by Sarah Rubin
Sammy puffed his chest out like a peacock. ‘That’s right. I checked Dad’s office, and Dr Learner’s lab. And I snuck into Graham Davidson’s office while he was on his lunch break. I even checked all of the conference rooms upstairs. But it wasn’t anywhere.’
‘Someone probably threw it out,’ Kevin said. ‘Did you check the bins?’
Sammy went quiet. For a minute I thought the poor kid was going to cry. Watching him made my chest ache.
‘I need to go,’ he said. ‘I just remembered there’s something I need to do. Not this. Something else. I’ll see you later.’
He shoved the balloons into my hand and ran off, looking backwards and tripping over his feet. I was pretty sure that the black town car was parked somewhere nearby. Sammy didn’t seem like a big walker.
‘Weird kid,’ Kevin said.
‘Look who’s talking.’
Traffic was starting to move again, and the pavements were clearing. I climbed on my bike and started to pedal towards the library.
‘So a break-in, huh? That must have been pretty scary. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ I didn’t feel like sharing. Especially not with Kevin. Not after I told him all that stuff about Della and Dad and how I felt about my family. I was playing it safe and keeping my mouth shut.
‘Is your dad OK?’
‘He’s fine.’
‘What about your sister? Doesn’t she have her audition today?’
I squeezed the brakes so hard my back wheel popped off the ground. I lost hold of the balloons and they floated up, seven red circles disappearing into the heavy grey sky. I didn’t even try to catch them.
‘Why are you following me?’
‘I’m not following you. We’re just going in the same direction.’ Kevin showed me his most angelic smile.
‘I’m going to the library,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to the library too.’
‘You’re going to the library? During the summer? You?’
‘Yep. Look up and watch the pigs flying.’
Kevin needed to fill in a library card application, so I left him at the mercy of the surliest librarian this side of the Ben Franklin Bridge and disappeared into the stacks.
I followed the Dewey decimal system to the 510s, the maths section. It was quiet there and I liked the books. My favourite spot was a window ledge between Arithmetic (511) and Analytical Geometry (516). Other, taller buildings had been built up around the library so the window looked across an alley on to a brick wall. It made that corner of the library feel like a secret hiding place, somewhere in the city where no one could see me. Dust motes speckled the air, catching the summer sun. I checked one more time to make sure no one had followed me, and then I got out my Goldbach’s Conjecture folder.
The mirror I’d taken from Mr Delgado’s office was still at the bottom of my bag, a thin layer of pencil dust clouding the surface. I wiped it clean on the front of my shirt and tucked it into the plastic pocket at the front of the binder. Then I flipped through the pages looking for where my copy of the Delgado file started. Dad might have told me to leave the case alone. But that was like trying to make one plus one equal five. Still, I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t going to go running around the city searching for Dr Learner. I had all the information in the file on my lap. If I found a clue or figured out a lead, I’d call Mr Delgado. He could handle it from there. I’d make sure he gave Dad an exclusive story too.
I paused for a moment on the last page of my notes on the Goldbach’s Conjecture. I’d planned to spend a quiet summer working on a proof. I’d also planned to spend a couple of nights sleeping in my own bed. That hadn’t worked out for me either. I turned the page over with a sigh and started reviewing the case.
I tapped the end of my pen against my cheek, counting as I thought. I was sure the key to the case was the way Dr Learner had disappeared. If I could just figure out the trick, the rest of the equation would fall into place. Unlike Graham Davidson, I refused to believe Dr Learner had built an invisibility suit without proof. Then again, I didn’t know Dr Learner. And everyone did say he was a genius. I shook my head. No, even if Dr Learner was the smartest guy on the planet and he had built a working suit, the case still didn’t make any sense. Why would he use it to disappear? What was the point?
I turned to a clean page and started writing down all the possible reasons I could think of for staging an impossible disappearance.
