Free Einstein's Secret by Irving Belateche

started his search. It didn’t take long for him to pass judgment. “The Weldons of Cumberland like their privacy.”
    “No number?”
    “Not even an unlisted number.” He closed the laptop. “We’re going to have to go in there unannounced.”
    “They’re not going to be too receptive to us if we surprise them.”
    “We can’t wait.”
    “Why not?”
    “Facts are changing. If we don’t follow this trail now, we’ll lose it.”
    Again, I couldn’t help but think that this was the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel. Except this time it felt like I was living that plot, because I had the weirdest epiphany: I doubted that Clavin had ever died in that car accident. Didn’t it make more sense that he’d died today, at the hospital? After all, I’d seen him there with my own eyes, and that was a fact.
    Had I ever actually seen his obituary? Or his funeral announcement? No, I hadn’t. There was no evidence that he’d died in a car accident.
    I made myself stop this chain of thoughts. The new history was playing on my doubts. Reconstructing my memory. Just as Eddie had said it would. But I wouldn’t let it. As long as I had this strange awareness of facts competing for reality, for the historical record, I thought I could control my memories.
    Eddie got out of the car and tried to fit through the spaces between the gate’s iron railings. He couldn’t. Then he looked to the top of the iron gate, but I could see that climbing over it would be impossible.
    He got back in the car. “We’re going to have to walk the length of the gate and find a way in.”
    *
    We continued down the road until the fence ended. Then we pulled off onto the dirt shoulder. Eddie opened the car hood, as if we’d had car problems, but that wasn’t our problem. Our problem was that the iron fence ran all the way into the woods, not just along the road.
    So we started walking its length, into the woods, hoping it would end soon enough. It didn’t. A few trees on our side had limbs growing over onto the other side, and those limbs were increasingly looking like our way in, though not an easy one.
    The iron fence finally gave way to a wooden split-rail fence, three feet high, that ran along the back of the Weston property. We walked along it until we were behind the mansion, then climbed over it. As we approached the back of the mansion, the forest thinned out, and it ended at the edge of what must’ve once been an expansive lawn. It was now overgrown with wild grass and weeds.
    At the other end of the lawn was a patio that ran along the back of the house. Eddie started toward it, fearless, but when he saw me hanging back, he stopped. “I can check it out alone. It’s up to you.”
    “You planning on breaking and entering? Or going around to the front and knocking?”
    “Not sure yet.”
    As I weighed whether I wanted to add breaking and entering to my resume, Eddie ran across the weedy lawn as fast as he could, minimizing the chance of being spotted from the house. At the back of the house, he positioned himself against the wall, between two of the five sets of French doors that bordered the patio.
    He looked back at me, waiting for my next move.
    I scanned the marble patio. It was weather-beaten, cracked, and barren of furniture, matching the desolate look of house.
    No one lives here , I thought, and used that rationalization to sprint across the lawn.
    I joined Eddie, and he leaned over and peered into the French doors. “Hard to tell, but it might be abandoned,” he said. “Let’s check some of the other windows.”
    Each window told the same story. The rooms were furnished with grandiose pieces, in keeping with the Georgian design of the house, but all the opulence looked dull and defeated, as if no one lived there. Either the house had been abandoned, or Harold Weldon’s descendants were terrible housekeepers.
    We checked the windows and doors to see if any of them had been left unlocked. None had. At that point, I thought