Chapter 31 Not What They Seem #2
Sudden tears fill Sterling’s eyes and spill down her cheeks. She bends her head, shuddering with silent sobs. Margaret may not be a fan of crying, but she accepts that other people do it. She reaches across the desk, plucks a tissue from a box and puts it in Sterling’s hand.
Margaret turns her head away to let Sterling compose herself and also to think.
Unless Veronica Ann had a longtime plan to kill her husband, which didn’t seem likely if she’d been the one to first suggest divorce and had a good lawyer, the belladonna in their yard would not have had berries during the time Dr. Deaver and Professor Sterling were having their affair, and thus it was probably not the source.
The only other possibility was the atropine in the locked cabinet.
Margaret waits until Sterling brings herself under control.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just miss him so much.”
“So do I,” Margaret says. Although maybe what she misses is the man she thought Dr. Deaver to be and not the man he actually was.
Sterling reaches for another tissue. “I must look like a wreck.”
“You look like someone who has lost a person they loved, Professor. In time, that sadness may fade but you will always bear traces of it, just as you bear the traces of mascara on your cheeks. By the way, do you happen to know if Dr. Deaver’s wife had a key to his office, to the lab? ” Margaret asks.
If Sterling is surprised by the sudden conversational shift, she doesn’t show it.
She pulls out another tissue and wipes at the small black trails that zigzag down her face.
“I don’t know if she had a key, but I doubt it.
She disliked the place. As far as I know, she only came here when she had to. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just trying to narrow the options.”
“Maybe you could ask the dean or someone in Human Resources about who had a key.”
“I think I know the right person,” Margaret says.
Sterling’s face is mostly clear now, although clumps of mascara still fleck her thick lashes. She stares at Margaret for a few seconds.
“If I had to guess, I’d say Veronica Ann is one of your two suspects.”
Margaret doesn’t want to admit her suspicion just yet. “A belief in a hypothesis has no bearing on whether it is true or not. My biology professor always said that.”
“You might be right,” Sterling says. “But I don’t think Veronica Ann would have sent him that threatening note, do you?”
Margaret sits up straighter. “What threatening note?”
“I thought that’s why you were asking all these questions.”
Margaret shakes her head.
“It was a text, actually. It came from an unknown number maybe six days before Jon died. It said something like, ‘It’s time to pay the price for your dishonesty and lies. I will not go quietly.’ ”
Blackstone? Margaret thinks.
“Did Dr. Deaver know who sent it?”
“Jon said it was this medicinal chemist in Florida who claimed he did early work on bicyclic octapeptides and that Jon had stolen his research and not given him credit. He demanded a collaboration, to get in on the Cameron Foundation grant. The guy had been bugging him nonstop and Jon refused to take his calls anymore.”
“Did the text worry him?”
“Maybe when he first got it. We were having dinner at La Bicyclette when it came in”—Margaret remembers the receipt on Dr. Deaver’s desk—“but after a few minutes, when I told him he should let the police know, he said it must have been the chemist who sent the text. He called the guy ‘pathetic’ and said he could prove he didn’t steal anything, and we finished our meals. ”
“He was sure of the source?”
“I think so. Of course I thought of the text right after Jon died, but the autopsy said differently.”
The university had published a small story in the most recent campus newsletter reporting that the medical examiner had determined Dr. Deaver’s death had been the result of a congenital heart defect combined with a head injury from a fall and included another appeal for donations to an endowment in Dr. Deaver’s honor.
It also listed the five warning signs of a heart attack.
Margaret thought the dean might have been behind the story as a way to label Margaret a crank in case her email was leaked. Ducking and covering were the man’s strong suits. She was no match at that game.
A loud knock on the door makes Sterling glance at her wrist. She is wearing one of those watches that counts your steps and heartbeats and scolds you if you sit for too long.
Margaret believes a watch should have only one job and that is to tell time, not to order you around or make you feel bad about yourself.
“Just a minute,” Sterling calls out the door. Then to Margaret: “I’m sorry but I have a student conference at three thirty.”
Margaret stands. “Oh yes, of course.” She digs into her skirt pocket. “Before I go, I was wondering if this button might be yours; I found it in the hallway near the lab, then I saw you wearing a sweater the same color the other day.”
Margaret isn’t sure why she doesn’t tell Sterling the truth about where she found the fastener.
Sterling stares up at Margaret in a way that suggests either she’s sensed Margaret’s deceit or tracking down the owners of lost buttons is a peculiar hobby left to sad people who have nothing else in their lives.
“I have a sweater that color, but it isn’t missing any buttons.”
“Well, I’ll leave you, then. Thanks for your candor. I hope you won’t mention our meeting to anyone.”
“I won’t, but may I be honest, Ms. Finch?”
“Honesty is always best.”
“There are five stages of grief, and I’m afraid after hearing your story that you may be stuck in the first phases: denial and anger.
Like you, I wanted to blame someone for Jon’s death.
I wanted someone to pay, but that isn’t the way forward.
The grief counselor helped me understand—I’m still seeing him, by the way—that sometimes life is just cruel and unfair, and the only way to go on is to accept that it is.
I’m sorry to say this, but it doesn’t seem like your facts completely support what you’re saying.
Jon’s great, wonderful heart just gave out.
If you want to blame someone, perhaps blame the demands of science, which made him push himself so hard. ”
Her voice is kind. “Maybe just let it go, Margaret.”
A sudden unsteadiness fills Margaret. Is Sterling right? Is she tilting at windmills simply because she can’t face the truth? The office walls seem to pulse in time to her heartbeat. The floor turns rubbery. She needs air.
“I won’t take any more of your time, then,” Margaret says, and rushes from the room, nearly toppling a young woman in jeans and a Roosevelt T-shirt waiting outside Sterling’s office door.
“Hey!” the girl says.
Margaret hurries outside, where she breathes in great gulps of air, not caring who notices her, although no one does.
Finally, she is calm enough to return to the lab, where she grabs her purse and thermos, locks the door and heads for her truck.
Once home, she changes her clothes and goes to work leveling the greenhouse pad.
It’s interesting how swinging a pickax into hard soil can soothe a troubled mind.