Maybe he was trying to hide from someone. I could understand that. I might not have seen the men in the silver Mercedes that morning, but they were out there somewhere. Being able to disappear sounded pretty nice. Still, inventing a million-dollar invisibility suit was a pretty drastic way to make your escape.
Maybe he was trying to prove that the device worked. But if he wanted to do that, he could just show someone. Maybe he had shown someone. Sammy seemed pretty sure that the suit was real. Then again, Sammy probably still believed in the tooth fairy. But if the suit didn’t exist, what was this all about? And how had Dr Learner pulled that Houdini from his office? It was a classic paradox, leading me round and round in a strange loop. I closed my eyes. Paradoxes were fine in theory, but this was the real world. There had to be a logical explanation, I just hadn’t found it yet.
I took out my phone and flipped through the pictures I’d taken at Dr Learner’s apartment, hoping to spot something I’d missed. But no matter how hard I looked at the scraps of equations taped to Dr Learner’s refrigerator or the cluttered floor, nothing jumped out at me. I stared the longest at the photo I’d taken in Dr Learner’s bedroom. There was something about that one clean square of space that bothered me. But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
‘There you are. This place is huge.’ Kevin came around the corner of the stacks speaking way too loudly for a library. I shoved my phone back into my pocket.
‘Quiet. This is a library, you know.’
Kevin rolled his eyes. ‘I’m not actually an idiot,’ he said.
‘You could have fooled me.’ I said it under my breath, but we were in a library. Under your breath is the same as shouting. I cringed. ‘Sorry.’
If the apology surprised me, it gave Kevin a heart attack.
He staggered backwards clutching at his chest and gasping for air, sliding down the shelves into a twitching heap on the floor.
I laughed in spite of myself. It started as a giggle and then it got out of hand. I laughed so hard the patrolling librarian came to shush me. Me. Even then I couldn’t stop. Kevin looked worried, and the thought of Kevin Jordan worrying about me made me laugh even harder.
Kevin grabbed my arm, scooped up my stuff and pulled me out of the stacks. He dragged me past the librarian and all the staring library patrons. Maybe it was their shocked looks, or the fact that I was running out of air, or maybe it was the tightness of Kevin’s fingers around my wrist that shook me back to my senses. Maybe it was all three. But I knew I needed to get a grip.
I took some deep breaths and counted prime numbers. When that didn’t work I switched to the Fibonacci Sequence. By the time we got outside (and I’d got to F14 = 377) I’d managed to calm down. I bent over, bracing my hands on my knees, and tried to catch my breath. My stomach ached. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed that hard.
‘Here.’ Kevin handed me a bottle of water from his bag and I gulped it down.
‘Thanks.’
I sat down on the marble steps. The storm was getting closer, I could almost feel the weight of the water in the clouds pressing down on us. I scanned the street, still no silver Mercedes. Most of me felt relieved, but a small part wondered: if they weren’t following me, where were they? And what were they up to? They hadn’t just given up, I was sure of that.
Kevin sat down next to me. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh.’
‘Really?’ I thought back over the year. He was probably right. School wasn’t exactly a comedy club.
‘You only
ever smile when you’re writing in that.’ He nodded towards my Goldbach’s Conjecture folder. ‘What’s in there?’
I looked at Kevin and tried to imagine a world where I could explain Goldbach’s Conjecture without a blank look or a snide remark. I could almost see it. All that laughing must have shaken something loose in my brain.
‘It’s just a maths problem I like working on. It’s not important.’
Kevin raised an eyebrow like he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t push it.
‘So why did you come to the library today?’ I changed the subject.
‘Ah. I needed your help. With this.’
Kevin pulled a thick stack of papers out of his bag. They were stapled in the top corner and slightly damp from where his water bottle must have leaked. ‘Principal Chase wasn’t happy about me running off without seeing her on the last day of school.’
‘I can see how that might have upset her.’ I wasn’t sure where Kevin was going with this, but I had a feeling it involved asking me for a favour.
