Physics Can Be Fatal (19 page)

*

     Edwina hatched a plan.  Based on her speculation that Charlotte Cadell knew more about Department goings-on than anybody else, possibly even including information about Alan Sidebottom’s murder, Edwina considered Charlotte an untapped resource.

    Charlotte presented as genteel and correct––the dignified spinster librarian––but Edwina knew that still waters ran deep, and that there was more to Charlotte than she let people know about, probably even herself.  The idea was to gain Charlotte’s confidence somehow.

    Edwina’s plan was to linger inconspicuously in the library until an opportunity presented itself to engage Charlotte in conversation.  Edwina would do her best to ingratiate herself, and hope that things progressed from there. 

    When she had finished teaching her morning class, Edwina stopped by her office to gather a few things and headed downstairs to the Sanborn House Library.  She was ready to launch Operation Charlotte.

     Edwina set with her laptop at the far end one of the long, study tables.  From her vantage point she could survey the whole library.  To give the scene added verisimilitude Edwina wandered toward the stacks and made of show of searching out specific titles, finally returning to the table with books in tow.

    Charlotte kept busy.  When she wasn’t working at her desk on the computer or on the phone, she was re-shelving books or helping a student locate information.  After nearly an hour of this, Edwina began to feel foolish, began to doubt her plan.

     But not quite ready to give up, Edwina returned the not-very-interesting books she had taken off the shelves, and wandered up the spiral staircase where she could peruse the balcony library collection.  Something in the biography section caught her eye, and Edwina was soon engrossed in a book about the nineteenth century Swedish physicist, Anders Jonas Angstrom.  She sat on the carpeted floor in the canyon of stacks, absorbed in the story of the man who founded spectroscopy, and who was the first person to ever examine the spectrum of the aurora borealis.

     “Excuse me, Edwina?” someone whispered.

     “Edwina?” they repeated.

     Edwina looked up.

    “I’m sorry if I startled you,” Charlotte said.  “I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you?  It’s just that I won’t be able to be here tomorrow afternoon––there’s a librarians conference I can’t get out of––I hate asking you this, but could you possibly set up afternoon tea tomorrow?   I know it’s a terrible imposition, but I wasn’t sure who else to ask.  It’s a pretty simple procedure, and I could show you where everything is––”

     “I’d be happy to, Charlotte,” Edwina answered quickly.  “It’s no trouble at all.”

     “Would now be a convenient time for me to show you where everything is?  I was just on my way downstairs to the kitchen.”

     Edwina could hardly believe the serendipity of the situation.  She eagerly followed Charlotte downstairs to the basement, flush with a feeling of adventure.  In all her years at Cushing, Edwina had never been into the basement of Sanborn House.  All sorts of images flew through her mind––rotting laboratory tables cluttered with antiquated and arcane scientific instruments, covered in layers of dust and cobwebs, and rusted out  . . .

    In fact there was nothing very interesting at all, just a dreary kitchen with no windows.  The lighting consisted of two fluorescent tubes running along a low ceiling.  It was a depressing room, dingy and airless.  Everything was brown––the floor, the cabinets and walls.  The only bright color was an orange metal kettle sitting atop an ancient looking stove.

     “What an absolute dungeon!” Edwina said. 

     “Oh, it’s not too bad,” Charlotte said.  “I’m in and out of here pretty quickly.”

     “I’ll tell you what I think,” Edwina blurted in a flash of inspiration, “I think we should buy some paint and get this place spruced up.  We could do it on the weekend.  It’s not very big––we could probably knock it off in a day.”

     Charlotte grew animated.  “What a lovely idea,” she said, gazing around the miserable little kitchen, at the stained ceiling, and peeling cabinets.

           “I hope you won’t regret your offer!” Charlotte said.

     Charlotte walked Edwina through the preparations for tea, which were largely self-explanatory.  She showed her where everything was kept––the cups and saucers, spoons, tea bags, sugar bowl, baked goods and trays.  The ornate brass samovar for the hot water was sitting in a corner.

     “It’s an awful lot of stuff to lug upstairs, isn’t it?” Edwina said.

     Charlotte smiled and pointed to the wall.

     “No lugging required,” she said.  And with that, she reached out and took hold of a barely visible panel in the wall, with a small, black handle.  She pulled upwards on the panel to reveal a dumb waiter.

*

     Using the ample space inside her backpack, the roomy saddlebags on her bike, plus the basket on the handlebars, Edwina was able to transport all the painting supplies to Sanborn House.  She got to the library just after ten o’clock Saturday morning. 

     Charlotte had not yet arrived, but Edwina wanted to get started.  She set about covering the floor with plastic sheeting.  Next she wiped down the walls and cabinets with a sponge and spray cleaner.  Overly pleased with herself for remembering to bring a flathead screwdriver to open the paint cans Edwina stirred and poured the paint into shallow rolling pans.  She had chosen a lively, orange sherbet color in high gloss finish.

     When Charlotte had still not shown up half an hour later, Edwina began to grow concerned.  Edwina checked her phone for messages and to see if somehow, by chance, she had Charlotte’s number.  She didn’t.

      Edwina went upstairs to look for Charlotte’s number on her desk in the library.  She hated to snoop through Charlotte’s things, but it seemed important.  Finally Edwina found Charlotte’s contact information and dialed her number.  Charlotte did not answer her phone, and Edwina started to feel anxious.  Charlotte, after all, was nothing if not punctual. 

