The Accidental Alchemist (10 page)

twelve

Hospitals and medicine have
come a long way in the last few centuries. Plague doctors once wore beaked masks filled with straw and fragrant mint, cloves, myrrh, and rose petals thought to protect them from miasmatic bad air, and used a pointed cane to examine patients without touching them. Their frightening costumes have been immortalized in woodcuts from the seventeenth century, but in person they were even more terrifying. Imagine lying listless with fever, unable to keep down food or water, your body covered in painful boils, only to be visited not by an angelic sympathetic doctor, but by a demonic, faceless figure who poked you with a stick and told you to repent for your sins. It was an image I would never forget.

I hadn’t been one of the unfortunate souls on the other end of the plague doctor’s stick, but I had seen their work when I used to practice plant alchemy and was more actively engaged in making herbal remedies to heal people. Just as doctors couldn’t stop the plague, healers like me were helpless to save everyone. My work wasn’t enough to save the people I loved.

That was a long time ago, but hospitals still made me uncomfortable. Contagious people crammed into sickbeds with countless others had given way to the sterile hospitals of the present century. The details didn’t matter. The very fact that sickness and death were such a part of life was something I’d been running from for a long time.

After seeing Blue sprawled on the floor, I dialed 911. The fire department was the first to arrive. They discovered Blue had a pulse, and the ambulance that arrived minutes later took her to the hospital. As the gurney transported her from the house to the ambulance, I knew what had happened. Wafting up from her body was a mix of scents similar to what I’d sensed earlier. Similar, but not the same. I frowned to myself, wondering what was going on.

Blue hadn’t regained consciousness and was now in a coma. After the police arrived, Blue’s hospital room was placed under guard. They must have thought the person who tried to kill her might try again.

I shivered in the sterile atmosphere of the hospital. I knew I should have trusted my instincts. Blue
wasn’t
responsible for the murder of Charles Macraith. She was a victim herself. Why would she leave stolen items in plain sight in her house? It was as if they were meant to be found—placed there to frame her, by the same person who tried to kill her. Would Dorian’s book be among the items recovered?

The tea from the hospital’s café consisted of prebagged cardboard boxes of black and green teas, plus one herbal mint blend. I took the scalding paper cup from the café to the waiting room. The scent of modern abrasive chemicals was making me feel sick. I was hoping the mint tea would help calm my stomach.

A light rain gave
the view from the waiting room windows a hazy appearance. It wasn’t falling hard enough to see the raindrops, yet the mist gave the trees outside a surreal sheen, as if I was watching an old movie instead of experiencing it as reality.

I was caught up in my thoughts and didn’t notice when Max sat down opposite me.

“You most likely saved her life,” he said, “by finding her when you did.”

I glanced around. Aside from me and Max, the only other people in the waiting room were two elderly women in the opposite corner. “Have you gotten any sleep?”

“I look that bad, huh?” He ran his hand through his disheveled black hair as his lips ticked up into a faint smile.

He didn’t look bad at all. In fact, in his rumpled suit, a barely visible spot of tea spilled on his white dress shirt, and despite his unshaven face, I felt stirrings in me I hadn’t felt in years. His sallow skin, however, suggested that he needed a good meal and a solid chunk of sleep more than what I was thinking about.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Stable. I don’t know much myself, but I can tell you that much.”

“What’s going on, Max?”

“It’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Which involves me—”

“I wasn’t finished. It’s ongoing, and because Blue is in a coma we can’t question her yet. But we found more of your stolen possessions, hidden at her house.”

“You found my books?”

“Books?”

“Books were among the antiques that were stolen.”

Max scrolled through the screen on his phone. “Damn.”

“What is it?”

“The crew found several of the items you reported, but none of the books.”

I groaned. I’d been holding out hope that it would be simple to recover Dorian’s book.

“It’s early in the investigation,” Max said.

“What’s the guard for? You really think someone is going to try to finish the job?”

Max studied my face for a moment.

“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t have a chunk of kale caught between my teeth.

“Why would you think that?”

“You answer a lot of questions with another question, Detective Liu.”

He sighed. “You ask a lot of questions, Ms. Faust.”

“This couldn’t have been an accident, if that’s what you’re getting at. The poison I smelled wasn’t something she would have mixed by accident. Someone gave it to her.”

“The poison that
only you
somehow detected.”

“This again?” Now I was annoyed. “I told you, I’ve studied herbs enough that I’m more sensitive to this type of scent than other people.”

“I don’t think she ingested it accidentally either.”

“Oh. You agree with me. Then what are we arguing about?”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“What?” I snapped. I was tired of riddles.

