Chapter 11 Hold On
Hold On
One year, a rare snowstorm swept out of the mountains, blanketing Margaret’s hill and valley in a slippery coating of white. The radio reported downed power lines and slick roads and advised people to refrain from driving unless it was an emergency.
Margaret had listened to the warning but quickly decided that leaving critical plants unwatered in the grow room and letting fragile solutions spoil in an unpowered, warming refrigerator constituted an emergency and started down the serpentine driveway in her truck.
She’d become an expert in navigating the dirt track through mud and rain and fallen trees (she carried a chainsaw and shovel in her truck for just such things), but snow was a different matter.
Halfway down the hillside, the vehicle’s tires lost traction, and the bed of the Toyota suddenly seemed to want to become the front of the vehicle and vice versa.
Margaret fought the urge to slam on the truck’s brakes.
Instead, she downshifted, gripped the wheel more tightly and steered.
On one side, snow-frosted oak and pine reached out as if to take the Toyota in their icy embrace.
On the other, a rocky embankment issued a siren call to the truck. She fought them all.
When she finally arrived at the main road, her heart pounded and her hands shook. Any other person might have parked and trudged back to their safe, warm house. Margaret, however, thought of all those cancer patients waiting for cures and plowed stubbornly on.
Margaret feels the same way now, unmoored and shaken but convinced that if no one else will investigate, she will. Not only to save Dr. Deaver’s reputation and research but to see whether something foul was afoot at Roosevelt University and make sure that justice was done.
She stops at the breakroom and buys a cup of vending-machine tea, then heads for a bench outside the science building to compose herself. Unlike Zhang and sometimes Calvin, she neither eats nor drinks inside the lab.
A mourning dove sounds its lonely cry. Students walk past in clumps, some laughing, some engaged in earnest conversation. Oh, to be so young and full of promise.
She swallows the last of the cup, which tastes more like a suggestion of tea, and settles on a plan, even though it will involve a lie. Just this one time, she promises herself, and only because it is absolutely necessary.
Margaret arrives at Purdy’s desk just as the woman is gathering her purse to leave for the day.
The materials for detecting carbon 14 are in the pocket of Margaret’s skirt.
If there’s carbon 14 residue on the empty scotch bottle or on the Diet Coke container and also on the atropine in the locked cabinet, she’ll have her proof.
“I’m hoping you can help me, Beth,” Margaret says. “It will only take a minute.”
Actually, it will take at least four minutes, but Margaret doesn’t mention that.
“I think I left the budget breakdown for the Cameron Foundation grant in Professor Deaver’s office. If I could just borrow the key, I can grab it and get the application finished.”
Purdy shakes her head. “I wish I could help, but Dean McDonald has closed the office until he figures out what the university owns and what goes to Dr. Deaver’s estate, and I’m just about to leave.”
“Perhaps the dean—” Margaret begins.
“He’s gone for the day.”
“I’m sure the dean would—”
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to wait.”
Purdy gives one last glance at her desk and heads for the front doors.
She’s wearing a tight black skirt and red stiletto heels that cause her hips to sway like a ship at sea.
Basic physiology would tell a person that walking around with your heels lifted in the air changes your center of gravity, which puts abnormal pressure on your hips.
Which means Purdy may be a walking candidate for hip replacement surgery.
Not that Margaret wishes that on Purdy. It’s simply an observation.
Purdy pushes open the door. Margaret’s best chance is escaping.
Before she can think, Margaret calls out after her. “Did you see anyone go into Dr. Deaver’s office the afternoon before I found his body?” The question had been at the front of her mind. How did it escape?
Purdy turns, a frown creasing her forehead. “Why would you want to know that?”
It’s a good question and Margaret’s mind scrambles for an answer. She isn’t ready to tell the gossipy Purdy about her suspicions.
“Well, um, because he was working on the grant and might have told someone the budget information that’s missing.
I need the pricing for, um, a liquid chromatograph.
With a programmable auto sampler.” It’s the first piece of equipment that comes to her mind and she hopes Purdy doesn’t know there’s already one in the lab.
“Maybe Travis Zhang, our grad student? He’s helping with the grant. ”
Lying is like standing in quicksand. Every word sinks you deeper into the muck. Margaret groans inwardly. Who would believe Zhang was part of the grant?
“I’m not the hall monitor, Margaret,” Purdy sniffs.
“I know. It’s just that…” What?
“It’s just that you’re very detail oriented and I thought you might have seen someone.”
The flattery seems to work because Purdy pauses. “Well, I didn’t see your Zhang fellow but I think I remember Dr. Blackstone heading that way. Around four fifteen or maybe four thirty. Maybe you could ask him.”
“Thanks, Beth. I’ll do that. Have a good evening,” Margaret calls as Purdy shoves her way outside.
She remembers the note on Dr. Deaver’s computer monitor. Could it have been Blackstone he was supposed to meet?
Blackstone certainly was jealous of Dr. Deaver, but who wouldn’t be?
