Poison Most Vial (14 page)

There was Wade in the far corner on his computer, running computer analysis of chemicals, looking for tiny differences in line graphs; texting his friends, too, every few minutes. Victor, with his textbooks lying open around him, running off to get his licorice every hour. Lydia, intense, working most nights to purify chemicals needed to run the tests. She also seemed to write in a journal or something when she took breaks.

Could that be something?

No, not that Ruby could see. She let it go. That's what Mrs. Whitmore had said. Let it come; don't force it.

Grace. What did Grace do? Ruby realized that she didn't really know. Chemical stains, maybe; some facet of forensics that Ruby now wished that she had taken the time to understand. All that time hanging around the most famous forensics lab in the country and she'd made little effort to learn what was going on there.

Grace. Very cute, very snobby, and . . . well, there wasn't a lot more Ruby could think of about her. But she noticed that her heart picked up a beat.

What was it? Grace Fleming. Grace, who was so worried
about her looks that she went to “freshen up” in the ladies' room every twenty minutes. She thought about the drug habit that her dad mentioned. She wasn't even sure that was true.

A door behind her groaned, and Mr. Rose shuffled out of his room, interrupting her train of thought. In his slippers, still half asleep, he groped for the coffeemaker, banged around the kitchen. Banged around for what Ruby thought was a very long time.

“Mornin', Ru,” he said. After banging around some more, he poured his coffee and cleared his throat.

“Ruby,” Mr. Rose said, and for a moment he had a hint of that stricken look he wore the morning when he was named the prime suspect. “I saw the drawing. In your room.”

“Oh, that,” she said. She got up and opened the windows, just like she'd done that first day; the murmur of College Avenue drifted up from below. So alien then, so familiar now. “It's good, huh?” she said finally, and saw the tension in her father's face vanish instantly.

Mr. Rose smiled in open relief. “You got her,” he said. “About to pull off some prank, it looks like.”

“Yeah, it was strange. I wasn't even thinking of her when I started drawing. It just sort of happened. I think we've maybe had two conversations the whole year, I don't know what happened. But that's the way I remember her.”

“Well, I'm so glad you did. She was a good friend.”

Was
is right, Ruby thought. “Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“We're not going back, are we?”

“No, honey, we're not.”

And so Mr. Rose told Ruby some stories about when she and Lillian were toddlers over a long and elaborate breakfast of pancakes, sausages, fried tomatoes, and one chocolate milk shake. It all seemed so easy and natural that Ruby wondered why it had taken so long. She would love to see Lillian again—if it ever should happen. She would happily tell her all about the Gardens, only without any expectation that her old friend would understand the place. It took time to do that.

“Tell me something,” Ruby said after bringing her dad up to date on all that she, Rex, and Mrs. Whitmore had reasoned through. “The nights I spent at the lab, doing homework, waiting for you to be done. The grad students had these routines, like Grace going to the ladies' room every fifteen minutes or whatever. Was it like that every night?”

“Yep,” he said. “Creatures of habit, all of 'em.”

“Rama, too?”

“Him most of all. New pot of tea a quarter after every hour. Same kind, same pot, same cup. He drank it all every time.”

“That's a lot of tea.”

“He lived on it.”

“I never saw him come into or go through the main lab—did he ever?”

“On a normal night, maybe once or twice. He would shove open the door and yell out at us when he wanted to say something. Mostly he holed up in that office, though, with the door closed.”

Ruby pushed up from the table, went back to the window. She smiled at the DeWitt campus now, shaking her head slowly.

“I have it,” she said, still gazing out the window. “I got it. Oh, it's so stupid, it was right there the whole time. Of course.”

“What are you talking about?”

For most of the previous hours, Ruby had been tracking the lab workers in her head, alert for some out-of-the-ordinary act that had slipped under the radar. But what if the crucial act in this case was one so ordinary that people never thought about it at all—except and only when they themselves did it.

“The bushes,” she said.

“Come again?”

“That's what Rex calls it. The bathroom. Dad, he had to go. He had to. All that tea. He had to go to the bathroom.
And if he didn't come through the lab, then . . . ” She stopped. Snorted. “Oh, I don't believe it.”

“What? What are you talking about? Explain yourself, willya?”

She did. The brilliant Dr. V. S. Ramachandran may have been brilliant, but he still had to use the men's room. He didn't cut through the lab and use the ones that everyone else did. He surely didn't water the plants in the courtyard. He must have been using the very bathroom below the library that she and Rex had visited back in August. It was a short walk from his veranda, and the door had opened from the outside. A five-minute visit to the bathroom would have given Roman—or anyone else—plenty of opportunity to spike the tea.

“Ain't that something,” Mr. Rose said. “How could I not see that? I guess I bought into all the legend talk about him.”

“Legends don't pee,” Ruby said.

He smiled. “Hard to look legendary when you got your forehead to the tiles and half of it's going down your pants leg.”

“Dad, please.”

Her father sighed, shook his head, pushed his chair away from the small breakfast table. “One thing still bothers me, though. I mean, I always thought that those red vials, the poison vials, they were for research, right? I always thought there wasn't enough there to kill someone.”

“Yeah, Dad, but you didn't know that for sure; and people react differently to poisons, that's what Mrs. Whitmore says.”

“Still—I mean, it can be noisy in that lab, but we heard nothing. I'm not saying he didn't drink some poison; obviously he did. It's just—”

“What?”