“Blue is a good person.” He paused but held my gaze. “I don’t think she took the poison accidentally—because there’s a good chance she took it on purpose.”

I was speechless for a few moments. “You think she was trying to kill herself? Why?”

“I’ve seen good people be driven to murder before. It eats them up inside.”

“Wait, you mean you think
Blue
may have had something to do with the murder?” I thought back on my conversation with Blue. I remembered a kindred spirit, not a guilt-stricken woman.

Max started to say something else, but his words were drowned out by someone shouting as they ran down the hallway.

“Is this the right way? Blue!”

Max jumped up and stopped Brixton before he got close to the room with the guard.

“Hold on, kiddo.”

“Where is she?” Brixton asked. His face was streaked with tears he hadn’t bothered to wipe away.

A lanky man followed a few steps behind Brixton. He looked familiar, though it took me a moment to place the tall, sandy-haired young man. I’d seen him at the teashop, Blue’s second customer of the day who’d gotten his tea to go.

“You can’t see her right now,” Max said.

Brixton tried to push past Max, who grabbed his wrist.

“Ow!” Brixton said. Max didn’t release his grip.

“You drove him, Sam?” Max asked.

“I knew he’d ride his bike here if I didn’t. I wanted to see her, too.”

“I’ll stay here,” Brixton said. “I promise. Just let go of your death grip. Isn’t this, like, police brutality?”

“You’re fine,” Max said, but at the same time he released Brixton.

“I’m Zoe,” I said to the newcomer.

“Sam Strum. I’m one of Brixton’s teachers.”

“Who
cares
?” Brixton said, tossing his backpack to the floor and flinging himself into a chair. “Blue is lying there dying—”

“She’s not really dying, is she?” Sam asked, scratching his neck. The skin was already raw. I understood the feeling of being uncomfortable in hospitals.

“She’s stable,” Max said. His expression was unreadable.

“Thank God.” Sam rubbed his neck nervously again. “God, I hate hospitals. I spent far too much time in this place with Aunt Olivia last year.”

At t
he mention of Olivia’s name, I realized this was the nephew she said recommended the teashop to her. It had taken me a moment to make the connection, because the difference between the two was striking. While Olivia was a tiny figure, Sam stood well over six feet tall. Yet where Olivia’s personality made her seem larger than her slight body, the impact of Sam’s exceptional height was lessened by his slum
ped shoulders.

Brixton tapped his foot and glared at us. “Why can’t we see Blue?”

“She’s asleep, Brix,” Max said, omitting the facts that Blue was in a coma and there was a police guard at her door.

Brixton glared at Max. “She’d want to see me.”

“I’m sure she needs her rest,” Sam said. “Let me take you home.”

“I’m staying here.”

“You can’t stay here,” Sam began.

“Why not? My mom isn’t home. She’s at an artist retreat. And my stepdad is away on business.”

“She leaves you at home alone?” I asked.

“I was supposed to go over to Blue’s house after school today. I was going to stay with her for a few days.”

Max and Sam glanced at each other. So it was Brixton who was going to be Blue’s houseguest.

“Can you call your mom?” Sam asked. “She’d want to come home to be with you now.”

Brixton started to type a text message, but Sam elbowed him. “
Call
her,” he said.

Brixton grumbled but did as he was told. He spoke quietly into the phone. I didn’t hear what he was saying until he handed the phone to me. “She wants to talk to you,” he said.

“Me?”

Brixton rolled his eyes and handed me the phone.

“Would it be too much trouble for Brix to stay with you for a couple of days?” Heather asked.

I walked with the phone to the other end of the waiting room. To make sure my voice wouldn’t carry back to Brixton and the others, I turned to face the window. The misty rain had turned into a heavier downpour.

“Brixton is really upset,” I said softly. “I think he’d like you to come home.”

“Oh, Brix is a resilient kid. He said Blue’s okay. He’ll be fine.”

“She was poisoned.”

“But she’s not dead or anything.”

I stared at the phone. Heather was so very young. I put the phone back to my ear. “Blue has been a big part of his life since he was little, right? He’s really upset. If you could come back—”

“If it’s too much trouble for him to stay with you—”

“Wouldn’t he feel more comfortable staying with one of his friends?”

“Have you
met
Ethan’s parents? No, I don’t want him staying there. And Veronica’s parents don’t have an extra room—and now that the kids are fourteen … If you don’t want to have him stay with you, don’t worry. He knows how to take care of himself. He’ll be fine on his own. I’ll be back in three days—”

“Hold on.”