She would bet 98 percent of the professors on campus were envious of Dr. Deaver’s genius, his fearless creativity, his shining reputation.
While envy and the pressure for scientific discovery have led more than a few researchers, including her old boss, to fraud or plagiarism or both, she’s never heard of a case that ended in murder.
Could Blackstone have been so consumed by revenge for what he saw as the theft of his idea that he’d used a poisonous plant to end his rival’s life?
Had he planned the murder to be both cruel and ironic?
She’s always had trouble knowing what is ironic and what is not—the curse of a practical and straightforward mind—but she thinks, in this case, it is true.
Plus, Blackstone certainly knew there were poisonous substances in the Deaver Lab and could have figured out a way to get access to them.
Steady, Margaret, she warns herself. Measured steps are the key to discovery, not a headlong rush in multiple directions.
She looks at her watch. Five forty-five. An idea arrives, although it’s a painful one. Letting people down is not something Margaret does. She steels herself.
It’s her weekly “Two for $26” date night at Applebee’s with her boyfriend, Keith, although the words “date” and “boyfriend” seem too strong for what they are.
“Dinner companions” or “food friends” might be better descriptions even though two weeks ago Keith told their server that they were celebrating their four-month anniversary.
When Margaret’s eyebrows lifted, Keith leaned forward and whispered, “Free dessert,” which made her feel slightly better.
They always sat at the same burgundy vinyl booth and ordered the same meal, the Riblets Plate and a gin and tonic for Keith and a cheeseburger with a glass of red wine for her.
She couldn’t deny the pleasure of that meaty burger, crisp fries and fruity red wine.
Such hedonism! Also, because they always split the check and the servings were so huge, Margaret could take half of the meal home for the next night’s dinner, which made the evening less of an extravagance than it seemed.
Keith would talk about his job as an accountant and about how unfairly he was treated by his bosses and the rigors of dealing with picky clients, and she would tell him about the work in the lab and, although he would often dominate the discussion, she enjoyed the give-and-take of conversation.
It made her feel heard and also seen, which was a nice change.
She’d met Keith at the annual garden society plant sale, where he was shopping for a hardy ground cover and she was browsing the nearby lupine selection.
He was about her age, pleasant-looking enough—horn-rimmed glasses, straw-colored hair, slightly hunched shoulders, which suggested office work—and was holding a pot of moss verbena with a perplexed look on his face.
“Verbena aristigera,” she’d said. “Drought tolerant and hardy with showy lavender flowers. Butterflies love it.”
At his request, she’d gone on to show him several ornamental grasses, little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and deer grass (Muhlenbergia rigens), which he said he wanted to plant in the backyard of his new town house and asked her if she’d have dinner with him “in appreciation of your help.” She’d agreed (she liked the way he wanted to know the botanical name of every specimen and didn’t seem intimidated by her height) and, somehow, they had fallen into this relationship? This routine? This what?
She calculates the time: seven minutes to walk to her truck in the remote lot, ten minutes to drive to Applebee’s. There’s still a chance she can make it.
It takes her a while to locate Joe the custodian but, finally, she finds him in the dean’s conference room buffing the floor with a noisy machine. Had his shoulders always been so broad?
She shakes away the question. Silly old woman.
“I’m afraid I need your help again,” she says.
“Whatever you need, Ms. Finch.”
“Margaret. Please.”
“Whatever you need, Margaret.” He smiles, which makes the scar on one side of his face lift and stretch.
Still, there’s a sincerity behind it that Margaret appreciates.
So many people smile when they don’t mean it.
Margaret herself has never been able to acquire that skill.
The few times she tried it, people asked if she was feeling ill.
The custodian listens attentively as she tells him about Deaver’s pupils, the effects of belladonna poisoning, the Diet Coke and scotch bottles, and Zhang’s harassment claim.
When she gets to the part about Zhang’s outburst in the auditorium, Joe says that there are people who laugh in the face of death, but they are usually on the battlefield with bullets flying and rockets exploding, not in a lecture hall.
How does he know about battlefields?
She tells him about the carbon 14 trail and that if he could let her into Dr. Deaver’s office, she could possibly prove her hypothesis correct.
“The police won’t take me seriously.”
“I think you should always be taken seriously, Margaret,” Joe says, and they agree to meet at Dr. Deaver’s office door in twenty minutes. He says he needs to finish the floor to avoid streaks, which Margaret understands completely. She, however, dreads what she must do next.
She goes into the hallway and takes up her phone.
“But they’ve already put in our orders,” Keith says when she tells him she needs to work late and will miss their dinner. His voice carries a whiny quality she only now notices. “How will I eat two dinners?”
“Just take my order home and have it tomorrow.”
“I’m supposed to pay for a dinner I don’t want?”
“I’ll send you a check for half,” she says.
“Don’t forget the 15 percent tip.”
“I won’t.”
“This is upsetting,” he says. “People are staring.”
“Don’t look at them.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Goodbye,” he says stiffly.
What did he mean by that?