The Accidental Alchemist

by Gigi Pandian

  That was how I came to be waiting at the police station to talk to a detective while my new home was roped off as a crime scene.

  Three people, with expressions ranging from curt to eager-to-please, told me I was welcome to help myself to coffee. All of them registered shock or confusion when I said I didn’t drink coffee. This was apparently the wrong town for such admissions.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” a friendly voice said. It wasn’t the tone of the voice itself that was friendly, I realized, but my positive association with it. How odd for me to have had that reaction. It was the detective who had visited my house the previous night.

  “Hello again,” he continued. Unlike the night before, he was now dressed in a charcoal gray suit and tie. Both were cut narrowly, matching his frame.

  “Detective Liu.”

  “And you’re Zoe Faust. Interesting last name.”

  “It’s an old family name,” I said, answering with a partial truth. Unlike Zoe, the name Faust wasn’t one I had been born with, but it was a name I felt a connection to on many levels. Johann Faust was an alchemist who lived in the early sixteenth century and died during an alchemical experiment. The Faust most people think of when they hear the name is the character in the play by Goethe—the man who sells his soul to the Devil. The Puritan preachers of my childhood in Salem Village spoke unrelentingly of the Devil, and as a child, he was as real to me as anything in this world. Once I realized what I had become, Faust felt a fitting name to assume.

  “You okay?” Detective Liu grimaced at his own question. “Sorry, dumb question after what you saw today. Did anyone offer you coffee?”

  “I’m not a coffee person.”

  He took a moment to look at me before answering. “You and I may be the only two people in Portland who feel that way.” He stopped speaking as he glanced at a commotion taking place at the other side of the floor. “C’mon, let’s talk somewhere quieter.”

  “Small world,” I said as we walked through the large station.

  “I’m here because I’d already been over to your house—” He paused as we reached a door, which he held open for me.

  We entered what I assumed was an interrogation room. He hadn’t read me my Miranda rights, so I wasn’t going to jump to the conclusion that I was a suspect. Breathe, Zoe.

  “You’ve had quite a day.” He set a bottle of water in front of me.

  “This wasn’t what I was expecting the second day at my new home.”

  “Where’d you move here from?”

  “You saw the trailer in my driveway? I’ve been living out of it for a few years. Traveling around. I wanted to see the country.”

  “Taking some time to see the world after college?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “But I didn’t go to college.” It was true. I had never earned a formal degree. I’d studied with some brilliant scholars in the United States, Europe, and Asia, but couldn’t risk the records that would be created if I had applied for a formal degree. It was easier to stay out of sight as much as possible.

  Modern technology and the Internet were a mixed blessing. At first it seemed like it would make it impossible to keep one’s identity a secret. But with a little bit of effort, one could be even more anonymous online than in real life. That was true of my shop Elixir, now an online store where I didn’t have to stand behind a counter to greet customers.

  I had shown the police my Massachusetts drivers license that listed my age as twenty-eight years old. According to official documents, I was the child of an American mother who looked remarkably like me and also bore a strong resemblance to my French grandmother. People often commented on the uncanny resemblance, but nobody ever suspected that we were the same person.

  “So.” Max rested his elbows on the table. “How did you know Charles Macraith?”

  I looked at the ceiling. Low and confining. “The real estate agent recommended him to me. I only had money to buy a fixer-upper, but I really wanted a house. I’ve been traveling so long …” Longer than I could say. “Sorry. I’m tired. I haven’t finished unpacking yet. I didn’t sleep well in the new place. I’m usually on my second cup of tea by now.”

  “I won’t keep you long.”

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you. I have no idea who would poison him.”

  Max Liu’s body jerked back. “Who said anything about poison?”

  “The smell. It was obvious.” I thought back on the awful sight of Charles Macraith’s still form on my porch. I hadn’t detected anything that anyone familiar with herbalism wouldn’t have sensed, had I? I tried to think about that moment. The scent was fleeting. Familiar fragrances mingled with unfamiliar essences. What exactly had I detected?

  The intensity of his eyes grew as he sat back and studied me in silence. “It was obvious?” he repeated with an intonation that said it was anything but that. His strong reaction faded as quickly as it had surfaced, and he was once again calm in the seat across from me.

  “Maybe it wasn’t as strong by the time the authorities arrived,” I suggested.

  He nodded slowly, but the skepticism in his expression was apparent.

  “I’ve studied some herbalism,” I said. “I’ve always been a natural with plants. I grow herbs, dry them, and cook with them. I have a good sense of smell.” God, why wouldn’t I shut up? I wanted him to believe me. I knew my innocence would be proven, but it was more than that. I hated the way he was now looking at me.

