The Accidental Alchemist (5 page)

five

I was free to
leave the police station. After I was dismissed by Detective Liu, a uniformed officer drove me home to look around the house to see what had been stolen.

On the short drive, I thought more about what the detective had said. Charles Macraith
hadn’t been poisoned
. How was that possible? I was sure I’d smelled poison and that it was coming from his body. I was rusty, though. I hadn’t honed in on the poison as precisely as I should have.

But I wasn’t wrong.

Not only was I letting down a dead man who deserved justice, but the most interesting man I’d met in ages thought I was both crazy and a suspect who was lying about something. Zoe Faust, crazy murder suspect.
Ugh.

“You okay?” the officer asked, glancing at me as he merged onto the Hawthorne Bridge.

Whoops, I must have said “ugh” out loud.

“I’m fine. Just rattled.”

He nodded and turned his attention back to the road.

Portland was a city of bridges. My new house was on the east side of the Willamette River. Downtown Portland, where my district’s police station was located, was west of the river. The Hawthorne Bridge was one of many bridges that connected the city. As we drove across the river, I looked over the water and the bridges to the north. Cars, bikes, and people made their way across the city as if nothing had hap
pened.

When we stepped out of the police car in my driveway, the wind whipping around us was so strong that it rattled the front windows, making me jumpy as we walked up to the house.

“You’re
living here
?” the officer asked.

I followed his gaze to the tarp that covered half the roof.

“It’s a fixer-upper.”

“I’ll say.”

I wasn’t permitted to retrieve anything inside the house, but in order to determine whether theft was a motive, I was able to walk through it to inventory what was missing.

I had unpacked only a few of the items in the crates. Most were valuable books and items related to alchemy that I sold online. After I’d closed the bricks-and-mortar location of my shop in Paris nearly a century ago, I catalogued the antiques that I left in a storage unit in Paris. Once the Internet created an online marketplace, I hired an assistant living in Paris who could ship items to buyers when an online purchase was made. My website’s inventory was small because it consisted of collectors’ items rather than a high volume of low-price trinkets.

Now that I had a house, I was planning on converting the attic into a business office and storing items myself, which was why I’d brought the contents of my storage unit here to Portland. High on Charles’s to-do list for my new house was making sure it was secure. Keeping everything on site was supposed to make my life
simple
. Now it looked like I’d achieved the opposite effect, my carefully preserved items ransacked and drawing the attention of the authorities.

Many years ago, I used to make a living selling dried herbs and herbal remedies, before I gave up practicing alchemy. Herbalism wasn’t the same thing as alchemy, but the processes overlapped enough that creating herbal remedies reminded me too much of my old life. My life with Ambrose.

In the modern age of regulations, it was also simpler to sell secondhand items. It was easy to accumulate desirable objects, which I began to do when I realized that many of the utilitarian items I’d once used were considered “antiques.” I didn’t think of it as a career. I didn’t have to sell much. Compound interest is a wonderful thing. Even though I was awful at turning lead into gold, I knew how to open a bank account. A small amount of money over a hundred years adds u
p. Still, I hadn’t ever cared much about money, spending more of it on others in need than on myself. While I’d been living in Albuquerque the previous year, I gave an anonymous donation to a family who had befriended me when I was new to town, after they were badly injured in a car accident. Most of my remaining savings had gone into buying the house and moving. The little bit I had left over was meant to pay for fixing up the house. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to try to get better at turning lead into gold. I sighed and turned my attention back to the task of inventorying the items at the house.

The thief hadn’t spent much time rooting through the crates, but most of the items I had already removed were gone. Five original alchemical manuscripts, two alembics used in the Court of Rudolph II, and a portrait of Isaac Newton, an alchemist better known for his more mainstream scientific discoveries. A few items remained, but it looked like that was because they had broken. Shattered glass covered the floor, along with the brittle, torn pages of a fifteenth-century book on alchemy.

Two items that weren’t mine were also missing. Dorian was gone. And so was his book.

