Free No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Page A

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 homosexuality. 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 José,” I said. “Probably checking to make sure I’m okay.”
    As José’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 pass 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 glass again. This time, he stared at it for several moments, moving his hand in a circle so that the brown liquid swirled in the glass. 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 circumstances, McConnell was a man who would tie up all the loose ends. The buttons 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