Any coffins or bodies that had been interred down here had been removed, and I was looking at an alchemist’s laboratory. Even though I’d never seen one before, I immediately recognized what it was. A gas stove sat in the middle, and there were shelves with beakers, mortars and pestles, jars of all kinds of strange-looking ingredients. But more extraordinary was the woman muttering in the corner.
“Where is it? What have you done with it? Must be here.”
Even from the back, I recognized her. “Tilda?”
She swung around. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were wild.
She looked at all of us, then her gaze focused in on Sylvia. “Why aren’t you dead? You should be dead.”
I could feel Sylvia holding her natural fury in check. I didn’t know how much time we had till she blew. But I certainly hoped enough time to figure out exactly what was going on here.
I asked, “Why should she be dead?”
“Because I put enough arsenic in that preparation you bought from Karmen to kill an elephant.”
The preparation that was meant for me.
She was admitting it? “You killed Karmen. Why?”
She laughed, a strange, brittle laugh. “Look at me. I’m old and frumpy. I have worked for that witch for twelve years, and she never aged a day while I grew lined and wrinkled. I begged her for her secret, but she claimed it was in her skin creams and I must be using them wrong. Did she think I was a fool?”
Too bad Karmen didn’t figure out her assistant was crazy.
“Oh, I suspected sorcery. I suspected witchcraft. But it wasn’t until she came”—and she pointed at Sylvia here—“and I heard them whispering that I finally understood what was going on. She was an alchemist. And she had the secret elixir of life. That’s what she was doing. She had made the elixir of life, and she wouldn’t share it with me.” She made a sound like a shriek. “Did she think I stayed for the paltry wages? I wanted youth. I wanted another chance at the life I’d wasted.”
Sylvia’s eyes were beginning to flash, and I saw Rafe put a gentle hand on her wrist. He knew me well enough to know that I was pretty good at getting people to talk. I was young and unassuming. And I had a way of sounding like I was genuinely interested. Well, I was genuinely interested. Why on earth would this woman have killed her boss? But I was beginning to see why.
“So she wouldn’t share her secret of eternal youth and beauty with you?” I asked.
“All she had for me was a bad wage and her contempt. So after your friend here offered a huge sum for a piece of her philosopher’s stone, I knew the source of her youth. All I had to do was find it.”
“But I don’t understand. Was Karmen’s recipe bad? Or did you add the poison?”
“I did it, fool. She was too crafty to let me see where she kept her elixir of life. But she came with that box and, as she always did, got me to do her dirty work. She said to wrap it up nicely and package it and you’d be by to pick it up.” Here she pointed at Sylvia.
“When she was out, I went snooping through her house. I went through everything. And then I found her key. The key to her secret laboratory. But the stone wasn’t there. The poison was, though. Arsenic. So I added a liberal dose to the powder before I wrapped it up.”
“Why didn’t you just keep that stone for yourself?” Sylvia asked. I’d been wondering the same thing. It was the logical thing to do.
Her eyes flashed. “Because she’d have known I took it. Besides, I didn’t just want enough for myself. What’s the point of living forever if you’ve got no money? I could make a fortune selling youth to others rich enough to pay my price.”
Sylvia had settled down now and was calmly listening.
“I knew it was here, you see. I knew her stone had to be here and her recipe to make more. But she grew suspicious of me. I probably asked too many questions. I could feel her watching me all the time. I needed to search her cottage and search the grounds. I had to find the stone and the laboratory that I knew was here, and the recipes.”
She banged her fist against the stone wall. “I didn’t grow careless. She tricked me. Telling me she was going out, even driving away. I resumed my search, and she caught me in her study, going through her papers. She fired me. Me. After all I’d done for her.”
She still seemed stunned that Karmen hadn’t wanted to keep employing an assistant who’d paw through her personal papers when she wasn’t home.
“I left, pretending to be sorry. I even returned her keys, but I had another set. It was easy enough to let myself into her cottage when she was out and put arsenic in her special tea.”
I remembered that special tea that we’d drunk that day. I swallowed hard.
“Then I waited. She always had her special tea every day at three o’clock. So I made sure I was here around that time. Once she was dead, I knew I’d have the place to myself and I could search at my leisure. I carried on working so no one would suspect me. No one knew Karmen had fired me.” Now she glared at me and Rafe. “Innocent, hard-working Tilda. Then you two arrived, pushing your way in. Interfering, meddling bride. And you brought the police before I was ready for them.”
I didn’t have a clue what to say, so kept my mouth shut.
She didn’t seem to care. She went on. “But they soon left, after stomping through her house and things