“You mean you’ll do it, Zoe?”

thirteen

I added an extra
scoop of unsweetened cocoa powder to the mixture in the blender.

“I’m not drinking that,” Brixton said.

“One sip,” I said, “is all I ask.”

“Whatever.” He skulked to the other side of the kitchen and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans, then took them out and crossed his arms. Without a cell phone, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

I’d driven Brixton back to my house from the hospital. Of course I wasn’t letting a grieving kid stay in his house by himself. I wasn’t sure how Dorian was going to react to Brixton’s staying at the house for a few days, or to the new information that his book wasn’t among the items recovered at Blue’s house. Upon seeing us come into the house, Dorian hadn’t yelled or hidden. Instead, he held up a clawed hand and simply said, “Phone.” Brixton complied, handing over the device. “I will return it to you when you leave the house,” Dorian told him. Brixton wouldn’t be getting any more videos of the gargoyle.

I hadn’t yet told Dorian that his book wasn’t one of the items recovered. I knew how important it was, so I couldn’t bring myself to break it to him. Brixton didn’t know Dorian was dying, so I had to wait until he wouldn’t hear us talking. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

I turned my attention back to the blender. The trick to creating a kid-friendly green smoothie is all in the chocolate. Fruits have natural sugars that sweeten a smoothie, but without chocolate, the flavor of vegetables can overpower the fruit.

In addition to the subtler flavors of cucumber and avocado, the sweetnes
s of a large pear, and the spicy kick of a knob of ginger, I added a few leaves of light green curly kale. Kale is a winter vegetable, making it abundant at local farmers markets. As it was, it would have been a perfect smoothie for me, but I was making this for Brixton. Sinc
e meeting him earlier that week, I had seen him eat cookies and peanut butter sandwiches he had in his backpack, but I hadn’t seen him eat a single vegetable. That was going to change. And he was going to like it.

To make sure it would be palatable for his taste, I added a scoop of peanut butter and instead of plain water I opted for coconut water, which was sweeter. After blending it well, I poured half of the creamy mixture into a mug and handed it to Brixton.

He took a sip and scowled at me. “What’s in it?”

“You saw everything I did.”

“Yeah, but this actually tastes
good
.”

I smiled. “Come on, I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

Even with my old furniture the movers had delivered, the house was sparsely furnished. Brixton would have to settle for the small mattress I’d brought inside from my Airstream trailer, which I’d placed in the upstairs bedroom with the least leaky windows.

When we reached the top of the creaking stairs, Brixton lagged behind.

“When do we get to check on Blue?” he asked.

“I’ll call and check on her. I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

In addition to a small backpack, Brixton had a guitar with him. Maybe that would help get him out of his funk. The scuffs and stickers on the case suggested the instrument was well-loved. I’d tried out several instruments over the years, but it was the piano that spoke to me most. Not the most practical thing for someone who lived on the road. But now that I had a house… If I could solve the madness surrounding me, was I fooling myself thinking I could stay a while? From the top of the stairs, I turned to look down at the living room. It was still filled with moving crates, but I could imagine a grand piano in the corner. Such an instrument might be worth the depleting task of transmuting lead into gold.

“Why don’t you bring your guitar downstairs after you get settled,” I said.

“I’m not playing for you,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Whatever.”

I left Brixton to unpack his small bag and found Dorian attending to the fireplace. “Both you and the boy are wearing heavy sweaters,” he said, “so it must be cold inside.”

“You don’t feel it?”

“I feel the difference in temperature, but I do not mind it. I checked the chimney last night. It is sound. I thought we would have a fire.”

“That’s a great idea.”

“Zoe Faust,” Dorian said, “for someone who has had time to learn to lie, your face is an open book, as they say. You are keeping something from me. Is it about the woman who was found nearly dead? Is her condition more serious than you are allowing the boy to think?”

“It’s about her, but not in the way that you think.” I hesitated. I hated being the bearer of bad news. “Some of the items stolen from the house were found at her house.”

“
Mon livre!
”

“I’m
sorry,” I said, “your book wasn’t among the items recovered.”

Dorian fired a million questions at me—or at least a dozen—none of which I knew the answer to. I was more than ready for a break from the gargoyle’s interrogation when Brixton came downstairs and found us sitting in front of a blazing fire. He brought his guitar with him but w
ore a skeptical look on his face.

“
Est ce que tu connais ‘Dame Tartine,’
Zoe?” Dorian said to me.

“Of course you’d think of that folk song. It’s all about butter.”

“Not only butter,” Dorian said. “Also anise and raisins.”

Brixton looked at us like we were crazy. But he also looked like he was itching to play the beaten-up acoustic guitar he held with a confident hand.

