing in. The walls were paneled, the floor covered in tile with Navajo rugs scattered around. A bed was set up in an alcove to one side.
Bright lights shone over a long worktable that was covered in metal and wires. A young man with dark wiry hair stood next to the table, holding a screwdriver, gazing nervously at the open door.
When he saw us, his face relaxed.
“Alison. You remembered Planck’s constant.”
CHICAGO, 1953