by Gigi Pandian
She nodded slowly, but the skepticism remained in place. “I didn’t realize it had been catalogued elsewhere.”
“This might sound sentimental and foolish, but if I could see it again, it would help me have closure. And also maybe help you figure out more about it. Since it means a lot to you too.”
“That decision,” she said, “will be up to my mother.” She scribbled text onto the back of a business card and handed it to me.
I groaned inwardly. Isabella Magnus. The woman who’d accused me of murdering her husband.
Cleo brushed a tear from her cheek, then gave a curious glance behind me. “I think you have a young admirer, Zoe.”
I turned and saw Brixton hovering a few yards away, near one of the towers of candles. I thanked Cleo and walked over to him.
“What are you doing here, Brix?”
“The teashop ran out of pastries so there’s less of a line now. People keep requesting avocado toast, but Blue is refusing to give in to pressure. I didn’t want to stick around.”
“That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
Brixton rolled his eyes. At least I’m fairly certain he did. It was awfully dark in the gallery. “Blue guessed this is where you’d be, and I needed to find you. Dorian called to tell me what was going on.”
“He did what?” I hissed.
“He said you needed my help.”
For the second time in twenty-four hours, I wanted to strangle the gargoyle. Over the summer, Dorian had asked for Brixton’s help spying on a dangerous man during the daytime when he couldn’t do it himself. Brixton had only been fourteen years old at the time.
I admired my young neighbor’s loyalty, especially since it had been hard-won. When he’d accidentally seen Dorian the day I found the gargoyle stowed away in my moving crates, he was understandably freaked out and had tried numerous times to get people to expose Dorian. Until he’d realized the implications of what exposing Dorian’s secret would mean and became one of the gargoyle’s fiercest protectors. And one of his only real friends.
“What exactly did he say I needed help with?” I asked.
“Well, at first he said it was”—Brixton lowered his voice—“breaking Tobias out of jail. But when I pointed out that this didn’t make any sense, since we don’t even know if Tobias has been officially arrested, he told me you were searching for your old mentor who went missing. He said it was really getting you down, since, you know, Nicolas was like a dad to you.”
Though I was touched that Brixton wanted to help, he was still only a kid. “Thank you, but I’m all right.”
“I know what it’s like, you know.” The boy’s words were hesitant now. “Not having a dad around, I mean. I couldn’t ask for a better stepdad than Abel, but for most of my life it was just me and Mom. I don’t know what I’d do if Abel disappeared without me knowing what happened to him. From how you talk about your past, the little you tell me, it seems like Nicolas meant a lot to you when you were my age. It just … I mean, it doesn’t seem right for me not to help.”
I stopped myself from embarrassing Brixton by giving him a hug in the gallery. I was wrong about him being a child. At fifteen, he was more mature and understood more of the world than I gave him credit for. He was right that Nicolas had once been like a father to me. For those four years when it was me and my brother against the world, Nicolas had not only taken us in and given us food, shelter, and an education, but most importantly, he’d believed in me.
“I promise I’ll let you know if there’s something you can do to help,” I said. “And if your mom is still working later this evening, you’re welcome to come over for dinner.”
“Nah, I’ve got plans with Ethan and Veronica. But you promise?”
“I do.” But only if it was safe. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Brixton.
nineteen
While I’d been inside the gallery, the clouds had let loose. Rain pelted down and lightning crackled above. Brixton wasn’t yet old enough to drive and had arrived on his bike, so I drove him the short distance home. His stepfather, Abel, was gone for long stretches of time with his oil-rig job, so Heather was spending more time at home than she had in the past.
Brixton and his mom had previously lived in a tiny apartment, but after Heather sold a few paintings, she started to take her art more seriously and wanted a proper studio. The one-car garage of a small rental house not far from Hawthorne Bridge served perfectly. It also served Brixton’s growing interest in music. He could play his instruments in a house more freely than in an apartment. The guitar had been his favorite until Abel brought him a banjo.
By the time I’d dropped Brixton off with his bike and was back at my house, Tobias had returned as well. I’d missed two text messages from him. The second one was from only a few minutes before, telling me that he was in the attic playing chess with Dorian.
“You’re okay?” I asked once I reached the attic. “You don’t need a lawyer or anything?”
“They had no reason to hold me,” Tobias said, standing up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the attic floor.
Dorian sat on the opposite side of my antique chess set. He barely glanced up at me, instead keeping his liquidy black eyes focused intently on the chess board.
“Not even your fake ID?” I asked.
“It’s not fake. It’s an official Michigan license. More real than I am, in the eyes of the law. I’m prepared for needing to show my ID to the police.”
“What about what she said about confirming where you were when Logan Magnus was killed? That was strange.”
Dorian glanced up at the two of us for a moment, and I thought he was going to say something, but he instead went back to studying the chess board.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” Tobias said. “She was also peppering me with questions about your online business. She asked what I thought of the fact that some of your inventory was small but some of the items were priced unexpectedly high.”
