The Accidental Alchemist

by Gigi Pandian

“Good cop skills, remember.” He tried to smile but failed.

  “It was years ago.”

  “I’m even sorrier to hear it, then. It’s never easy to lose someone you love, but it’s especially difficult when they’re taken too young.”

  “We’re supposed to be talking about Blue.”

  “We’re not supposed to be talking about anything.” He leaned back in the seat of the car and shook his head. “You’re supposed to go talk to Detective Dylan about whatever it is you think you know about the case.”

  “It’s only an observation.”

  “Your observations have been pretty good so far. Blue probably wouldn’t have been found in time if you hadn’t suspected something and gone to see her.”

  “A lot of good I did her.”

  “The evidence still would have pointed to her, regardless of when we found her. But because of you, she pulled through.”

  “Thanks for being a good liar. I doubt there was enough poison in her system to kill her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Ever since you told me the poison was stolen from the lab, I’ve been trying to think more about what I smelled.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Omitting facts he didn’t need to know was hardly the same thing.

  “You placed the scent?”

  “I told you it reminded me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. I realized what it was. It smelled like an old Chinese herbal remedy … that had been tainted.” I tried to think of a way to mention the mercury, but there was no good way to do it. It was odorless.

  Max shook his head. “I know a thing or two about Chinese herbs. You’re off base.”

  “You learned from your grandmother.”

  “I did.” His lips tightened as he said it.

  “She wouldn’t have exposed you to toxins. To anything dangerous.”

  He opened his mouth and took a breath to speak but decided against it.

  “You admit I have a point,” I said.

  “Maybe. It’s too bad you didn’t think of this before the sample was stolen. This could have helped the lab guys narrow things down.”

  “I know,” I murmured. I wondered if there was a way for the vial to be “found.” It wouldn’t be able to be used as evidence, but successfully prosecuting the culprit was less of a concern of mine than finding Dorian’s book and making sure Blue wasn’t unjustly convicted. Would the police even consider testing something that was lost and then found? Maybe there was a way we could plant the vial in the grass near the lab, making it look like the thief dropped it …

  “Zoe?”

  “Yes?”

  “I lost you for a minute.”

  “Sorry. I’m distracted. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “Tell me about it. Let me drive you home.”

  “There’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” I said as he maneuvered out of the parking garage.

  “Tell it to Dylan.”

  “Let me run it by you first.”

  He sighed and kept his eyes on the road, flipping on the windshield wipers as a misty rain began to fall.

  “You guys are looking into some blackmail angle about Blue’s past—”

  “I can’t talk about it,” Max cut in.

  “I know. That’s fine.” It wasn’t fine, but I could deal with that later. “What I mean is that you might be ignoring the real motive.”

  “Which is?”

  “Those antiques of mine that were stolen. I’ve been spending a little bit of time cataloging, and some of the things might be even more valuable than I previously realized.”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Is that the cop sound for a noncommittal answer?”

  “We’ve been looking into all the angles, Zoe. You don’t have to play detective. We know what we’re doing.”

  “But the alchemy book—” I broke off when I saw Max’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. His expression had changed. A wall had gone up. This wasn’t like the other information he was withholding. He was hiding something.

  twenty-six

  The light rain had turned into a full-blown rainstorm by the time Max dropped me off at my house. Gusts of windswept rain crashed against the car, making it difficult to have a conversation, which was fine by me. I didn’t trust myself to speak. Max couldn’t be involved. Not only because he was a detective, but because of what my gut was telling me. The question was whether I should believe my instincts.

  As I entered the house, I discovered the rain wasn’t only falling outside. Hearing dripping water, I went straight to the attic room that I had been hoping to turn into my business workspace.

  I found Dorian there, placing buckets and bowls under the leaks.

  “Il pleut des cordes,” he said. “You caught up with the boy? Were you able to speak with Blue Sky?”

  I filled Dorian in on what had happened that evening with Brenda Skyler, a.k.a Blue Sky.

  “You have learned nothing helpful!” Dorian said, jumping up from where we sat on the hardwood floor in between the buckets of rainwater. A drop of water fell on his head. He swore.

  “Moving into an old house during the wintertime might not have been a wise decision,” he said, pushing one of the buckets under the new leak with his feet. “Merde. Mon pied.”

  “Your foot?”

  “It is nothing.”

  But as he spoke, I could see his foot rested at an awkward angle. It wasn’t bending like the rest of his body. It was solid stone.

  “Dorian—”

  “I said it is nothing!” he snapped.

  If he didn’t want to talk about how quickly his body was turning to stone, I wouldn’t force the issue. What I needed to do was figure out how to help him.

  My eyes searched the beams of the sloping ceiling. “The tarp is secure. Where are all these leaks coming from?”

  “Modern construction is not the same as the solid buildings from the old days.”

  “This house is about a hundred years old.”

  “Exactement,” Dorian said. “Modern.”

  We couldn’t live like this. I needed to keep calling contractors until I found one who hadn’t heard about the recent murder that was making people wary to work on the house. I didn’t care about any of the cosmetic upgrades I had originally been interested in. For now, what we needed was someone who could make the house habitable.