‘She went mental. She called my house. Luckily I got to the phone before my parents. It took everything I had to calm her down.’ The idea of Kevin charming Principal Chase almost made me start laughing all over again. ‘She said if I turned in all of these workbooks before summer detention starts next week I don’t have to go.’
‘So?’ I said. ‘Fill them in.’
‘I need to get over ninety per cent.’ He looked at me, practically batting his eyelashes.
‘You must be joking. I’m not doing your homework for you.’
‘Aw, come on. I didn’t say that. Just help me. It’s your fault, you know. If I hadn’t run off trying to save you, I wouldn’t be in this mess.’
‘Why didn’t you just tell her what happened?’
‘What, about the two gorillas in black suits who shoved you into a car and drove off? I tried. She didn’t believe a word of it. Come on, you’re smart. Just help me out here. I’m an idiot, remember?’
I looked at the workbooks and back at Kevin.
‘Come on,’ Kevin said. ‘I’ll buy you a pretzel.’
‘Fine. I’ll help. But I’m not giving you the answers.’
I helped Kevin with his maths workbook and it was like pulling teeth.
‘It says right here show your work! Half of the marks are for showing your work.’
‘Who cares how you get there if you get the right answer?’
‘Because maths isn’t all about the answer. It’s about the process. If you just write down the answer, you might as well have just looked it up in the back of the book.’
‘Wait, the answers are in the back of the book?’ Kevin flipped through the pages and then sighed. ‘I knew it was too good to be true.’
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. We were getting nowhere fast. I could understand if Kevin wanted the answers so he could work backwards and figure out the solutions, but he didn’t. He didn’t get that half the joy of maths is figuring out how to solve the problem.
I stopped.
It was me all over. How had Dr Learner escaped? The problem had taken up so much space in my brain, I hadn’t stopped to think about anything else. About the real problem. Where was Dr Learner now? I didn’t need to solve the problem of Dr Learner’s mysterious disappearance. I needed to solve the problem of Dr Learner’s current location. That’s what the men from Chronos R&D were doing. They hadn’t just given up following me. They’d probably found a new lead, something I hadn’t thought of yet. And I refused to let them find Dr Learner first. This was my case, not theirs.
‘Kevin, you’re a genius,’ I said. He was too shocked to reply.
I got out my phone and did a search for Dr Adrian Learner. Most of the results were news reports of his disappearance. I saw the one my father had written near the top of the page. He’d be happy about that.
‘I don’t want news, I want a biography.’ I scrolled down. There.
It was an article from the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni magazine: Penn’s Science Success Stories. Dr Learner and Mr Delgado were both heavily featured. I skimmed through the page.
‘He won the Beakman Fellowship . . .’
‘Whoa, check out those sideburns!’ Kevin pointed to a picture of a young Dr Learner in a lab coat with what looked like a group of other graduate students. They were standing in front of a large window in one of the university buildings, the Philadelphia skyline sparkling in the background. I looked more closely. Standing next to Dr Learner was a younger, skinnier version of Mr Delgado.
Dr Adrian Learner will join his former classmate Mr Samuel Delgado to help us open the new Delgado-Learner Science Building in September. The building features offices for new science faculty, eight classrooms and four state-of-the-art laboratories.
And there it was, finally. A lead.
Everyone I’d talked to said Dr Learner was a brilliant man, absolutely devoted to his research. He’d never willingly leave in the middle of a project. That’s why Sammy was so worried. But what if there was somewhere he could keep working in secret?
‘There,’ I said. ‘That has to be it. A lab at the new science building.’
‘What, you think he’s at the university? Wouldn’t someone have already checked there?’
‘The building’s been under construction all year. It’s still not open. Yesterday, Della was complaining about the roads on campus being shut because of it. And Graham Davidson said Dr Learner hated to leave his experiments. If he disappeared of his own free will, he’d want to be somewhere he could keep working. People were looking for places he might be living, places with beds. But Dr Learner would sleep on his office floor if he needed to. And it would be really easy for him to hide on campus. There’s lots of people going in and out, he’d just look like another professor.’
