The Botanist's Assistant, page 10
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Margaret corrects in her mind.
“He screwed you too.” Blackstone is on a roll. “Now that it looks like I’m going to be in charge of the lab, I’ll take care of you. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. I’ll help you get a real job. I won’t stand in your way like Deaver did.”
There’s a quaver in Calvin’s voice. “Wait, Dr. Deaver said I had talent that other people didn’t see. That all it would take was hard work and I’d find a job.”
“And you believed that?” The question comes out as a sneer. “Let me ask you: Did he ever take you to conferences, set you up for a presentation?”
“Well, no. I get nervous when I’m around too many people.”
“Doesn’t matter. He could have helped you, made a few introductions. He wanted you under his thumb so you and that Finch woman could do his grunt work, and he could keep polishing his reputation.”
That’s not true, Margaret thinks.
“I never thought of it like that,” Calvin says.
“By the way, have you heard anything about the autopsy? What actually killed the guy?”
Margaret leans closer but a flush drowns out the answer.
“I need to shut down that old bird. She’s going to ruin everything,” Blackstone says.
“You could let her go, I suppose.”
Margaret’s mouth opens in disbelief. After all she’s done for Calvin, he’s suggesting she be fired?
“Too obvious,” Blackstone says. “Nope. I have a new plan for her. She acts so high-and-mighty, but she underestimates me at her own risk.”
The skin on the back of Margaret’s neck prickles.
Water rushes out of faucets, again drowning the conversation except for the words “stop her.”
Paper towels are ripped from their dispensers. No time left.
Margaret is easing the door closed when a voice makes her jump.
“That’s the men’s room, dear.”
Margaret turns. A stout white-haired woman wearing a forest-green blouse and a pleated plaid skirt stands behind her.
“These hallway lights are definitely a safety issue,” the woman says. “No wonder you couldn’t see the sign. I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time.”
She must be the consultant.
Margaret doesn’t have a minute to spare. Calvin and Blackstone will be coming out the door any second now.
“Oh yes. Thank you. Terrible lights,” Margaret says, dipping slightly in what appears to be a curtsy. Why did she do that? She’s not addressing the queen, although the woman does bear a resemblance to the former monarch in a British-moor kind of way. Footsteps approach the men’s room door. “You’re right. I’ll be sure to look more closely next time. I have to run. Really. But thank you. Goodbye.”
Margaret hurries away before she can interpret the expression on the woman’s face. What did Blackstone mean about having a plan for her?
Her mind whirls with Calvin’s betrayal and Blackstone’s threats. She pushes herself through a back door of the building and into the sunshine. There’s no one she can trust anymore. Except perhaps for Joe Torres. But does she really know him?
She sets off, her feet carrying her once around the science building and then across the lawn past the oak to a weedy soccer field surrounded by a faded track. Why didn’t Calvin stand up for her? And why was Blackstone asking about the autopsy unless he was concerned someone would discover that Dr. Deaver was poisoned?
It feels as if Roosevelt University has turned into the academic version of a besieged tomato patch. Tomato vines, it was known, will secrete a certain chemical when under attack by caterpillars that causes the caterpillars to eat one another in gruesome acts of cannibalism.
Where was she in Roosevelt’s garden of betrayal? Was she the next to be eaten?
The thoughts unnerve her, and she hurries back to the science building, where the safety meeting is about to begin. Sure enough, it’s as much of a time waster as she feared. Afterward, she buys a cup of vending machine coffee in the breakroom and drinks it amid the chattering of staff and graduate students. No one pays attention to her and that’s good. Her thoughts are noisy companions enough. At ten oh eight, she heads for the lab, noticing that the hallway memorial is gone.
Joe Torres has done his job. Now she must do hers.
What’s inside the lab, however, stops her cold.
All four windows in the lab are open, and a scattering of knobcone pine needles on the floor serve as testament to the change in weather. The refrigerator door yawns wide, the solutions and samples inside spoiled, and someone has left the mass spectrometer running and it’s making an unpleasant sound. There’s broken glass on the floor and test tubes scattered willy-nilly, as if they’d been flung around the room.
If Zhang hadn’t already left, she would have thought he’d attempted one last experiment. Could this be Blackstone’s work?
Quickly, she hangs up her purse and dons her lab coat. A wave of nausea washes over her. She doesn’t know if it’s from the bitter breakroom coffee or the tension of seeing her beloved lab in such disarray. Once, a doctor diagnosed Margaret with stress-related irritable bowel syndrome, although it turned out later that her upset was caused by a deep discount on canned beans at the supermarket, which Margaret had found hard to resist.
She closes and locks the windows and retrieves a broom from the storage closet. Who would do this to a place where important work was being done? Both Blackstone and Veronica Ann Deaver would know about research protocols and also possibly have keys to the door. Or maybe Calvin had been goaded into anxiety-driven vandalism by Blackstone’s comments about how Dr. Deaver had misused him. He wasn’t at the safety meeting.
Margaret is dumping another dustpan full of glass and pine needles into the trash when she hears a sharp voice.
“If this is how you keep your lab, Margaret, no wonder Dr. Blackstone suspects sloppy data.”
