The Elusive Elixir

by Gigi Pandian

  I grabbed my phone and looked up a photo of a chemistry lab. I handed the phone to Brixton. As he hesitated, I relaxed. “You’ve only seen my alchemy lab a couple of times. Come with me.”

  I unlocked the door to the basement and lit the candles that illuminated the room.

  “I still think it looked more like this than the photo you showed me,” Brixton said.

  “Have you been inside a chem lab?”

  “I saw that meth lab before it got shut down.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “I’m not making this up. I’m not.”

  Was he trying to convince me or himself? “I didn’t say you were. It must have been really upsetting to see a dead body.”

  “I’m not a kid, Zoe. I’m not imagining things.” His voice broke and he swallowed hard. “I know what I saw.”

  That’s what worried me. If Brixton had seen a murderer, that meant the murderer might have seen him too.

  Nineteen

  I made sure Brixton had told the police everything he’d seen and extracted a promise that he wouldn’t investigate further. I wasn’t sure how much good that promise would do, so I insisted on tossing his bike in the back of my pickup truck and driving him home.

  From my seat I watched Abel open the door and give Brixton a bear hug in the doorway. Abel mouthed “thank you” to me and waved. I drove home in silence, save for the sound of the engine I’d tended for more than half a century.

  I turned off the engine once I reached the driveway in front of my Craftsman house. I sat there for a few minutes, unsure of what to think, feel, or do. This couldn’t be Madame Leblanc’s revenge on me, could it? It wasn’t impossible that she could have tracked me to Portland. But this was far too subtle a way for her to frame me through alchemy. This murder wasn’t meant to be discovered so quickly. The discovery in the remote area had occurred because Brixton had been following the killer.

  Gripping my keys, I walked over to the Airstream trailer that had sat in the other half of the driveway since I’d moved in. I unlocked the creaking door that needed oil, then lay down on the built-in couch.

  Though I’d cleaned out most of the contents of the trailer when I moved into the house, subtle scents from years of love and life lingered. The musty postcards I’d sold at flea markets across the country for decades. The fresh, uplifting mint from the tendrils of lemon balm and peppermint plants that had lived in my traveling window box garden. And the salty scent of the sea—a combination of the flavored salts I used to flavor simple meals and the trailer’s long stretches driving across snow-covered country roads and through sandy beach towns.

  I wasn’t maudlin enough to truly believe that death followed me wherever I went, but I was at a loss to explain the deaths surrounding me. Jasper’s death in my Paris shop couldn’t be connected to a dead body found in a shack in the woods in Portland—yet they were both connected to alchemy.

  I closed my eyes and let the fragrance of salty, musty mint carry me back to a time when life had been simpler. Only that was a false memory. My life had never been simple. From the time I’d been driven from Massachusetts for having an “unnatural” aptitude with plants, to ignoring Nicolas Flamel’s warnings about how to study alchemy, to finding love with a man who’d killed himself after his son failed to find the Elixir of Life along with him. Those hadn’t been simple times.

  The years I’d spent traveling across the United States in my truck and trailer were simple on the surface, but if I was honest with myself, I knew I’d been running away. There was always a cloud lingering over my head, even when I would park my trailer in a nice town and settle down for a year or two at a time.

  The quirky friendliness of Portland’s residents and the greenery the city insisted on maintaining was an inviting combination that made me think I might finally have a simple life, at least for a little while. Though that illusion had been shattered the day I moved in, I still held onto hope. If I could figure out the last piece of the puzzle to save Dorian, put these unsolved deaths behind me, and spend time with Max—

  My eyes popped open.

  I was having dinner with Max that evening. The thought filled me with a mix of emotions, ranging from desire to comfort to apprehension. Part of me wanted to cancel, because how could I possibly think of enjoying myself with everything that was going on? But life has always been complicated. I’d seen too many people regret spending their time worrying instead of living. With one last look around my empty trailer, I went inside the house and picked out a dress to wear that night.

  I walked to the restaurant on Hawthorne with the sun high in the sky above me. It was the start of summer, but it was also an early dinner. Max knew I wasn’t a night owl. Even though he didn’t know how closely my body’s reactions were tied to the cycle of the sun and the planets, he understood that I felt most comfortable in the earliest hours of the evening.

  Max had suggested this restaurant because it served organic vegan food, and as I looked through the front windows, I realized the restaurant was even closer to my own way of eating than I’d imagined. Patrons were being served on wooden plates.

  Even as the world moves towards progress, a pendulum is also in play, swinging between different ideas that societies embrace at different times. When I was growing up in Salem Village—not to be confused with wealthier Salem Town—in the late 1600s, we grew our own food and ate off of shared wooden plates called trenchers.

  Today’s young people had embraced much of what I remembered from my childhood, going back to the land and appreciating slow food, the idea that food should be locally sourced and respected for its traditions and transformative processes rather than thoughtless calories that immediately appear out of thin air at a takeout counter. As a bearded man in the window took a sip of dark beer from a mason jar, I smiled at another parallel. In my day, beer was often drunk for breakfast with porridge. I’m sure today’s hipsters would have approved.

