Chapter 8 Among the Flowers
Among the Flowers
On Sundays, lots of people go to the beach or to church or plant themselves on couches to watch sports on TV.
Not Margaret. Sunday is her garden day, and if the weather is even remotely cooperative, Margaret is outside among her plants.
She weeds and waters. She fertilizes and feeds.
She praises plants that are doing particularly well and tends to those infected by aphids and other pests.
Depending on the season, she may plant or prune or deadhead.
Last year, she built a retaining wall using rocks from her four-acre property.
Unlike the rest of her ordered and plain life, Margaret’s garden is a riot of colors, textures and scents.
Dainty violets line a winding path of stepping stones next to a row of silvery dusty miller.
Gaudy gladiolas lord it over black-eyed Susans while lilies erupt in clumps and deer grass sways in the breeze. Vines climb, roses bloom, cacti prick.
Margaret inherited the cottage and her garden from her great-aunt Hazel and has not changed it—only added to it—partly as tribute to the independent old woman but also as a way to exercise the creative right side of her brain, which, as a researcher, gets little workout.
“I believe in whole-grain bread and whole-brain science,” Dr. Deaver said once, which made Margaret realize that, basically, she was the human equivalent of supermarket white bread and vow to do better.
Usually, her garden relaxes and soothes her. Today, however, the weight of Dr. Deaver’s demise, the fact that his work might be lost and the clues that suggest he didn’t die a natural death make her feel as if she’s spent the whole day moving through mud.
By five fifteen, she is so tired she can hardly drag her trusty three-pronged cultivator through the soil.
She shoves herself to her feet, puts away her tools and gloves, and trudges inside to clean up.
Usually, her showers last three minutes but today she pushes it to four.
The water feels good drumming against her back, and she stands there letting it run down her frame until she realizes the waste she is causing and quickly twists the faucet handles closed.
She dries off, wipes steam from the mirror, then rubs the towel vigorously through her wavy brown hair, which she notices is so streaked with gray now that she can’t justify calling it brown anymore. She’ll need to change her driver’s license when it comes up for renewal next year.
Margaret accepted her plainness years ago: her too-long face, her too-widely-set eyes, her oversized nose.
What she has a hard time accepting is the way society reacts to imperfections like hers with suggestions of surgeries and injections and lasers.
As if it were a horrible disease that needed to be cured before it infected someone else. Why doesn’t a person’s inside count?
According to her mother, Margaret got her looks and height from her father, who had been a football star in high school.
(Margaret was conceived during senior prom but became fatherless at age six when the semitruck her father was driving lost its brakes on a mountain pass and he died in a bonfire of motor oil and auto parts.)
Margaret turns away from the mirror. Her mother never had a chance to go gray, dying from inoperable stomach cancer at the age of forty-two.
It was a horrible death, made more devastating by the fact that Margaret was the only one left of her family to care for her.
Now it will be Dr. Deaver whose hair will never gray, nor will he see his latest and possibly most important discovery be celebrated far and wide.
Margaret puts on her house clothes—charcoal sweatpants, a men’s Pendleton shirt size large and lambs-wool-lined slippers ($2.
99 at the thrift store). She keeps three sets of clothes—her work outfits, her gardening apparel and her house clothes—plus a brown sweater and a green down jacket for when it gets cold. Anything more feels like an excess.
She heads for the kitchen.
Late afternoon light sifts through the front windows of her cottage, casting shadows over the faded but plump sofa, her padded footstool, her mystery book and reading lamp on the end table.
The cabin is small and made of rough wood, 750 square feet at most. She got the cottage nine years ago after her great-aunt died and bequeathed her the former homesteader’s cabin due to having no other heirs.
There is a tiny kitchen against the back wall, which opens to 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 above the 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 be wrong?
Most people would label her habits eccentric: the old truck, 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 own way. 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.