Authors: Elissa D. Grodin

Physics Can Be Fatal (26 page)

BOOK: Physics Can Be Fatal

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Refreshments in hand, students and teachers gathered around Edwina, until the entire department was crowded into one corner of the library. The air of suspicion that had draped itself over Sanborn House since Alan Sidebottom’s death soon evaporated into the air with the clinking of china cups and saucers, and the
bonhomie.

“Well done, Edwina,” said Seth Dubin, perched on an ottoman, his teacup raised in a toast.

“Hear, hear!” everyone shouted.

“I hate to tell you this,” Edwina laughed, sitting on a sofa between Nedda Cake and Mitchell Fender. Her jaggedly chopped hair looked awful, and she still had plenty of bruises and cuts on her face. “But we all fell under suspicion at the beginning. Then Nedda put the idea in my head that Professor Sidebottom and Helen might have had a child together––”

“Wild, unsubstantiated, guesswork,” Nedda interjected. “Some of my best work.”

“And a bunch of you are in the right age range to be their love child,” Edwina continued. “The idea being, that a long-lost child of Alan Sidebottom and Helen might be motivated by revenge or greed, or some dastardly thing like that.”

“So this girl came to New Guilford with a plan to kill Alan? How’d she know he would even be in New Guilford?” asked Donald Gaylord.

“She didn’t,” Edwina said. “She had been living in New York, working as a hairdresser, when she wasn’t getting fired. She was in and out of money troubles and trouble with the police. One day she got the bright idea to do some research and find out who her birth parents were. She found out Helen was her birth mother, and decided to come up here and try to get money out of her somehow, by hook or by crook. But the father was unlisted on the birth records, so she didn’t know who he was. She opened the salon in New Guilford, sent those pink flyers to the department, and waited, hoping Helen would show up.”

“What was she going to do if Helen never came into the salon?” Lois Lieberman said.

“I don’t think she thought it through that far. She’s obviously crazy, and I think she made up her plan more or less as she went along,” Edwina said. “I think eventually she would have shown up at the Department and confronted Helen in person. Maybe even blackmailed her. God knows.”

“How did she even know about Alan Sidebottom?” Mitchell Fender said.

“Poor Professor Sidebottom. It was rotten luck,” Edwina said.

“Penny Crawford,” Edwina continued, “that’s her actual name, happened to read in the college paper about Professor Sidebottom coming to Cushing this semester. She had already figured out––where would we be without the Internet?––that Helen had been in Brussels the summer Penny was conceived. Penny recognized Alan Sidebottom’s name from the list of attendees at the Brussels conference, saw a picture of him and noticed her resemblance to him, and put two and two together. She wrote to him asking for money, and he completely blew her off. Then, when he showed up at the salon, she was furious that he didn’t notice the resemblance between them. Then he made the fatal mistake of making a pass at her. That sealed his fate, and she decided to poison him right then.”

Edwina took a sip of tea. The library was silent for a few moments, except for the ticking of the clock on the mantle.

“Will Tenney––the detective––says Penny Crawford has huge issues with men, with being abandoned and ill-treated, and so on. I think she figured Professor Sidebottom deserved the punishment of death for refusing to give her money, for ignoring her, for denying her very existence––for blowing her off at every turn. But the truth is probably that Professor Sidebottom didn’t even know Helen had his baby all those years ago.”

“Then we come to the poison. This was truly diabolical. I was staring at that pink flyer she sent everyone. Remember how it had a background design of an old botanical print? I finally remembered where I had seen that same kind of flower before. The night I had dinner at The New World with Professor Sidebottom, he was admiring the murals. He told me a story about a cat he had as a boy that died from eating flowers just like ones in the mural. Tall, spikey, purple flowers. I looked them up and made the connection: they were the same flowers on Penny Crawford’s flyer. Foxgloves. Latin name:
digitalis purpurea.
If you grind up the flower you get digoxin, the same ingredient that’s in Professor Sidebottom’s heart medication. Only, if you take a huge dose of it, it will trigger a massive heart attack. Penny mixed some in with shampoo or conditioner, or both, and rubbed it into Sidebottom’s scalp. Later that night, when he was asleep, he had a fatal heart attack.”

