The Accidental Alchemist (24 page)

thirty-four

The next morning I
was so groggy I was sure that even a strong green tea and a fruit smoothie wouldn’t fully rouse me. I was wrong. Shuffling down the stairs, I was given a fright that raised my senses to a state of high alert.

Dorian’s body contorted at an unnatural angle, his head hanging upside down with his hands and feet stretched out. I rushed to his side.

“Are you all right? Can I help?”

“You can position my hips,” he said.

“What?”

“The lady on the video says my hips should be the highest part of my body. But since people do not have wings, do you think wings cou
nt?”

My laptop computer sat open on the coffee table, the screen displaying a video of a yoga cla
ss.

“Yoga?” I said, relaxing. The gargoyle wasn’t dying. He was contorting.

“I thought it might help keep my body moving.” He moved from downward dog to cobra pose. “
Zut.
This is quite unnatural.”

I burst out laughing.

“Yes,” Dorian said, righting himself. He stretched his shoulders as he stood up straight. “I can see you agree.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sleep deprived. Is the yoga helping?”

He shrugged. “I can still shrug, so it is not hurting. At what time does the library open? Can you get me more books before you meet with Ivan today?”

As we fixed breakfast, the phone rang.

“Zoe, it’s Heather. Brixton has run off again. He, Veronica, and Ethan didn’t show up at school today.”

“What is it?” Dorian whispered, watching my reaction to the phone call. I shook my head.

“Since they ran off last night,” Heather continued, “and were just goofing off, the police think they’re just ditching school. But … I don’t know. I don’t like what’s been going on. I have a bad feeling.”

I did too.

I thought back to that false door we’d gone through. The one that was clearly there to disguise the fact that anything was beyond it. While the kids were having their movie night, had they seen something they weren’t supposed to see?

A
fter I got off the phone with Heather, I tried Max. He didn’t answer his cell phone. I didn’t see him at Blue Sky Teas, either, which Cora was keeping open. As I headed to his house, wind whipped around me, blowing dark clouds overhead. I turned up the collar of my silver coa
t.

My repeated knocks on the door went unanswered. I was almost back to the sidewalk when I heard a noise behind me. Turning, I saw a bleary-eyed man standing in the doorway.

“
Max?
”

He wo
re a bathrobe and looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. And what was he doing asleep at nearly nine o’clock? The wind was picking up. A gust blew open his bathrobe. I found myself surprisingly disappointed that he was wearing pa
jamas.

“This better be important,” he said, cinching the belt of the robe.

“It is. Put the kettle on. I’m coming in.”

———

Twenty minutes later, Max was showered and shaved and we stood together in the warm kitchen, a storm raging outside. Heavy rain beat against the kitchen window box that contained his indoor herb garden.

“I should call this in,” he said.

“Call in
what
exactly? That we have
a bad feeling
? The kids went missing last night and they were fine.”

Max looked out the window, his jaw firmly set. “Tell me again what you know.”

“I suspected Brixton and his friends might have been exploring off-the-grid sections of the tunnels when I saw Brixton’s spelunker hat.”

“Why couldn’t they be a little older so their dares involved sneaking into each other’s bedrooms,” Max said mostly to himself.

“When I found them last night, they weren’t in a normal section of the tunnels.”

“You mean they’d gone past the tourist section, through one of the boarded-up doors.”

“That’s what I thought at first.”

“What do you mean that’s what you
thought at first
?”

“The door I went through wasn’t a boarded-up door. It was a
hidden
door. It had been made to look like it was stone, to blend into the rest of the wall.”

“How did you find it?”

I hesitated. It was Dorian who had found the door. “I heard the movie playing. I followed the sound.”

Max nodded. “Could you find it again?”

“I think so.”

“Then let’s go.”

———

After several wrong turns, we found the hidden section of tunnel.

Max swore. “I’ve searched here so many times … I never found this.”

“You’ve searched here?” I pushed open the door in the same way Dorian had done.