  A heavily tattooed couple stepped past me. The one with an intricate black dragon wound around his elbow and a fedora on his head held the restaurant door open for me.

  Max was already in the lobby. He was dressed in a slim-fitting charcoal suit and skinny silver tie that made me want to reach out and touch it. I resisted the temptation, but Max didn’t. He greeted me with a brief kiss that tasted of lemon and rose hips. I pulled back but left our noses touching for a moment. That made him smile.

  “I’m glad you’re home from visiting your grandmother’s friend,” he whispered.

  If you want a lie to be believable, stick as close to the truth as possible. When I left for Paris, I told Max and most of my Portland friends a believable lie: that my grandmother’s dear friend was quite elderly and wanted to see me before she died.

  “I’m glad to be home too. Thanks for making sure Brixton was taken care of today. He came to see me after he was done talking to the police.”

  “Poor kid. He seemed really shaken.”

  “Does he need protection?”

  Max pursed his lips. “Why would he need protection? People used to deal drugs out of that place, but not since it’s been boarded up.”

  The hostess interrupted Max’s strange answer and led us to a corner table.

  “Are we talking about the same thing?” I asked once we were seated. “He told me he found a dead body and saw the killer. I know he says he hung back far enough and the guy didn’t see him, but what if he was wrong? I’m still worried he’ll be in danger.”

  “Brix either let his imagination get the better of him or he was trying to get a rise out of you. I can see him doing that.” Max’s deep brown eyes softened. I wished I hadn’t brought up the murder.

  “He wasn’t acting, Max.”

  “The body is at least a decade old, Zoe.”

  “But Brixton said—”

  “I don’t know what Brixton was playing at when he tal
ked to you, but the victim has been dead for quite some time. For whatever reason, Brixton lied to you.”

  Twenty

  “Maybe it wasn’t a deliberate lie,” Max continued. “Brixton loves dark things, like how he’s into Portland’s murderous history.”

  “Not so much anymore,” I murmured, thinking of where that interest had led us earlier that year.

  “His imagination probably got the best of him. But I’d have thought he’d find it exciting to find a mummified dead body.”

  “Mummified?”

  “That’s not exactly the right word, but I’d rather not talk about decomposition over dinner. Brix really didn’t tell you that? Maybe he was trying to tell a macabre joke that backfired and he didn’t know how to talk his way out of it.”

  I shook my head. Something wasn’t right here.

  “I’m surprised you kept our date if you thought Brixton was in danger,” Max said. “I’m glad you came, and that I could put your mind at ease.”

  My mind was far from at ease, though. Brixton could be immature, but this wasn’t right. “Brixton told me there were alchemical items like the things I sell.” I took a moment to take a sip of the water placed on the table, deciding how much I should say to Max. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that was Brixton’s imagination, too, since he knows I collect healing and alchemical artifacts for Elixir?”

  Max swore softly and shook his head. “I’d have thought the guys would tell him not to talk about the case. Don’t you want to talk about something else? How was your trip? How was the visit with your grandmother’s old friend? Did the boxes she found in her attic belong to your grandmother like you thought?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I don’t want to change the subject yet.”

  Max rested his elbows on the table. “What can I tell you so we can properly begin this meal? At first the guys thought it was a drug lab, but it turns out Brixton got the part about alchemy right.”

  “He did?” Brixton was right about alchemists being in Portland, but not about the state of the dead body?

  “It wasn’t exactly like the stuff in your shop, though,” Max said. “Someone was using it as a lab to practice alchemy. Can you believe in the twenty-first century there are still people who believe in that nonsense?”

  My shoulders tensed, and I instinctively reached for the gold locket hanging around my neck. A waitress came to take our orders, so I was saved from saying something I’d regret. If cayenne-spiced bean burgers with a seasonal early summer salad and white wine didn’t make me feel better, I didn’t know what would.

  “I’m glad you ordered some wine,” Max said, his eyes lingering on my locket. “You still look tense. Don’t worry about Brixton. He’ll be all right.”

  “Your grandmother wouldn’t have called alchemy nonsense, Max.”

  “Being an apothecary is different.” He crossed his arms defensively. “That’s about healing people. It’s like the herbal remedies we both use, but with a different name.”

  “That’s not how you talked about it before.” Sometimes it seemed like Max was so close to being open to the ideas I wanted to share with him, but other times he was closed off, as if two sides of himself were fighting with each other.

  “I can get fanciful when I think about my childhood. False memories from photographs.” He gave me a shy smile and relaxed his arms. “I hope you like the guy in front of you more than eight-year-old Maximilian.”

  “Not Maxwell?”

  “Nope. Now you know everything about me.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “I doubt that.”

  The waitress dropped off our glasses of wine, and we raised them in a toast. “To eight-year-old Maximilian,” I said, “who saw the world as full of wonder, and who believed anything was possible. May we find him once again.”

  Instead of laughing, Max frowned. What had gone wrong with my date?