I dialled Mr Delgado’s number.
‘Hello?’
It was Andrew, Mr Delgado’s Personal Secretary with capital letters.
‘Andrew, it’s Alice Jones.’
‘Ah, Miss Jones. How can I help you?’ It was hard to hear him over the people talking in the background, and the faint sound of a piano.
‘I need to talk to Mr Delgado.’
‘I’m afraid Mr Delgado is busy at the moment. We’re having a little celebration.’ He slurred his words a bit, and I wondered if Andrew had had a few too many sips of champagne. If so, it must have been some party.
‘What are you celebrating over there?’
‘It isn’t official yet, but it looks like we’ve won the contract. We’ll make the official announcement after we sign the papers tomorrow. It’s a real coup for Delgado Industries.’
I was surprised Andrew didn’t try to cover up his mistake. I knew Delgado Industries was trying to win that four-million-dollar contract with the government, but only because Dad snooped through Dr Learner’s emails. But I guessed if they were announcing it tomorrow, it didn’t really matter. I had bigger things to worry about anyway.
‘Right, well, good for you,’ I said. ‘But I still need to talk to Mr Delgado. I think I might have a lead on Dr Learner.’
‘Really,’ Andrew said, ‘I’m so sorry, he can’t come to the phone. But I’ll take a message and pass it to him as soon as possible.’
‘Fine, tell him I think Dr Learner might be hiding out at the University of Pennsylvania. In the new science building he bought them.’
‘New science building. Right. I will let him know,’ Andrew said, and suppressed a hiccup.
‘Make sure you tell him right away. I think those men from Chronos R&D are still looking for him.’
Andrew chuckled to himself the way adults do when kids are ‘acting grown-up.’ It made my hair stand on end.
‘I’ll be sure to tell Mr Delgado right away,’ he said. Then he hung up on me.
I was not filled with confidence.
‘So is that it?’ Kevin asked. ‘Hey, if you get that reward money will you buy me a new bike? My brakes are busted.
’
I didn’t like it. Mr Delgado would be stuck at that party all afternoon. Andrew might not even remember to give him the message. And for all I knew the men from the Mercedes were already on their way.
I called my dad and paced up and down, counting steps while the phone rang. I’d got to nineteen when Dad’s phone transferred me to voicemail.
‘Della must be in the middle of her audition,’ I said as I hung up.
I started down the steps to where I’d locked my bike.
‘Wait, what are you doing?’ Kevin asked.
‘I’m going to the university. Those Chronos guys might have figured it out already.’
He stood at the top of the steps staring while I undid the chain and swung my leg over the seat.
‘Well,’ I called up to him, ‘are you coming or what?’
Kevin shook himself awake, and then jumped down the steps. ‘Fine, but if we do find him, you definitely owe me a bike.’
We rode through the city in silence. I kept picturing Sammy back at Delgado Industries hunting through the trash. He might be hiding something, but he was serious about solving the case. He’d probably climb into a skip if he thought it would bring Dr Learner back. It was strange – a week ago I couldn’t stand Sammy, but now I didn’t want to let him down.
I pedalled faster and Kevin kept up.
We crossed the Schuylkill River on Walnut Street and pedalled into the heart of the university.
The Delgado-Learner Science Building was on the west side of the campus. Half of the building was hidden by scaffolding, but the parts I could see seemed to be finished. Two young elm trees flanked the entrance and threw dappled shade over the first half of the brass nameplate. I wondered if Mr Delgado would make someone come and cut them down. I was pretty sure the whole point of naming it after himself was so that people could see it.
‘This is it,’ I said.
I pulled on the large metal handle, but the front doors of the Delgado-Learner Building were locked. I stepped back and tilted my head up, scanning the building for signs of life. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
