I said, “I like both theories. Connor Grant is the human equivalent of a switchblade. He acted as his own—brilliant—lawyer and he got off. In my opinion, that just does not comport with the personality of a career high school science teacher. Yuki, you agree?”
“In spades. He was smooth and tricky and sympathetic at the same time. Hey, he beat our pants off.”
I said, “I keep asking myself, who is this masked man, anyway? Granted, going through his boxes could be yet another dive into ninth-grade science, but if there’s a clue in here …”
“… we’ll know it if we see it,” said Cindy.
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m hoping for dirty pictures, sketchy bank accounts, warrants for previous misdeeds, and of course his plans for blowing up a big public venue. Or, hey, Mr. Grant, surprise us. It would be a genuine bonus round if we found evidence of a crime that he was never charged with.
“But for tonight, as a minimum, I’d just like to find something ugly that will scare this guy and get him to retract his complaint against me.”
We did a four-way fist bump and divvied up the boxes.
Claire likes to work with music. She fired up her smartphone and tuned in to something classical. Then she grabbed a filebox, lifted out a fat sheaf of paper, and set it down on the table in front of her. Yuki and Cindy worked as a team, each sorting through a box at a time, showing various bits of paper to each other as they went.
I watched everyone and worked on my own box as well.
I was scraping the bottom of my third box when a name that I had seen before jumped out at me.
I shouted, “Yuki, there’s a paper here on litigation written by a Samuel Marx, U. of Miami. I found law books in Grant’s place with bookplates saying they belonged to Sam Marx.”
Yuki said, “Looking up Samuel Marx now.”
She tapped on her laptop, then said, “He was a lawyer in Skokie, died about ten years ago in a house fire.”
I said, “If you type Sam Marx plus Connor Grant, what do you get?”
She shook her head. Nothing. Had Grant known Marx? Had he bought Marx’s books at a tag sale? It was a connection between Grant and the law, but it added up to nothing. Yet.
CHAPTER 88
WE WORKED FROM six until ten, when Claire said, “Let’s air out our brains, okay?”
She cued up one of her husband Edmund’s orchestra pieces, the Double Bass Concerto in D Major, by Vanhal. The music absolutely lightened our moods. Coffee cups were topped up and we polished off the tin of oatmeal cookies, including the crumbs. Cindy, Claire, and Yuki texted their significant others and I called Mrs. Rose, telling her that I’d be home in a couple of hours. “I hope so, anyway.”
But unopened boxes were calling. After the break we began sifting and sorting again.
Mainly, we had found photocopies of newspaper clippings about explosions, randomly interspersed between tests on astronomy, paleontology, and basic chemistry, papers we’d set aside for further discussion.
When all boxes had been searched, we talked back and forth about our findings. For instance, I had something in my hand that was pretty shocking.
It was a copy of a Wisconsin newspaper article about a house fire thirty years ago in which a family had died. According to the story, a backyard grass fire had lit up a propane tank, destroying a suburban home, flattening it to rubble. Four people had lived in that house, and they were so burned up, the bodies couldn’t be identified.
It seemed significant, so I opened it up to the floor.
“Is this the beginning of Connor Grant’s story? Did this gas explosion get him thinking about the power and the glory of bombs? Why else would he save it?”
Claire said, “He may have known the family?”
She googled the name of the town and Connor Grant’s name, then said, “I got zippo.”
We took a few more spins around the internet, and the search for Connor Grant science teacher produced small-time science fair pieces on Grant going back a dozen years.
“They could be real stories, or they could be planted,” Cindy said. “It’s not too hard to post something about yourself in a chat room or on a blog, start a website, write an article for a small-town paper. Then it gets picked up by other publications, not fact-checked, and then it shows up multiple times on Google.”
“Listen to this,” Claire said. She read from the article. “William Tilley officiated at a memorial service for his friend Connor Grant, a climate scientist who was killed in a plane crash.”
Claire looked up. She said, “This Connor Grant’s body was never recovered from the burned wreckage.”