I sighed and looked around the attic at the antiques bursting from the shelves. I’d finally finished cataloguing nearly everything I owned, but I didn’t have the heart to put all of them for sale on my business website. Elixir was less a profitable business model and more a way of getting by. I didn’t want to spend my days filling orders and collecting new acquisitions. I had several items worth a lot of money that collectors would buy every month or so, which kept me going, and the rest of my orders were small and infrequent.
“She asked me about my business as well,” I said. “But why would she care about antiques? I only have a couple of paintings.” My eyes fell on one of Isaac Newton. He’d hidden his alchemical experiments during his lifetime to avoid ridicule.
“It’s not the art connection,” Tobias said. “Running an online business in general can be cause for suspicion. Apparently it’s a good way to cover crimes. Like I said, the fact you don’t do a brisk business is suspicious. The expectations of capitalism in the twenty-first century, I suppose.”
“I can’t win,” I said. A storefront drew too much attention in the modern age, as did selling herbal concoctions. I’d thought selling antiques remotely was my safest option.
“She was only fishing,” Tobias said. “Your business isn’t a front for anything, so you’re fine. Same for me. She had no real evidence to hold me, only vague suspicions, so she let me go.”
“One thing you have not told us,” Dorian said, standing and clasping his hands together, “is how you explained the inconsistencies in your life, Monsieur Freeman. I expect this is why an intelligent detective would harbor suspicions.”
“I told the detective the truth. Or at least as close to it as is possible. My father was the famous singer the Philosopher. He fell off the grid and went to Mexico after his big hit in the late 1950s. That’s why my records are spotty and she suspected I stole someone’s identity t
o get my ID—because I lived with Pop, off the grid in Mexico, until he died. And if a fifty-year-old man can marry a twenty-five-year-old woman, why not the reverse? Rosa was a young soul, so we fell in love. We told people in Detroit I’d moved home to be the caregiver to my mom because we thought it would be easier to get by if people weren’t constantly judging us.”
“You just left out the part about her being about a hundred years younger than you,” I said. That part always got awkward. Tobias’s cover story was similar to my own—that I looked very much like my French grandmother, whom I also was named after—and to the convincing story we used for how the two of us had met.
“Dorian is luckier than us in that regard,” Tobias said.
“Simply because I can turn to stone at will and am a beautiful specimen,” Dorian said, “does not mean I am luckier. I am social by nature, yet am trapped in the house all alone.”
“I’m here with you,” I said. “And Brixton comes over all the time. He spends more time with you than he does working in the garden. And you’re out all night exploring and you have your cooking—”
“Oui. It is only years of hard work that have made me the Michelin-star-worthy chef you see before you today. I am innately talented, but hard work is très nécessaire.”
Tobias stifled a laugh. “I meant you’re lucky with your cover story. Your references are in order, and nobody you work with has seen you.”
“Working for blind chefs was a brilliant idea, yet one I cannot take credit for. It was my father’s plan.”
When Notre Dame restorer and architect Viollet-le-Duc had realized his gargoyle prototype was too small for the new gallery of gargoyles he was building, he’d given the stone carving to his friend, the famous stage magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin—who became Dorian’s “father.” The magician began reading from a book of alchemy that he thought was only a dramatic prop but was actually imbued with the alchemy that brought Dorian to life. After recovering from the shock of the gargoyle being alive, the magician had raised Dorian in secret like a son, and before his death made sure Dorian would have a place in the world.
“And now that we are all safe in my attic,” Dorian added, “we shall set aside our game of chess. It is time for a council of war.”
“Is that a line from one of the novels Zoe has been getting for you?” Tobias asked.
“Many of them,” Dorian said with a straight face. “It is such an apt phrase in times of crisis, no? We have many items of importance to work through.”
“Nicolas is being held captive in parts unknown,” I said, “and I need to examine the Philippe Hayden painting that holds the clue without getting myself or Tobias further implicated in Logan Magnus’s death. Which is going to be tricky, since his wife is the one who has it and she’s accused me of murder. And we need to do it without getting Brixton involved. Are we agreed, Dorian?”
Dorian ignored me as he took my laptop in his clawed hand. “Oui, mon amie. You must also relax, so we may think with clear heads.” After a few taps on the keyboard, Tobias’s song “Accidental Life” began to play on the laptop speakers.
“1959,” Dorian said. “That year, I was cooking for a blind man in Lyon. He was a vegetarian, and I did not yet know how to cook vegetarian meals properly as I do now. Such a wasted opportunity.” He shook his head. “That was followed by working for a man who’d lost his sight from cancer. He later underwent chemotherapy, when it was a new treatment. He appreciated my cooking all the more once his body had recovered from the poisons used to save his life. I appreciated his praise, yet I did not understand at the time how differently foods can taste depending on one’s own body. But now, it is quite like my own situation, no? Now that I am truly alive, the flavors themselves are—”
“Stop changing the subject away from Brixton,” I said. “I’m happy that you’re enjoying food more. But we are not getting Brixton involved in a potentially dangerous investigation. You need to promise you won’t tell him we need help again.”