Max shook his head at the fake stone.

“What were you—” I continued, but Max held up his hand for me to be quiet.

We walked in silence for several minutes, falling into step beside each other. Max set the pace, alternating between walking slowly and hurrying. Whenever he saw an object like an old wooden chest or a break in the walls that might have been a door, he stopped to examine it, then quickly moved on. I understood the unspoken motivation. If the kids had been taken against their will, we needed to find them quickly. Only when we reached the dead end room where the kids had been watching the movie did Max speak.

“Damn,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

“What did you think you’d find?”

“You asked me earlier why I was searching the tunnels. Remember I told you I fell through a trap door chasing people I thought were involved in a girl’s death?”

“When you saw the monster.” I shivered at the memory.

“Don’t remind me about my vivid imagination.”

I hoped that was all it was …

“I was following a smuggling investigation that led me here,” Max continued. “That’s why I think it’s possible that the kids may have seen something they weren’t supposed to when they were down here.”

“What were people smuggling?” I asked.

“It’s an ongoing investigation, Zoe. I can’t just tell you whatever I want to.”

“No,” I said. “You just lie around your house drinking twelve-year-old scotch.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I smelled it on your breath when I got to your house. That’s something I’m sure anyone would have smelled, regardless of their herbal skills.”

He sighed. “I had a bad night last night. I’m no good at sitting on the sidelines.”

My flashlight flickered. “I could have sworn I put new batteries in
this.”

“I don’t want to get caught here in the dark. Not after what I’ve seen. Let’s get out of her
e.”

We made our way back the way we came. Max walked especially quickly. I wondered if he was thinking of monsters.

When we reached the entrance through which we’d climbed down, the sound of the rain echoed as it pounded on the metal door above. We were now in a section of the tunnels with electric light and earthquake-reinforced walls. Two empty soda cans littered the dusty floor. Max clicked off his flashlight.

The string of electric lights was dim compared to the harsh flashlight beam, but it was reassuring to be in a section of tunnel that felt like civilization.

“This is private, dry, and well-lit,” I said. “Tell me what you know about this smuggling operation. If Brixton and his friends saw someth
ing—”

“There’s been a resurgence of interest in herbal remedies in recent years,” said Max, “especially in places like Portland.”

It was one of the reasons I felt comfortable here. People wouldn’t look twice at a young woman growing strange herbs in her yard.

“But herbs aren’t illegal,” I said. “They’re not regulated by the FDA.”

He hesitated. “We think it’s tainted herbal remedies.”

“You didn’t think to mention this before?” I felt my body shake with anger.  “That’s why you were so suspicious when I detected poisons!”

“H
erbal poisons aren’t a common type of poison to use to kill someone,” Max said. “You were new to town and knew a lot about herbs and poison
s …”

If only we had been able to tell each other what we knew. “I understand why I might look suspicious, but why would someone sell herbs that were poisonous? That hardly seems like a good business model
.”

“The most educated guess we’ve pieced together is that these are tainted herbs coming in from China. The smugglers wanted to capitalize on this new herbalism craze, bu
t they didn’t know much about herbs themselves. They bought a large, cheap shipment from criminals, hoping to turn a quick profit without paying any taxes. And the tunnels were the perfect place to store the supplies. They didn’t realize the herbs were tainted with poison until Anna became ill and killed herself. After that, they pulled back. We haven’t seen anything lately.”

“You think Charles Macraith was involved in it?”

“He had a work injury last year that made it impossible to work.”

“I know,” I said. “He told me my house was his first real job in a while. He’d been hired by the agent who put the house on the market just to do a walk-through to make sure prospective buyers wouldn’t fall through any holes in the floors and sue her. He wasn’t up for more than that while he recovered. The real estate agent is the one who gave me his name.”

“Charles had to have been hurting for money because of his loss of work,” Max said. “Sure enough, when we looked into him, we found a large sum of cash at his house.”