  I had to figure out what to do with Dorian while someone fixed the house. Because of his deteriorating life force, it wasn’t a good idea for Dorian to turn himself to stone and pretend to be a decorative stone object in the house. I would have to lock the basement door and have Dorian stay there during the day while a handyman made stopgap fixes to the rest of the house.

  But the house was the least of my problems. I was no closer to figuring out who was framing Blue and where Dorian’s book was. I’d tackled memories from the past that I wasn’t yet ready to face, all to help the little gargoyle, but I had little to show for it beyond the amorphous feeling that I might be close to understanding more about the book’s coded illustrations.

  “There is a haunted look in your eyes, mon amie,” Dorian said.

  I looked up at the dripping beams. “Speaking with Blue brought up memories I didn’t want to think about.”

  “Come. We have done as much as we can to protect the room from water. Have you eaten dinner?”

  I shook my head.

  “I will cook.”

  Despite the fact that it was Dorian who was dying, I was the one who couldn’t remain calm through our dinner of roasted chickpeas in a cayenne spice mix with cabbage braised in mustard and cumin seeds. I hated feeling helpless. I had grown accustomed to being lonely, but I was good at taking care of everything that had to get done. I could grow my own food from seeds, turn plants into
healing remedies for the ailing, fix the engine of a truck on a desolate country road, and learn new languages and adapt to local customs. What I couldn’t do was unravel the mysteries I’d encountered that week: Who killed Charles Macraith and why? Where was Dorian’s book? What did the pages I’d photographed mean?

  My unrest became unbearable when Dorian brought out a beautiful apple tart he made for dessert. It reminded me of food I’d eaten as a child on special occasions.

  “The food was not good?” he asked.

  “It’s what the apple tart made me think of. You don’t know the story of where I’m from. Before you knew of me in Paris.”

  “From your accent, I know you are American.”

  “I was born in Salem, Massachusetts.”

  “The same city as the famous witch trials. Oh! You do not mean—”

  “I do.”

  “Mais non. This is terrible.” Beneath his horns, his forehead creased with concern. “I did not know.”

  “You had no way to know the foods you cooked tonight would remind me of it.”

  “They burned you?” His black eyes widened.

  I shook my head. “It didn’t come to that.” I took a deep breath. Dorian had told me his story. I wanted to tell him mine.

  “By the time I was sixteen years old,” I said, “the witch trials were going strong. I wasn’t a witch. Therefore I thought I had nothing to hide. It was a foolish assumption.”

  “You were already an alchemist?”

  “I was known as a ‘simpler’—someone who understands how to use plants more than most people. Because I understood the cycles of nature, people said the plants ‘spoke to me.’ They said it was witchcraft.”

  “Mon dieu.”

  “By the time I realized what was happening, hysteria had taken over. I was going to be arrested and tried with those poor women.”

  “Were any of them witches?”

  “I don’t think so. But really, I knew so little at the time. I had led a sheltered life. Difficult, but sheltered. I came from a family of farmers in Salem Village, growing oats and rye in the rocky soil. It was a deeply religious community, one where you didn’t dare speak out of line. If it hadn’t been for Thomas …” I removed my locket necklace and held it in my hand for a moment before handing it to Dorian. “My brother was the one who saved me. He was only fourteen at the time, the same age as Brixton, but things were different then. We were expected to grow up more quickly. That’s a miniature portrait of Thomas on the left side of the locket.”

  “Such a serious boy.”

  I pushed past my urge to cry. “He helped me escape to London, by boat. I was so hesitant to leave my mother and sisters that Thomas insisted on coming with me. As the only son in the family, he was expected to take over the farm, but he was willing to give up his whole life to help me escape my fate.”

  Dorian returned the locket.

  “The trip to London used all of our money. This was the 1690s. A fourteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl with no family and no formal training didn’t have many options for employment. With my skills, I was able to make simple plant mixtures that helped people. It was enough to survive. It was also enough that alchemists took notice of my abilities. An alchemist used a tincture we had sold to track us down. When he found out it was I, not Thomas, who had used plants in such a way, he was wary. Female alchemists were quite rare. His associate, Nicolas Flamel, was more open to the idea. Nicolas and his wife took us in and agreed to train me.”

  “The famous French scrivener and bookseller,” Dorian said. “Yes, I know of him. He and his wife Perenelle turned lead into gold and gave much money to charities in Paris. When wandering the streets of Paris during the night, I would often walk by their graves. But wait—the dates on their headstones were before the Salem Witch Trials.”

  “They discovered the Elixir of Life. When their graves were exhumed, they were found to be empty. They faked their deaths because the world was not yet ready to know the secrets of alchemy.”

  “Something you believe as well.”

  “I do. For many reasons. It takes rigorous study to truly understand alchemy. There are no quick fixes, which is what people would want. The Flamels knew that well. After faking their deaths, Nicolas and Perenelle moved to an estate in the French countryside, assuming new identities. It was there that I studied with them for several years. Thomas came with me and became a gardener. Then the plague came.

