No One You Know Part 4

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 kinship 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."

"Probability is a strange thing," McConnell said. "In terms of evolution, an instinct for probability should be built into our brains as a way of avoiding danger, but the reality is that most people are terribly inept when it comes to calculating probability. Our running into one another, for example, might at first glance seem totally improbable. But you're a traveler, I'm an exile, and Diriomo isn't all that far off the beaten path. In general, people want to believe that the world is safe. Random acts of violence make them feel unsafe. Therefore, when someone is murdered, the initial instinct is to blame someone close to the victim, despite the fact that probability dictates that all of us come in close contact with dangerous individuals on a regular basis."

"What about the math problem?" I asked. "Goldbach. What about Thorpe's suggestion that the two of you were getting close to solving the problem, and you didn't want to share the credit."

"Close to proving it," he corrected me. "But that's ridiculous. We were nowhere near. Thorpe didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't give up on it, though. After I moved here, I spent most of my free time working on it. It was soothing, something to pa.s.s the time. More than that, I'll admit, the Goldbach Conjecture reminded me of Lila. It was a pact we'd made with one another, that we would once and for all prove it. I felt so guilty after she died. Whatever happened to her, I hadn't been there for her. I should have driven her home that night after dinner. But I didn't, because we had stayed out too late, and I needed to get home to my son. He wouldn't fall asleep until I tucked him into bed. So I walked her to the Muni station. Every day, I live with the fact that I failed her."

The rain was coming down hard, thrashing the trees outside and making everything smell earthy and green. Because the room had no air-conditioning, I had left the window open. A screen kept out most of the rain, but a few drops splashed onto the floor beneath the window.

McConnell leaned forward. His chair sc.r.a.ped against the floor, and his knee touched mine. Instinctively, I reached into my bag for the tryer. His eyes followed my hand. His expression was pained. "Don't be afraid of me," he said. "You have no reason to be afraid. I loved your sister, Ellie. I would never, ever, have done anything to hurt her."

I wanted to believe him. For Lila's sake, I wanted it to be true.

He stood to leave. In his face, I saw defeat. He must have felt that he would never convince me. "Wait," I said. "I have one more question."

"Hmmm?"

"Your son, Thomas."

"He turns twenty-three this year. A few months after I came to Nicaragua, I called my in-laws. Margaret's father told me that Margaret had remarried and moved out of state. He wouldn't tell me her new last name, or where they'd gone. I sent birthday and Christmas cards care of my in-laws' address up until three years ago, when they began to come back marked 'wrong address.'"

"Do you ever think about looking for him?" I asked.

"Every single day. But at this point, I think that if he wanted to find me, he would have."

He picked up his book, his hat. "It's late. You've been kind to listen to me."

"Wait," I said again, but I had nothing with which to stall him. I realized I wanted to hear more about my sister, to reminisce with this man who had known an entirely different side of her. How quickly, in the course of one's day, the unthinkable can become reality.

He moved toward the door, placed his hand on the k.n.o.b, and then seemed to remember something. He dropped his hand and turned to face me. "Did Lila ever tell you about Maria Agnesi?" he asked.

"Yes, along with the others-Sophie Germain, Olive Hazlett, Charlotte Angas Scott, Hypatia."

"Then maybe you recall how Agnesi used to solve problems?"

I shook my head.

"According to biographers, Agnesi was a sleepwalker. After laboring over some impossible problem, she would go to bed in defeat. The legend is that when she woke up in the morning she would find the solution on her desk. But I've always believed that's only a pretty myth. I think it was simply that when she woke up the next morning it was a new day, and she was able to see things in a different way."

He opened the door and disappeared into the dark hallway. I stood there for several minutes. Part of me believed I must have conjured the whole night from my imagination. Finally I went to the window and parted the curtain. In the distance, I could see his dark silhouette moving slowly down the street in the rain.

Ten.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER MCCONNELL HAD LEFT, I thought back to the conversation Lila and I had just weeks before she died, the day she tried on the slinky blue dress and told me about her plans to solve the Goldbach Conjecture.

Every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

Lila had explained the conjecture to me quite plainly. It was part of her ongoing effort to educate me in a subject in which I was hopeless. I think she believed that if she worked on me long enough, she might be able to convince me of the inherent beauty of numbers. I humored her in large part because, by some miracle, she managed to make the stuff seem interesting, something not one of my teachers had ever managed to do. She loved to tell me about the people behind the numbers-Poincare and Agnesi, Fermat and Ramanujan, Euler and Leibniz and Pascal. While the subject itself was dense and, for the most part, impenetrable, I found the human side of math and all of the stories surrounding it to be fascinating.

