The Accidental Alchemist

by Gigi Pandian

  Max nodded, but his expression remained skeptical. “She’s still at the hospital under observation, with a guard checking on her regularly. They’re waiting for us.”

  I wanted to take my own car to the hospital to be alone with my thoughts, but Max said he had something to tell me before we got there. He insisted we ride together. I slid into the passenger side of a sleek black sedan. It suited him.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

  “Blue Sky isn’t her real name.”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”

  “It’s the real name on her identification,” Max said.

  “You mean she officially changed her name?”

  “Not exactly. After we started looking into her, I discovered the truth. Since you’re going to talk with her, you should know the truth going into this.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe she was a killer either.”

  “Instincts aren’t the same as facts, Zoe. You should know what you’re agreeing to when you speak with her.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Blue’s real name is Brenda Skyler. Ten years ago, she faked her own death.”

  twenty-four

  “You came,” Blue said. Her voice was weak, but she was sitting up in the hospital bed. It had been adjusted so she could talk without getting out of bed.

  I was being allowed to speak with Blue alone, on the condition that the conversation was being recorded. I wasn’t sure why she would talk to me but not the police, but I was going to find out. “Of course I came. You know we’re being recorded, right?”

  “They told me.” She held up her finger to her lips, then turned over her palm. There was something in her hand. It was the tincture dropper that had fallen into her bed after I’d given her a few drops. She handed it to me. “Thank you,” she said, “for coming to visit me. The nurse told me you were the last person to come visit me before I woke up, even though the police think I’m the one who killed—” She broke off and gave me an earnest look. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Why did you want to see me?”

  “They told me Brixton was staying with you. That was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. He was supposed to stay with me. How is he?”

  “Concerned about you.”

  “But he’s all right?”

  “He’s good.” Sure, he’d snuck out in the middle of the night and broken into a police lab … but he was well-fed and healthy.

  “Does he think—he doesn’t think I did this, does he?”

  “No, he believes in you. You’re the one thing he talks about more fondly than anything.”

  She blinked back tears. I started to get up, but she grabbed my hand. “I asked for you because life is too short to waste time doing things one doesn’t want to do. I know, now, that the truth has to come out, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be on someone else’s terms. I want to tell it to someone who understands.”

  “You barely know me.”

  “I know what you’re doing here,” she said.

  My pulse quickened. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Portland is the perfect place to reinvent oneself.”

  “I’m not—”

  She laughed, then cringed. “Owe, I’ve got the damnedest headache.”

  “Let me get a doctor. I don’t think you’re up for talking.” I didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. I needed an excuse to get out of there. I had the strongest impulse to hook up my trailer to my truck and never look back.

  “Wait, I want to get this off my chest,” Blue said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re a kindred spirit. Someone who’s here to start fresh. Was it a bad breakup? No, you don’t have to tell me. That’s the whole point of starting fresh.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “Something like that. I’ve been living out of my trailer for a long time. But when I got to Portland …”

  “It feels like home, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “I’m glad my instincts were right about you. You seem like you’re too young to understand what it’s like to feel so desperate that you need to flee your entire life, never looking back but always wondering if it’s right over your shoulder. But you’re an old soul. I hope you’ll understand.”

  I wished I could tell her how right she was. That I could tell her I understood running more than she thought.

  “You look like you want to say something,” Blue said.

  I shook my head. “You should probably start telling me what the police want to know, before they decide I’m not a good interrogator and they should do it themselves.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I already know,” I said, “about Brenda.”

  “Ah. I suppose you want to call me that now.”

  “Not if you prefer Blue.”

  I was in no position to judge. After all, Faust was the name I’d chosen for myself after realizing what I’d become.

  “I was going to tell you myself, but I guess they beat me to it.” She ran a hand through her wild gray hair. “If you can believe it, I used to have perfectly coifed hair and not a gray hair in sight. I paid obscene amounts of money to have my hair dyed, straightened, and styled.”

  “I can’t picture you without your untamed curls. They suit you.”

  “I agree. My old life didn’t suit me in any way imaginable.”

  “Lawyer?”

  “Lawyers always get a bad rap, don’t they? Don’t people think of any other profession that would be a drag?”

  “So you weren’t a lawyer?”

  “No, you were right.” She laughed. “I was a lawyer. Sort of. I went to law school straight out of college because it’s what was expected of me. It never occurred to me that I could do something different with my life. I met my husband during law school. He was the charming guy all the women in our class fell for—handsome but with a little bit of quirkiness that showed in his imperfect nose, smart enough to do well at school without having to study all the time, confident enough to be a good public speaker and to flatter women in just the right way. I should have known he was too perfect.”

  “Things like that usually are.”