  “It was the early 1700s. The plague hadn’t been entirely eradicated in Europe. Before the Black Death killed much of the population of Marseille in 1720, it swept through the countryside where we were living. Thomas fell ill.

  “I had been studying alchemy for nearly ten years, but as the study of alchemy goes, ten years isn’t a very long time. I hadn’t yet been expected to transmute base metals into gold or extend life. But when Thomas fell ill, and my usual herbal remedies failed to cure him from the plague, I was desperate. I threw myself into finding the Elixir of Life, hoping I would be able to share it with Thomas because of our strong familial bond. The Flamels told me that transferring the immortality of the Elixir of Life from one person to another couldn’t be done, and that even the most clever of alchemists had never understood why. They suggested I spend Thomas’s last days keeping him company. I didn’t listen. I didn’t know if it would work, but I had to do something. Everyone had told me I had a gift. My connection to plants was considered alchemy, so I thought I could use my plant knowledge to create the philosopher’s stone and in turn use it to create the Elixir of Life. I’m human like anyone else. I wanted that quick fix. I worked so hard and slept and ate so little that I was often delirious. I didn’t know what I was doing by then. I thought I might have been getting close when Thomas died.”

  “Je suis desolé, mon amie,” Dorian said. “I am so sorry, Zoe.”

  “If I had listened to the Flamels, I would have spent my time trying to heal Thomas through the means I already knew, or at least to have spent more time with him before he died. You can understand why I abandoned alchemy for many years after that. I left the Flamels and wandered for years, barely surviving. I didn’t realize that I had indeed discovered the Elixir of Life until my hair turned white but the rest of me didn’t age.”

  “How could you not know you had discovered it?”

  “Alchemists speak in riddles. There was no way for me to know what the philosopher’s stone looked like. Some alchemists suggest that it’s not even a stone, but a powder or a liquid. The Greek alchemist Zosimos described it as a ‘stone that is not a stone.’ The Flamels told me that no alchemist can know what it is until they find it for themselves.”

  “Alchemists,” Dorian said, his snout flaring.

  “Because I hadn’t taken any of my research with me, I wasn’t sure which of my transformations was ‘the one true thing.’ It was only my love for Thomas that had made me focused enough to discover alchemy’s deepest secrets. Once I realized what had happened to me, I returned to the Flamels. But where their house had been—” I broke off, the memory of the landscape as clear as if it had happened that day. I saw the blackened land. I smelled the sodden ash.

  “I found only charred ashes,” I said. “The house had burned to the ground. I couldn’t tell if they had died in the fire or escaped. The nearby villagers couldn’t tell me anything. The other alchemists I knew who also knew the Flamels had died by then, so I wasn’t able to find out what happened to them.”

  “I thought you said they were immortal.”

  “The Elixir of Life doesn’t stop violent or accidental death. It only stops the progression of aging. It’s why I adopted the food habits I have now—if I was potentially going to live forever, I wanted to feel healthy.”

  “The Flamels might be out there somewhere.”

  “I don’t know, Dorian. I tried to find them, but it was as if my whole life with the
m had been an illusion. I found no evidence of their existing after they faked their deaths in Paris.”

  “They were careful.”

  “Too careful. I never saw them again.”

  twenty-seven

  The next morning, I willed my eyes to focus on the woodcut illustrations from Dorian’s book. The longer I stared at them, the more they blurred together. The twisted birds, the desolate landscapes, the fragments of Latin text that spoke vaguely of alchemy but didn’t include nearly enough steps.

  I took a brief break to fix myself a bowl of date and cinnamon oatmeal, as much for warmth as energy. In addition to rainwater, the house was leaking enough cold air that I couldn’t shake a chill. I was seriously considering moving back into my trailer until I got the house fixed up. As I held the bowl cupped in my hands for warmth, there was a knock at the door.

  Brixton stood in the doorway, a small paper bag in his hand.

  “Don’t you have school?”

  “It’s Sunday. But it’s cool. You’ve got enough going on that I don’t think you’re senile or anything.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “So can I come in or what? It’s freezing out here.”

  The rain had stopped but a cold wind was blowing. Brixton was dressed in his usual jeans, t-shirt, and hoodie, but it was cold enough that he’d also bundled in a bomber jacket.

  “Sure,” I said, “but it’s not much warmer inside the house. And I thought your mom would want to spend time with you, now that she’s home.”

  He rolled his eyes as he came inside. “Where’s Dorian? I bought him something.”

  “He’s upstairs dumping out the buckets of rainwater we collected last night, courtesy of the leaking roof.”

  “Do you need help with the tarp? I’m a good climber.”

  “I’ve got a professional coming over later today, hopefully before the rain comes back.”

  “How’d you find someone to come to a haunted house?”

  “I don’t think superstition would keep rational adults from a good job.”

  “It’s not just superstition. We told you the place was haunted. That’s why I came to check it out the first day I met you.”