Had Dorian gone in search of his missing book? Or had he been taken himself? The shiver I felt creep up my spine wasn’t from the drafty front door.

I gave the officer a list of the missing items—except for the last two. I couldn’t very well tell the police about a half-living half-stone gargoyle, and I didn’t know the provenance of Dorian’s book. For all I knew it could have been stolen, either by Dorian or at some point in the past. I had taken a few photos of it with my phone, but I was hesitant to give the police the full details about the book. I first had to find out what had happened to Dorian.
Where was he?

I assured the officer I could stay in my trailer until they were done with the crime scene. He left me in the overgrown front yard, the wind swirling around me.

I’d been living out of my trailer for long enough that I’d made it a home. A tiny home, but one that was free of the prying eyes of the outside world. I unlocked the door of my sanctuary, the 150-square-foot Airstream trailer. I’d spent years slowly customizing it. In spite of the madness going on around me, stepping into the trailer lifted my spirits.

Along the back window, I kept a small herb garden. The potted plants lived in trays that I could move between the inside of the trailer and the outside world—I even had a sill on the side of the trailer to set the planter box. The only danger was remembering to bring it inside if I was going to move the trailer. I had only made that mistake twice. Well, maybe three times.

My current winter mix consisted of cottage rosemary, lemon thyme, sage, shiso, chervil, Mediterranean oregano, and aloe, all growing out of clay pots in the long wooden planter. Rounding out the mix were two larger containers of mint varieties that needed more space. Spearmint and lemon balm flanked the rack of fresh herb pots, their tendrils wrapped around the wooden planter box. The mint would have easily overtaken the other plants if I hadn’t used some leaves daily. A sweet, minty scent filled the trailer.

The plants were arm’s length from a tiny kitchenette. I kept my cooking simple, so building out the kitchen wasn’t necessary. It was the plant ingredients themselves I cared about, which is what I made space for. In a nook next to the kitchen was an area I kept dark with an added curtain. That’s where I hung dried herbs next to a custom-carved wooden shelf full of herb-infused oils, tinctures, and salts.

Underneath a narrow couch that converted into a bed, drawers slid out to reveal the less expensive alchemical items I sold at flea markets in my travels across the U.S., including a full drawer of vintage European and Americana postcards—a reliable bestseller. Finishing out the trailer interior was a modern, though minute, bathroom. I had grown up without indoor plumbing, so in spite of its size and lack of water pressure, it felt luxurious.

Conspicuously absent was space for alchemical transformations. That was the point. I hadn’t wanted any reminder of practicing alchemy. Getting involved in it had been an accident to begin with. And discovering the Elixir of Life? The biggest accident of all. I hadn’t done it for myself. I had been trying to help my brother and I hadn’t understood what I’d done. But it didn’t matter. It was too late.

“Zoe?” a young voice called out, pulling me back to the present. “You in there?”

I opened the door of the trailer. Brixton stood in the tall grass, a backpack on his back. Of course. I had told him to come over after school to weed the garden, which now seemed completely unimportant. Not twenty feet behind him stood the crime scene tape.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” I said, jumping down from the trailer’s front door.

“The murder,” he said with a shrug. “Yeah, I heard. Everyone heard.”

“I’m not going to press charges for you letting
yourself into my house,” I said. “You don’t have to do any weeding. But what you
think
you saw—”

“The gargoyle,” he said matter-of-factly. “Where is he?”

I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. “Why aren’t your friends here?” I asked instead. “Surely they’d want to see a walking, talking gargoyle.”

He glared at me.

“They didn’t believe you, huh?” I said. So Dorian had been right about that.

“I looked up alchemy. Is that how you brought a piece of stone to life?”

What had I gotten myself into? “Brixton, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here.”

“We could go inside. So nobody overhears us. That’s what you’re worried about, right?”

“No. Well, yes. But mainly it’s that you shouldn’t be at a crime scene. I’m sure your mom wouldn’t want you here.”

“She knows I’m coming over. Can we go inside or what?”

