by Gigi Pandian
“Moi? I am but an innocent gargoyle.”
I scoffed at the thought. If only.
fourteen
I led Detective Vega along the waterfront path that would take us to the spot where Dorian had found the pendant. It was far from the Logan Magnus art gallery, but on the same eastern side of the winding Willamette River.
“You came here at night?” she asked. “I know you’re new here, so I should tell you this isn’t a part of town to come to at night. There are several homeless encampments by the warehouses. Most of the people are just down on their luck, but it attracts some people you don’t want to mess with.”
I’d decided it would be best to stick to as much of the truth as possible, both for myself and for the case. I was going to show her both when and where Dorian found the pendant.
“It’s peaceful at night,” I said.
“And a bit macabre in this industrial part of town, with all of these abandoned warehouses … ”
“I like walking in cemeteries too, Detective.”
She snorted.
It was the truth. I came to terms with death a long time ago. I would have lost my mind if I hadn’t. It didn’t make it easy, but I was now at peace with the fact that I hadn’t been able to save my brother from the plague, and with what had happened to my love Ambrose. But I felt wretched that Nicolas might still be alive but imprisoned somewhere, similar to the anxiety I’d felt when Dorian had been dying an unnatural death, doomed to be awake but trapped in stone forever. I hoped that if Nicolas was imprisoned as his note suggested, that at least he was with Perenelle. Even though she’d always baffled me, Nicolas loved her dearly.
“Did Logan Magnus like to walk here too?” I asked, looking for one of the indentifying markers Dorian had mentioned.
“That’s not how this works,” she said.
“Having a civilized conversation?”
“You were asking about the case. But if you call asking about things that aren’t your business civilized conversation, how about telling me about how you got Max out of his shell.”
“I wasn’t aware he was in one.”
“Seriously?”
I thought back to the first time I’d met Max, as he stood on the porch of my new home the day I moved in, in search of a trespassing kid. He’d been a study in contrasts from the moment I saw him: wanting to uphold the law but also defend Brixton from breaking-and-entering; open to the possibilities of the world but also holding back; so close to letting his guard down but resisting with every breath. I knew from our first fleeting encounter that he was caught between two worlds, like I was, which was one of the things that drew me to him. But in a shell? That was a new idea.
“You know about his wife, of course,” Detective Vega said. She looked at me expectantly.
If she was hoping to get a rise out of me, she failed. “Chadna,” I said. “A tragedy that she died so young.”
Detective Vega nodded. “That was before I knew him. But we’ve been friends a long time, and he’s never dated in the years since. Not seriously. Not until you.”
Max had told me that when we’d first started dating, but somehow it felt different coming from one of his friends who’d seen it from the outside.
“That’s some family of his,” Detective Vega said. “Mina in particular.”
Unlike her question about Max’s wife, I didn’t think this question was meant to shake me. But it did. I’d known Max for three quarters of a year but I had no idea who Mina was. He’d spoken about his grandparents, but I knew his grandfather had gone back to China after his grandmother had died.
“Mina?”
“You haven’t met Mina and Mary yet?” she asked. “His sister and mom are forces of nature.”
I shook my head. Why hadn’t he introduced me to his family if even fellow detectives had met them?
We arrived at the spot where Dorian’s drawing indicated he’d found the pendant, in front of an empty warehouse that was rather creepy even by day.
“Here,” I said. “This is the spot. Somewhere right around here.”
“You didn’t think to turn it in to a Lost and Found?”
“What Lost and Found? It was so dirty that I was certain it had been here for years. I would never have kept it if I thought someone was missing it. And the metal isn’t worth more than a few dollars.”
“It was dirty?” Detective Vega repeated. “You didn’t mention that at the station.”
“We only had a few minutes to talk before you arrested my friend.”
A hint of embarrassment flashed in her eyes, but she quickly covered it. “Were you planning on selling it through Elixir?”
“I don’t know why that matters, but no. I liked it and was wearing it myself, as you know.”
“You didn’t think to have it authenticated to see if it was worth anything? If it was real?”
“Real?”
“You know, real as opposed to fake.”
“No, I don’t know.” What was she getting at? I worked with enough metals to know pewter when I saw it. “You mentioned forgery earlier … What are you really asking?”
The detective sighed. “The papers got ahold of this, so there’s no use keeping it from you. There’s an art forgery ring here in Portland. We closed in on one of them, a guy who calls himself Neo, who’d been creating high quality forgeries of old paintings.”
“Portland PD has an art crimes team?”
“I wish. It would make my life a lot easier. We got a tip. It turned out to be legitimate. We got a warrant for the studio and seized the fraudulent artwork, but the forger fled before we could collar him and find out about his associates.”
“And this has to do with me or the Logan Magnus case because … ”
“It’s not like TV where we solve a case within an hour. I’m putting together pieces of a puzzle. Logan Magnus was a local artist who was involved in the art community here. It was rumored he knew what was going on. It’s a possible piece of the puzzle.”
