He grinned suddenly. “It wasn’t hard: she wrote her name in all her workbooks. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, that it was really Gertrud Memler pretending to be Martina, or—I didn’t know. But Martina made a list of all the publications she’d produced back in the 1930s, when she was in Vienna. She wrote out the steps she went through in solving some of the problems, and she said—”
He broke off to pick up an old notebook and flipped through the pages. “See, she wrote it in German and in English: ‘I am putting down all these steps so that anyone can see that it is I, Martina Saginor, who made these discoveries.’ And then, she had the prisms at the beginning and end of all her workbooks. Plus, she had copies of the letters she’d written under Gertrud Memler’s name.”
“So those letters really came from Martina,” I said. “Not a Nazi getting a conscience after seeing the horrors of nuclear weapons. But why did she keep quiet all those years? Why not be in touch with Kitty—with your grandmother—and your mother? Did she come over before the war? Were all the records of her having been in Terezín and Sobibor false?”
Martin shook his head, his thin face troubled. “I don’t know any of that. If she left a personal journal, it’s one of these German notebooks.”
He picked up another old school exercise book and showed us the faded German script. “Her notebooks in English were only about physics. Even at the end of her life, she stayed current with physics; she was thinking about problems in dark matter and supersymmetry. She had a telescope, she kept a star journal; she tried to work on gamma ray bursts.”
Dorothy nodded and spoke for the first time since we’d found the hidden workshop. “She used to invite me out here to look through her telescope—she kept it on that platform outside. She never told me she was really an Austrian scientist, although I could tell she had a bit of an accent.
“Learning who she really was explained something to me. Ada—Martina, I should say, but I knew her as Ada for fifty years—Ada knew more science than I did, with my master’s in chemistry, but she claimed she never went to college. She’d give talks on physics and astronomy over at the high school; she’d let the kids come out and look through her scope, tell them about black holes, make it all come alive for them. She used to tutor the college kids in physics, help them with their problem sets, that kind of thing.
“In my early days here, I pushed her to get a degree and try for a job at a big school, but she said she liked small-town life, she liked the slow pace, not having to be competitive or look over her shoulder. I finally let it rest.”
“I wanna see the telescope,” Lily said.
Dorothy laughed. “You can, sugarplum, it’s over at the library for you and any little girl in Tinney to look through.”
I wondered about the skeleton I’d found yesterday. If Martina hid from the FBI under a double identity, as Ada Byron, or sometimes as Gertrud Memler, was that the real Memler, buried in Edward Breen’s old basement? Who had killed her? Who had buried her?
“How did you know to let Martin into the workshop?” I asked Dorothy.
Dorothy gave a bark of a laugh. “Ada said if someone claimed to be from Martina’s family and claimed to know physics, see if they could solve a problem set. Like a prince in an old fairy tale, pulling the sword out of the rock, Martin worked the problems in the first few days after he got here.
“When I saw those problems, after the lawyer gave me all the documents Ada left behind for me, they took me a month and I still couldn’t solve them very elegantly. Ada included a couple of different answer guides and Martin worked out two problems according to what Ada called the best solution; his other three solutions were clumsier but still—he got them in three days! And he knew the Saginor family history; he knew that his grandmother was Martina’s daughter.”
“What are you doing here in the workshop?” I asked Martin. “Hoping to find information on the patent?”
“I’m trying to rebuild the BREENIAC from Martina’s notes, sticking to what she dated from before 1953. I thought if I could prove that Martina designed the first magnetic memory, Mr. Breen would have to stop threatening me. Martina used a special gauge of wire that I don’t think Edward Breen had thought of, so Martina created a more reliable current than he designed, but I can’t quite get it to work.”
It seemed ludicrous to me, completely practical yet utterly impractical, like filling a garage with dry ice to freeze a model rocket. “You need to abandon it for now,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time before Cordell Breen or Homeland Security gallop up to Dorothy’s door; we don’t want to be sitting ducks for them. Why don’t you gather up the most important of her papers and your notes; we’ll get them into safekeeping in Chicago.”
“We’ll go over to my bank in Tinney right now,” Dorothy said. “We can rent a safe-deposit box there. Better than putting them at risk by driving all over Illinois with them.”