“You may have noticed the crime scene tape. I can’t even go inside myself.”

“I meant your trailer. You live here, right? I used to live in one with my mom. Ours wasn’t nearly this nice. It’s starting to rain. You going to let me in?”

“A little rain never hurt anyone.”

“I want to see the gargoyle.”

“He’s not inside.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s not my pet. I don’t have him on a leash—”

“You mean he’s gone?”

Two women walking past slowed down as they passed the front gate. With the large yard, they were far enough away they couldn’t hear what we were saying, but Brixton was right. This was a conversation that would be better without prying eyes.

“Come on in,” I said.

“Wicked,” he said as he stepped inside, apparently forgetting about Dorian. “Can I see the philosopher’s stone? Is it over here in the corner?” he pulled back the curtain keeping my dried herbs and infused oils in the dark.

“You did some research.”

“Can I see it?”

“What do you think it does?”

“Makes gold. And makes you immortal.”

“You think I’m immortal?”

He gave me a look that only a teenager can. The equivalent of rolling the eyes but without moving a muscle.

I could have told him that although I’d lived for centuries, I could die almost as easily as anyone else. I had mostly stopped aging, so I wasn’t likely to die of an old-age-related condition, but I could be killed by anything else that would kill a person, such as disease or violence. Therefore I wasn’t exactly immortal. I hadn’t even entirely stopped aging. The white hair that everyone thought was so stylishly dyed was my true hair color.

Instead of explaining all that to Brixton, I gave him the simple version: “I’m not immortal.”

“If you don’t have the philosopher’s stone, what about Alkahest?” He looked around the trailer.

“The universal solvent? Why do you ask about that?” Asking about the famous philosopher’s stone, I understood. But Alkahest? It wasn’t an element popularized in books or movies.

“It’s the part of alchemy I looked up online that didn’t make any sense at all. If it dissolves
everything
, then how would you keep it? I mean, wouldn’t it, like burn through anything you tried to keep it in? Wouldn’t it even burn through the earth, destroying the world?”

“Good point. Maybe that’s why I’ve never encountered it.” The theories asserted about how to make Alkahest were dubious. I’d seen recipes that called for ingredients including blood, sweat, and worms. “Not everything you read online is true, you know.”

Again with the eye roll.

“I’m good with plants like these herbs,” I said, pointing at my beloved herb garden. “I can transform them into a lot of things, like the salve I used on your arm. That’s what makes me an alchemist. I don’t make gold. And I don’t bring stone gargoyles to life.”

“So,” Brixton said, making himself comfortable on the long seat in the living area. “You think the gargoyle did it?”

“Feet,” I said automatically, knocking his sneakers off the cushions. “Did what?”

“Killed Charles. Because he didn’t want to be discovered.”

I stared at Brixton. The kid was right. Dorian took not being discovered seriously.
Very
seriously. My pulse quickened as Brixton’s words sunk in. I felt my heartbeat so strongly in my ears that I could barely hear what Brixton was saying. It was like that damn story by Poe. Though I wasn’t guilty of murder myself, it might have been
done because of me.

Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I knew why. Because I liked the little creature. A misfit, like me. And he’d helped me in Paris years ago … hadn’t he? How would he have known about that if he hadn’t been there? And he couldn’t go around killing anyone who saw him. He was the one who’d pointed out that nobody would believe Brixton. The gargoyle wouldn’t have turned violent … would he?

“Earth to Zoe,” Brixton said.

“It doesn’t fit,” I said, shaking my head.

Brixton shrugged. “At least you didn’t say
oh he’s such a nice guy, he would never have done it
. I hate it when they say that on TV.”

“This isn’t TV.”

“Are you always this much of a downer?”

“A man was killed.”

“Yeah, I liked him.”

“You knew Charles Macraith?”

“He came around the teashop. He didn’t talk much, but he used to help me with my homework sometimes.”

“Teashop?” I wondered if it could be the same place I’d visited when I’d fallen in love with this neighborhood. The welcoming café was one of the main reasons I’d felt so at home here.