Physics Can Be Fatal (24 page)

     Edwina did not have time to give the matter further consideration. Leah suddenly moved in very close.  She grabbed a fistful of hair on top of Edwina’s head and yanked it straight up.  She chopped it off in one snip.  Edwina seized the moment.  She steadied her feet, and pushed off the floor as hard as she could.  The chair spun rapidly around, hitting Leah’s legs with the metal footrest.

     Leah cried out.  She stumbled backwards.  A hand mirror and hair dryer clattered to the floor with a crash.  Edwina knew this was far from a debilitating blow, and that she had no time to lose if she wanted to escape.  She struggled to her feet, and hobbled as awkwardly as imaginable, with a chair tied to her back, toward the front door.  Turning sideways to protect her head and face, Edwina crashed into the front door, shattering the panel of glass. She flung herself through the opening, hoping to land with the back of the chair hitting the ground first.  In this way she would be at least slightly buffered from the impact, and her head would be less likely to crack open like a coconut.  As she flew through the clattering glass she hoped someone inside the Laundromat, or other passer-by, would hear the commotion and come to her aid.

Chapter 19

     When Edwina’s eyes opened at last she tried to focus on a blurry object that appeared to be green and yellow.  Her body throbbed with pain, and she had a brutal headache.  Gradually, yellow roses came into focus.  Edwina wondered where she was.

     Slowly she turned her head and a figure appeared nearby.

    “How you feeling?”

     Edwina grinned.  She tried to speak but her lips were so dry they stuck together.  The person in the room held up a glass of water for her to sip.

     “Hi, Will,” Edwina croaked.

      Her face and head were bruised and cut, and she had two black eyes.  Remarkably there were no broken bones, but one side of her body was badly bruised, and there were cuts and lacerations on her arms and legs and hands.  

     “Nice haircut,” said a voice from the corner.

     Nedda Cake was sitting quietly in a chair by the window.  She rose and walked toward Edwina, and perched on the side of the bed.

     “Baked you some shortbread,” the old professor said, tapping on a tin box she held in her lap.  “You had everybody in the department worried sick, you know.” 

     “What happened?” Edwina said, extending a hand gingerly to her bruised head and feeling her hair, which had been chopped short and lopsided.

     “You went to see Leah Block at her salon.  Do you remember that?” Will said solicitously.  “Later, when you’re feeling better, you’ll have to explain to me why you went to see her.”

     “Sure,” Edwina said closing her eyes.  “I remember she tied me to a chair.  I thought she was going to kill me.  I think I remember jumping through a glass door.”

     “You should probably use a stunt double for stuff like that in future,” Will said.

     A doctor with a kind face and a calm demeanor entered the room.  She extended her hand toward Edwina.

     “I’m Dr. Kurra,” she said, smiling.  “How are you feeling?”

     “Not too bad,” Edwina said, struggling to sit up.  “Ow.  My head,” she moaned, sliding back down in the bed.

     “You will be pretty sore for some weeks,” Dr. Kurra said.  “Your body is badly bruised, but luckily, your concussion was not too serious.  It’s lucky you were tied to that chair because it acted like a seat belt.  Otherwise, you would have been thrown from the vehicle, so to speak, and would have sustained far worse injuries.  There are no broken bones, just bruising and a few cuts.  Nothing very deep.  Your body is going to turn some amazing colors, but don’t let it worry you.  Those are the colors of healing.  Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about the haircut,” Dr. Kurra smiled.

     Edwina laughed for the first time since the accident.

     “Thank-you for everything, doctor.  When can I go home?” Edwina said.

     “You know, it’s funny.  Your friends here predicted you would ask me that,” Dr. Kurra chuckled.  “I would like you to stay one more night.  You can go home in the morning.”

     Will picked Edwina up at the hospital the following morning.  They stopped for groceries on the way to her house.

     “Do you have anybody who can stay with you for a few days, until you get your strength back?” Will asked, putting away the groceries.

     “I’ll be fine,” Edwina said, filling the kettle with water.  “It’s really not necessary.  I’m feeling much better already.”      

     Will wanted to tell Edwina he was worried that Leah Block might come after her.  She had tried to harm Edwina once, and she might try again.  But he decided against confiding these fears in Edwina.  They would only alarm her, and maybe he was overreacting.  Besides, Leah Block was nowhere to be found, and had most likely hightailed it out of New Guilford.

     They sat at the kitchen table having tea and blueberry muffins from Dan’s Bridge Market Bakery.

     “So tell me the whole thing,” Edwina said, cautiously biting into a warm muffin.

     “First of all, let me just say that I’m glad you’re okay.  It could have been a whole lot worse.  You know that, right?” Will said.

     Edwina nodded; crumbs fell onto her shirt.

     “And I swore I wouldn’t do this, but––I did tell you not to snoop around on your own.  I hate to say ‘I told you so’, but you really need to stop doing things like that.”

     Edwina nodded again.  Will stirred honey into his tea and drank some.

     “You were lucky,” he began.  “There was a Cushing student doing laundry next door at the Laundromat.  While her clothes were in the dryer she walked next door to see if she could get a haircut.  There was a ‘Closed’ sign on the door, but when she peered in, she could see you in the chair and Leah cutting your hair.  She watched for long enough to see that something wasn’t right, and she called the cops.”

     Will took another drink of tea.