“If you play these chords,” Dorian told Brixton, “we will sing.”

Dorian and I sang the French-language verses about sweet pralines, fried croquets, and baked biscuits, with Dorian prompting Brixton when to play different chords.

“It’s about a woman, Dame Tartine, who lives in a house of food,” I explained. “A tartine is a French style of open-faced sandwich.”

“I’m fourteen, you know,” Brixton said. “Not eight.”

“But the song is in French,” Dorian said. “It has a very nice sound. If you learn the words, you do not have to tell your girlfriend what they mean.”

“Veronica is
not
my girlfriend,” Brixton said. He didn’t blush when he said it, but it was interesting that he immediately thought of her when Dorian used the word. I remembered the tall, awkward girl standing on my porch earlier that week who was going to be a knockout once she grew into her own skin.

“How long have the three of you been friends?” I asked.

“Me and VCM have been best friends since we were little.”

“VCM?”

“Veronica Chen-Mendoza. V or VCM for short. Anyway, Ethan moved here two years ago. Everybody wanted to be friends with him except us.”

“I must have misunderstood your English,” Dorian said. “Is he not your friend?”

“Me and V hated him at first. His parents are, like, uber-rich. He has everything. But then we learned he doesn’t care about that stuff. He’s cool.”

“Why does he dress like James Dean?” I asked.

“Yeah, kinda weird, huh? He had us over to his house and showed us this movie
Rebel Without a Cause
. That’s when we knew he was cool.” His face clouded over. “Do you think Blue tried to kill herself? That’s what people are saying.”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“She’s like a mom to me, you know? You met my mom. She acts more like Veronica’s little sister than a mom sometimes. I don’t know what I’d do if Blue doesn’t—” He broke off and stood up, walking away from us. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

Dorian stood up. I put my hand on his arm to hold him back, giving Brixton space.

“When do we eat around here?” Brixton said after a minute. “I’m starving.”

“That is the best suggestion I have heard all day,” Dorian said. “Let us cook.”

I followed them into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

“We begin with
mise en place
,” Dorian said to Brixton. “This means putting everything you wish to use in a meal in its proper place, before you begin cooking. What shall we cook for dinner?”

While they prepared dinner in the kitchen, I sat in front of the fireplace and stared into the richly colored flames. What was I going to do about the two of them? I couldn’t let either of them down.

Since the police hadn’t recovered Dorian’s book with the other items found at Blue’s house, there was renew
ed urgency in deciphering the few pages I had.

I spread out the photographed pages, stopping on the one with an unsettling image of a basilisk, the creature that symbolizes the destructive fire necessary to perform transformations. As you’d normally find in an alchemical woodcut, the creature had the head of a bird and the body of a serpent. That’s where the similarities ended. The tail of this serpent was contorted and wrapped in such an unexpected and disconcerting way that I was sure it had to mean something. But what that was, I had no idea. Perhaps the background setting had significance. The contorted basilisk was perched at the top of crumbled castle ruins, clinging to the one turret that remained.

My own books hadn’t yet proven helpful to decipher any of the pages, so I again opened my laptop, delving deeper on the Internet for anything that might be remotely relevant. Nothing like this image seemed to exist. I typed sections of the convoluted Latin into a search, again coming up empty-handed. Read literally, the text explained how one needed to walk in the direction where one cannot see. Riddles! The alchemists always had their riddles. I had never appreciated that part of alchemy. I liked my mysteries solved, which is probably why I loved the detective fiction that came of age in the nineteenth century. Yet there was something about the riddle of these pages that tickled at my brain—as if I’d been searching in the wrong places and the answers were within me.

“Ignore the color of the soup,” Dorian said, carrying a tray of three steaming bowls from the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with the … oh.” The creamed soup was certain shade of brown that should be reserved for a room of the house that wasn’t the dining room.

“He didn’t warn me,” Brixton said, following Dorian out of the kitchen carrying a Dutch oven with two pot holders. “I thought using the purple carrots would be cool.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve done it myself. It’s simple chemistry. Purple blended with the other vegetables gives you brown.”

“The risotto is a much more palatable color,” Dorian said.

As we ate, I couldn’t pull my mind from
Not Untrue Alchemy.
I was missing a crucial element of deciphering the pages, making me simultaneously far away and close to unlocking the secrets in those pages.

I knew what I had to do.

There was one thing I hadn’t yet tried. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that it was the key. I could immerse myself in alchemy, doing something I hadn’t done in nearly a century. I could set up my alchemy laboratory. I didn’t know if I was ready, but that didn’t matter. I had to be.