Page 29 of The Botanist's Assistant
“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 sciencebuilding and then across the lawn past the oak to a weedysoccer 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’dattempted 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.