  “You want to start over? Tell me what happened at your house this morning?”

  My mouth was dry, but before my hand touched the bottle of water, I stopped. Fingerprints. He wanted my fingerprints. I breathed deeply and swallowed.

  “I went on a walk,” I said, “and got turned around on my way home. Charles Macraith had already arrived when I came through the gate. He must have been waiting for me on the porch when someone found him and poisoned—”

  I closed my eyes and thought back on what I remembered. I hadn’t imagined the scent of poison. But I should have seen signs in addition to the smell. Many poisons would have resulted in the victim vomiting, but not all poisons had that effect. I tried to think back …

  “You didn’t find him robbing your house?” Detective Liu asked.

  My eyes popped open. Many of the items I’d taken out of storage were valuable antiques that were my livelihood.

  “I didn’t give him a key,” I said. “He was meeting me on the porch.” I groaned and put my face in my hands. “The door knob,” I said. “It broke off yesterday. What was stolen?”

  Max Liu’s expression shifted from detached to confused.

  “You didn’t go inside?”

  “Why would I have done that? A man was dead and I had no idea anyone had been inside my house.” My house with my living gargoyle. “Wait. I’ve been unpacking. It’s a mess. How do you know anything was stolen?”

  “Broken glass and an antique book with ripped pages. Didn’t look like something you would have done yourself. Uh, you don’t look very well. I’ll be right back.”

  I nodded, my head spinning. The faint voices coming from outside the room weren’t the voices of rational police officers but the voices of an angry mob. I wasn’t inside a rather pleasant modern-day police station, but in a grimy cell awaiting trial.

  When the door opened, I snapped back to the present. Detective Liu set a steaming mug of tea down in front of me.

  “Chinese privet,” I said as the steam reached my nostrils. “For calming the nerves of someone who’s stressed out. That’s the scent you had on your hands, along with lavender, last night.”

  He sighed. “You weren’t lying about smelling a poison, were you?”

  “You didn’t bring me this tea to help my nerves, did you? It was a test.”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Why would I have made up th
at I smelled poison?”

  He ran a hand through his black hair. “Could you tell what it was?”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t something I could identify. It was harsh. Toxic. I’m trying to think what would help narrow it down.”

  “We’ll run a tox screen.”

  I knew that toxicology wasn’t magic. It wasn’t as simple as testing blood for “poison.” You had to know what you were looking for and run a specific test to find it. When it was a new science about a century ago, it did seem rather like magic, working backward to detect a particular poison inside the complex human body.

  “You don’t want the tea?” he said.

  “I’m all right. It smells wonderful though.”

  He watched me for a moment before speaking. “We already have your fingerprints from your house, you know,” he said. “It had been cleaned before you moved in and it looks like only you and Brixton touched the doors and windows without gloves since then. Computer databases are a wonderful thing for expediency. I know you’re not in the system.”

  I laughed nervously. “Guess I watch too much television.” As part of being careful with my identity, I’d never held a job that required fingerprinting. I took a sip of the tea.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked. “It’s incredible.”

  “I grow it in my backyard.”

  “You made this yourself?”

  “Yeah, I learned about it from my grandmother.” It wasn’t exactly a smile on his face when he spoke, but his face softened when he spoke of her. “She and my grandfather were apothecaries in China. That’s what they were called back then.”

  I wished we’d met under other circumstances. I wanted to ask him about his garden, about this tea, and about his grandmother, but it was a ridiculous thought at that moment. A man was dead, I had possibly been robbed of all of my possessions, and my new, unbelievable friend was nowhere to be found.

  “Have I given you enough information to narrow down the poison?”

  “We don’t need more information about what you thought you smelled.”

  “What do you mean thought I smelled?”

  “We don’t need to run a tox screen to know what happened.”

  “You’re saying you already know what poisoned him? Then why ask me all these questions? To gauge my reaction?” I mentally kicked myself. He wasn’t a genuinely nice guy. He’d been playing “good cop” to get at what I knew.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Detective Liu said. “Charles Macraith didn’t die of poisoning.”

  My hand clamped over my mouth. “He’s not dead?” How could I have been wrong? No, there was no way I had been mistaken. I’d seen more dead bodies in my lifetime than I liked to think about.

  “You misunderstand me,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do by misleading us with talk of poisons, but we’ll find out. Charles Macraith wasn’t poisoned. He was stabbed. That’s what killed him.”

  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 happened.

  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 up. 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 ver
y 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.