Chapter 18 Coffee Trouble
Coffee Trouble
On top of everything going on, this morning is when her coffeemaker decides it’s had enough. Margaret measured the grounds, poured in the water and pushed the little switch. There was a half-hearted hiss, then what sounded like a sigh. Then nothing. No coffee. Not even hot water.
She unplugged the squat machine, then plugged it back in, even though she knew rebooting was only for computers.
It was worth a try. Now she’ll have to make a trip to the thrift store to see if someone has decided to abandon a perfectly good machine for one of those fancy coffeemakers with little cups and showy flavors.
Give her a Mr. Coffee and her trusty Folgers and she’s good.
She is planning her schedule when she arrives at the college parking lot.
(She’ll eat her lunch during her morning break, then go on a quick Mr. Coffee mission to the Goodwill near the campus at noon.) Dr. Deaver’s parking spot is empty, and she’s glad.
Either Blackstone hasn’t arrived or he’s finally realized that he overstepped his bounds.
She pulls her truck neatly into her spot.
The morning sun lights the campus’s hodgepodge of buildings in a way that makes the place seem more attractive than it actually is: the twin 1930s Spanish-style edifices where Science and Humanities live; the imposing 1950s concrete-and-glass building that houses Social Sciences and Psychology; the odd, four-story, white-stucco complex with its jutting angles and meandering courtyard that serves as a student dormitory and reminds her of an M.C.
Escher lithograph, along with industrial-looking administration, gym, and cafeteria buildings.
The university ebbs and flows at donors’ whims, which is why there is no coherent design to the campus.
New philanthropists, maybe some of those ambitious young men and women in Silicon Valley, are needed.
And yet, who knows what edifice they might conjure.
She heard one possible donor wanted a building that looked like a spaceship.
Margaret strides up the path toward the lab. Two young women jog across a swath of green lawn in sweatshirts and tiny shorts. A giant oak (Quercus kelloggii) spreads its limbs.
At the science building’s front doors, she is greeted by a notice announcing a required safety meeting this morning at eight fifteen.
How had she forgotten? Although what could some consultant tell her that she didn’t already know?
In her ten years here, she’s prevented or stopped more than a few catastrophes, including discovering two undergrads who, wanting to get high, had snuck into the lab and were about to ingest a container full of Psilocybe semilanceata mushrooms Dr. Deaver was testing for possible antimicrobial action.
She had said she could either phone the young men’s parents or they could change their majors to psychology, to which their mind-bending ways might be better suited.
They chose the latter. It’s also why there is now a locked cabinet in the lab with Dr. Deaver having the only key.
She is just passing the men’s room on her way to drop off her lunch when she hears a male voice, then a familiar cough. Calvin?
She would have kept going but the next words sound like “lying” and “Deaver,” although they are too muffled for her to be sure.
Margaret stops, glances up and down the hall and steps closer to the door. She recognizes the nasal quality of the other voice. It’s Blackstone. She hears “humiliate,” then something, something…“my turn.”
She considers the notion of privacy but decides a possible murderer doesn’t deserve that particular constitutional right. She puts a hand on the lavatory door and slowly pushes it open an inch, then two.
“Your Big Bird is pecking where she shouldn’t be pecking,” Blackstone is saying. “Somebody needs to clip her wings.”
“She’s harmless,” Calvin says. “Nobody listens to her.”
There’s the sound of a flush.
“She thinks Deaver was some saint, that he could do no wrong.” It’s Blackstone again. “But he messed with a lot of people’s lives, including mine. He was a liar and a cheat and a prima donna and he got what was coming to him. It’s good riddance to a bad apple, I say.”
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Margaret corrects in her mind.
“He screwed you too.” Blackstone is on a roll. “Now that it looks like I’m going to be in charge of the lab, I’ll take care of you. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. I’ll help you get a real job. I won’t stand in your way like Deaver did.”
There’s a quaver in Calvin’s voice. “Wait, Dr. Deaver said I had talent that other people didn’t see. That all it would take was hard work and I’d find a job.”
“And you believed that?” The question comes out as a sneer. “Let me ask you: Did he ever take you to conferences, set you up for a presentation?”