One of the things that makes the Goldbach Conjecture so unique is that, despite the notorious difficulty of finding a proof, its basic terms are actually quite simple. A prime number is a counting number whose only divisors are itself and one. Dividing it by any other number will result in a fraction. While the Goldbach Conjecture is generally a.s.sumed to be true, in the two and a half centuries since it was first proposed, no one had managed to prove it. One can say that 4 is the sum of the primes 2 and 2, that 6 is the sum of the primes 3 and 3, or that 8 is the sum of the primes 5 and 3. You can continue making these calculations for months, years, even decades, finding that every positive even integer you encounter fits the conjecture, but no one has come up with a way to prove that no positive even integer exists that is not the sum of two primes. Because the even numbers are infinite, a case-by-case proof is impossible. What is needed is a general proof, an argument that covers every possible even number to infinity. Therefore this simple, elegant, and seemingly true statement-every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes-remained only a conjecture, rather than a solid theorem on which others could be built.

This, Lila explained to me, is the particular onus of mathematics. Whereas scientific proofs are based upon a body of observations which, taken together, add up to what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a particular hypothesis, scientific theories are not absolute. They are always subject to change. When new evidence comes along that disproves an accepted theory, the theory goes out the window. With science, there is always some degree of doubt.

Not so with mathematics. In order for something to become a mathematical theory, it must have absolute proof. Once a theory is proved, it is true forever, and the advance of mathematical knowledge is powerless to change it. This means that mathematicians are held to a higher standard of proof than anyone else. Take for example the Pythagorean theorem, that bit of triangle logic that forms the basis of every sixth-grade geometry cla.s.s. The concept had been used by the Chinese and Egyptians for millennia when it was finally proved by Pythagoras around 500 B.C. More than two thousand years later, it's still true, and it always will be. For eternity, humans can count on the fact that, in any right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse will be equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides.

For the past eighteen years, one thing had been firm in my mind: the ident.i.ty of Lila's killer. My meeting with McConnell had changed that. What McConnell left me with was a problem. I could believe what he had told me, and allow the story of my life as I knew it to completely unravel. "What is a life but a compendium of stories?" Thorpe had said. Thorpe's story of Lila's death had become my own; it was the windowpane through which I had viewed the world for my entire adult life. If I chose to believe McConnell, I must face the possibility that the ident.i.ty of Lila's killer would never be known, that the person who truly committed the crime had duped everyone, and had paid no price at all. Or I could go on believing Thorpe's version of events, in which case there was still no justice for my sister, but at least there was an answer-an answer that made some kind of sense-a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Eleven.

THE NEXT DAY, I REPLAYED THE EVENING'S events in my mind-the meeting at the cafe, the walk to the pension, the long conversation in my room. In the bright light of morning, the previous night took on the fuzzy contours of a dream. I opened the cupboard beside the bed where I kept the rum. Part of me believed the bottle of rum would be full, the gla.s.ses unused; but the bottle was half empty, and the bottoms of the gla.s.ses were coated with an amber film. On the white tile floor, the ghostly imprint of McConnell's big shoes.

I had breakfast downstairs with Jose and his wife-strong coffee, fried beans, and bland, warm tortillas. Jose did not ask about the stranger in my room, but he and his wife looked at me differently. Their usual friendly chatter was replaced by silence. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had disappointed them by bringing a man to my room-thereby acting out of character-and that I had surprised them in an unsatisfactory way.

At half past nine a car arrived to take me to Jesus's farm. It was sixteen miles along a b.u.mpy, unpaved road, the morning sun beating through the windows. The driver chain-smoked and sang softly to himself, occasionally glancing at me in the rearview mirror. On the seat beside me was my bag, containing only a wallet, a couple of small gifts, and my cupping journal. The latter was a thick, tattered, 810 moleskin notebook in which I recorded my impressions of various beans. During my career as a cupper the journal had traveled around the world with me-to Ethiopia, Yemen, Uganda, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Java, New Guinea. This was my diary of sorts, but instead of people and faces it was filled with detailed notes on aroma and body, acidity and balance. The words a.s.sociated with cupping were as varied as the coffees, and I found comfort in their simple, precise poetry: a taste described as sweet could be further broken down into piquant, nippy, mild, or delicate, while a sour-tasting coffee was acrid, hard, tart, or tangy. Aromas were dry, sugary, or enzymatic, the latter of which could be further described as flowery, fruity, or herby. A flowery aroma was either floral or fragrant, a fruity aroma was either citrusy or berrylike, and an herby aroma was alliaceous or leguminous. Most people sipping their morning java wouldn't identify the aromas of onion, garlic, cuc.u.mber, or garden peas that characterized the herby coffees, or the cedar and pepper aromas in a spicy coffee of the warming variety-but to me a major part of the joy in drinking a cup of coffee came from noticing these subtle variations.