  “He wasn’t as smart as we all thought. He was cheating on tests. The worst part was, after I found out, I helped him. I thought I was in love. I, however, took the code of ethics seriously. I couldn’t bring myself to take the bar exam, because I knew I was morally compromised. For him. He knew he had me. We got married right after law school. He did a clerkship for a judge, during which I helped him with a lot of the work without anyone knowing. After the clerkship, he started his own private practice. It was early in his career to do so, but he was charming enough to pull it off—with my help. I couldn’t legally practice law, but I helped him with research and cases, as a legal assistant. I played the part. I know I was fooling myself, thinking I was being ethical by not being a practicing lawyer myself. He was a master at psychologically manipulating me. It took years for me to see it. Years during which I blindly followed his lead.”

  “What happened to change your mind?”

  “He knew me. He knew I was a good lawyer who did everything ethically except for lying about the work I did for him. He knew he could only push me so far and that I’d never do anything I knew to be morally wrong. ”

  “But he would.”

  “There were some of his cases,” she said, “where he didn’t ask for my help. He didn’t even tell me he was working on them. I could see why. They were worse than I could have imagined. When I found out, I kept the knowledge to myself. But I knew what I had to do.”

  “You left him?” I asked.

  “If only it had been that simple. He kept meticulous records. One of his files was a fake record of everything illegal I had suppose
dly done—without his knowledge, of course. He’d been keeping the records as insurance, in case he ever did push me too far. A few years before I found out the extent of his crimes, I had a brief moment of clarity during which I thought about leaving him. It was induced by one too many martinis—an indulgence that used to get me through my days with him—so I stupidly told him I might leave him. That’s when he showed me the file.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Falsified records about things he claimed I had done that would send me to jail. He had the gall to pretend I’d actually done these things and that he was being a faithful husband by protecting me and not turning me in. Spousal privilege and all that.” She scoffed. “If I left him or told any ‘lies’ about him, he would no longer feel obliged to cover up my crimes.”

  “That’s awful.” What was even worse was that after everything I’d seen in my life, I could imagine him getting away with it.

  “I knew, then, that I could never leave him. Not safely. I started putting away money. We spent so lavishly that it was easy to save a hundred dollars here and there without him noticing. It added up. But I didn’t yet have a plan. I was a broken woman then. I couldn’t see any way out. I still believed his only crime was in what he was doing to me—manipulating me into doing his work for him. He’d never physically abused me, so I told myself I wasn’t being abused, even though I was. It would have been easier if he’d hit me.”

  As screwed up as that sounded, it made sense. Her husband had known how to push her just to the brink but not over the edge.

  “Once I found out he was breaking the law to help corrupt clients, that’s when I had the idea to disappear.”

  “But you knew you couldn’t leave him without repercussions.”

  “Even if I’d gone to jail myself,” she said, “that would have been okay, as long as I brought him down with me. But knowing him, I’d have ended up serving a life sentence while he came off looking like a saint for caring for a deranged wife for so long. I wasn’t left with many options. But by then, I had saved up a decent amount of money that he didn’t know about. Not a great deal of money compared to what we were used to spending, but what did I care about that? I never cared about the clothes or the spa treatments. I’d always wanted to do something like I’m doing here in Portland.”

  She paused to take a sip of water. Her hand shook as she did so.

  “Do you need a doctor?” I asked, helping her raise the glass to her parched lips and then set it back on the side table.

  “Hell, no. I’ve been asleep for days. It’s just taking me a little time to wake up. Where was I? Oh, right, taking charge of my life.” She clapped her hands together. “I’d wasted too much of my life with that bastard. I wasn’t going to let him ruin the rest. Without him knowing, I collected my own evidence—real evidence—that he was falsifying documents for crooked clients. Sent the evidence to the proper authorities, left a suicide note, then drove my car into Lake Michigan.”

  “You died that day.”

  “Brenda Skyler died that day. Blue Sky was born.”

  “Max said it was smart of you to take a name so similar to your own. That way you’d recognize it and respond when people addressed you.”

  “Max, huh.” Her eyes twinkled. “I know that look.”

  “You were explaining how you faked your death,” I said, feeling the color rise in my cheeks. “How did you pull it off? And please tell me your husband didn’t get away with his crimes.”

  “I met a lot of interesting people while we practiced law together. I was able to get a fake ID pretty easily, then got a real one once I moved to Oregon. As for my husband—” She paused and gave me a conspiratorial grin. “The bugger got disbarred and served five years in jail. The last I heard, he was selling men’s suits in Detroit. I, on the other hand, have been living exactly the life I wanted to. No more working fourteen-hour days. No more dieting. No more playing hostess to people I never liked. No more straightening and dying my hair. No more manicures.”

