In spite of her grief, Tilda had done a perfect job. The cloth bags were beautifully sewn, and the names embroidered on the front. I doubted I’d be giving my bridesmaids these gifts now, though. What if they were “accidentally” laced with arsenic too? I couldn’t take the chance. I wanted to keep Tilda talking for a few minutes while Rafe snooped around, so I asked her whether she’d be staying on.
“I think so. I hope so, but that depends on her husband. He inherits everything.”
“Her husband?” This was news. There’d been no trace of a man in Karmen’s home. “I had no idea she was married.”
“They haven’t been together for years. Patrick Herrick runs a crystal shop in town. I’ve asked him to think about keeping the business going. I could run it myself if I hired a helper. He said he’d think on it.”
I tried to keep my expression neutral, but Patrick Herrick could easily fit Violet’s description of the man who’d visited Karmen as they were leaving on the day she died. Perhaps, while we were here, we might pay Herrick’s Crystal a visit.
There was no sign of Rafe in the main room. He was in the kitchen studying one of the stenciled sayings. “These are interesting,” he said as we came into the kitchen. “Were they here in the old days at the pub?”
There was no way those stencils were that old, and if I knew it, he definitely knew it. He must have been trying to get some information out of Tilda. Obligingly, she walked closer to him.
“I don’t think so. I’ve always assumed that Karmen put them there. They’re in Latin, aren’t they? I don’t know what they mean. Never thought to ask Karmen.”
“Interesting,” he said again. And then looked at me. “Ready to go?”
I nodded, and we left.
I waited until we were driving away to ask, “Well? Did you find anything?”
“Only that saying stenciled on the wall.”
“My Latin’s a little rusty. What did it say?”
“Essentially, from the cygnet comes the swan.”
“Hardly a revelation. A cygnet’s a baby swan, right? And it grows into a swan?”
“It’s also associated with alchemy.”
Now that was interesting. “Really?”
“Yes. And that symbol that was beside the stenciled saying but down below a little bit. That’s the symbol for arsenic.” I remembered the symbol. It was a triangle with the sharp point facing down and a shape like the letter A without its crosspiece over top, and a tiny squiggle trailing off the right side of the open A. Who decorated their walls with symbols denoting a deadly poison?
Now I felt as though I’d dipped my feet into ice water. “Arsenic killed Karmen.”
“And arsenic almost killed you, if you’d taken that substance that was in the box with the runes.”
He didn’t need to remind me. “And the message on the box, ‘As above, so below,’ also refers to alchemy, right?”
“Yes.”
“But I don’t understand. Why would she have the alchemical symbol for arsenic on her wall?”
“Arsenic is a powerful symbol of alchemy itself. Arsenic in its raw state is a dull white color, but when heated, it changes color.”
“But still, it’s a strange thing to put on her wall.”
“There were a lot of strange things on her wall. I had a few minutes to study the various sayings while you two were busy. They all relate to alchemy in some way, but there are snippets of various ideas and concepts. She had quotes stretching from Isaac Newton to Carl Jung.”
“Do you think she just stenciled things that interested her? Maybe the arsenic symbol appealed to her visually.”
“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. Like all alchemists, I suspect Karmen was very secretive. Everything was in code.”
“And so you think if we could crack the code, we might figure out who killed her?”
“If we could crack the code, we might find her recipes.”
“Do you really need a recipe to turn lead into gold?” I asked it a bit sarcastically. That man did not need any more wealth.
He looked at me in surprise. “No. I want to stop that recipe from falling into the wrong hands.”
I shuddered at the idea of the wrong person pretty much having an endless supply of gold. They could seriously screw up international markets, build armies. I could think of a lot of things somebody with evil intent and a lot of money could do. I understood why he wanted to make sure we got there first. Except that I didn’t think she’d been turning out gold. “Rafe, I think she’d found the elixir of youth, not a way to make gold.”
He turned to look at me. “Yes. Exactly. Imagine such a formula in the possession of someone with evil intent.”
Like, for instance, her murderer.
“Maybe whoever killed Karmen already has what they were looking for.”
“It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Instinct. Some things I can’t explain, I just sense.”
I nodded. It was something I understood well and was only beginning to really listen to in my own life. I’d ignored that little voice of wisdom too many times, and now I was trying to treat it with the respect it deserved. And what was that little voice trying to tell me now? I closed my eyes and went back to that scene in the pub.
“Do you think Tilda knows anything?”
“Not to be rude, but one glimpse of Tilda’s aging complexion and I would say no.”
“Can we make a stop in town? I want to visit the crystal shop.” Then I told him what Tilda had shared, about Karmen being married to Patrick Herrick, who owned the shop. I couldn’t tell Rafe about the moonstone buttons with the tiny suns and moons carved into them, but they were symbols of alchemy too. Alchemy was suddenly everywhere.
“I think that could be the guy