It’s the dean.
“This wasn’t my doing. This was sabotage.” Margaret may have spoken more loudly than she intended.
“First poison, now sabotage?” The dean shakes his head. “I’m afraid you’ve gone off the deep end.”
“I can only report what I see.”
The dean’s face hardens.
“You know what sabotage I see?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “The sabotage I see is the email you sent and you refusing to do what I ask. You are undermining me and all my work to put this university on the map. I can’t have you contradicting me about the collaboration between Drs. Deaver and Blackstone. And I certainly don’t appreciate you putting it in writing.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Or is it your stubbornness and need to nitpick everything? Professor Deaver is dead and we have to move on. What if that email gets out?”
“What if I could prove there was no partnership between Blackstone and Professor Deaver?”
The idea had come to her as she cleaned the lab. If she could get hold of Dr. Deaver’s research notebooks—a careful recording of his thoughts, discoveries and processes—she might find proof that it was he who discovered the stinging bush and not Blackstone, which would negate any claim to the research. In addition, if she can get into the locked cabinet, she could determine whether the atropine there was the murder weapon. Anyone using extracts or specimens from the cabinet was required to use a sign-out sheet and record how much they used. It was a system she set up herself. So if the bottle was missing or it was nearly empty without someone signing it out, it could indicate an unauthorized person had breached the cabinet.
“You have proof?” the dean asks.
“Maybe in a few days.”
The dean’s face turns a shade of red seen only in beets and ripe cherries.
“This is exactly what I mean. You get an idea in your head, and you won’t let it go, even when you don’t have any evidence to back it up. You’re doing yourself—and the university—no favors with this nonsense. I want you to do what I say and do it immediately. Otherwise, I may be forced to take action.”
Margaret doesn’t ask what action he plans to take in case it causes him to do it immediately.
“I want you to get that data into Dr. Blackstone’s hands and finish the draft application and stop spreading rumors. You made Miss Purdy very upset with your talk of poisoning.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to deflect her questions like you asked.”
“Well, you only made it worse.”
“Has there been an official cause of death?”
“Let it go, Margaret,” the dean warns.
“A toxicology screen would—”
The dean puts up a hand. “No more. I’ve had it with this craziness.”
A different person might pretend to be contrite, but Margaret is not that person.
“I’ll do what you ask, but I need a favor from you too.”
The dean throws up his hands.
“I need to get into Dr. Deaver’s office to retrieve his research journals. I need some of his notes to finish up the paper.” A half-truth since his research notes about his discovery of the plant might prove her point about the collaboration and, thus, safeguard Dr. Deaver’s work from Blackstone’s meddling.
“His office is closed until we’re able to figure out who has rights to his papers and download his hard drive. Besides, you said in your email he already left you plenty of notes.”
Margaret scrambles for an answer. She’s worked herself into a corner.
“Well, then, perhaps you have the key to the cabinet where our extracts are stored. I was never issued one. I need to do some confirmatory tests and recalibrate machines and I need what’s in there,” she says just as the dean’s cell phone pings.
He pulls it out of his pocket, reading whatever text has been sent. His forehead creases. “Is everyone here incompetent?” he mutters. “Am I the only adult in this whole university?” He shoves the phone back into his pocket and turns for the door.
“Sir,” Margaret says. “The cabinet key?”
The dean doesn’t even turn around. “Why would I have the key? For Pete’s sake, just call a locksmith. I’ve got better things to do.” With that, he is gone.
By the time Calvin walks in, Margaret has already phoned a locksmith, swept up the pine needles and glass, and is disposing of the spoiled chemicals from the refrigerator.
“What happened there?” he asks.
“The refrigerator door was left open.” Margaret no longer trusts him enough to tell him the truth.
“Not by me.” Calvin can’t seem to look her in the eye.
“I’m not saying you did it” (although perhaps he did). “What I’m saying is that I need you to wash and prep the equipment, then we need to redo all of yesterday’s work. Meanwhile, I need to order new supplies.”
Maybe it’s the sternness in her voice or his guilty conscience, but Calvin throws on his lab coat and gets to work without another word about needing a smoke or not having slept.
At twelve thirty p.m., her plan to replace her coffeemaker during lunch thwarted by the mess in the lab, Margaret hurries to the breakroom, where she gobbles her meal. She barely tastes the food. It’s as she is finishing her apple slices that the assistant biochemistry professor who seemed so upset at Dr. Deaver’s death, Rachel Sterling, comes in.
She wears a crimson lipstick that shows off her copper-brown eyes and dark hair and she seems to have recovered from yesterday’s show of grief. She heats up a carton of ramen noodles in the microwave, pulls out her phone and settles at a table with a pair of chopsticks. She doesn’t acknowledge Margaret, but it seems more like a desire for privacy than a snub.
At one thirty-seven p.m., the locksmith arrives, and while Calvin raises his eyebrows at the man drilling into the cabinet lock, he doesn’t say a word.
Margaret waits until Calvin is gone on his break to inspect the cabinet. She unlocks the door with the new key and finds the bottle of atropine, the purified belladonna extract. It’s three-quarters empty. Expectation surges. As far as she knows, no one has used the atropine for a long time. Has she found the murder weapon?
