Page 31 of The Botanist's Assistant
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 workwithout 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 barelytastes 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. Coffeeat 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’saccidentallyslowed 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 andfuchsia, 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?