     With the mystery of Alan Sidebottom’s death still casting a shadow on Sanborn House, Edwina ran downstairs on a feverish whim.  She threw open the dumb-waiter, half expecting to find Charlotte’s crumpled body stuffed inside.  Happily, it wasn’t.

     Just then Edwina heard someone coming down the basement steps. 

     “I am so sorry I’m late!” Charlotte panted.  “I had a flat tire and I had to wait for the auto club to come and change it for me.  I really am so sorry––I feel just awful!”

     Edwina was relieved and amused to see Charlotte dressed in old khaki pants, an oversized flannel shirt, and Converse sneakers.  So different from her usual garb of sweaters and tweed skirts.  Her hair was even fixed in pigtails.

     “What do you think of the color?” Edwina asked, indicating the partially painted wall.

     Charlotte gazed at the swath of glossy orange sherbet color.

     “Oh my goodness!  It’s wonderful, so bright and cheerful!  It’s perfect!” 

     “This color is going to make the most incredible difference,” Charlotte beamed, picking up a paint roller.

     “Honestly, it’s going to make coming down here so much more pleasant!  Especially now, with all the Alan Sidebottom business, the whole place seems gloomier than ever,” Charlotte said.

     Edwina’s ears twitched.  She was bursting to approach the topic of the murder, but did not want to seem over anxious about it.

     “I’m glad you approve of the color.  It was between this, and bubblegum pink,” Edwina said.  “And another thing I was thinking, is that we could change out the lighting.  We could get a perfectly nice, cheap lighting fixture for the ceiling, and get rid of these horrible fluorescent tubes.”

     “What a good idea!” Charlotte said, swabbing paint onto a wall.

     Edwina allowed a few minutes to pass.

     “Speaking of Professor Sidebottom,” she ventured, “What do you make of it all?  Poor man, coming all the way to Cushing, just to get murdered.”

     Charlotte was quiet for a moment.  Edwina wondered if she had overstepped.

     “It’s horrible,” Charlotte said.  “Everyone looks at each other a little differently now, as if everybody suspects everybody else.  It’s poisoned the atmosphere around here.”

     “Oh, I agree,” Edwina said.  “There’s definitely suspicion in the air.   I mean, to think that we could actually have a killer in our midst . . . ”

     “It’s getting fume-y in here,” Charlotte said.  “I’m going to run upstairs and get the electric fan from my desk.  Be right back.”

      Trying not to force the conversation, Edwina let the proceedings relax into a companionable silence, with the two women occasionally remarking on their progress, or how good the new color looked, or how much more cheerful the basement would be.

     They finished by early afternoon.

     “I’m famished,” Charlotte said.  “I’d love to take you to lunch to repay you for your hard work.  And speaking of repayment, I’ll get the department to reimburse you for the paint and everything.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Edwina.”

     “Don’t bother!  I charged all this stuff to the college.  But lunch sounds great––I’m starved,” Edwina replied.

      They rinsed out the brushes, rollers and pans, folded the plastic sheeting, and along with the extra paint, put everything in a small storage area just off the kitchen. The women stood in the doorway, admiring their work.  The dull little room looked almost inviting with its shiny new orange sherbet walls and cupboards.

     “Let’s leave the fan going down here.  It’ll help dry the paint faster,” Edwina suggested. 

      They decided on the New World for lunch, and ordered wine while they waited for their food to arrive.  Drinking wine in the middle of the day and dressed in paint-spattered work clothes, Charlotte seemed more interesting than the guarded persona she exhibited at work.  Edwina regarded Charlotte in this new incarnation, and wondered what other layers and colors Charlotte might reveal.  She wondered, too, if this transformation in Charlotte was the result of the change of venue––being away from the professional restraints of Sanborn House––or the wine, or both, or something else altogether. 

     Fine lines of sadness and despair had etched themselves around Charlotte’s delicate eyes on along her cheeks.  But she slowly became more animated the more she drank and the more she talked, until these fine lines began to read more like determination than resignation.         

     “I feel sorry for some of these Cushing kids,” Charlotte said.  “They are so used to having all the advantages in life, but soon enough they’ll find out how hard life really is, and how much is just luck.  They take for granted that they will achieve all their goals, but most of them won’t be able to deal with it when things don’t go their way.”

     Edwina kept quiet.  She wondered if Charlotte was speaking autobiographically, as people so often do, without even realizing it.

     “I, myself, was a promising physics student years ago, ready to set the world on fire.  Did you know that, Edwina?  No, I didn’t think so.  Then I met a young man, also a student in the department, and we fell in love.  We imagined a life together in academia, with children, and a house, and a picket fence.  We got engaged.” 

     Charlotte ordered another glass of wine.

     “One fine spring morning he broke off our engagement.  He wouldn’t even say why.  He gave me this.”  Charlotte held her hand out for Edwina to see the Victorian ring Will Tenney had admired. 

     “You can imagine how I felt,” Charlotte went on. “I dropped out of school.  I began to suffer from depression, and had to move in with my parents because I couldn’t––or wouldn’t––look after myself.  I never finished my degree.”

     “I’m awfully sorry, Charlotte,” Edwina said.

     “The reason I’m telling you this,” Charlotte said, “is that eventually I did find out why he broke off our engagement.  You see, my fiancé was a student of Alan Sidebottom at the time.  We both were,” Charlotte grimaced.

    
Aha!
Edwina thought. 
I knew she must have known Professor Sidebottom somehow!
 

      Charlotte seemed to be waiting for Edwina to say something.

     “What an incredible coincidence,” Edwina ventured.