  She paused to pat her ample belly and show me her calloused hands with short fingernails.

  “I eat without starving myself,” she said. “I use my hands to garden and collect wildcrafted plants, and opened the teashop to make enough money to live simply while doing something I love.”

  “I suppose it’s illegal to fake your own death,” I said. “But why is that important now?”

  “That’s not why they want to arrest me,” she said.

  “I know.” I suddenly felt very awkward, knowing I was the one who found the poison attributed to Blue, which I was now certain had been planted to frame her.

  “They have this crazy idea,” she said, “that Charles was blackmailing me about my past. They think that’s why I killed him.”

  twenty-five

  “What, what?” I said. “Blackmail?”

  Blue looked taken aback. “I thought you said you already knew why they were arresting me.”

  “I do. Because of the poison and stolen items at your house.”

  “What are you talking about?” Blue said, trying to get out of bed but realizing she was still attached to an IV. “There are stolen goods and poison at my house?”

  “Don’t try to stand,” I said.

  “Did anyone get hurt?” She gave up fiddling with the IV and stared at me. “Oh, God, Brixton. You said he was okay, right?”

  “Brixton is just fine.”

  Blue rested her head against the pillow and crossed herself. “Thank God for that. Anyone else?”

  “Just you.”

  “I drank something, didn’t I? Things are still a bit fuzzy.”

  A nurse stepped into the room. “That’s enough for today.”

  “I’m fine,” Blue said. “I want to know what’s happening.”

  A detective followed the nurse into the room.

  “I agreed to tell you what you wanted to know to fill in the blanks of my past,” Blue snapped at the detective. “But you’re not telling me everything. I have a right to know the charges against me.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Faust,” the detective said. “We’ve got what we need.”

  “What do you mean?” None of this made any sense.

  “Thank you, Ms. Faust,” the detective repeated. “Your service in the interest of justice is greatly appreciated.”

  I held Blue’s gaze for a moment before walking out the door.

  I found Max in the waiting room. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Not here.”

  We walked in silence to his car.

  “Blackmail?” I said. “You think Charles Macraith was blackmailing Blue? Why would you think that?”

  Max drew a deep breath, his hands taut on the steering wheel of the car, looking straight ahead at the concrete parking garage. “I shouldn’t have anything to do with this case.”

  “I might know something,” I said before I could stop myself.

  His head snapped toward me. He was so close to me I could smell peppermint on his breath. “If you know something, you should tell Detective Dylan.”

  “He won’t believe me.”

  “Why would I believe you?”

  “Isn’t poison a strange choice for a killer these days?” I asked.

  It used to be a lot more common for people to poison each other. Before modern toxicology, it had been easy to get away with it. Many fatal poisons could easily be confused with diseases of the day. Arsenic was such a popular way to kill someone and disguise the death as being from natural causes that it acquired the nickname “inheritance powder.” But these days, poison was a strange choice, especially when it was such a diluted form.

  This didn’t make sense on so many levels. If Dorian and Brixton hadn’t stolen the vial, I was confident the lab would have come across the mercury and isolated the other toxins. The killer hadn’t stabbed Bl
ue, so the lab would have been looking for poison in her case, unlike with Charles Macraith. It wouldn’t have gone undetected. Which didn’t seem worth it, since there wasn’t enough poison to kill.

  “I can’t figure you out,” Max said. “Why can’t you answer a simple question with a simple answer?”

  “It wasn’t a simple question.”

  “So you have to answer it with another question? Why don’t you just tell me what you’re getting at.”

  “If you tell me what’s going on with the blackmail.”

  “Why do you care? Detective Dylan isn’t pursuing you as a suspect. You can get on with your life.”

  “I suppose ‘justice’ isn’t a good enough answer?” I asked. I couldn’t tell him about Dorian, the dying gargoyle, for whom I needed to solve the case in order to retrieve the book that I hoped could save him.

  “One of the reasons I’m good at being a cop is because I know human nature. Justice is a damn good reason, but only if it accompanies something more personal.”

  “Brixton cares about Blue,” I said, “and I care about Brixton.”

  “He got to you, huh?”

  “You’re telling me he hasn’t gotten to you?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I saw myself in him.” Max looked away and started the car, but didn’t make a move to back out of the parking space.

  “You mentioned that before. What did you mean by it?”

  He hesitated for a brief moment. “Only that you were never a fourteen-year-old boy.”

  “I had a brother. He was impetuous like Brixton. He—” I broke off. My hand flew to my locket. I hadn’t meant to let it slip out, but it was too easy to let my guard down around Max.

  “I’m so sorry, Zoe.”

  “Why?”

  “You used the words was and had.”

  “You picked up on that, huh?”