“And I’ve given you another piece. This is where I found the pendant. Now I have to be somewhere.”
When I stepped through the front door, my house was eerily silent.
“Tobias? Dorian?”
Silence.
I pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. The scents of sourdough bread and ginger cookies lingered in the air, but the room was empty. “This isn’t funny, guys.”
The sound of tapping on the hardwood floors was a welcome one. A moment later, Dorian appeared in the kitchen.
“Why are you home?” he asked.
“I’m picking up Tobias to go to the art gallery.”
Dorian rolled his eyes. “Alchemist, you have many talents, but adapting to technology is not one of them. Look at the small metal device you keep in your purse.”
I pulled my phone from my bag. Sure enough, Tobias had sent me a text message saying that he’d gone to Blue Sky Teas.
“Why did he go to the teashop?” I asked Dorian.
“He wished to see Heather’s paintings.”
“He doesn’t know her. Why did he want to see her artwork?”
“I may have mentioned they were inspired by alchemy, inspired by the items in Elixir. Why are you looking at me like that? I cannot have a conversation with our friend?”
I found Tobias sitting at a table under the weeping fig tree. He wasn’t alone. He was sitting with Max.
Blue came out from behind the counter and gave me a hug. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “I just had to show the police where I found the new charm on my necklace. What’s the deal with—”
“They’ve been inseparable for the last hour.” She grinned. “I don’t think they even noticed when I came over to take their plates and refresh their tea. That’s always a good sign, when friends and lov
ers get along.”
I found myself feeling a mix of worry and happiness, and I wondered which would win out. I was keenly aware of the silly grin on my face as I watched Max and Tobias, who were both completely oblivious to my presence. They looked like long-lost friends.
Tobias was the first to notice me. He waved me over to the table.
“Three times a day,” he said to Max as he stood. “That’ll kick the last of your cold.”
“Your cayenne tea recipe?” I asked.
“Good guess,” Max said.
“He thinks cayenne can cure anything.”
Tobias laughed. “Because it can. I gave Blue the recipe, so she’s making a cup for Max before he heads back to work. You ready to go to the gallery?”
“He’s a great guy,” Tobias said once we were outside.
“I still shouldn’t have let it slip about Rosa. I wasn’t thinking. I tend to let my guard down around Max.”
“Turned out for the best. That’s what we bonded over. Being widowers. I didn’t expect how cathartic it would be talking to him about it. It was good for me to talk with him, Zoe. As long as he doesn’t go poking too deep into the past, it’ll be okay.”
I hoped he was right.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tobias said as we got into my truck. “Are you sure it’s wise to go back to the gallery right now?”
“The portrait has to be the painting Nicolas talked about in his note. It’s our only clue—”
“That’s not what I meant. It’s where Logan Magnus’s widow accused you of murder.”
“I already gave the police the pendant and showed them where Dorian found it. Even if she’s at the gallery, what can she to do me?”
Tobias gave me a wary look. “I don’t know if it’s endearing or frustrating that you’ve retained a degree of innocence after all these years.”
“Endearing,” I said. “Definitely endearing.”
But when we reached the waterfront art gallery, we found an even bigger problem than whatever havoc Isabella Magnus might wreak.
The painting of Nicolas Flamel was gone.
fifteen
“They must have moved it,” I said to Tobias. But as I walked through the gallery, I didn’t see the painting. The space was dark. It was difficult to find things. The portrait had to be here somewhere …
The gallery was lit only with natural light and candles in open-topped glass cases. No electricity. I thought at first the owners were making do as best they could with the converted warehouse space, until I saw a cell phone being charged in an electrical outlet. The lighting was intentional. The shape of the space affected the light as well. The front doors and window were made of glass, but the rest of the long, narrow space contained no windows.
I understood why the curators had made their decision. The whole set-up made the paintings feel magical. In the flickering candlelight, the colors of the paint jumped as if the people and objects inside the frames were moving. Gold leaf danced, carbon black shadows sheltered hidden secrets, and whites glowed as if they couldn’t be contained by the canvas.
This was how art had been viewed in churches in Medieval Europe. Before my time, but not by much, so I was familiar with the concept. Long before movies could be imagined, this was what made representations of people come alive. The effect was similar to magic lanterns, but using color rather than shadows.
“Look at that,” Tobias whispered. He came to a stop in front of The River of Flames, one of Logan Magnus’s most famous paintings, a conceptual work of art that depicted a raging, twisting river leading to a rusty faucet. The colors he’d used in the river were vast, ranging from bright lead white and true silver that made the river appear clean and crisp to earthy ochre reds that appeared to be flames. At the end of the river, depending on the way the light caught the painting, the water coming from the faucet either flowed up from the drain like the flickering flame of a candle or down from the spout like water tainted with modern chemicals. It was a trick of the light, but one that was realized to full effect in the dark gallery.