  On my walk home—alone—I replayed Max’s words again and again. Someone had been practicing alchemy in the woods. That was the relevant fact. But what I couldn’t stop thinking about was that Max thought my beliefs were idiotic. Of course, he didn’t know they were my beliefs. Not exactly. How could I tell him, especially now? But I had more urgent things to worry about.

  I still couldn’t quite believe that Brixton had been right. I had to see that shed in the woods.

  I climbed the stairs to my attic. The door was locked from the inside.

  “Dorian?”

  “Un moment!”

  The door swung open a minute later. A gargoyle with one of his arms hanging limp at his side looked up at me. “I thought you were out on a date.”

  “I was. It ended. Why did you have the door locked?”

  He flapped his wings defensively. “You are the one who says I must be careful.”

  “Tonight isn’t a night to be careful,” I said. “It’s a night for action. I need you to show me the cabin in the woods.”

  While we waited for it to be late enough for Dorian to safely venture outside, I made myself a chocolate elixir in the blender, which I needed for energy to stay awake so late into the night.

  Two hours later, I doubted the caffeine had been necessary. Adrenaline was more than enough to keep my eyes wide open as Dorian and I snuck across the grass in the no-man’s land between two neighborhoods.

  From the outside, the cabin in the overgrown section of woods looked abandoned. Though a public path cut across this narrow swath of forest, a sign nailed to the cabin’s door marked it as private property. Holes and broken pieces of wood indicated the front door had once been nailed shut, but jagged pieces of wood now hung loosely around the door frame. The door itself, musty and half decayed from years of neglect, pushed open easily.

  Stepping through the crime scene tape across the rickety threshold, it became obvious that the disrepair was only an outward disguise. Though the police had taken most of the objects from inside the cabin—presumably why they hadn’t left an officer to guard the shack—enough remained to assure me that Max and Brixton were right. This was the workspace of practicing alchemists.

  It was the scent that hit me hardest. Honey, charred salt, and ash. It smelled like Dorian’s Tea of Ashes.

  This wasn’t simply an alchemical lab. This was backward alchemy.

  A branch snapped in the distance.

  Dorian’s horns twitched. He’d heard it too.

  I turned off the flashlight and felt my way to the window on the far side of the cabin. I tensed as a weak floorboard moaned under my foot, but I needed to get to that window. That was the direction from which the sound had come. Dorian shushed me, but I had no choice. I had to see what was out there. Like the door, the window had been boarded shut long ago. Unlike the door, the window hadn’t recently been opened. My only view was through the uneven spaces between rotted boards.

  Only a small sliver of moon hung in the sky, leaving our surroundings nearly pitch black. But it wasn’t too dark for me to make out the shadow of a figure, perhaps fifty feet from the cabin. A man.

  “We need to leave,” I whispered. “Now.”

  “What do you see?”

  “There’s someone out there.”

  “Let me see. You know I see better in the dark.”

  “Cover yourself in your cape.”

  Dorian didn’t fight me. I heard the sound of cloth flapping as he flipped the cloak around his wings. He took my hand and remained mute. Thank heaven for small favors.

  My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness, but Dorian could guide us. He led the way out the front door.

  “Un moment,” he whispered.

  “Don’t—”

  But it was too late. He’d already let go of my hand.

  It couldn’t have been more than a minute that I stood alone in the crisp darkness of the cabin porch in the sinister woods, willing my eyes to ad
just and for Dorian to return. But it felt like an hour. Every sound made by nocturnal creatures and plants blowing under the pressure of the gentle wind set my senses on edge.

  I jumped as a familiar hand took mine. My eyes had adjusted to the dim moonlight enough for me to make out Dorian’s cape-shrouded form.

  “A man,” he whispered. “With my leg, I cannot risk getting a closer look. But you are right. A man is out there. Watching.”

  Dorian tugged at my hand, pulling me away from the cabin. “If we go this way, the cabin should block us from his view. As long as he cannot see in the darkness as I can, this path should be safe.”

  I followed Dorian’s lead, creeping between the thick groupings of trees on our way out of the woods, hoping the man out there didn’t have night vision goggles. At the edge of the greenbelt, we waited in silence for a few more minutes before walking to where my old truck was parked. We didn’t need to speak. Both of us understood we had to be sure we hadn’t been followed.

  “This is bad, Dorian.” I turned the ignition, cringing at the sharp sound of the engine revving. No sense in keeping quiet now. I opted for speed instead. The tires screeched as I peeled onto the street and pointed us homeward.

  “It will be worse if you are given a speeding ticket.”

  I gripped the gear shift.

  “I wish to hear ‘Accidental Life,’ ” Dorian said.

  The cassette was already in the player, so I hit the play button. Tobias Freeman’s booming voice filled the car. He’d written the song for his 100th birthday, in the 1950s. After I’d nursed him back to health when I met him in my work on the Underground Railroad, Tobias had discovered the Elixir of Life. His loved ones had not. One by one, he had watched them age and die. It was a lot to grapple with, as I knew well. He’d recorded the track under the moniker The Philosopher. The soulful song by my friend immediately made me feel calmer.

  “Bon,” Dorian said with a grin.

  “You asked me to play the song so I’d feel better, didn’t you?”