Chapter 15 When You Hear Hoofbeats
When You Hear Hoofbeats
By the time she arrives at the lab the next day, Margaret has almost convinced herself that the wolfsbane was not a threat but a mistake.
Aconite isn’t common, but it certainly grew in the area.
Perhaps one of Dr. Deaver’s admiring students—he taught a popular class titled The Superpowers of Plants—had spotted it in the marshy area near campus, admired its blooms and hadn’t recognized what it was.
What was that saying? When you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras?
She’d run from the plant as if it were a charging herd of them.
Margaret turns to the day’s emails. She doesn’t care for email.
First, it piles up so quickly and easily that no matter how many you delete one day, the same number seems to appear the next, and, secondly, many of the emails she receives are riddled with spelling and grammar errors.
Some people blame the mistake on autocorrect, but to Margaret’s way of thinking the sheer number of misspelled words and grammar garbles undercut that excuse.
Why can’t people just talk to each other?
The first is from Dean McDonald, who says that he wants the draft paper submitted to Dr. Blackstone in two weeks and that the grant application should be sent by Friday.
He also reminds her that while the application should acknowledge Dr. Deaver’s death it should only include Blackstone’s CV, “since there was an apparent collaboration between the two of them and we must emphasize that connection.”
Margaret feels herself grow hot.
How dare Blackstone claim a collaboration with Dr. Deaver, and didn’t the dean understand that Levi Blackstone’s unimpressive CV could doom the application even before it got to the full committee for consideration? A big grant did not go to a mouse of science.
A rat of science, Margaret amends.
The truth is that even she, a mere research assistant, has more impressive credentials than Blackstone. Unlike others in the world of science (mostly male), Dr. Deaver has included her name as an author on the last nine years of his papers.
Then there is also the fact that Dr. Deaver has left a detailed list of what needs to be done to further his research, and she is capable of most of it.
Could she put her name as the grant applicant?
She dismisses the idea even as it forms. The Cameron Foundation would no more award the money to a fifty-four-year-old research assistant II with a master’s degree from a state college than it would give it to Joe the custodian, although he’s probably more capable than Blackstone.
What brought Joe to Roosevelt University anyway?
Margaret knows she can’t let Blackstone get away with his scheme, nor can she endanger the possibility of a new cancer treatment. She thinks of her mother’s ravaged body and the chemotherapy that had only delayed cancer’s long and terrible march toward death.
Margaret puts her fingers to the keyboard.
Dear Dean McDonald,
The deadlines you’ve stated are acceptable; however, there was no collaboration between Drs.
Deaver and Blackstone as Professor Blackstone might claim; therefore, I cannot report what is not true.
As an alternative, perhaps you might serve as the applicant so that Calvin Hollowell and I might continue the work.
Dr. Deaver left extensive notes and I am confident that with the addition of another postdoc and perhaps a bioengineer or medical chemist, or a collaboration with one afforded by the Cameron Foundation grant, we might complete the work and thus put Roosevelt University on the map with Stanford and UCLA as you stated.
Best,
Margaret Finch, Research Assistant II.
She hits Send and takes a few calming breaths before opening a second email from the dean.
This one announces to the entire campus that, per Professor Deaver’s request, his body will be cremated and no funeral services held.
The note goes on to remind faculty and staff that a grief counselor is available if needed and that an endowment has been set up in Dr. Deaver’s name if anyone wishes to contribute.
Margaret frowns. Dr. Jonathan M. Deaver may have had many wonderful attributes, but humility wasn’t one of them. Having worked with him for a decade, she is almost certain Dr. Deaver would have wanted fanfare, not quiet contemplation, to mark his death.
He would have wanted people to talk about his contributions to science, about his brilliant and yet quirky mind, about his quick rise to fame.
He would have wanted soaring music, a grand hall, a procession to the gravesite.
This would be followed by a big reception with bottles of good wine, pillars of seafood and carved meats, and photos of Dr. Deaver at work set on easels around the room.
What would have made him skip this final tribute?
Margaret is pondering this when Calvin arrives with another hacking cough. He really should see a doctor.
“Are you feeling better?” she asks.
“I got some sleep if that’s what you’re asking, but I don’t know if I can take another day at the dog park. All that barking and snapping. I think I’m getting PTSD.”
Should she tell him that the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders requires some traumatic event as a trigger for PTSD and that a snapping toy poodle might not qualify?
Or is it the more polite thing to let him go on with his mistaken diagnosis so as not to make him feel worse?
She asks, instead, if he’s seen the dean’s email about Dr. Deaver’s memorial.
Calvin slides his messenger bag under his workspace. “Yeah, I saw it.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as strange that Dr. Deaver wouldn’t want some kind of memorial?”
Calvin shrugs. “I heard it was the wife’s decision, not his. Listen, I’m going to grab a cup of coffee and a muffin from the café. Want anything?”
“I brought my own coffee, thank you.”
Margaret knows the story of Veronica Ann Deaver, even though she’s only met her a few times.
Armed with a PhD in chemistry, Veronica Ann had hitched her wagon to the star of her husband’s career, believing he would land at Harvard, MIT or Stanford, where, as is often the custom, she would also be awarded a position.
Instead, he’d chosen Roosevelt, which, he claimed, didn’t silo departments and thus promoted collaborative knowledge and inquiry and allowed space for creative thought.
Roosevelt, however, was too cash-strapped to offer Dr. Deaver’s wife a faculty position, and thus she had turned to other pursuits: charity work, cooking and, oddly for a chemist, fashion design.
While Dr. Deaver had remained mostly mum about his marriage, Margaret knew it wasn’t the happiest of unions. Once, she’d come into his office to find him doing the New York Times crossword puzzle while Veronica Ann’s tinny shout came out of a cell phone on his desk.
“You always promise but you never do what you say. You left me sitting there with the Cunninghams and a cassoulet that I’d spent two days cooking and not a word. You may have fooled everybody else but not me. I know who you are.”
Dr. Deaver had mouthed, “Sorry,” and Margaret had fled the room.
Margaret thinks of the yelling and shouting of her own family, of the way it all ended. What had prompted this lack of a last tribute?
It takes Margaret twenty-two minutes, but there it is: a divorce filing by one Jonathan Matthew Deaver against Veronica Ann Deaver, dated ten days before his death.
Why hadn’t he mentioned it?
Margaret scrolls through the petition. Dr. Deaver is claiming his Land Rover, two original paintings by a semi-famous artist, plus a summer home near Lake Tahoe and interest in a successful biofungicide company he helped form seven years ago, in addition to any future companies or earnings resulting from his work.
Meanwhile, he will split the proceeds of the sale of their main house plus pay $4,000 a month in alimony, which to a woman of Veronica Ann’s tastes and Dr. Deaver’s earnings is a pittance, and also let her have her 2022 BMW, a sculpture estimated to be worth $150,000 and her fashion line, which Margaret knows has never made a profit.
Irreconcilable differences is the stated reason for the divorce, but Margaret is struck by the unevenness of Dr. Deaver’s offer to his wife. He had always been a man of fairness and a supporter of justice. This, however, indicates neither.
Margaret shuts down the computer as Calvin returns from his coffee-and-muffin run. What happened between Dr. Deaver and his wife? Was the lack of a funeral Veronica Ann Deaver’s attempt to wound her husband the way he wounded her?
Before she can answer herself, Zhang walks through the lab door.
“Dudes,” he says, “I have some amazing news.”