Chapter 14 #2
Noises began emanating from the kitchen.
Arthur briefly wondered if he ought to intervene, but found he didn’t care.
If Salvatore was making a mess, well, it could be no worse than the one Arthur had made of things.
How would anyone trust him to investigate on their behalf ever again?
How would anyone trust him to make scones again, for that matter?
Perhaps he ought to pack it all in and go back to being a corporate cog.
Maybe Martha would hire him to help organize her files or something.
But then…no…he still didn’t understand QuickBooks.
After some amount of time passed—Arthur had no idea how much, because he couldn’t summon the strength to lift his hand to check his watch—Sal returned, accompanied by a sweet aroma of sugar and the sharp tang of blood on the air.
“I made you an anatomically correct heart-shaped pancake,” Sal said, in a gentle voice. “And I even put real blood in the center so it’ll gush out when you cut into it.”
Salvatore almost never cooked. He was practically allergic to spatulas. If Sal had put in the effort to use the stove, Arthur could put in the effort to sit up.
The pancake did indeed look like a human heart, a little dash of red leaking from the underside.
“It’s lovely, Sal.” Arthur leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Better eat it quick, before it gets soggy.”
Though his failures felt as heavy as the wards around the platinum pavilion after Ambrosia revoked their invitations, Arthur smiled a little, and ate the pancake.
“Did you use baking soda?” Arthur choked on the first bite, eyes watering with the effort not to gag. He recalled that Sal had made this dish for Nora during her stay here and wondered why she hadn’t run for the hills.
“Of course! I followed your recipe precisely!”
Arthur nodded with perhaps too much vigor. He knew the recipe said to add baking powder, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Sal his gorgeous concoction was utterly inedible.
“Is it any good?” Sal asked, a flicker of anxiety crossing his expression.
“Delicious,” Arthur lied. Perhaps he could send Sal off on an errand and dispose of the pancake in his absence. “I’m just absolutely parched.”
“Oh! Here!” Sal reached behind him and produced the half-drunk, slightly melted, electric-blue beverage in a to-go cup he’d swiped from an abandoned table at the Big Bad Brew after Brody refused to serve them.
Arthur tried to decline, but Sal pushed it toward him with a wistful sigh.
“Go on. It doesn’t match my outfit anyway. ”
The coroner’s office in Trident Falls was on the northern edge of what could only generously be called the downtown area.
The building was rather charming, with pale blue siding and landscaping overflowing with native shrubs and flowers.
A clean concrete path led up to the front door.
Nestled between two rhododendron bushes were a gaggle of lawn flamingos dressed in miniature Hawaiian shirts and sporting sunglasses.
Arthur and Sal had never visited Lore at her place of work before; Arthur had expected it to be somber and dreary, considering the function of the place, but he hadn’t taken into account the personality of the coroner herself.
As they placed their teal tandem bike in the small parking lot’s rack, Arthur paused.
“What’s wrong?” Sal asked. “Did I lose any of the potions?” He looked over his shoulder at the glittery red backpack shaped like a pair of lips, turning in a circle to get a better look like a dog chasing its own tail.
Inside were the bottles they’d stolen from the coven before Ambrosia kicked them out, all accounted for.
“No, it’s not that. I was just wondering how long Lore has been the coroner here. She looks so young, but she’s not human.”
“Awfully rude to ask an elected official their age,” Sal said wisely. “I bet Nora can tell us, when she’s not so busy with the Solstice Festival. Or we could always break into the records department for a bit of a sexy heist!”
“What makes it a sexy heist?” Arthur asked before he could think better of it.
“Oh, you know. The soundtrack…the ambience…the company…” He gave Arthur a dramatic wink as they approached the front door.
There was a decorative sign that read OPEN in a flowy font, surrounded by drawings of huckleberries on branches just like the ones that bloomed light pink in front of the office itself. A bell chimed when they entered.
Inside was a cozy lobby, though no one manned the reception desk. A few plush chairs sat arranged around a coffee table. Arthur hesitated, then strode toward the only other door in the room. Before he got there, Lore popped out.
“You got the goods?” she asked as though this were a covert drug deal rather than a planned meeting for (mostly) legal purposes.
“Sure do,” Sal said, patting his lip-shaped bag. It clinked softly.
“All right, let’s head down to where the magic happens.” Lore paused. “Not literally.”
From what Arthur had gathered, elves had a magic of sorts, though it wasn’t the same as fae magic or witch magic.
