Chapter 23 When the Deluge Comes
When the Deluge Comes
The rain begins, as storms near the coast often do, with a shift in wind direction and the sudden rolling in of clouds. By the time Margaret is driving home, the rain has turned steady and cold. It matches her mood.
She powers the truck up her wet driveway—she has maneuvered through much worse—and arrives at her cottage, the headlights sweeping across her front porch and revealing the presence of a small creature staring intently at her front door.
“Well, I’ll be,” she says.
It’s the cat.
Margaret lets herself into the house through the laundry room to avoid tracking mud into the cottage and puts on her house slippers. She opens the front door.
“I guess the coyotes didn’t get you after all,” she says to the small hunter, who does not even look up at her but stares intently past her and into the cottage as if willing himself inside.
His fur is wet. Smears of mud have been added to the burrs on his legs and belly. He looks unkempt but somehow noble too.
“Are you hungry?” she asks, then answers herself. “Of course you are. Why else would you be here?”
It’s been a long day of surprises and turns of events. The return of the cat is only the latest of them.
Joe had arrived at the janitor’s closet flushed and slightly out of breath. He hadn’t located the intruder despite hurrying through every inch of the building’s first-floor hallways and outside where a person could easily escape into the maze of walking paths and buildings.
Whoever had breached the office was quick and agile, he’d surmised, which, to Margaret’s mind, would rule out the dean, and also Calvin.
The former intern, Emily, also didn’t seem like a possibility.
She was slender and softly fleshed, given to sighs and languid movements.
Emily had, in fact, come back on Friday asking if she could have something of Dr. Deaver’s.
Apparently, she wanted to set up some kind of memorial altar, which her poetry professor had suggested as a way to cope with lingering shock and grief.
Calvin had instantly handed over Dr. Deaver’s coffee mug, which Margaret didn’t approve of, but she didn’t feel like she could yank it out of the girl’s hand.
Both Blackstone and Veronica Ann Deaver were athletic, however.
In December, Dr. Deaver had complained that since his wife began training for a half-marathon, she’d grown so thin and angular it was like trying to hug a fence post, and Margaret had spotted Blackstone in the hallway wearing tight shorts and a biking jersey and walking like a duck in those weird, clicking shoes.
She didn’t know how fit Officer Bianchi was, but why would he run after letting himself into the office?
No, the intruder must have been either Blackstone or Veronica Ann. Both could have gotten their hands on a key to the office and to the locked lab cabinet. Both would have known about the research notebooks. But why either would have stolen the latest of them was unclear.
“Where should we start?”
“Let’s see. You take the 2023 and I’ll take 2022, which is when Dr. Deaver told me how he discovered the bush.”
Joe again settled himself on the overturned bucket and she took the rolling stool. The soft snap of turning pages became a brushstroke to the hum of the overhead lights. Joe knew how to be quiet. She admired that.
It took some time but there it was: the first mention of the stinging bush. Margaret read the entry.
According to what Dr. Deaver wrote, Blackstone and he were having a glass of wine with two out-of-town colleagues when Blackstone mentioned an incident at a botanical field meeting in the region of Brazil.
During a rainforest tour, he said, one of the attendees’ hands had brushed against the leaves of a native bush.
The researcher, a professor from New York, had found the stabs of the bush’s spines so painful that even the powerful opioid OxyContin didn’t relieve the discomfort.
Margaret remembered the stories that had circulated later about the incident.
The professor had apparently kept swallowing pills in hopes of ending his pain so that, when he got up to give his presentation, he rambled off into a rant about so-called citizen scientists thinking they were equal to actual researchers and that they had ruined funding opportunities for people like him.
He had to be escorted offstage but not before he raised his fist and shouted, “We will not be defeated!” several times.
It took the researcher a year for both the stinging sensation in his hand and his humiliation to fade.
Reduction of inflammatory response as in Urtica dioica? Dr. Deaver had written in his notes. Perhaps inhibitory properties? Couldn’t sleep. Find supplier and start extractions. More to come.
She told Joe what she’d found.
“Urtica dioica is the stinging nettle,” Margaret explained. “The entries after that are about how he found a supplier, a guide, to harvest a few of the leaves and began to isolate the compound we’re studying. It’s tricky business.”
“So, this Blackstone guy was both right and wrong,” Joe said.
“Mostly wrong. It was Dr. Deaver who did the work.”
“Still, Blackstone was the one who told him about the bush. How do we know Blackstone didn’t mention the stinging nettle idea to your professor?”
Margaret could see his point. In fact, it bothered her that the entry hadn’t mentioned the online article Dr. Deaver had told her about. Perhaps he had simply forgotten the order of things. She wanted to believe in Dr. Deaver’s integrity. What Joe found next made that harder to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Joe held up a business card.
“Here’s something interesting.”
Margaret inspected the small white rectangle. It carried the name of a female botany lecturer and the address of a small southern university.
“Check out the back,” Joe instructed.
Margaret did. A note in blue ink read: Room 225. Knock twice.
“He was a handsome man. I’m sure women threw themselves at him all the time,” Margaret said, and started to hand back the card.
“And what does that mean?” Joe pointed to a penciled notation on the front corner of the card.
“Hippeastrum reginae,” Margaret read, then: “Native to Peru and Brazil with showy red blooms. In Victorian times it represented a prideful woman.”
“A botanical little black book,” Joe said. “Well, I’ll be.”
“I don’t know about that,” Margaret said, but she did. It might not be obvious to a layperson, but a botanist would have no trouble interpreting what the notation meant. Red for passion, a tall and sturdy stem indicating strength and a Greek interpretation of the name pointing to success.
