by Ami Diane
Chapter Twenty-One
LIBBY VAULTED OVER Marge’s overstuffed couch and landed on the cushions in a heap. Sweat threatened to ruin the clay face mask she’d haphazardly slathered on.
The older potionist ran into the room, still rolling curlers into her hair.
“You use curlers?”
“Not normally, no. Help me, will you?”
Libby jumped up and began twirling the woman’s short silver hair around a curler just as the sound of a car pulled into the driveway. Curled on the other end of the couch, Max watched them curiously.
Footsteps pounded up the porch steps. Libby looked from the mugs on the coffee table filled with cold water and tea bags to the front door. As she did, her gaze snagged on a small cauldron hanging in the fireplace.
“Marge!”
The potionist’s eyes bugged out as a second bout of heavy knocks rattled the door.
The cauldron was too heavy to move. In fact, Libby wondered how Marge had positioned it in the first place before she recalled the woman had a potion that defied gravity.
“Just a second!” Libby called out.
Frantically, she motioned at the recliner. They dragged it over the aged hardwood floor and in front of the fireplace.
As Marge strolled to the door, yelling, “Alright, alright! Keep your holster on!” Libby hopped over the armrest and bounced into the chair, a magazine in her hand. She was breathing like a racehorse.
Cool air rushed in when Marge opened the door.
“Hello, Deputy Jackson. What can I do for you?” she said a little too pleasantly for the middle of the night.
Libby causally lifted her gaze from the magazine. Jackson’s lean, muscular frame filled the doorway. His eyes narrowed suspiciously at Marge then took in the interior of the room before settling on Libby.
She raised her eyebrows in a silent question.
“Can I come in?” he finally asked.
Marge shrugged and widened the gap in the doorway. His boots thudded over the floor. “What took you so long to answer the door?”
“We were in the kitchen,” Marge replied.
“Uh-huh. And that noise I heard…?”
“What noise?”
“Sounded like furniture being moved about.”
“Marge was singing,” Libby said, drawing a glare from the apothecary.
“My singing’s not that bad.”
“It’s like a canary being strangled to death.” She looked to Jackson for confirmation. “Am I right?”
“Isn’t that chair usually over there?” The deputy pointed to the naked spot beside the couch.
“Now you’re Martha Stewart all of the sudden?” Marge huffed. “We can’t do a little Feng Shui on our girls’ night?”
“After midnight? You ladies want to tell me what you’re really up to?”
Libby cleared her throat. “Like Marge said. Girls night.” She pointed at the streaks of clay on her cheeks.
“And you usually read magazines upside down?”
In her hands, an upside down Chris Pratt stared back at her. “Yep. You know how they say that if you do stuff with your non-dominant hand, it creates new neuropathways or something—”
“She means neural pathways,” Marge cut in.
Libby shot her a finger gun. “Yeah, that. Anyway, I’m trying it this way. I figure it’s got to be doing something to my brain.”
He smirked. “I’m sure it is.”
Libby muttered under her breath, “I walked right into that one.”
“Look, the reason I’m here,” Jackson said, an official edge to his voice, “is because we received several calls about a small fire at the RV resort.”
“That’s awful,” Libby said.
Marge gasped appropriately. “Was anyone hurt?”
Jackson stared at her before slowly responding. “No, thankfully. It was just a small one. Thing is, it was in front of Brent’s trailer. And his wife called in about a prowler seen moments after the blaze started.” His eyes flickered to the couch where Max snoozed. “The prowler had a dog too.”
“That’s a little weird, isn’t it?” Libby said. Marge nodded in agreement.
Jackson continued. “You know what Brent told me the second I stepped out of my car?”
“What?” both Libby and Marge asked, echoing each other.
“Told me some crazy story about you two running around the place, causing all sorts of mayhem.”
Libby felt “mayhem” was a bit of a stretch for a moderately-sized poop fire, a frightened worker, and the equivalent of a high-dose muscle relaxer.
