Einstein's Secret by Irving Belateche Page A

more for Clavin,” I said, “say ‘yes’ like you mean it.” Chastising Eddie was my feeble way of treating Clavin like a human being and not a clue.
    Andrea stepped up to us and didn’t say a word for a few seconds. A sure sign that she was here to deliver bad news.
    “I’m sorry,” she said in a measured tone. “Your uncle is gone. You were very lucky to have had a few words with him before he passed.”
    My first thought shouldn’t have been a thought at all. It should’ve been a feeling. A feeling of sorrow. But it wasn’t. My first thought was a question. Who was the man visiting Clavin? He must’ve been in the room when Clavin died.
    “Will you two be taking care of the arrangements?” Andrea asked.
    “Yes. We’ll take care of everything.” Eddie said this solemnly, as if he meant it, which I appreciated. But then he added, “Do you know who my uncle’s other visitor was?”
    “He didn’t introduce himself.”
    “And you didn’t pick it up when you were in the room?” Eddie’s solemnness was gone. He was in interrogation mode, and he must’ve realized it because he then tempered his tone. “I mean, it’d be great if we could contact some of his other relatives. It’d mean a lot to us.”
    “I didn’t overhear a name.” Andrea didn’t seem annoyed. Not yet.
    “The truth is,” Eddie said, “we didn’t know much about our uncle because he was estranged from our side of the family. Maybe this can bring us all back together.”
    Andrea glanced toward the interior of the hospital, and at first I thought she was ready to get away from us, but then she lowered her voice. “His name was Greg Van Doran.”
    What?! Impossible. This coincidence was the most unnerving one yet until the rational explanation spelled itself out. The visitor must be related to Greg Van Doran, a descendant of his, a Van Doran who’d taken on the same first name. That made sense.
    “Did our uncle recognize him?” Eddie said. “Or did he have to introduce himself?”
    I had no idea what the point of Eddie’s question was, and it looked like Andrea felt the same way. She looked at her watch and shifted uncomfortably. She was probably thinking that she’d said too much already. “I have to get back to my floor,” she said. “I’m sorry about your uncle and I hope your family comes together. Family is everything.”
    Except when you don’t have one, like me, I thought .
    Andrea reached out and squeezed my arm, comforting me for losing Clavin. I accepted her gesture as if it were meant to acknowledge the loss of my own parents.
    She headed back into the building.
    “Gregory Van Doran, huh?” Eddie said.
    “He must be a relative of the original one.”
    “That’s one explanation.” Eddie raised his eyebrows, which formed a curious and amused expression, one I hadn’t seen before.
    “And what’s the other explanation? An impostor, like us?”
    “It doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that he’s after the same thing we are.”
    If that was true, that would mean that Clavin’s visitor knew as much about this little corner of history as I did. Maybe even more. That just wasn’t possible. Unless he really was a relative of Van Doran’s, and Van Doran was truly connected to Einstein’s secret.
    Eddie was already back on his MacBook Air, in search mode. “I’m checking out Van Doran’s relatives.”
    While he ripped through hundreds of web pages, Andrea’s words came back to me. Family is everything . Clavin had no family, no living relatives that I knew of, so no one was going to be “making arrangements.” When my mom had died, Aunt Jeannie had “made the arrangements,” and tried to do so much more. Her number one priority had been to shelter me from the blow of losing my mom.
    She left her own two kids in the care of her husband so she could live with me while I finished out the school year. Then she stayed through the summer until I left for college. Aunt Jeannie stuck to my every