“Well, no. I get nervous when I’m around too many people.”
“Doesn’t matter. He could have helped you, made a few introductions. He wanted you under his thumb so you and that Finch woman could do his grunt work, and he could keep polishing his reputation.”
That’s not true, Margaret thinks.
“I never thought of it like that,” Calvin says.
“By the way, have you heard anything about the autopsy? What actually killed the guy?”
Margaret leans closer but a flush drowns out the answer.
“I need to shut down that old bird. She’s going to ruin everything,” Blackstone says.
“You could let her go, I suppose.”
Margaret’s mouth opens in disbelief. After all she’s done for Calvin, he’s suggesting she be fired?
“Too obvious,” Blackstone says. “Nope. I have a new plan for her. She acts so high-and-mighty, but she underestimates me at her own risk.”
The skin on the back of Margaret’s neck prickles.
Water rushes out of faucets, again drowning the conversation except for the words “stop her.”
Paper towels are ripped from their dispensers. No time left.
Margaret is easing the door closed when a voice makes her jump.
“That’s the men’s room, dear.”
Margaret turns. A stout white-haired woman wearing a forest-green blouse and a pleated plaid skirt stands behind her.
“These hallway lights are definitely a safety issue,” the woman says. “No wonder you couldn’t see the sign. I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time.”
She must be the consultant.
Margaret doesn’t have a minute to spare. Calvin and Blackstone will be coming out the door any second now.
“Oh yes. Thank you. Terrible lights,” Margaret says, dipping slightly in what appears to be a curtsy.
Why did she do that? She’s not addressing the queen, although the woman does bear a resemblance to the former monarch in a British-moor kind of way.
Footsteps approach the men’s room door. “You’re right.
I’ll be sure to look more closely next time.
I have to run. Really. But thank you. Goodbye. ”
Margaret hurries away before she can interpret the expression on the woman’s face. What did Blackstone mean about having a plan for her?
Her mind whirls with Calvin’s betrayal and Blackstone’s threats. She pushes herself through a back door of the building and into the sunshine. There’s no one she can trust anymore. Except perhaps for Joe Torres. But does she really know him?
She sets off, her feet carrying her once around the science building and then across the lawn past the oak to a weedy soccer field surrounded by a faded track.
Why didn’t Calvin stand up for her? And why was Blackstone asking about the autopsy unless he was concerned someone would discover that Dr. Deaver was poisoned?
It feels as if Roosevelt University has turned into the academic version of a besieged tomato patch. Tomato vines, it was known, will secrete a certain chemical when under attack by caterpillars that causes the caterpillars to eat one another in gruesome acts of cannibalism.
Where was she in Roosevelt’s garden of betrayal? Was she the next to be eaten?
The thoughts unnerve her, and she hurries back to the science building, where the safety meeting is about to begin.
Sure enough, it’s as much of a time waster as she feared.
Afterward, she buys a cup of vending machine coffee in the breakroom and drinks it amid the chattering of staff and graduate students.
No one pays attention to her and that’s good.
Her thoughts are noisy companions enough.
At ten oh eight, she heads for the lab, noticing that the hallway memorial is gone.
Joe Torres has done his job. Now she must do hers.
What’s inside the lab, however, stops her cold.
All four windows in the lab are open, and a scattering of knobcone pine needles on the floor serve as testament to the change in weather.
The refrigerator door yawns wide, the solutions and samples inside spoiled, and someone has left the mass spectrometer running and it’s making an unpleasant sound.
There’s broken glass on the floor and test tubes scattered willy-nilly, as if they’d been flung around the room.
If Zhang hadn’t already left, she would have thought he’d attempted one last experiment. Could this be Blackstone’s work?
Quickly, she hangs up her purse and dons her lab coat.
A wave of nausea washes over her. She doesn’t know if it’s from the bitter breakroom coffee or the tension of seeing her beloved lab in such disarray.
Once, a doctor diagnosed Margaret with stress-related irritable bowel syndrome, although it turned out later that her upset was caused by a deep discount on canned beans at the supermarket, which Margaret had found hard to resist.