Chapter 16: The Selectric

I walked out of my parents' house without my coat.

I didn't notice until the cold hit my arms on the step.

Lucas was out of the car before I reached the curb.

"What did she say?"

"Aldous gave her the note," I said. "He told her it was a prank."

He stopped walking.

He stood in the middle of East Sixty-Third with a cab honking behind him.

"Aldous," he said.

"Get in the car, Lucas."

He got in the car.

He didn't ask anything else all the way home.

I didn't tell him the rest.

Not in the car. Not with my guard in the front seat.

Not until I'd seen it myself.

【She didn't tell him about the typewriter. Smart. Or scared.】

【She's checking. That's what cops do. They CHECK.】

At home he went into his study and shut the door.

It was the first time since the birthday party he'd shut a door on me.

At midnight I knocked.

He was at his desk with the Foundation's bank records spread out, the ones he'd been reading for a month.

On a side table under the window, under a gray dust cover, sat a shape I'd walked past fifty times.

I'd always thought it was a printer.

"Can I see that?"

He looked up.

"It's a typewriter," he said. "It's old."

"Can I see it?"

He pulled the cover off himself.

An IBM Selectric. Sky blue. The kind with the little silver ball that spins and slams the letters onto the page.

It was clean. It was loved.

The ribbon was new.

"Do you use it?"

"Sometimes. Thank-you notes. My grandmother says a man should never email his thanks." He almost smiled. "Why?"

I should have asked him straight then.

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