“He also seemed to be under the influence of pretty powerful medication.”
“Well, there you go,” Marge said. “He probably started the fire himself.”
“He claimed he was drugged. His wife confirms he hadn’t taken anything and was behaving perfectly normal minutes before.” He crossed his arms, dividing his attention between the two of them. “We also have an eyewitness who said Brent was chasing two females. She claims Brent was the one terrorizing them and that they were in fear for their lives.”
Good ol’ Tiffany. She should probably send the gal one of those fruit bouquets tomorrow.
“So,” Jackson said, his voice winding down, “you two were here all night?”
Libby bit the inside of her cheek, not wanting to outright lie to him. “Well, we did go outside to walk the dog.” That much was true.
“And that’s it?”
“Yep,” Marge said. She obviously had no qualms about lying to him, so Libby let her.
The deputy’s shoulders slumped. “You know what? I know you’re lying, but at this point, I don’t really care. And I have no probable cause to take it further. All I can say is, whoever was behind this is lucky there weren’t security cameras around the place.”
Libby’s gut twisted. The thought had never occurred to her, and that made her feel more foolish. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to invest in a ski mask, after all.
“The department doesn’t have time for this. We have the murder of a treasured member of the community to solve, not to mention a missing fisherman, and now reports of two people running around, harassing citizens.” While he’d been speaking, his scar had been turning different colors.
Libby didn’t have to know him long or well to know he was furious. This became abundantly clear when he stomped towards the door. “Just do me a favor, will you? Until we find Bea’s killer, stay out of trouble? Is that so much to ask? Just go straight home from work. Maybe separate for a few days.” Without another word, he left.
Libby waited until his headlights faded before she spoke. “Well, now I feel kind of bad.”
Marge dropped onto the couch, exhausted. “If it helps us solve this murder, then it’ll have been worth it. Did you learn anything?”
The night had been so chaotic since curled under Brent’s trailer with Max that she hadn’t had a chance yet to consider their findings. She sagged deeper in the chair, the upside down magazine still in her hands. She tossed it onto the coffee table with a sigh.
“Brent’s not our guy.”
“Max was sure?” Marge scratched behind the canine’s ears, causing the dog to stir from a nap.
“Yep. Said Brent smelled like the outdoors but in a different way, whatever that means.”
The silence that followed was filled solely by the ticking clock on the mantle. Libby straightened in her chair. “Wait a minute. Actually, what he said was that Brent smelled like lavender, vanilla, and ginger.”
Marge watched her, waiting expectantly before finally saying, “And?”
“And I know someone else who smells like that. Someone else who wears perfume with those exact ingredients.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
LIBBY WHILED AWAY Tuesday morning as best she could before her lunch date with Marge where they would test her theory of Brent’s whereabouts the night of the murder.
In her lab, she swept the floor clean, which was no easy feat co
nsidering the corrugated metal of the shipping container. There were an alarmingly amount of glass shards from a broken graduated cylinder—or three—in the dustpan when she dumped it into the trash.
In the far corner on an empty table, she had yet to figure out the purpose of, she lit a candle to expunge the ever-present scent of metal and smoke. The vent hood and air purifier Arlene had installed seemed top-of-the-line and typically was enough, but the expansive room still held a touch of Eau de Mad-Scientist-Dear-God-We’re-All-Going-to-Die.
The still air filled with the crackling of pages as she browsed the ancient potion book. It wasn’t exactly ancient so much as very, very old, being passed down from potionist to potionist through the ages, beginning when alchemy was in vogue.
She had read the titles dozens of times already but didn’t understand the purpose of half of them. Like, Object Vivit. The paper for the recipe was yellowed and stained with something she hoped wasn’t blood. She had run the weedy, one-liner description written in Latin through an online translation generator and discovered that the potionized gas would animate any object.
