The Helium Murder(3)

This newest phase of my life had begun when I’d retired from my physics lab in California and returned to Revere, as abruptly as I’d left. It had been more than thirty years since my departure, right after my fiancé at that time, Al Gravese, died in a car crash. My plan, if I could call it that, was to see how it felt to be back in the city I was raised in.

I had some unanswered questions about Al’s death, and any day now I was going to do something about the little notebook of his that I’d found in one of the cartons Rose and Frank had stored for me in their attic—now my attic, too.

My return to Revere also unleashed unresolved feelings centering around Josephine Lamerino, my mother and worst enemy in my formative years.

“You’ll never amount to anything, Gloria,” Josephine told me almost daily during the first twenty years of my life. “You’re fat and lazy.”

I’d expected her to stop taunting me when I did all my chores, or when I was valedictorian in high school, but she never did. Not even after she died, when I was in college—her voice never left my head. Josephine’s early message to me was louder than that of my father, who whispered that he was proud of me; stronger than that of my professors as I earned a Ph.D. in physics; more powerful than that of friends like Rose and Frank. It was my life’s work to drown her out and build some measure of self-confidence.

My whistling kettle brought me back to the present. I settled in my favorite glide rocker with a mug of French-pressed coffee, which added as much rich aroma as good taste to my afternoon. I opened my copy of the Boston Globe and read the full article about Margaret Hurley. A sidebar about her career profiled Margaret as one of a new crop in the House of Representatives. At thirty-four years old, she was the elected spokesperson for the people of the Seventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, which included Revere.

I’d hoped for a reference to the helium vote, but the Globe reporter focused more on Hurley’s personal life and overall professional accomplishments, noting that her minor in chemistry at Boston’s Simmons College added value to her political science major, and got her a choice spot on the Science and Technology Committee. Hurley’s only survivor was her brother, Brendan “Buddy” Hurley. No details of the accident, if that’s what it was.

I wondered if Matt would see this death as science related and invite me to work on the case. I envisioned myself tutoring him on helium as I had on the hydrogen case. I thought I’d begin by emphasizing how difficult it is to capture helium in a useful form on earth, in spite of its abundance—hydrogen and helium together make up almost ninety-nine percent of the universe.

I mentally prepared a chart for Matt, showing him the uses of helium at various temperatures. I titled it, “The Coldest Liquid in the Universe.”

The picture of us working together was very appealing. Matt was a widower, and eight months younger than me, as I’d found out during a spontaneous party for his fifty-fifth birthday in the fall. Was I actually looking for more police work? Or a way to spend more time with Matt? Neither motive was appealing to me, since I was still uncomfortable with this adventuresome life I seemed to have adopted recently.

I got busy at my computer, searching the Internet for information on who stood where in Congress on the helium vote. According to the sites I browsed, it seemed that Congress was leaning toward selling the reserves. I wondered how Hurley would have voted, resolving to check earlier newspapers for a clue as to which way she was leaning.

I’d just gotten a computer hit on a report submitted by a physicist, Vincent Cavallo, a consultant hired by the government to do an independent analysis of the program, when the phone rang.

“Hi, Glor. Any new murders lately?” Elaine Cody, a technical editor at the lab I’d worked at for many years, was teasing me long distance, from her Berkeley, California, home.

Elaine and Rose had much in common, starting with their wardrobes—designer suits and dresses, Italian leather handbags and pumps for work, and fancy sandals for evening. Even their sweat suits were plush and beautifully tailored. No matter which coast I live on, I thought, my friends are thinner and classier than I am.

Rose’s husband Frank was also in that category, a natty dresser, staying fit and trim in spite of his healthy appetite for Italian food. So far, of all the people I was attracted to in one way or another, Matt Gennaro was the only one who looked like me—between two and three sizes overweight, with naturally graying hair and a closet full of dark clothes, designed to disappear into the wallpaper.

“I want to be like Marie Curie,” I’d told Elaine once when she tried to persuade me to buy a frothy peach dress for one of her weddings. “When Marie’s family offered to give her a wedding outfit, she asked them to buy her a dark dress that she could wear to her lab the next day.”