“Bof,” Dorian said, pushing away the laptop and crossing his arms. “I bow to you. I will not use a good resource, simply because ‘convention’ says he is still a child.”
My life was certainly a strange one. A living gargoyle and a former slave were gathered around a laptop computer surrounded by alchemical wares I’d collected over the centuries. But it felt like the most natural thing in the world, working together with friends to solve a problem. I hadn’t realized how desperately I’d missed that while living out of my Airstream. I’d had freedom and more safety, but I wasn’t truly living.
“I wrote this to commemorate my hundredth birthday,” Tobias said as the chorus of “Accidental Life” danced through the attic. “I count my birthday as the day Minty saved me and several others. Not the day I was born on the plantation. I’d say I was ‘celebrating’ but that’s not the right word.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. But neither is commiserating. We’ve had some good times—”
“—and helped some good people,” Tobias added.
“Yes, yes.” Dorian waved his hands through the air and flapped his wings. “I did not realize I was signing up for the maudlin party in the attic.” He stood to his full height and puffed up his chest. “I am sorry I found the song, as it has brought out the worst in you both. Truly, you are far too sentimental. Now is not the time. You will never be ready for battle.”
“Hold on,” I said. “We’re not going into battle to find Nicolas. I need to see the painting to find its clues. Isabella might not give me permission to see it, but if there’s a good photograph, I might not need the painting itself. I was already thinking of ways we can look at it. First—”
“This,” Dorian said, “is why we need our council of war. I have already taken the liberty of conducting research from my attic, both online and speaking on the telephone with an art historian. This portrait you speak of by Philippe Hayden … It does not exist.”
twenty
“That can’t be right,” I said. “The painting clearly exists. It’s just that nobody knows what Nicolas Flamel really looked like, so art historians don’t know who the man in the painting is. You can’t search for it by using his name.”
“Non,” Dorian said, his strong French voice echoing off the sloping ceiling of the attic.
I shivered, but I didn’t think it was because of the rain pelting on the skylight window above us.
Dorian sniffed. “You think me this careless? Non, I have sought out Philippe Hayden works of art. There are many, many photographs of his paintings. Several of his works of art are similar to each other. Yet none of them resemble what you described in the slightest.”
“So Cleo could have been wrong about it being a Philippe Hayden,” Tobias said. “People see what they want to see. It’s not just vanity. Many forgers are damn good at painting in the style of another artist. Like Van Meegeren. Nobody would believe he painted the ‘Vermeer’ masterpiece until he painted a new one while in jail. Ironically he was caught not for forgery—”
“—but for selling Dutch masterpieces to the Nazis,” I said. “Selling national treasures to Nazis was treason, a far greater offense. I remember that trial.”
“I know he was a scoundrel,” Tobias said, “but I can’t help respecting anyone who put one over on the Nazis.”
“He was most likely a collaborator too, you know. Or at least a sympathizer.”
Tobias swore. “Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so. Not the folk hero he wanted people to think he was.”
“I forgot you lived through part of the occupation in Paris.”
“Allo?” Dorian said. “Do I need to separate you two children so you’ll stop reminiscing?”
“I’d hardly call talk of Nazis ‘reminiscing,’” Tobias mumbled.
“Dorian is right.” I sat down on the hardwood floor in front of the old chess set, which ha
d been carved by hand around the time I’d studied under Nicolas. “It’s hard to focus because there are so many ways we could go about this. The painting is key. Because of Nicolas’s note, I’m certain it’s a Philippe Hayden. Nicolas had to have been referring to the one and only painting of himself. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“If only living through history made us experts on all things from the past,” Tobias said.
I smiled at him. “I know an art historian we can contact. One who also knows about how to find lost works of art.”
“Yes,” Dorian said, “I have already taken the liberty of calling him.”
My smile vanished. “You did what?”
“I mentioned this a few minutes ago, no? I shared with you that I have spoken with an art historian. I found his contact information in your Elixir records.”
“You were going through my—”
“Lane Peters was quite charming—he sends his regards, Zoe—yet he did not have high hopes for me. Philippe Hayden is an artist whose body of work is much debated. But Monsieur Peters told me something most interesting. Much like the case of the Vermeers you spoke of, many of the paintings art historians once believed to be Hayden masterpieces are in fact modern forgeries.”
“It’s not a forgery,” I snapped. “I’m not disputing the fact that there are Hayden forgeries out there. But that’s not the case here. It can’t be.”
“Instead of arguing,” Tobias said, “let’s think about how we find out.”
“Truce,” I said. “I have an idea. One we should have thought of immediately. Even though the painting was misattributed, the auction house that sold the painting will have photographs. We know the name given to the painting from Cleo: The Alchemist. We can find the auction house.”
Tobias threw his head back and chuckled. “Damn. You’re absolutely right.”
“She is a wise one,” Dorian said, “our alchemist.”
We found the auction house online through the name of the painting and the date of sale, but no image accompanied the listing, so we had to contact the auction house.
