Chapter 19 The Good Servant
The Good Servant
If, indeed, Dr. Deaver had been the one to check out the atropine from the closet (the handwriting looked like his), then could his death be a suicide rather than a murder? Had he mixed the poison with his scotch and drunk it down to dull atropine’s bitter taste?
But if suicide was your intent, why would you sign out the drug?
Habit? A hint of what you’d done? But a hint to whom?
And what would have prompted him to kill himself?
There had been no signs of depression. He was always energetic and cheerful.
His work was also stellar, which ruled out someone discovering falsified data.
Perhaps a terminal disease not related to his heart? Then why file for divorce?
A horn blares from behind her truck and Margaret looks into her rearview mirror to see a red sports car on her tail.
Margaret glances at the speedometer and realizes she’s accidentally slowed to fifteen miles an hour below the speed limit.
She presses harder on the gas pedal. The truck hesitates as if deciding whether to obey, then leaps forward like a frightened jackrabbit.
The red car swerves around her anyway, the driver—a man with a gray crewcut—lifting a middle finger as he passes.
A small, fleshy sword-wave of discontent.
Did he expect the gesture to wound her? She’s been insulted by better people than he.
Margaret motors on. Was the missing glass an attempt to make his suicide seem like murder and perhaps frame Veronica Ann for his death? But what would have prompted him to do that?
Margaret’s mind dizzies as she steers the truck up her driveway. What was it that Agatha Christie said? That imagination was a good servant but a bad master? She must stick to what she absolutely knows.
Margaret parks the truck next to her cottage.
She installs the new (used) Mr. Coffee in the kitchen and sets the old one aside to be recycled.
She changes into her house clothes and starts her dinner: roasted vegetables with chicken thighs, which were marked with a sell-by date that was one day past and thus were 50 percent off.
She’d read somewhere that, every year, people threw away ninety billion pounds of food thanks to those innocuous-looking but all-powerful dates. As far as she’s concerned, all one needs is two eyes and a good nose. It’s how cooks did it for centuries.
She has twenty-five minutes before her meal is ready, so she goes outside and turns on the drip irrigation system she installed. The late afternoon shadows are long and lean.
Margaret steps into the garden, inspecting the roses and fuchsia, stopping by the clematis.
The lavender looks content, as do the rosemary, thyme and mint, although there seems to be a gopher afoot.
They are the scourge of her garden. The moonshine yarrow is also coming along nicely.
She planted it in a sun-exposed spot near the base of her chaste tree (an experiment) and it looks pretty against the pale purple blooms. A dragonfly has settled itself on a bearded iris.
Its gossamer wings and elongated body make it appear ancient and futuristic at the same time.
“Help yourself to the midges and mosquitos but please leave the bees alone,” she tells it.
She checks her watch. The chicken and vegetables are almost ready.
She plucks a few mint leaves to add to a glass of ice water and heads inside.
Her dinner is satisfying although thoughts of Dr. Deaver’s death keep intruding.
Why would Dr. Deaver have suggested they “fly high” in her birthday card if he intended to kill himself?
She opens a window to let out the heat generated by the oven and does her dishes. She is about to get the broom and sweep her floor when she hears a car engine approaching.
If the wind is right, she can sometimes hear the hum of vehicles from the valley below, but this sounds as if it’s coming up her hill.
Except for the propane truck and the few times she had to call in a repair person when a job was too complicated for her—the installation of a new fuse box, a septic tank that needed to be pumped—no one comes up her driveway.
She has no relatives to stop by. No Jehovah’s Witnesses or trucks brave her hill.
Not even her mail carrier will attempt it.
Margaret sticks her head out the door into the evening air. The vehicle sounds close. The engine revs, then falls silent, then revs again.
There’s a seasonal spring about two-thirds of the way up the hill that turns the road to mud at certain times of the year, and unless you know to gun the engine and speed through the mire, it’s possible for a car to become trapped.
Margaret puts on her gardening shoes, grabs a headlamp and her shovel.
