Physics Can Be Fatal (22 page)

       As for those ex-wives, girlfriends, and children, she was finding it a bit harder to glean details about them.  Information about Alan Sidebottom’s private life was harder to come by on the Internet because tittle-tattle makes no claim to be part of any particular professional province.  You can’t do a ‘gossip’ search.  Edwina found any number of biographical sites listed for Professor Sidebottom, but they mostly dealt with his educational background, academic achievements and honors, and included very little in the way of personal information.

    Gradually Edwina did manage to extract from various sites, with no great concern for reliability, a list of ex-wives and the children he had with them.  Reliability was not the issue here; Edwina was willing to venture down as many rabbit holes as necessary in hopes of unearthing useful information.

      Professor Sidebottom’s bibliography was, of course, easy to access.  There were many sites that listed his published credits, so Edwina had no problem gathering sites where she could find his articles.  She would familiarize herself with them, so she could compare his writings against some of his colleagues’ work, with an eye to sniffing out anything that might have been ‘heavily borrowed’.  She would add the names of people Professor Sidebottom had possibly plagiarized (if there were any) to her growing list.  Likewise she would add the names of editors, publishers, and television producers he had worked with, and cross-reference all these names.  Perhaps one or two names would emerge from the pack, and point Edwina in a useful direction.

    This new leg of the investigation was time-consuming and tedious.  It took days for Edwina to plow through all this new information, searching for connections that might have some bearing on Alan Sidebottom’s death.  Some small piece of information that seemed insignificant at first glance might redirect the inquiry onto a fresh path. 

     Edwina took a walk over to the main library at Hinley Hall, hoping to take out copies of Professor Sidebottom’s three books.  She wanted to re-acquaint herself with all his work, and perhaps get a clearer understanding of Mitchell Fender’s claim of plagiarism.

Chapter 18

     By the time Edwina got home Thursday evening she was feeling tired and hungry, and a little bit run down.  She hadn’t quite realized she had been working longer hours than usual, and getting less sleep because of all the time she was putting in on top of her regular workload––time spent on the Sidebottom investigation.

     She took a hot bath and dressed in warm pajamas and a long, flannel robe.  After dinner (grilled cheese, cucumber and tomato sandwich) she fed logs into the woodstove for the night, took vitamin C, and made a bourbon hot toddy.  She padded upstairs and got into bed with Alan Sidebottom’s books.

     It had been years since she’d read them.  She opened his extravagantly titled,
M Theory, My Arse!
and sipped hot toddy as she read.  By the time she reached Chapter Three the hot toddy was gone.  Halfway through the chapter, she was fast asleep with the book in her hands and the reading lamp on.  Edwina slept straight through the night for twelve hours.  She woke up the next morning at 7:30, ravenously hungry, and feeling much better than she had the night before.

     Will texted her at eight o’clock

    
Anything interesting come up in your research?  We are trying to get Jimmy Lopez’s cell phone records, see if he traveled to NG, but no luck, yet.

     Edwina texted back.

     RU free 4 breakfast, Earls, 9:00?

*

     Will was sitting at a corner table by the windows.

     “I ordered chili and eggs for you.  Is that okay?” he said.

     “Fine,” she said, getting out of her warm coat, hat and gloves, and laying them over the back of the chair.  Her hair was static-y from the wool hat.  A few blond hairs floated upwards toward the ceiling.

     Earl set down a cup of tea for Edwina and coffee for Will.

     “So, I thought it might be interesting to cross-reference some of the names I collected,” Edwina began, shoving her bangs to the side.  “You know––ex-wives, editors, children, work colleagues, stuff like that.  I actually did get some interesting results, but nothing seemed very suspicious.  Just gossipy stuff.   Professor Sidebottom married the wife of a close friend.  The man was also Sidebottom’s book editor, and they continued working together, even after Sidebottom married the guy’s wife.  Then when the wife later left Sidebottom, she married one of his colleagues at Cambridge.  I also discovered that Sidebottom’s oldest son, Christopher, married one of his dad’s ex-wives, who was close in age to Christopher.  Jesus, how fraught can family relationships get?  I was also reading through the records of the court case when Sidebottom was arrested for smashing up a bookstore window.  Turns out it was a Scientology bookstore.  Sidebottom was drunk at the time, but in court he said he would gladly do it again even if he was sober!”

     Earl set down two orders of scrambled eggs with chili and cornbread.  Edwina enthusiastically dug into her breakfast, pouring honey onto the cornbread and taking a big bite.

     “Go on,” prodded Will, enjoying Edwina’s recitation.  He dabbed at his chin with a napkin, signaling Edwina to do the same.  A dab of honey trickled slowly toward the point of her heart-shaped face.

     “Well,” she said, scooping up a forkful of chili and eggs.  “He once assaulted a prostitute, when he found out she was transgender.  He would have gotten off with a charge of simple assault, but Sidebottom felt horrible about the whole thing and ended up paying her a lot of money.”

     “Then we have Rosamund Penrith-Godbold,” Edwina continued.  “Professor Sidebottom’s third wife.  There was a very nasty court case when they got divorced.  She sued him for everything he had, including sole custody of their little daughter.  But the court records say that during the trial Sidebottom exposed Rosamund for having had a string of affairs with women during their marriage, and he threatened to publish photos taken by a private investigator he hired, if Rosamund didn’t back off.  Sidebottom got shared custody of the little girl, and ended up not paying Rosamund much money.  He called her an unfit mother.  She attacked him in the courtroom.  Physically.”