They didn’t make potions or curse swaths of undead.
What they did do was still a bit of a mystery to Arthur.
Lore had never been particularly forthcoming about it, and Arthur understood that she—if not elves as a whole—preferred to keep it private.
Through the door marked Employees Only, the cozy atmosphere gave way to a more formal, sterile design.
Lore led them down a set of stairs into a basement.
The air smelled faintly of formaldehyde and disinfectants, and it was chilly enough Arthur would have gotten goose bumps if he weren’t already perpetually cold.
Most of the basement level seemed to be the morgue, but there was a side room full of gadgets and machinery Arthur couldn’t begin to understand. He recognized some of the glassware and a Bunsen burner on the counter.
“Welcome to my lab!” Lore gestured grandly. “It’s nothing fancy. Most stuff I gotta send to a bigger place in Bend or Salem, but I can at least test for magic here.”
She rummaged through a drawer and produced a vial of what looked like litmus papers.
“Where shall I put our ill-gotten spoils?” Sal asked, lighting the Bunsen burner. Arthur quickly switched it off, before Lore turned back to face them.
“On the table there is fine.” She gestured to the empty surface as she pulled on gloves.
Sal arranged the vials in rainbow order.
Lore let out a whistle. “That’s more than I expected. Hey, you two wanna help me test them? It’ll go a lot faster that way.”
Arthur found himself quite curious about the process, so he readily agreed. Lore showed him what PPE he would need (only gloves and safety glasses), then offered the same to Sal.
“So sorry, I have a latex allergy,” Sal said.
“These are nitrile,” Lore replied.
“That one, too.” He raised a hand and began ticking off his fingers as he listed the others.
“Can’t do polyester, nylon, goatskin, deerskin…
Really any kind of gloves meant to protect the hands from manual labor.
I’m happy to supervise.” Sal perched on the edge of a counter, a satisfied gleam in his eyes.
Arthur recalled the many occasions he’d insisted on Sal’s help in the garden and how disastrous those had been. He didn’t bother anymore. Sal had quite competently weaponized his incompetence. “It will probably go faster with just the two of us,” Arthur said, pushing his safety glasses up his nose.
He was right, of course. Lore walked him through labeling each bottle and test strip—which turned out to be not litmus but enchanted paper she warned him not to touch with his bare skin—then gave him a pipette with which to withdraw a sample amount of liquid.
Sal might’ve found this sort of work tedious, but Arthur enjoyed the precision of it.
“So, how’s the investigation going?” Lore asked as they carefully dispensed potion onto their corresponding test strips.
Arthur paused, pipette hovering over a bottle. “Ah. Well.” He didn’t want to lie, but telling the truth would be embarrassing. It was one thing to admit his failures to Sal and the cobwebs in the rafters. Lore was another story entirely.
Sal came to his rescue. “Oh, it’s a riot. You’ll never guess what we discovered last night during an unsupervised visit to the yurt of Ambrosia Celestine herself!”
“What?” Lore asked eagerly, giving Sal her full attention.
“The fake psychic’s journal!” Sal clapped. “Isn’t it so scandalous? Ambrosia might be our killer.”
“I’m guessing this evidence hasn’t made its way to McMartin yet?” Lore raised an eyebrow at Arthur.
“Not yet.” Arthur focused very hard on getting a sample of the next potion.
“I wanted to read it more carefully before surrendering it.” Besides which, Arthur thought privately, he wasn’t sure he could trust McMartin to believe the truth of how they’d come to find the journal.
For all he knew, the sheriff would claim they’d had it the whole time and arrest Salvatore again.
“I don’t blame you one bit,” Lore said sharply, as if her own thoughts had followed a similar path to his. “If anyone asks, you never told me anything about a journal. Well, I might drop some hints for Stephanie so she knows you’re making headway.”
“How is she holding up?” Arthur asked. Now that he thought of it, he hadn’t seen Stephanie since the prisoner exchange at the sheriff’s department. Had she been at the festival peddling her wares since the incident, or had she relied on Lore and other friends to do it? He couldn’t recall.
“Oh, you know…” Lore trailed off, a faraway look in her paintball-splatter eyes. “She’s been in her garden a lot, which I guess is better than the alternative. I’m just worried this whole ordeal is going to make her even more of a shut-in.”
Arthur would have been happy to leave it at that. He wasn’t the most social butterfly himself, so he could respect when other people needed time to themselves. Sal had another notion.