Quickly, she pulls out the drawer where the sign-out book is kept, and there it is: the date and time, March 12, twelve thirty p.m. (the day before she found Dr. Deaver’s body).
She scans her finger across the row and sees the initials of the person to last check out the chemical: JMD.
Jonathan Matthew Deaver.
19
The Good Servant
Margaret locates a Mr. Coffee at the thrift store for $7.99, but there is no joy in the discovery. Her mind is flooded with thoughts of what she’s seen and heard today. Her drive home is a muddle of questions and thoughts.
If, indeed, Dr. Deaver had been the one to check out the atropine from the closet (the handwriting looked like his), then could his death be a suicide rather than a murder? Had he mixed the poison with his scotch and drunk it down to dull atropine’s bitter taste?
But if suicide was your intent, why would you sign out the drug? Habit? A hint of what you’d done? But a hint to whom? And what would have prompted him to kill himself? There had been no signs of depression. He was always energetic and cheerful. His work was also stellar, which ruled out someone discovering falsified data. Perhaps a terminal disease not related to his heart? Then why file for divorce?
A horn blares from behind her truck and Margaret looks into her rearview mirror to see a red sports car on her tail. Margaret glances at the speedometer and realizes she’s accidentally slowed to fifteen miles an hour below the speed limit. She presses harder on the gas pedal. The truck hesitates as if deciding whether to obey, then leaps forward like a frightened jackrabbit. The red car swerves around her anyway, the driver—a man with a gray crewcut—lifting a middle finger as he passes. A small, fleshy sword-wave of discontent. Did he expect the gesture to wound her? She’s been insulted by better people than he.
Margaret motors on. Was the missing glass an attempt to make his suicide seem like murder and perhaps frame Veronica Ann for his death? But what would have prompted him to do that?
Margaret’s mind dizzies as she steers the truck up her driveway. What was it that Agatha Christie said? That imagination was a good servant but a bad master? She must stick to what she absolutely knows.
Margaret parks the truck next to her cottage. She installs the new (used) Mr. Coffee in the kitchen and sets the old one aside to be recycled. She changes into her house clothes and starts her dinner: roasted vegetables with chicken thighs, which were marked with a sell-by date that was one day past and thus were 50 percent off.
She’d read somewhere that, every year, people threw away ninety billion pounds of food thanks to those innocuous-looking but all-powerful dates. As far as she’s concerned, all one needs is two eyes and a good nose. It’s how cooks did it for centuries.
She has twenty-five minutes before her meal is ready, so she goes outside and turns on the drip irrigation system she installed. The late afternoon shadows are long and lean.
Margaret steps into the garden, inspecting the roses and fuchsia, stopping by the clematis. The lavender looks content, as do the rosemary, thyme and mint, although there seems to be a gopher afoot. They are the scourge of her garden. The moonshine yarrow is also coming along nicely. She planted it in a sun-exposed spot near the base of her chaste tree (an experiment) and it looks pretty against the pale purple blooms. A dragonfly has settled itself on a bearded iris. Its gossamer wings and elongated body make it appear ancient and futuristic at the same time.
“Help yourself to the midges and mosquitos but please leave the bees alone,” she tells it.
She checks her watch. The chicken and vegetables are almost ready. She plucks a few mint leaves to add to a glass of ice water and heads inside. Her dinner is satisfying although thoughts of Dr. Deaver’s death keep intruding. Why would Dr. Deaver have suggested they “fly high” in her birthday card if he intended to kill himself?
She opens a window to let out the heat generated by the oven and does her dishes. She is about to get the broom and sweep her floor when she hears a car engine approaching.
If the wind is right, she can sometimes hear the hum of vehicles from the valley below, but this sounds as if it’s coming up her hill.
Except for the propane truck and the few times she had to call in a repair person when a job was too complicated for her—the installation of a new fuse box, a septic tank that needed to be pumped—no one comes up her driveway. She has no relatives to stop by. No Jehovah’s Witnesses or Amazon trucks brave her hill. Not even her mail carrier will attempt it.
Margaret sticks her head out the door into the evening air. The vehicle sounds close. The engine revs, then falls silent, then revs again.
There’s a seasonal spring about two-thirds of the way up the hill that turns the road to mud at certain times of the year, and unless you know to gun the engine and speed through the mire, it’s possible for a car to become trapped.
Margaret puts on her gardening shoes, grabs a headlamp and her shovel. It’s near dark. If someone has mistaken her driveway for another or taken a wrong turn intending to go to the county park that borders her land (it’s happened twice before), they might become stuck. She will redirect the wayward driver toward a spot where they will be able to turn around, and if they are stuck, she will unstick them. She has no wish for visitors, intended or accidental.
Margaret is approaching the driveway’s second hairpin turn where a small boggy pond is home to a burgeoning crop of common horsetail (someday she will get rid of the invasive plant) when she sees, on the road below, a sight that causes her to stop so suddenly her foot slips on a patch of loose dirt and she nearly falls on her behind.
