I took her up on the offer, following her over to the garden house. We went through a little wooden door into what must at one time have been a storeroom but was now a comfy sitting area. Bookshelves lined the entirety of the back walls—mostly medical and botany books with a few Latin books here and there as well. I took a seat in a plush green chair as she put a kettle on over in the kitchenette.
“It’s nice back here. Cozy.”
“This is where I spend most of my time,” she said. “You’re welcome to join me whenever you like.”
My gaze shifted to a thick metal door at the back of the room. “What’s through there?”
“Nothing. Just some sleeping quarters for when we have visiting scholars. Also, there are times when it just makes sense to crash out down here.”
A moment later, she brought over two mugs of steeping tea, followed by a smattering of cookies artistically arranged on a yellow plate. I took one as she settled into the couch.
“Did Professor Casimir spend much time here in the garden?”
“Isabelle?” she laughed. “No. She wasn’t a plant person by any means.”
“Were you two friends?” I adjusted my position and sank farther down into the soft fabric of the chair.
She gazed over her mug, her eyes growing distant. “I thought we were,” she finally said.
“What was she like?” I asked. “I find everything about her to be somewhat contradictory. It’s like I can never get a complete picture of her. Like, do you know what she was doing on an archaeological dig?”
Aspen sighed and looked down at her hands. “Can I give you some free advice?”
“Sure,” I said cautiously.
“I would stop worrying about that relic or artifact or whatever it is.”
“Why?”
Aspen shook her head. “It’s a waste of your time.”
“It definitely isn’t. I’m convinced that it’s the key to everything I’ve been working on.”
“Look, Robin, this blog post you’re talking about—this is the first I’m hearing of it. And if she really went on some kind of expedition to Egypt—”
“Essex,” I corrected.
“Wherever. If she went to Essex, she did it somehow without any of us knowing.”
“I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Robin, as far as I know, before her big departure, Isabelle hadn’t left the college in more than five years.”
I sat staring at her in silence, completely dumbfounded. Five years? She really hadn’t left the campus for five years? That made no sense to me, but I also didn’t know how much I could trust Aspen or why she would necessarily have been privy to everything that Casimir did. Clearly she wanted to throw me off track, but I hadn’t the slightest idea why. I decided to change the subject, hoping that it might ease some of the tension that had been building in the room. Getting up, I wandered over to the bookshelves. She came to stand beside me, looking over them with a mother’s approval.
“Do you have a favorite book?” I asked.
“It’s quaint of me, I know, but I still love Culpeper.” Standing on her tiptoes, she reached and grabbed a recent print of the seminal seventeenth-century herbal text and handed it to me. “It’s what first got me interested in botany.”
“I can understand that,” I said, turning it over in my hands. “What about fiction?”
“I don’t read novels.” She grimaced.
“Seriously? Why not?”
“I don’t like things that aren’t real. They make me nervous.”
“To each her own, I guess.”
