Page 60 of The Botanist's Assistant
“I didn’t need an explanation, but thank you for your honesty,” Margaret says. “In science, however, failures are not always failures. In fact, sometimes a failure proves as much as a success might. I’m sure you will do better next time. Perhaps avoid bars and vodka tonics.”
“Tell me about it,” Calvin says and trudges out the door.
Poor Calvin.
Margaret goes to lunch at noon, hoping to run into Rachel Sterling and start a conversation as part of her plan. She practiced opening lines while driving to work this morning. One was straightforward: “I know you admired Dr. Deaver as much as I did and was wondering if we could talk about your relationship with him.”
The other was more circular. “As a biochemist, I’m sure you must understand Dr. Deaver’s work. Perhaps we could chat about a few particulars that relate to the paper he was preparing.” The resulting answers, she hoped, would then lead to a more personal conversation.
As it turns out, there is no need for either line, as Rachel Sterling never arrives at the breakroom while Margaret is eating. She finishes her meal, checks the campus schedule and discovers Sterling’s office hours are at three p.m. tomorrow. It’s better not to leave the meeting to chance.
Margaret can feel the clock ticking on her job here at Roosevelt University. What if this Anita Allshouse person decides to see a therapist and is suddenly energized to complete all the work on her desk in record time? What if Veronica Ann looks carefully at the surveillance footage and suspects that Margaret was not a plant thief but a snooper and destroys the belladonna plant that may or may not be in her garden? How can she trap Blackstone without incriminating herself if he, indeed, took the atropine from the locked cabinet?
Uncharacteristically, she finds her mind wandering deeply into these thoughts while she and Calvin are at the bench, causing her to nearly forget to substitute her nitrile gloves forthe leather gloves she uses to handle the leaves of the stinging bush, of which there are only four left.
“Gloves, Margaret!” Calvin cries. He looks at her a little strangely after that.
By two twenty, she is worried she will make another, even more damaging mistake because of her lack of concentration, and she tells Calvin to take the rest of the day off.
“Try a nice long walk instead of a jog,” she tells him. “It might make you feel better.”
She sits at the bench for a few minutes, staring out into the knobcone pine and the blue sky beyond. A new plan begins to take shape, and she goes online to Google Street View to confirm what she remembers.
Margaret drives first to the thrift store, where she purchases a ball cap, a white cotton button-down shirt and a pair of men’s jeans for a total of $9.97 plus tax. Between the cat, a visitor and this foray, she is leaking money like a broken sprinkler pipe. She consoles herself that, in two months, her garden will be full of zucchini, string beans, bell peppers and possibly tomatoes, which will reduce her grocery bill. By then, of course, she might be on unemployment or looking for a new job. Perhaps the discount grocery market will be hiring. It seems like a new clerk waits on her every time she visits.
She banishes the dire thoughts as she changes her clothes in one of the secondhand shop’s dressing rooms. She parks a few houses from the Deaver home. It’s a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of town, full of nice, well-spaced homes. The views are of distant green and oak-dotted hills. Soon, the grasses will turn and the hills will become golden hummocks against a blue summer sky.
From her truck she watches Veronica Ann’s home, prepared to stay as long as necessary. Thirty minutes later, however, Veronica Ann Deaver’s BMW backs out of the garage and drives away. Margaret grabs the small set of binoculars she keeps in the truck for bird-watching and the clipboard she dug out of the lab’s supply closet, believing that, even among the young, a clipboard is a sign of authority that most people respect. Not that it’s ever been studied. She gets out of the truck, clipboard in view, her hair tucked firmly under the ballcap, and rings the doorbell at Veronica Ann’s neighbor’s house. She waits, knocks on the door, then waits some more.
She had planned to say she was a county inspector, although she hadn’t quite worked out exactly for what. Unpermitted construction? Destructive moths? Leaky faucets? Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. If there was one thing her earlier spying foray proved it was that people accept whatever an older person says just as they would a toddler’s blathering. An older person could say that tin hats protected you from brain cancer and people would just nod and go on their way. It was all that harping about degenerating minds and amyloid plaques that had ruined the last pleasure of old age, which was the thought that you might have gained wisdom during the long course of your life.
She is saved from that outcome, however, by a silent house and an unopened door. She looks around once, then heads purposefully along a stone path into the neighbor’s backyard, where she can peer over the fence into Veronica Ann’s property. Another benefit of height.
Margaret trains the binoculars first on a corner of the yard where dappled sun leaks through a white poplar to the plantsbelow. She moves along the flowers and shrubs. There is the Madagascar periwinkle, a toxic plant that spawned the chemotherapy drug vincristine. There is foxglove and caladium and white snakeroot.
White snakeroot was what killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother after she drank milk from a cow that had consumed the plant. Plenty of people in those days died that way. Lincoln was only nine years old when she passed.
But there is no deadly nightshade as far as she can see. Nor is there wolfsbane, which was the stem left at the lab’s door. The landscaping carries a variety of poisonous plants, but it appears they are ones common to many household gardens. Perhaps this was not a poison garden after all. Once again, testing has proved her hypothesis wrong.
Or has it?
To confirm a finding, a good scientist must retest, so Margaret again lifts the binoculars and runs her gaze slowly and methodically over the yard. She is just about to give up when she sees it: a small specimen in the farthest corner of the property.Atropa belladonna.Margaret’s pulse ratchets up and she has to slow her breathing to steady her hands.
She examines the plant carefully through the binoculars, from stem to branch to leaf tip. It’s dotted with tiny purple flowers but not a single berry.
Of course, it’s too early for the plant to fruit, she thinks. How had she not realized that? Belladonna does not usually produce berries until June.
Margaret lowers the glasses. It’s the very last day of March, which means warmer-than-usual weather has caused the plant to bloom early, but ripe berries are still weeks away.UnlessVeronica Ann harvested the fruit last year, processed it and saved the deadly juice, this plant was not the source of Dr. Deaver’s death.
What to do with this information?
Margaret decides the answer lies, not in secretly searching Veronica Ann’s house for belladonna extract, but in interrogating Dr. Deaver’s possible mistress, and that will have to wait until three p.m. tomorrow.
As she drives home, she assures herself that today’s purchases will not go to waste. She will keep the new jeans and use her old gardening denims to fashion a cat bed for Tom (they are growing thin at the knees anyway) and wear the ball cap when she is grading the spot for her greenhouse (she discovered Sunday that her wide-brimmed gardening hat wasn’t suitable for pickaxing and soil moving). As for the shirt, she will find a use for it.
Maybe wave it as a white flag for surrender when I’m unable to prove Dr. Deaver’s murder and save my job, she thinks.
She resolves that will not happen.