“That’s why you think Blue blackmailed him. Because she was hiding from her past, and she only accepted cash at the teashop so she would have access to large amounts of untraceable money.”

“It fits.”

“How does it fit?”

“He was known for being the kind of guy who inspires confidences,” Max said. “You haven’t been here long enough to know it, but even though Portland is a big city, its neighborhoods like ours have small-town charac
teristics—including the gossip. The community Blue created at her teashop fostered a lot of friendships, but Charles never gossiped about anyone. That’s the kind of person people open up to, sometimes unwisely.”

I had to bite my tongue. That was exactly why I had hired Charles Macraith in the first place.

“But it still doesn’t make sense,” I insisted. “Blue knows all about herbs. She would never buy tainted herbs. Even if I could believe she’d do something like that, she knows too much to buy and sell tainted herbs.”

“I agree. I’ve known Blue for years. But that’s the way the facts point.”

“Except that she’s under arrest, meaning it’s someone else on the loose who’s taken the kids.”

“We don’t know they’ve been taken,” Max said. “They lied to their parents last night. All the facts point to the conclusion that they’re playing hooky today.”

“That’s not what your gut says.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not. The thing that’s bothering me most is that I can’t put my finger on
why
I think that.”

“I know why,” I said, the reason dawning on me. “Their parents were irate last night. There’s no way the kids would do something stupid so soon after their last escapade. Something else is going on.”

“I’m half-tempted to pull Sam out of school to get him to help us search the tunnels for the kids,” Max said, “since that’s where you found them last time. He teaches a section of his class on local history, including information about the Shanghai Tunnels. The students get really into it.”

I frowned. “Brixton said he took them on an underground tour that involved sections of the tunnels not included on the tourist tour
s.”

“That can’t be right,” Max said. “He wouldn’t have taken them anywhere off-limits.”

“He’s the ‘cool young teacher’ who loves his students. Of course he would. But what I’m wondering is what
else
he knows.”

“You’re suggesting Sam is somehow involved in this?”

“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said. “Something isn’t right, though.”

“I know. I feel the same way. I hate that I can’t trust my own gut anymore. Ever since I saw that monster.” He winced. It could have been from his injury, but my guess was that it was his chagrin for believing he’d seen a monster.

“I don’t think you saw a monster,” I said. The pieces clicked into place. Tainted herbs. My dream that had been hallucinogen-induced. The timing of the arrival of Dorian and his book. “When you saw ‘the monster’ the first time, it was on the smuggled herbs case, right?”

“What does that have to do with it? It was the fall that disoriented me—”

“I think,” I said, “you were given something tainted with a hallucinogen.”

There
wasn’t
another creature like Dorian. Max had only equated the two after he caught a glimpse of Dorian. I let out a huge sigh of relief.

“You’re
relieved
that I was drugged?” Max began to pace.

“The police never determined if there were drugs in the dead girl’s system, right?”

“It was determined to be suicide. The family had the body cremated before I was on the smuggling case, before I could see the two might be connected. So you’re right. We never learned if there was a hallucinogen in her system.”

“Did the lab test for hallucinogens in the poison you found at Blue’s—”

“God, Zoe, I’m not even on this or
any
case anymore!”

We stared at each other for a few moments. The close air of the tunnels felt stifling.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll find Brixton and his friends on my own. Have a nice life drinking good scotch alone in your house.”

Max groaned. “Wait. Fine. Tell me more about what you were thinking about Sam. I didn’t know he was such an expert on the tunnels.”

“I was thinking he could have found tunnels nobody else knew about,” I said. “But I’m grasping at straws now. Forget I said anything. There’s nothing to connect him to this. Lots of locals are interested in the tunnels.”

But Max wore a strange expression on his face, caught between concern and anger. “Not everyone has a pile of medical bills for a sick aunt who raised him. That’s why Blue took him on at the teashop, to help him supplement the money he made as a teacher.”