It’s near dark. If someone has mistaken her driveway for another or taken a wrong turn intending to go to the county park that borders her land (it’s happened twice before), they might become stuck.
She will redirect the wayward driver toward a spot where they will be able to turn around, and if they are stuck, she will unstick them.
She has no wish for visitors, intended or accidental.
Margaret is approaching the driveway’s second hairpin turn where a small boggy pond is home to a burgeoning crop of common horsetail (someday she will get rid of the invasive plant) when she sees, on the road below, a sight that causes her to stop so suddenly her foot slips on a patch of loose dirt and she nearly falls on her behind.
It’s an older-model white van.
Margaret’s vision swims.
She scrambles back uphill a few yards and crouches behind a knobcone pine. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears.
What is the vehicle doing here?
It’s the same question she should have asked thirty-four years ago when her mother told her she needed to keep an eye on her sister, Grace, who had been grounded for stealing their mom’s credit card to buy a pair of expensive sneakers that, Grace claimed, were owned by every girl in her school except her.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” her mother had ordered Margaret after Gordie said he’d planned a motorcycle ride with friends that day and wouldn’t be around. “Make her do her chores. I want the carpet vacuumed and the laundry folded before I get home.”
Margaret groaned. She knew she would end up doing Grace’s assignments.
Grace slept in until eleven that day, then proceeded to try to persuade Margaret to let her go to her friend Jennifer’s house down the street. When Margaret said no, Grace huffed away. Doors slammed. Music was turned up loudly.
When Margaret told Grace to shut off the music and do her chores, Grace said she was hungry and wanted to walk to the mini-mart four blocks away. “There’s no food in the house,” she said, which was mostly true.
“There’s peanut butter and bread,” Margaret said.
“I hate you,” Grace said.
“I hate you too,” Margaret said back.
Grace flounced away and the music was turned up high again. All Margaret wanted was to lie on her bed and read the Rachel Carson biography that she’d checked out of the library, but her sister was making that impossible.
“Turn down that music,” Margaret yelled.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Grace shouted.
A few minutes later, Grace was back in the room they shared.
“Can I at least go in the front yard and get a tan?” she asked.
Margaret knew she should say no, but the peace and quiet that Grace’s retreat would provide was too tempting. She didn’t even look up from the page.
“Sure, but don’t go anywhere else. I’ll be watching you.”
“I won’t,” Grace promised.
Neither kept her word.
Margaret continued reading in the bedroom they shared, and when she finally went out to check on Grace, all she found was a rumpled orange beach towel spread out on their patchy lawn.
Great, the little sneak is off with her friends and I’m going to be blamed for it, is what she thought.
But when Grace didn’t return home that evening or the next morning or the day after that, Margaret didn’t need anyone to blame her. She blamed herself.
Why had she let Grace go outside? Why hadn’t she paid more attention or gone out and watched her like she threatened to do?
A neighbor who lived four doors away told police later that she remembered seeing Grace next to the open sliding door of a beat-up white Ford van.
There was a dark-haired man next to her (although she never saw his face) and the neighbor said she couldn’t be sure, but she thought the man had either shoved Grace into the van or lifted her into it, then slammed the door and sped away.
The neighbor hadn’t said anything until the police knocked on her door. She didn’t approve of all the noise and comings and goings at the house and figured it was just more of the same.
At first, police leaned toward the idea that Grace had run away and suspected one of Gordie’s pals, a guy named Nate.
He was dark-haired, in his late twenties and owned a beige van, which police said could have been mistaken for white.
It turned out he’d been two hundred miles away helping paint his mother’s house that day.
The investigation then turned toward a possible kidnapping.
As the days turned into weeks, the once-noisy house fell silent.
No more shouts, no more motorcycle engines, no more loud men.
It was so quiet, Margaret could hear the buzz of a fly against a window screen, the distant bark of a dog and her mother’s sobs from behind the bathroom door.
That’s when Margaret started her data book.
Perhaps there had been a clue to what happened to Grace.