In addition to my cupping notes, the margins of the notebook were crammed with descriptions of cupping houses, notes on local customs, names and birth dates of farmers' children, anecdotes about the time I spent with them. If I were to be struck by a bus, my cupping journal would be the most significant thing I left behind, the record by which a stranger might deduce my personal history.

When the car stalled three-quarters of the way up the steep mountain road, I thanked the driver, paid him, and set out on foot. Walking always calmed me, the feel of earth beneath my feet and the rhythmic motion of my legs and arms. I happened to agree with Henry David Th.o.r.eau on the nature of a good walk: "You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking."

Behind me I could hear the driver working on his car-metallic clangs that made it sound as though he was tearing it apart, punctuated alternately by cursing and impa.s.sioned prayers to the Virgin Mary. Soon I was beyond reach of his voice, and could hear animals rustling about on the forest floor, warblers in the branches, the rat-a-tat-tat of woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. At this alt.i.tude the air was thin; my breaths were short and my lungs felt tight. It helped, at least, that I was in shade, protected from the sun by a canopy of trees. I was on farmland now, less than a quarter-mile from Jesus's home. The rich aroma of the coffee berries was mixed with the tart, sweet smell of lemon trees and the mild scent of plantains. I heard a familiar, raspy note, a series of bright, slurred whistles, and followed the sound to find the bright yellow underbelly of a Baltimore oriole in the branches above.

A young girl appeared in the clearing. "Ellie!" she called, running out to me, arms outstretched. It was Rosa, just shy of six years old. I'd known her since she was a baby, and was amazed each time I returned by how much she had changed, her hair styled shorter and shorter, her features becoming more defined year by year. I imagined that by the time she was sixteen she would be all elegant angles, with a stylish bob and starlet bangs. I dropped my bag on the ground and lifted her in my arms.

"I have something for you," I said.

She beamed. "What is it?" she said, eyeing the bag. "A present? Can I open it?"

"Listen to you! When did you learn English so well?"

"A lady comes to teach us on the weekends," she said. "Angel is learning, too."

I reached into my bag and pulled out a gift wrapped in bright red paper. It was a leather-bound diary and red pencil, each inscribed in gold with her name. Rosa started to untie the ribbon. "It's for your birthday," I said. "Promise you'll wait until next week to open it."

"I promise." She grabbed my hand. "Come on. Papa's waiting."

When we got to the little house, Jesus was standing on the porch. He came down the stairs and greeted me with a hug. I'd first met Jesus five years before, when Mike and I had traveled to Nicaragua to investigate some of the new co-ops that were beginning to take shape in the country following years of civil war. At the time, Jesus had teamed up with three other small coffee growers to form the Rosa Cooperative. Mike and I had been impressed from the beginning by their commitment to shade crops, and their eagerness to learn about the preferences of specialty coffee buyers in the U.S. Since then, they had invited five other small operations into the fold, and their coffee was gaining a solid reputation.

Jesus invited me inside, where we talked business over a plate of fried plantains. Occasionally my Spanish faltered, and Rosa stepped in to act as translator. There was a burst of conversation outside. Jesus's wife, Esperanza, came through the door, Rosa's little brother Angel at her heels. I caught up with Esperanza and played with the children for a little while.

When Esperanza left to put Angel down for a nap, I followed Jesus out the back door, across a dirt path to the wooden shed that served as a cupping house. I could hear Rosa behind me, her bare feet padding softly in the dirt. Not once had I seen her in shoes. I remembered her feet when she was a baby, the thin, straight toes. Once, I had seen Esperanza lift her, naked save for a cloth diaper, up into the air and pop the baby's tiny foot into her mouth. Rosa had laughed and squirmed in her mother's arms. It was the first time I had felt that maternal pang other women talked about so often-the first time I had actually been inspired to envision myself with a child of my own. Several days later, back home in San Francisco, I had told my boyfriend Henry about Rosa's little foot, how it fit so perfectly into her mother's mouth, and how Jesus had beamed with pride when he showed me the wooden cradle he had made for their first child.