“He used the real materials,” I whispered back. Even though the paintings were dry, I could smell the faint scents of the minerals used to make the colors. The tinny odor of lead white, the bitter scent of ultramarine, I even caught a sulfurous swirl of cinnabar in the air.
Before the Renaissance, artists had mixed their own paints. But a combination of modern inventions, such as stable binding materials, made it possible for artists to concentrate on painting and leave to others the painstaking work of transforming minerals into pigments and pigments into paint. The profession of “colormen” was born. These tradesmen would sell their paints directly to artists. It was a boon to artistic productivity, but a shame that the knowledge was lost to so many artists themselves. Painters became separated from their raw materials.
I knew the basics of pigments and paint creation because many painters had bought their raw materials from me. The raw materials that create paint were also used as medicines, which meant they were sold by apothecaries. Apothecary shops were the first art stores.
There was, of course, a dark side to this knowledge. Books like The Craftsman’s Handbook, written in the early 1400s, revealed to modern artists exactly which pigments they could use to mimic old paintings and how to faux-age their creations. The knowledge could be used for innocent purposes, like Logan Magnus’s artwork. But it had also been used by forgers. Which Detective Vega said Logan knew something about.
“I’ve seen pictures of his art,” Tobias said, “but it doesn’t capture this. Not at all. Do you smell that? I bet he even mixed his own paints. You don’t think he’s … ”
“No.” I shook my head. “He wasn’t an alchemist. At least not the way you mean. Logan Magnus didn’t grind and bind his own paints starting when it was necessary to do so.”
“How do you—”
“He grew up and aged in the public eye. Don’t you remember his father, artist Lawrence Magnus?”
“The guy who did those psychedelic paintings in the ’60s?”
Before I could answer, the candlelit paintings seemed to come alive around us. A group of people had entered the gallery, and the gust of wind that followed them inside caused the candles to flicker violently.
The Underwater Underground had a similar theme to The River of Flames, showing modern junk under water, with ghostly men and women dressed in medieval clothing using the appliances. As the flickering candlelight shone upon them, the people appeared to come alive and move.
The works of art had a hypnotic effect that made it difficult to move quickly. I shook myself. We weren’t here to appreciate art. I pushed Tobias along, but no matter how many paintings we passed, I didn’t see the one I was after. I left Tobias back at The River of Flames as I sought out the office. As I glanced over my shoulder, his gold-flecked hazel eyes remained transfixed on the twisting river in the haunting painting.
At the far end of the narrow warehouse, a four-foot-square self-portrait of Logan Magnus had been hung next to an equally large photograph of the painter at work. The photograph was one I’d seen in the paper after his death. He was dressed all in white, as was his famous style, his slacks and dress shirt covered in paint flecks from all the colors of the rainbow. A few strands of his messy brown hair were coated in red paint. In the large size of the original photograph, fine lines were visible on his face, which was set in concentration as he worked on a painting.
Along the back wall of the gallery near the photograph and self-portrait, a woman sat behind a desk. “Excuse me,” I said. “Where did the painting go that was in the window yesterday? The one of the man with haunting eyes.”
She reddened. “That was a mistake.”
I guessed the woman was in her late twenties, but the tone of her frustrated words made her sound like one of Brixton’s high school classmates. Her eyes were lined with ko
hl and gave a smoky, ethereal look to her pale face. Her hair was cut in a similar style as mine, at a sharp angle and not quite reaching her shoulders. But hers was as black as mine was white. And there was something else about her … She’d been crying.
“The painting was put up by mistake?” I repeated.
“It’s not a Logan Magnus.”
“Then how—”
“Archer didn’t send you, did he?” Her eyes narrowed and she scrutinized my white hair and silver raincoat. “You look like his type.”
“Archer?” Her gaze unnerved me.
Her face relaxed. “I’m sorry. Never mind. Like I was saying, it was a painting Logan owned, not one he painted. It’s back in storage where it belongs. The swap was a practical joke in very poor taste. That’s why I’m here myself to oversee things now.”
“I’d still love to see—” I began.
“The gallery turned out beautifully,” cut in a man with an English accent, speaking to the woman I was talking with. “I’m glad you used this space. Much better than those other properties. It’s a truly worthy memorial for Logan.”
In the dim light, I hadn’t seen him approaching us. His deep voice startled me. In his three-piece suit, he was dressed more formally than anyone else in the art gallery. More formally than anyone I knew personally in Portland, but he had long hair that balanced out the formality, deep brown with hints of gray that fell to his shoulders.
The two hugged like people who knew each other intimately before the man turned to me with a charming but sad smile. “Please forgive me for interrupting,” he said—but I was hardly listening. My attention was forced elsewhere by a voice I’d hoped I wouldn’t hear again.
“Mr. Freeman?” The commanding voice echoed loudly above the hushed tones spoken in the gallery.
I turned to see Detective Vega approaching Tobias. I hurried over and reached his side as the detective did.
“I’m going to need you to come with me,” she said.