It might be fun to recreate a scene from Toy Story, but other than that, she couldn’t see a reason to brew it. She paused over a hair coloring one, wondering if she could pull off green, glow-in-the-dark. Deciding she couldn’t, she flitted through several more before wavering on another.
Mood Paint: When applied in aerosol form to a painted surface, the potion forms a two-dimensional, atomic-scale, hexagonal lattice invisible to the naked eye. This sheet absorbs light and shifts the wavelength reflected back different to that of the paint underneath. Furthermore, the lattice shifts to match the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the occupant(s) nearby.
It sounded as if whoever had invented this recipe had been more scientifically inclined. Maybe that’s why Arlene’s potion book was rumored to be the best along the west coast.
If she understood the description correctly, what she had before her was a paint-version of a mood ring. She looked around. The lab’s steel and rust-dappled walls were looking rather drab.
Why not? She had time to kill, and she was trying to take her mind off of two unsolved murders. Her mother’s was ever-present in the back of her mind, a reminder that every day she awoke without her mother’s killer brought to justice was another day of failure. She knew her mother wouldn’t have seen it that way.
Also, Libby had made progress in recent weeks, if only marginally. Since her last conversation with Orchid, she had picked up her phone a dozen times to dial the detective on her mother’s case, but how would she explain learning what she knew? And furthermore, what good would that do?
Her mother had been in fear that night, prior to the killer’s arrival, so much so that she hid a knife in her bed. It still wasn’t concrete information that narrowed down the search.
She sighed, running her finger down the list of ingredients on the page. Everything on the list could be found in the overflowing, sagging shelves in the corner—except for chicken-of-the-woods, which she knew as Laetiporus. According to the scribbled notes, the collector harvesting the bracket fungus had to have their back to the sun on a clear day for potency.
What it didn’t say—but her education and personal experience told her—was that she needed to collect it while it was young to avoid adverse reactions. She wondered how many previous potionists had made the mistake of harvesting a more mature sample.
She recalled spotting the fungus in the woods between her and Deputy Jackson’s houses. Of course, she’d been running for her life the last time she’d been through there, so she could be mistaken.
Climbing the rungs of the ladder, she knocked on the manhole cover and waited while Ivy dragged it aside. She exited the lab into the stifling, fragrant air of the greenhouse. As she began to crunch over the gravel, one of Ivy’s vines snaked out and curled around her ankle, not unlike when Orchid begged for food.
“Hey, Ivy. Did you need something?” She checked the soil but found it damp, so that couldn’t be it.
Another leafy creeper stretched out and wrapped around a pair of clippers.
“Ah, you want that haircut.” She glanced wistfully at the door in the direction of the forest. “Alright, really quick.”
Grabbing the clippers, she chopped the vines, keeping the creepers longer in the middle near the ground so they still covered the entrance to her secret laboratory.
When she finished, she stepped back, the corners of her mouth turning down. It wasn’t a hack job, but if Edward Scissorhands had had one too many drinks and approached Ivy, this would be the result.
Since Ivy didn’t have any eyes or visual organs to speak of, Libby doubted the plant could see her handiwork, but she gave it a thumbs all the same. “You look great.”
The plant shivered in what she was taking to be a pleased reaction.
“I mean, really nice. I’ll have to introduce you to another plant…” The idea died on her tongue as the horticulturist in her realized how ridiculous this statement was. “Uh, I mean… I’ll introduce you to some nice soil where your nodes can root. Okay, that just sounds wrong.” She patted the plant. “I’ll be back. I need to go collect a thing for another thing.”
Grabbing an old plastic pot, she set out for the forest. The bracket fungus that loosely resembled fluffy pancakes grew on the trunks of trees, and she quickly located them. After collecting a decent amount with her back to the sun, she returned to her lab to begin brewing the potion.
While the base ingredients bubbled over a Bunsen burner beneath a fume hood, she mashed the Laetiporus she’d collected on a non-ventilated bench she used for prepping ingredients. The surface teemed with dried garlic skin, cricket legs, and splatters of mud from the Dead Sea.
