Page 11 of The Botanist's Assistant
There is a tiny kitchen against the back wall, which opensto a modest living area with a river-rock fireplace that Margaret had to coax back into utility when she moved in. A short hallway leads to her bedroom and a cramped bathroom. A laundry room is tucked into a corner behind the bathroom. It’s enough for her.
The cottage’s best feature—besides the garden out front—is that it sits eight hundred feet up a steep, forested hillside with a view of a narrow river valley below. Its elevation also means the vertiginous, hairpin driveway tends to keep visitors at bay, not that Margaret wants people showing up and knocking on her door. She has grown used to padding around a quiet house, to being able to follow her routines without people questioning why, for instance, the floor needs to be polished at exactly four p.m. on Saturday and why you must check the stove twice before you go to bed. There was something to be said for an independent life, although she’d noticed one consequence of prolonged solitude. She’d begun talking to herself more than she used to, having whole conversations, in fact.
“Spaghetti night,” she announces as she enters the kitchen area, which instantly proves her earlier point. She will get this chatter under control.
There is, in fact, no need to announce the evening’s dinner. Sunday is always spaghetti night. In summer, she will chop fresh tomatoes and add basil from her garden. The rest of the year, she uses jarred sauce. Today, she feels too tired to even twist open the lid. Perhaps some Earl Grey would help.
As she’s filling the kettle, however, Margaret’s decision shifts. Caffeine will only make her mind run to places it shouldn’t go. She needs something different.
She puts the kettle aside and reaches into a high shelf abovethe sink (one advantage of height) and pulls out a bottle of Irish whiskey. It was given to her by Dr. Deaver after it was awarded to him, along with a fancy watch, at a botany conference two years ago.
“Without your wings, I’d just be a lot of hot air,” he’d said and handed her the bottle. “You deserve this as much as I do.” She supposes the whiskey is expensive.
Oh, how she misses him.
She wipes the dust from the bottle, pours half an inch into a small glass and carries it out to her front porch.
The day is headed toward evening and the light has turned golden and soft. Margaret settles onto the wooden rocking chair her great-aunt left her and lifts her glass toward the sky.
“Here’s to you, Professor Deaver,” she says, and takes a sip.
The liquor burns her throat, but in the right way to mark a loss.
Margaret stares over her river valley.
Once home to ranches and farms, the area is now populated with houses pretending to be French mansions and Spanish villas. Fancy horse stables and backyard vineyards surround these giants, while at the far corner of her view is the manicured hole of some swanky golf course that she heard costs three hundred dollars to play. Across the way, on the opposite hillside, sweeping driveways lead to more Spanish villas and monstrous modern houses made of glass and steel. Are the people in those houses happy? Do they look across to her hillside and tell tales of the eccentric woman who lives in the little cottage in the woods?
She supposes they do but, technically, would they bewrong? Most people would label her habits eccentric: the oldtruck, the secondhand clothes, the schedule so regular you could set your watch by it. She is fifty-four without spouse or child or pet—unless you count her flowers and the woods around her house, which most people don’t. When the world wants you to conform, it invents words to exclude what doesn’t fit. She’s been called every exclusionary word in the book: strange, odd, peculiar, quirky, and, more times than she can count, spinster (why do people insist everyone be paired off like animals on Noah’s ark?). “Eccentric” is the least of the pejoratives.
She sips the last of the whiskey as the sun drops behind the opposite ridge. She feels relaxed, warm inside. No wonder Dr. Deaver sometimes finished the day with a drink.
She pushes herself from the chair and goes into the house. She boils noodles and heats up jarred sauce, then slices two bolete mushrooms she found in her woods and sautés them in olive oil ($6.99 with coupon). The scents of earthy mushrooms and sweet olive oil fill the cottage. She turns the kitchen radio to her favorite station. She feels not happy, but maybe a little less sad.
When the spaghetti is ready, she carries her plate to the table. The whiskey and the view of her valley have heightened her appetite, and she devours the food while also wondering how she can persuade Officer Bianchi that her suspicions are worth examining.
After, she does her dishes, sweeps the wood floor and settles on the couch with her latest Michael Connelly. She likes how Bosch is sometimes dismissed but always goes his ownway. Tonight, however, her mind keeps going back to poison and to Zhang. What is she missing?
She closes the book, gets up from the couch and retrieves her daily data notebook. She thumbs backward and then forward. It’s on her third time through that she finds the entry. It was recorded the day before Dr. Deaver’s body was found.
March 12, 11:15 a.m.: Z. contaminates sample with ham sandwich. Redo test of Kerria japonica at six months’ growth.
Off the lab is a grow room where plant specimens are cultivated and tested.
Margaret’s mind leaps, connections form. Could this be what might convince Bianchi?
Quickly, Margaret takes off her house slippers, laces on her gardening sneakers and drinks a large glass of water to dilute whatever alcohol may be left in her system. Stars speckle the sky. She climbs into her truck. She has work to do.
9
To Clean or Not to Clean
Margaret lets herself into thescience building through a back door and maneuvers through the dim hallway to the lab. Tributes to Dr. Deaver—bouquets, balloons, candles, handwritten notes—are piled by the door. Someone has even left a teddy bear, although the significance of it escapes Margaret. Dr. Deaver was not a child.
In a few days, Joe the custodian will have to clear away the fading tributes. Briefly, she wonders where he is. Then she unlocks the door and gets to work.
The day before Dr. Deaver’s death was discovered, when Zhang had been caught in the ham-sandwich incident, he had been working with the radioisotope carbon 14 as part of one of Calvin’s projects. Unless Zhang had been careful, which she doubts, the presence of carbon 14 residue on the locked cabinet might be an indication of guilt, a radioactive fingerprint if you will.
Margaret double-gloves and begins her detective work, using wipes, solution and small tubes, which she labels and feeds into the scintillation counter. Sure enough, the sampletaken from the cabinet door shows traces of carbon 14 radioactivity. But does that implicate only Zhang? Calvin, too, could have been sloppy.