     “We arrived minutes after you crashed through the front door, and the ambulance raced you to the hospital.  The student waited with you until the ambulance arrived, but she never saw Leah leave the salon.  When we rushed in to arrest her, she was nowhere to be seen.  She had crawled out of a skylight in the bathroom and jumped in her car.”

     Edwina was feeling sleepy and her headache was starting to come back.

     “Wow, I need to thank that student.  You have her name, right?  But right now I’m kind of tired.  I think I’d better go upstairs and lie down.”

     Will walked upstairs with Edwina.  She nudged off her shoes and fell quickly to sleep.  Will covered her with the quilt at the foot of the bed and closed the door to her bedroom.

     He felt uneasy about leaving Edwina alone in the house, so he hung around downstairs, tidying up, rinsing out the cups and plates.  He checked in with Chief Burnstein and she okayed him to stay at Edwina’s house for as long as he deemed necessary. 

     He looked around for something to do.  The fire needed stoking, and he added a few more logs.  Will put the fresh eggs on the counter in a bowl, and burned the paper egg carton in the woodstove.

     He wandered through the little house.  A center hall staircase divided the living room on one side and the kitchen on the other.  The dining room had been incorporated into the kitchen years earlier.  It was obvious from the sparse furnishings in the living room that Edwina did not use it much.  A sofa and chairs arranged on a hooked rug sat in front of a fireplace that looked as if it hadn’t had a fire burning in it for some time.  There was a pair of owl-figured andirons, with large eye-holes for flickering flames to show through, but there were no ashes in the firebox.  Open muslin curtains on metal rods framed the windows.  A handsome mantle clock carved with wood scrolls sat over the fireplace.  

     Will came back into the kitchen, still poking around for something to busy himself with while Edwina slept.  He stood at the back wall of the kitchen gazing out the windows.  His project suddenly appeared.   The paving stones in Edwina’s terrace had not been properly laid, and the changing temperatures from winter to summer had caused them to heave out of place.  Will would remove them, dig a proper foundation, and replace them so they would no longer shift around.

     First order of business was to find something for digging.  Will put on his coat and gloves, and walked out to a utility shed in the back.  Along with the cobwebs and mice nests there was a decent collection of tools hanging on hooks.  He grabbed a spade and a shovel.

     Will removed the slate slabs from the ground and set them aside.  They were not especially thick, and he figured digging out two inches of dirt would provide a stable foundation for the terrace.  Thankfully, the dirt was not too hard.  In another month the ground would have been frozen, and impossible to dig.

     Will retrieved the wheelbarrow from the shed, and wheeled it to the gravel driveway of Edwina’s house.  He shoveled gravel into the wheelbarrow until it was full.  He returned to the construction site and dumped the gravel into the newly dug footprint of the terrace.  He used a rake to spread the gravel all around.  Now the fun part came, putting the slate pavers back together in a pleasing and efficient configuration as possible.

     When he was finally finished, Will sat on a tree stump to assess the job he had done.

    
Not bad,
he thought.

     Will returned everything to the shed and cleaned up the work site before he went back in the house to wash up and find something to eat.  Edwina appeared in the kitchen doorway, having slept for three hours, just as Will was biting into his second blueberry muffin.

     “Oh, hi,” she said, surprised to find Will still there.

     “I hope you don’t mind me hanging around.  I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I took off.”

     “No, it’s fine.  Thanks.”

     Edwina made a pot of tea and invited Will to stay.  She knew he was eager to talk about the recent turn the investigation had taken.  They sat down at the kitchen table.

     “Are you sure you feel up to talking?” Will asked.

     “I’m fine, Will,” she said, sipping tea.  “Remember my idea about Professor Sidebottom and Helen Mann possibly having had a child?” she began.  “It was Professor Cake who put the idea in my head.  Over the years I have learned that she generally says things for a specific reason, and that’s why I wasn’t willing to let go of the idea.  Professor Cake can be wily––sometimes even oblique––and it kept coming back to me that she went out of her way to point me in the direction of a baby.  I thought I had pursued it as far as I could.  But I was wrong.”

     Will listened intently as Edwina continued.

     “You told me when you went to the Carriage House you noticed a smell in the bedroom you described as a sweet chemical, or something like that, right?  Nowhere else, but in the bedroom?  And specifically, the bed, right?”

     “Right.”

     “Then it turned out Professor Sidebottom used one of these when he got a haircut on the last night of his life,” Edwina said, reaching across the table for her backpack.

     “Everybody in the department got one of these, you know,” she said, pulling out the flyer.  “I would bet the Physics Department is probably the only place that received them.  I think we were targeted by this salon––specifically, Alan Sidebottom.  And Helen Mann.”

     “Take a closer look at it,” Edwina said.

     Edwina laid the sheet of pink paper on the table where she and Will could examine it together.  She ran her finger slowly down the page to the bottom.

     “’Proprietor Leah Block’,” she read out loud.  “Move the letters of her name around.”

     Will studied the name on the flyer. Edwina handed him a pencil.

     “Black hole?” he said.

     “Kind of a strange coincidence, isn’t it?  You do realize black holes are incredibly significant in the physics and astronomy community.  They’re pretty much the holy grail,” Edwina said.   “I think she did it to get people’s attention, hoping it would lure them in.  As it happened, Professor Sidebottom went there because it was the only place open at night.”

     Will studied Edwina intently as he processed these new details in the case.