“How would she even know about such a thing?” asked Ravi Kapoor.

“All gardeners know about it,” said Paolo Rossetti. “It’s the reason a lot of people don’t grow foxglove in their garden. Dangerous to pets.”

“Penny Crawford grew up on a farm in the Midwest. She knew a lot about plants and things,” Edwina said. “She knew all she had to do was to introduce a large amount of digoxin into his blood stream. It was easy to mix it in with whatever hair products she used on him. Don’t forget, Professor Sidebottom was drunk at the salon. Penny told Will Tenney that he even dozed off at the sink. She could have been massaging the poison into his head for ten or twenty minutes, if he was asleep. That would be plenty long enough to get it into his bloodstream.”

“How incredibly cruel,” Charlotte Cadell said.

“It’s inhuman,” Seth Dubin said, shaking his head. “Wicked beyond measure.”

“I wonder if she thought she would get away with it?” Donald Gaylord said.

“It’s really pretty clever,” Lois Lieberman said. “She actually might have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for our very own Miss Marple, here.”

“What about Helen?” Donald asked. “Was this wicked girl going to murder her, too?”

“No idea,” Edwina said. “It probably depended on Penny’s whims. Maybe Helen would have come to harm if she didn’t shell out serious money. I don’t know.”

The library fell silent over the thought of Helen’s narrow escape from death.

“I feel that Professor Sanborn should be here for this,” Charlotte Cadell announced.

Ravi Kapoor jumped to his feet.

“I will help you fetch him!” he exclaimed, eager to assist.

Charlotte and Ravi reappeared a few minutes later, wheeling Theodore Sanborn into the library in his glass case, and parked him squarely amidst the group.

Donald Gaylord brought down an excellent bottle of Port from his office. Charlotte Cadell got paper cups from the kitchen, filled them with Donald’s Port and passed them around.

“How about some music?” Pete Talbot said, opening his laptop.

Minutes later, furniture had been moved to clear a space for dancing. Lois Lieberman kicked off her shoes and led the way. Paolo leapt to his feet and joined her. Others joined in, too––Ravi Kapoor and Charlotte Cadell, Pete Talbot and Laura Brenner, Mitchell Fender and the department secretary, Ruth Benjamin.

Edwina sat with Nedda Cake, sipping Port and enjoying the spectacle.

“How did you know there was a child?” Edwina asked her mentor.

Nedda turned to face Edwina, her pale eyes gleaming.

“I didn’t. I wanted to help you think outside the box so you could get to the solution. I didn’t think anyone had tested the equation for a child, and it seemed worth considering.”

Edwina regarded the old woman tenderly. The two sat contentedly, nestled comfortably on a velvet-covered sofa, enveloped in the plush surroundings of Theodore Sanborn’s beautiful library. Edwina began slowly to dance, without moving from the sofa, gently moving her shoulders, arms, and head along with the music.

Nedda watched Edwina with amusement, and after a few moments, followed her lead.

By early December there were two feet of snow on the ground in New Guilford.

Seth and Sheila Dubin went their separate ways, and not long after, Sheila moved to New York. Seth Dubin and Lois Lieberman began seeing a good deal of each other, now out in the open. Ravi Kapoor and Charlotte Cadell began dating, an eventuality some department members had predicted. Paolo and Francesca Rossetti had a healthy baby boy.

During the first full moon of the snowy winter season Edwina and Will went cross-country skiing on a cold, starry night. The hills were illuminated by a bright, frosty moon, and glittered beneath a black sky brilliant with constellations. The only sound besides the hooting of owls was the quiet shushing of their skis as they made tracks through the powdery snow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

.
Elissa D. Grodin is a children’s author and novelist, and has written for the
Times Literary Supplement
. She lives in New York City and Connecticut with her husband, actor/commentator/activist Charles Grodin. They have a son, Nicholas.