“There was this too.” Joe produced a creased sheet of notepaper, some kind of letter.
Margaret took it with a growing sense of trepidation.
The handwriting was rounded with loops and a small open circle over each lowercase I. J, it began, What’s going on. You won’t answer my calls or texts. When we were in Austin you told me how special I was & that you wouldn’t forget me & now you won’t even talk to me!!
Somebody needed a grammar lesson.
I can’t believe you would ghost me, the note went on. Not after our time together. I think of you all the time. You need to call me. Right now. Or text. If you don’t, I might have to call your wife. I looked her up. This is not a threat. It’s just how I feel. I love you, Jonathan. Call me.
It was signed Lillie.
Margaret remembered seeing that oddly spelled moniker on a name tag attached to the chest of the pretty young undergrad who’d been assigned to escort Dr. Deaver, a guest of honor, around the Austin Conference of Botany last year.
At the time, she’d wondered what parent thought they needed to change a perfectly good Y to an IE and add an extra L.
How much more efficient to spell the name the correct way.
She’d asked the young woman where she had gotten her name and she’d said, “It’s a flower,” as if Margaret were some dense first grader.
The girl—young woman—had certainly taken her job seriously, though.
She’d been like an adoring shadow to her charge.
She fetched sandwiches and cold drinks, kept track of Dr. Deaver’s messenger bag and led him to presentations and lectures so he arrived on time.
Margaret had seen her outside Dr. Deaver’s hotel room around nine one night but assumed the young woman had been running a last errand.
Had Dr. Deaver plucked and deflowered this vulnerable young woman, or had she fallen under Dr. Deaver’s spell as many did and assumed a relationship that wasn’t there? The note was unclear, but she had a sinking feeling.
“There’s another Deaver note on the back,” Joe said.
Margaret turned the paper over. “Convallaria majalis,” she read out loud.
“What’s that?”
“Lily of the valley, a woodland plant with a pretty scent but, because of its concentration of cardiac glycosides, also highly poisonous. Sometimes people put it in wedding bouquets, which I don’t think is the best portent for a marriage, but nobody asked me.
They might as well carry a sign: Trouble Ahead. ”
She knew she was going on, but she needed to drown out the riot of doubts that had begun gathering in her head and shouting slogans like, “What Else Did He Keep from You?” and “I Thought He Respected Women.”
“So, pretty but dangerous. Is that what Deaver was trying to say?” Joe asked.
Margaret let out a sigh. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“This could point to motive on the wife’s part,” Joe said.
“If this Lillie called her, the wife might have accepted it and forgiven him—some women do—but then, when he filed for divorce, whether it was the young woman or not, she lost it. She was about to lose her comfortable life, and you said she was a chemist so she would have known about atropine and probably had a key to his office. She could have gotten into that cabinet you talked about.” He was rolling now.
“Then she could have forged his initials in case someone got suspicious and ordered a tox screen. That way it would look like suicide.”
He snapped his fingers. “Did she drink Diet Coke?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret said.
She didn’t know anything at the moment. Facts twisted and turned. Details arrived, then disappeared.
“We could go look in the wife’s recycling for Diet Coke bottles,” Joe said.
“I guess we could.”
Joe set down the notebook. “You’re right. I’m getting way ahead of myself. I do that sometimes. We should make a real plan.”
Would she soon be digging through someone’s trash or getting in touch with this Lillie person pretending to be…what? A polltaker asking about her position on affairs with married men?
Margaret’s stomach rumbled, the release of the hormone ghrelin notifying her stomach and intestines that she’d missed her dinner. The body was full of noises: creaks and pops and grumbles. They never bothered her.
“You’re right,” Joe said as if answering her digestive tract. “I should get back to work and you can get home to eat. We can check in tomorrow. There’s lots more to investigate, including who stole that last research book and what could have been in it.”
Now here is the cat, wanting dinner just as she wants hers.
“Just a minute,” she tells the feline, closing the door against a gust of wind that sends raindrops pelting a side window.
She returns with a clean bath towel, unfolds it near the throw rug at her front door and invites the cat inside.
He steps into the room as if he is a guest arriving at his favorite hotel.
“Sit there.” She points at the towel. “I’ll get you some food, then start a fire. I don’t want mud all over my floor.”
The cat sits and Margaret goes to her cupboard. There’d been a sale on tuna fish, five for five dollars, and she opens a can, then sets it in front of the feline. Maybe she will have a tuna fish sandwich for her own dinner.
The cat sniffs at the food as if judging its quality, then digs in while Margaret sets herself to fire making.
She lays out two oak logs as a base, crosses two pieces of pine over it, stuffs a fire-starter stick and kindling beneath the pine and strikes a match.
Flames soon lick the wood in a hungry but satisfying way.
She checks the cat. He is next to the empty tuna can licking a paw.
“Here, let me do that,” she says.
It takes her twenty minutes to rub off the mud and scissor the burrs from the hunter’s fur.
He looks better but she can do little about his scars.
She peers more closely at the cat’s closed eye but can’t tell if there’s been an injury or if it’s infected.
Should she apply some topical antibiotic and see what happens?
She runs a hand over the cat, checking for burrs and tangles she missed.
When she draws her hand down the length of its back and up its tail the second time, it arches to meet her touch.
From inside the little animal comes a low rumble, like the soft snore of a contented sleeper.
The little feline gets up and goes to sit by the fire.
“You’re welcome,” she says.