     “Wow,” Will said.  “Sounds like motive to me.  But isn’t she––”

     “Nope, she’s here in America,” Edwina said.  “She now lives with a painter in London, but the two of them have been in New York for an exhibition for the past two weeks.”

     “That’s great.  I’ll check her out,” said Will.  “Anything else?”

     Edwina asked for another cup of tea.

     “Lots of stuff, but I think Rosamund’s our best shot,” she said.

     After breakfast they lingered a few minutes outside Earl’s, talking about the investigation.

     “Where are you headed?” Will said.

     “To school.  I have a class.”

     “I was just wondering if you wanted to walk along the river a little bit?”

     “Don’t you have to get to work?” Edwina asked.

     “I don’t have to be in for a little while.  Here, I’ll take your bike,” Will said, taking hold of Edwina’s bike and walking it alongside him.

     They strolled a few blocks north to Sycamore Street.  At the end of Sycamore Street they headed down a small incline that lead to the River Walk, a public garden that meandered along the riverbank for the length of Main Street.  The day was cold, but with no wind to chill them, Edwina and Will were enjoying the warmth of the bright sunshine.   

     Will received a text.

     “My Chief says Jimmy Lopez’s cell records are coming in this afternoon.  That should be interesting,” Will said.

     “Do you think he’s really a likely candidate for Professor Sidebottom’s murder?” Edwina asked.

     “I won’t say he’s at the top of my list, but it’s a possibility.  Jimmy Lopez would have had incredible ease of movement––nobody in New Guilford knows what he looks like, and he could have been in and out of here pretty quickly.  Couples do each other’s bidding all the time, and Gaylord could have put Jimmy up to it.  He could have told Jimmy everything he needed to know about the layout of the Carriage House, where to park his car, and so on.  It’s even possible that Jimmy Lopez––or whoever killed Professor Sidebottom––was waiting for him outside the restaurant the night you had dinner with him.  You said the whole Department knew the two of you would be at the Old World Tavern that night.  Somebody could have stalked Sidebottom straight out of the restaurant until they had the opportunity to get the poison in him.”

     Will left Edwina at Sanborn House, then headed back to the police station, no more than a twenty-minute walk.  As he strode across the Green along the campus path, Will was thinking about how Edwina’s freckles were fading in the cold weather.  He wondered if they’d be invisible by the time winter came.

*

     A few days later Edwina was sitting in her office, marking exams, when she got a text from Will.

    
Rosamund Penrith is off the hook.  Airtight alibi.

    
What about her partner?
Edwina texted.

    
Checked that out, too.  Both in the clear.

    
“Damn!” Edwina said aloud.  “Back to the drawing board,” she sighed.

     None of the leads from her recent round of research were panning out.  No secret Sidebottom offspring attended Cushing or appeared to live in the area.  And the professor’s misdemeanor offenses of public intoxication, assault, and vandalism hardly added up to someone wanting to kill him.

    Edwina got up from the desk to stretch her legs.  She approached the chalkboard, and flipped it to the reverse side, the side with her murder notes written on it, the side she was careful not to display when other people were in her office.  As she stood reading it over, something bright pink across the room caught her eye.

     She removed a pink flyer from on top of some books in the bookcase where she had absently placed it days earlier.  Edwina studied the printed advertisement she held in her hands.  It read, ‘Leah’s Place ~ A Hair Salon For Men & Women, Welcoming The College Community ~ First Visit 50% Off’.  The ad included an address, phone number, and email address, and appeared in an attractive cursive font printed over a faintly reproduced botanical print showing old-fashioned style flowers in a bouquet.  At the bottom of the page it said, ‘Proprietor: Leah Block’. 

    
Interesting name,
Edwina thought. 
Dutch, like Block Island.

     Edwina slowly gazed back up at the chalkboard, and looked again at the flyer in her hand.  Something was trying to suggest itself to her, but she couldn’t grasp it.  Was it something about the flyer?  Was it a connection between the flyer and what was written on the chalkboard?  She examined them both over and over again, searching for a spark of an idea.  She could faintly sense that a connection was trying to forge itself in the back of her mind, a triangle connecting some part of the information on the chalkboard and something written on the sheet of pink paper, and Alan Sidebottom’s death.  She just couldn’t work out what it was.

     Edwina had a class to teach.  She gathered up a pile of exams and loaded them into her backpack.  She set off for the new classroom building across the Green.

     “I’m handing back your exams today,” she said, making her way around the classroom, distributing papers.  “I want to let you know that I enjoyed reading them.  They showed a good grasp of the concepts we’ve been talking about.  Today I want to go over some of the more difficult ideas, the ones many of you are finding hard to understand.  We all need to get on the same page.”  She stopped in front of Dylan D’Arcy.

     “Here you go, Dylan,” she said, handing the young man his exam.  “Very creative.  I especially enjoyed the anagram you made out of ‘critical hypotheses––‘hypothetical crises’?  Nice touch,” she chuckled.

     Students were busily flipping through the pages of their exams, comparing grades, reading Edwina’s remarks, and commiserating among themselves.  Edwina made her way back to the front of the classroom.