“Something's way off, is what. You're telling me Rama didn't call out, didn't make a sound, didn't try to get any help? I know it's Rama and all, but those poisons would not have killed him right away. They would have made him sick. After an hour or so, he had to be feeling terrible—yet he did nothing, as far as we can tell, anyway. It's like he was acting like he had an antidote.”

Coconut pudding, was it? Maybe bananas in there, or whatever you call them—plantains—and with fish, plus some spices?

Ruby always had trouble figuring out what was being served at Rex's place.

“I'm over it, seriously,” Rex was saying between forkfuls. “Like the way I see it, this is just an injury, like a peg leg or whatnot, what they call that—a disability. No reason to be prejudiced about things like that, right, Ruby?”

“Exactly,” she said as one of the Travises or Justins climbed on her knee.

“I mean, it's not her fault, musta been some kind of accident. Nobody wants to give up a marble just like that, you know.”

“Yep, I sure do,” Ruby said. “What are you talking about?”

“The fake eye. The technology's so good, you don't notice it. Like when you got a real good wig, you swear that's the person's hair up there, not some furry dish towel like what they got at House of.”

“Rex, you still don't think—”

“Travis! Don't you climb on the table,” said Rex's mom, Mrs. Prudence, lifting the small boy from Ruby's lap and handing him to Rex's dad, a silent man everyone called Mr. Jeffrey. “I just think it's wonderful that you two are visiting that woman. She never came out of that apartment before, and now I see her down on College sometimes, at the stores, even says hello to you.”

“That's something, moving around with a bum eye,” said Mr. Rose, who had almost finished the coconut-fish-custard thing. “I've had a patch on, and it's hard to get used to.”

“Dad, that's just—”

“What do you three talk about, Ru?” he said. “She's a former forensics person; is she helping us out?”

“Yeah—stuff—not a big deal.”

“I just think she's happy to have some company, I really do,” Mrs. Prudence said. “Justin—please pass the chicken down this way.”

And so it went: more food, more dishes, more adult talk. It was forever before Ruby and Rex could excuse themselves
and escape down to College Avenue like freed prisoners. The street was gray and empty, somber-feeling even for a Sunday evening.

“So, one thing,” Ruby said, still out of breath. It was getting cold, the leaves mostly gone from the trees, brittle underfoot. “Did you see what she wrote on that folder?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Whitmore. On that folder she has with
Rama Jr
. written on it. And now we know why it says
Jr
.”

“Yeah we do. And I did see
Ask Grady about glass vials
.” Rex missed nothing, Ruby thought, ever. “What you think that is?”

“I don't know,” Ruby answered, “but she underlined it. Another thing. You remember when she said that the teacup was empty? How'd she know that?”

“It wasn't in the reports, you're right. Grady, maybe?”

“Probably. Or her old friend Ms. Diaz.” Ruby looked over her shoulder instinctively at the ninth-floor window. She dropped her voice. “Do you trust her, Rex? Mrs. Whitmore?”

Rex stepped forward and kicked a bottle cap toward the opposite curb, watching to see whether it jumped over. It didn't make it, hitting the curb and rolling under a car. His shoulders slumped.

“I do, Ruby. I don't know. She got her own things she's
working out, that's a true fact. But probably so does everyone, you know?”

“Thank you, Freud. And the bottle cap's over there by that tire; I can tell you're working through that right now,” Ruby said.

“I am. Need to put at least one of those little suckers over or I won't feel right, psychologically.”

Ruby waited while Rex found another cap and kicked it over the opposite curb. “Guess it takes a boy's brain to figure out that little ritual,” she said.

“Deep down, we very complex.”

“Well, deep down, I'm very superficial, so let's review this case. At 6:15
P.M.
, my dad sees him alive.”

“Check.”

“At, let's say, 6:22, the man goes out to that bathroom we found.”

“Bushes pit stop.”

“Roman's waiting out in the courtyard, hidden. He ducks in there, pours the poisons into the tea—the nightshade and the chokecherry and the more potent one.”

“Monkshood.”

“Right. Then he slips back into the lab area, passes the red vials to Lydia, who stashes them in my dad's locker either then or later, doesn't matter. Now Rama comes back, drinks his tea, and—that's the problem.”

“What?”

“He took no action. And as my dad said, he musta felt real, real sick. If you look up those poisons on the Internet, it says that they usually cause symptoms within the first hour, for sure.”

She stopped. They were at the foot of College Avenue, across from DeWitt's main gate; broken leaves swirled around it in the cold, haunted wind. She could see Rama in her mind now, one gulp and another and empty.

“Then what?” she asked out loud. “He goes into that bathroom sometime in there, we have to assume that.”

“I sure don't know, Ruby. But say we go down in that bathroom, see if we can find a glass vial. It's all we got. There was all kinds of trash and stuff down in there.”

“Any vials?”

“No idea. I wasn't looking, and we got no idea what they look like. You thinking of making a run now?”

Ruby looked up at the great stone dungeon of the science library again. Risky. They'd have to break in. And the truth was that she was not sure they could find the little bathroom again, at least not quickly—or without help.

“We should maybe just see if Sharon's got an idea about it; it's getting dark.”

“Or Simon,” Rex said. Ruby waited for a crack about Simon, but it didn't come. “Tomorrow, too. Before we start thinking about it too much.”