Page 41 of The Botanist's Assistant
“Where should we start?”
“Let’s see. You take the 2023 and I’ll take 2022, which is when Dr. Deaver told me how he discovered the bush.”
Joe again settled himself on the overturned bucket and she took the rolling stool. The soft snap of turning pages became a brushstroke to the hum of the overhead lights. Joe knew how to be quiet. She admired that.
It took some time but there it was: the first mention of the stinging bush. Margaret read the entry.
According to what Dr. Deaver wrote, Blackstone and he were having a glass of wine with two out-of-town colleagues when Blackstone mentioned an incident at a botanical field meeting in the Amazon region of Brazil. During a rainforest tour, he said, one of the attendees’ hands had brushed against the leaves of a native bush. The researcher, a professor from New York, had found the stabs of the bush’s spines so painful that even the powerful opioid OxyContin didn’t relieve the discomfort.
Margaret remembered the stories that had circulated later about the incident. The professor had apparently kept swallowing pills in hopes of ending his pain so that, when he got up to give his presentation, he rambled off into a rant about so-called citizen scientists thinking they were equal to actualresearchers and that they had ruined funding opportunities for people like him. He had to be escorted offstage but not before he raised his fist and shouted, “We will not be defeated!”several times. It took the researcher a year for both the stinging sensation in his hand and his humiliation to fade.
Reduction of inflammatory response as inUrtica dioica?Dr. Deaver had written in his notes.Perhaps inhibitory properties? Couldn’t sleep. Find supplier and start extractions. More to come.
She told Joe what she’d found.
“Urtica dioicais the stinging nettle,” Margaret explained. “The entries after that are about how he found a supplier, a guide, to harvest a few of the leaves and began to isolate the compound we’re studying. It’s tricky business.”
“So, this Blackstone guy was both right and wrong,” Joe said.
“Mostly wrong. It was Dr. Deaver who did the work.”
“Still, Blackstone was the one who told him about the bush. How do we know Blackstone didn’t mention the stinging nettle idea to your professor?”
Margaret could see his point. In fact, it bothered her that the entry hadn’t mentioned the online article Dr. Deaver had told her about. Perhaps he had simply forgotten the order of things. She wanted to believe in Dr. Deaver’s integrity. What Joe found next made that harder to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Joe held up a business card.
“Here’s something interesting.”
Margaret inspected the small white rectangle. It carried the name of a female botany lecturer and the address of a small southern university.
“Check out the back,” Joe instructed.
Margaret did. A note in blue ink read:Room 225. Knock twice.
“He was a handsome man. I’m sure women threw themselves at him all the time,” Margaret said, and started to hand back the card.
“And what does that mean?” Joe pointed to a penciled notation on the front corner of the card.
“Hippeastrum reginae,” Margaret read, then: “Native to Peru and Brazil with showy red blooms. In Victorian times it represented a prideful woman.”
“A botanical little black book,” Joe said. “Well, I’ll be.”
“I don’t know about that,” Margaret said, but she did. It might not be obvious to a layperson, but a botanist would have no trouble interpreting what the notation meant. Red for passion, a tall and sturdy stem indicating strength and a Greek interpretation of the name pointing to success.
“There was this too.” Joe produced a creased sheet of notepaper, some kind of letter.
Margaret took it with a growing sense of trepidation.
The handwriting was rounded with loops and a small open circle over each lowercase I.J, it began,What’s going on. You won’t answer my calls or texts. When we were in Austin you told me how special I was & that you wouldn’t forget me & now you won’t even talk to me!!
Somebody needed a grammar lesson.
I can’t believe you would ghost me, the note went on.Not after our time together. I think of you all the time. You need to call me. Right now. Or text. If you don’t, I might have to call your wife. I looked her up. This is not a threat. It’s just how I feel. I love you, Jonathan. Call me.
It was signedLillie.
Margaret remembered seeing that oddly spelled monikeron a name tag attached to the chest of the pretty young undergrad who’d been assigned to escort Dr. Deaver, a guest of honor, around the Austin Conference of Botany last year. At the time, she’d wondered what parent thought they needed to change a perfectly good Y to an IE and add an extra L. How much more efficient to spell the name the correct way. She’d asked the young woman where she had gotten her name and she’d said, “It’s a flower,” as if Margaret were some dense first grader. The girl—young woman—had certainly taken her job seriously, though. She’d been like an adoring shadow to her charge. She fetched sandwiches and cold drinks, kept track of Dr. Deaver’s messenger bag and led him to presentations and lectures so he arrived on time. Margaret had seen her outside Dr. Deaver’s hotel room around nine one night but assumed the young woman had been running a last errand.
