Page 75 of The Botanist's Assistant
She has tossed spaghetti noodles with chunks of fresh tomatoes and tears of basil from her garden, along with garlic, olive oil, butter, salt and a grinding of black pepper. There is a small bowl of grated Parmesan cheese on the table.
Calvin beams. “Your tomatoes came just in time for my birthday.”
“A little present from Mother Nature,” Margaret says, seating herself at the head of the table. “That June fog really slowed everything down.”
“I guess that makes them not-so-Early Girls,” Joe says, and Calvin chuckles.
Joe pours red wine all around and Margaret thinks,It’s five p.m. on a Saturday, butwhy not?
Calvin grabs the pasta fork and scoops two big servings of spaghetti onto his plate. He’s wearing gray gym shorts with a black Grateful Dead T-shirt that bears the large image of a skull. A skull shirt isn’t something Margaret thinks a regular person would wear to a birthday celebration, but then, she’s not Calvin. She is, however, grateful that he’s not dead.
Margaret had arrived at the lab door just as Calvin was taking a second bite from the cupcake. She had yelled “Stop,” grabbed it from his hand and flung it to the floor.
“Hey!” Calvin had said. “What was that about? You said I could have it.”
“I want you to sit down while I call an ambulance,” Margaret said firmly.
“An ambulance?”
“The cupcake was intended for me. I think it may have been poisoned.”
Calvin turned as white as his lab coat and clutched a hand to his throat.
“Stay calm. You’re going to be fine. Just give me your phone.” Margaret had left hers in her purse in the janitor’s closet.
Calvin fumbled the phone from his pocket, moaning, “How can this be happening? I’m too young to die. Why did I even try to stop smoking?”
“Sit, Calvin. Panic doesn’t help,” Margaret said, although her own heart was racing, and fear was rising like a tide inside her.
Calvin could not die. She would not let him.
A fire truck and ambulance arrived seven minutes later, and Margaret accompanied Calvin to the hospital, bringing the cupcake remains she’d scraped from the floor. She told doctors of the possibility that Calvin had ingested poison of an unknown origin, handed them the cake leavings, and treatment was started quickly even as his heart began to beat wildly and vomiting set in. He spent five days in the hospital, Margaret arriving promptly at four thirty p.m. each day to relieve Calvin’s parents, whose strict schedule of dinner and the nightly news at five thirty had Margaret’s full support. The appearance of Calvin’s mother and father at Calvin’s bedside each day at nine a.m. also served to reassure Calvin that perhaps the poodle had not usurped his inheritance after all. Tests of the cupcake, meanwhile, determined it had, indeed, been poisoned, containing ground-up wolfsbane—enough to kill an adult. Even one as big-boned as Margaret.
It turned out Purdy had audited a Zoom version of Dr. Deaver’s Superpowers of Plants class and had become entranced with poisonous plants and the evil work they’d done. She’d harvested the plant after discovering it near the university, leaving one stem at the lab door in hopes of deterring Margaret from her investigation through intimidation and fear, and saving the other to use as a poison if needed.
Purdy was detained by the campus police after the ambulance had pulled away. Joe had called Officer Bianchi saying he was holding a murder suspect and gave him the location.When the officer arrived, Joe played the recording for him while Purdy shouted that she’d been intimidated and confused and forced to say things that weren’t true. Bianchi looked rattled but he took Purdy in for questioning, then called the sheriff’s department. Sure enough, the scotch bottle (with traces of belladonna-laced alcohol) and the glass were found inside Purdy’s car, which made Margaret glad the article she’d left about cluttered desks hadn’t inspired Purdy in the least. In addition, a scattering of dried wolfsbane leaves was found along a baseboard in Purdy’s kitchen. She obviously did not sweep the floor as she should.
There were news articles and breathless TV reports about a spurned lover and a poisoned professor, but no one knew the extent of the story until two months ago when theWashington Postpublished a long, in-depth article Joe had written. It told a story of rivalry, jealousy and betrayal at a small university that had brought not only a renowned and popular professor’s death but an attempted cover-up that had failed, thanks to the dogged work of an underpaid but dedicated fifty-four-year-old research assistant.
The headline in thePostread:Poison, a Professor and the University That Tried to Cover Up a Murder. It was the most-read article on thePostwebsite for a full week. Purdy was awaiting trial after a preliminary hearing found there was enough evidence to prosecute her.
Margaret, Joe and Calvin are silent as they eat, as peopleoften are when the air is fresh, the food is good and one is hungry. It’s why Margaret doesn’t believe in appetizers. Why dull the intense pleasure of eating on an empty stomach?
Both Joe and Calvin ask for seconds.
Three weeks ago, in what was a complete surprise to him, theWashington Postcalled and offered Joe a permanent job. Editors there wanted him to travel the country writing about cold cases and people wrongfully accused of crimes. He’d put in his resignation letter at the university and was already looking into a possible article about a case involving the unidentified bodies of a woman and her daughter and how new techniques for testing degraded blood samples had identified the victims and renewed the search for their killer.
Margaret had been reluctant to agree to the article when Joe proposed it shortly after Purdy’s arrest. When, however, the university launched a damage-control campaign claiming sloppy police work and an investigation into possible irregularities in Dr. Deaver’s work that hinted at the possibility he had swallowed the poison himself, she couldn’t stay quiet.
Officer Bianchi had folded like a cheap suit (Joe’s words). When Joe asked him why he hadn’t ordered a toxicology screen after Dr. Deaver was found dead, Bianchi claimed he was considering the request “from that strange woman” when the dean had called. According to him, the dean said he would keep quiet the fact that Bianchi had been coaching his kid’s soccer team on university time in exchange for Bianchi not requesting a toxicology screen.
“I thought it was the professor’s heart anyway. Everybodysaid it was,” Bianchi told Joe. “I couldn’t lose my job over something like that. I got a family to support.”
Purdy’s story was more complicated.
Her life, as Joe discovered, had been filled with cruelty and desertion.
Abandoned in a cheap Las Vegas hotel room with her younger brother when she was eleven—her parents went off to gamble and never came back—Purdy had been shuttled through twelve foster homes, then tossed out into the world when she turned eighteen.
