The Janitor Who Solved the Impossible

Chapter 4

Maya began, after that, to watch the janitor.

She told herself it was an investigation. Some hours it felt more like a rescue, and she could not have said who was being rescued.

He was not hard to find. That was the strange part. Elias Ward was everywhere in Westbrook High, and nowhere. People walked around him as they walked around furniture. Teachers talked across him, mid-sentence, as if he were a pane of glass.

But if you watched — really watched — the furniture had habits.

He took his break in the boiler room, and he read the newspaper there, and he only ever read the science pages. Maya timed it for three days. The front page he folded away unread. Sports, unread. The science pages he read slowly, one finger under the lines, his lips moving sometimes — not at the words, she realized, but at the numbers. Twice she saw him stop at some figure in a column and shake his head, very slightly: the small, patient head-shake of a man watching someone repeat an old mistake.

The line on the library board, meanwhile, had gone nowhere at all. The reporter from the county paper had written it up as a short, puzzled item, buried deep in the weekend paper. Hargrove told everyone who asked that it was a student prank, in poor taste, and under investigation. Nobody claimed the line on the board. Nobody ever had.

And on Thursday the three days ran out. Nobody claimed the money either. Cole's office announced that the professor would present the complete solution himself, at Open Day, in the auditorium, with the university's development people in attendance. Hargrove spoke about it in the corridors as if he had personally arranged it.

Thursday afternoon, in the library, the radio on the librarian's desk was murmuring the news while Elias emptied the bins along the wall. A cheerful voice announced that district test scores had risen twelve percent above the state average.

"That's not twelve," Elias said.

He said it to the bin he was tying off. The librarian looked up. Maya, at the carrel behind the atlases, forgot the page she was on.

"Twelve percent of what?" Elias went on, mild as anything, pulling the drawstrings tight. "They've mixed the two districts again. It was four points on the old scale. They do it every October. Makes the fall look better."

He carried the bag out. The librarian stared after him, then down at the radio, as if it had personally misled her. Which, Maya supposed, it had.

On Friday, Maya committed her crime.

She had a regional competition problem in her notebook — not Halden, nothing like Halden, but hard, the kind of hard that had taken the math team three meetings to c***k in September — and in the corridor outside Room 114 she took the notebook out of her bag and let it fall. Not dropped it. Let it fall, at the exact moment Elias Ward came around the corner with the mop bucket, so that it landed face-up, open, directly in his path.

She made herself keep walking, all the way to the water fountain, before she turned.

Elias Ward had stopped.

He stood with the bucket at his feet, looking down at the open notebook on the corridor floor. For a moment — she would have sworn it on anything — his whole posture changed: the shoulders squared, the head came up, the tired stoop unbent itself into the stance of a man standing in front of a room that belonged to him.

Then he picked up the mop, and walked around the notebook, in a small, deliberate arc, as a man steps around a sleeping dog he does not want to wake — and went on down the corridor, and did not look back.

Maya stood by the water fountain for a long time before she went back for the notebook.

He saw it, she thought. He saw all of it. He solved it standing there, or he refused to solve it standing there, and I don't know which of those is sadder.

Saturday was Open Day.

Westbrook filled with parents in good coats, with alumni, with two local reporters and a woman from the university's development office who photographed everything, including the cake. The partnership — the word had capital letters in Hargrove's mouth all week — hung over the whole day. Cole's university and Westbrook High, joined in a photograph, with Hargrove at the center of the photograph, beaming.

The centerpiece, at noon in the auditorium, was announced on the program in gold letters: PROFESSOR NATHAN COLE — THE HALDEN PROBLEM: THE COMPLETE SOLUTION.

Nine hundred people watched Cole write for forty minutes.

Maya sat in the third row with the stapled proof in her lap — ushers had passed it out at the doors, printed and stapled, three pages long — and photographed every board on her phone as it filled. Cole's solution went up in long, elegant, utterly confident lines, above the stranger's first step, which nobody had dared erase: the denser, humbler hand, the small compressed symbol. The two handwritings stood one over the other on the same slate, and she found she could not look at them together without her stomach tightening.

Cole reached the third page.

Maya followed him there on the printed sheet, one finger under the lines, and so she knew the exact line he had reached when something made her turn in her seat.

At the back of the auditorium, where the windows ran the length of the wall, Elias Ward was washing the glass with a squeegee. He had stopped mid-stroke. He was looking at the board — at the third page of it, at the lemma's line, the same line she had her finger on — and he looked for ten seconds, and he shook his head. Once. Slowly. The same small head-shake he gave the newspaper's numbers.

Then he picked up his bucket and went out through the side door.

Up on the stage, Cole spread his hands. "The Halden problem is solved."

The development woman was on her feet first. Hargrove applauded with his whole body, and the hall rose around Maya, and Jess grabbed at her sleeve — "Maya, the photo, the development lady—" — and Maya pulled free and went after the only honest thing that had happened in that auditorium all morning.

She caught him at the supply closet at the end of the science wing, where the corridor smelled of bleach, and she was breathless and graceless and seventeen, and she did not care.

"Mr. Ward."

He stopped. He did not turn quickly. Elias Ward never did anything quickly.

"Miss Bennett."

"You shook your head." It came out accusing, which was not how she had rehearsed it all the way down the corridor. "In there. When he reached the third page. You looked at the board and you shook your head."

"I wash the windows, Miss Bennett."

"It's the lemma." Her voice dropped; some instinct older than thought told her this was not a corridor conversation at full volume. "The lemma on the third page. Something's wrong with it."

Elias Ward looked at her for a long moment — not through her, the way everyone looked through him, but at her, and it was like being read.

"The lemma on the third page is wrong," Elias said quietly. "It was wrong when he wrote it, and it was wrong thirty years ago, in another man's handwriting, in another room. Good day, Miss Bennett."

He took his bucket into the supply closet, and the door eased shut behind him, and Maya stood alone in the bleach smell with one sentence going around and around in her skull.

Thirty years ago. In another man's handwriting.

He hadn't said if the lemma was wrong.

He'd said when.