After adding the fungus, she connected intricate tubing to the beaker. Waiting for the fumes to distill, she organized the storage shelves which had been immaculate when she had first discovered the lab. It proved challenging to keep the chemicals arranged by category, especially when she had to often consult a college textbook she’d found in the library.
Bottles were separated as either organic or inorganic. When finished, she stood back and admired her work, giving a satisfied nod—until her eyes landed on the box on the floor. It held the equipment she had taken into her kitchen that day Jasper blew up like a balloon. It was a mess, and her shelves, at the moment, appeared immaculate. She’d unpack it later.
Instead, she rearranged the jointed glassware. The cabinet of flammables and corrosives gave her anxiety, so she didn’t touch that section any more than she had to.
Now that the base ingredients’ vapors had been distilled, she used a digital scale to measure out equal amounts of burned soil, a single buckthorn berry, tree sap, along with four other odd ingredients. It wasn’t until she finished dropping these eclectic middle ingredients into the new beaker that she realized each was used as a derivative to make pigments in paints. She knew this from her brief, unsuccessful encounter with an art class in college.
When it came time to add the top ingredients, her finger pressed the page as she reread the only ingredient listed: glass shavings.
It made sense in that glass refracted light, but a prism would’ve been better. Glass shavings. An immediate question came to mind: how was she to shave glass?
She imagined taking her electric razor to the thing was what the writer of the recipe had had in mind. Grind it up? She was no expert potionist—but it seemed rather dangerous to be breathing in dust from glass.
Fortunately, a quick tour of the rows upon rows of ingredients revealed that Arlene had somehow solved the problem. Inside one glass bottle, fine, crystalline sand glimmered, like high-end glitter.
Libby admired it a moment before reading the hand-written warning label taped to the side. After retrieving a mask and goggles, she measured out the correct amount and stirred it into the liquid when it reached two-hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
It seemed to take forever
for the new potion to cool, but when it did, it shimmered and glowed a rainbow of colors, much like the Aurora Borealis, only in liquid form. She had to admit, it was the most beautiful potion she’d ever seen.
She bounced from foot to foot in anticipation before she poured the potion into a ginormous spray bottle. The moment the spray top was screwed on, she ran over to the nearest patch of bare wall, right beside the large periodic table poster.
She pulled the trigger. A glittery mist spread out and shimmered when it came in contact with the metal surface. Then it disappearing as if absorbed by a sponge.
After several more spritzes along the length of the wall, she stood back and admired her work.
She slumped against a table. The sections she’d sprayed looked just how one would expect, like damp patches of the same ugly metal.
Slowly, the gray and rust shifted, becoming red. A bright, retina-blinding Christmas red. The patches spread like a virus. To her horror, green lines branched out in a criss-cross pattern, not instead of the red, but on top of the red.
“No,” she whispered, staring at the horrible plaid pattern now taking over the entire wall. “No, no, no.”
How was this possible? Did she somehow have Christmas on her brain, and the potion was matching her mood?
She squeezed her eyes closed and attempted to conjure up the happiest thoughts she could muster. Chocolate donuts. Kittens. Hot tea on a cold day.
She cracked her eyes open and swore loudly. It hadn’t worked. So, she went the other direction and delved into her darkest thoughts, mostly those revolving around her mother’s death, then the more recent unpleasantness of losing Beatrice.
But no matter what she felt or thought, that insufferable plaid stared back at her. It had spread to all four walls and was rapidly taking over the floor and ceiling. It was like standing in the middle of a giant present.
She stomped back to the recipe book to figure out where she’d gone wrong. After another bout of cursing, she pinpointed her problem. She had thought the recipe had called for her to collect the chicken-of-the-woods with her back to the sun. However, what was actually written was to collect while backing to the sun which she now took to mean the fungus was to be collected while walking backward in the direction of the sun.