Trouble's Brewing (Stirring Up Trouble) (7 page)

“Zoe,” Mom’s voice penetrated my thoughts. She rolled down the window, and called my name again. “Earth to Zoe. Get in the car.”

I was standing next to the door on the passenger side with my head so far in the clouds I didn’t remember the walk to the car. I opened the door and climbed into the car, setting the bag of chalk at my feet. “Sorry.”

Four stores, two adorable outfits, and one big salad later, Mom and I pulled into the garage.

“Thank you for pretending to be patient while I shopped,” Mom said as she removed her packages from the car.

Hugging the bag of chalk to my chest, I followed her inside the house. “You’re welcome.”

“You almost pulled it off.”

“I tried.”

I stopped in the kitchen to unload the three boxes of ice cream chalk, normal chalk, and egg chalk. I would save the other chalk for later.

I needed to check the texture. I grabbed a knife and the cutting board. After covering the board with butcher paper, I chopped up an ice cream cone and scraped the powder into a small glass bowl. I switched out the paper and did the same with the other two kinds. Smiling, I stared down at the three glass bowls lined up on the counter. Time to test the texture. I stuck my hand in the ice cream cone bowl and felt the subtle graininess I was hoping to find. But as I continued to sift through the substance, I realized that most of the powder was soft. Too soft. The grittier portion probably came from the harder outside surface of the cone. I had hoped for more grit. The other two were even softer, with finer powder, and no graininess.

My instincts told me I needed a harder substance, but I didn’t know if hardening the chalk itself would work or if I needed something harder than chalk. I hoped that sleeping on it would give me some inspiration.

I fell asleep after two hours of lying in bed with a storm of ideas running through my mind. Exhausted from the excitement, I slept like a rock until my alarm woke me at seven.

I bolted out of bed, hoping Finn would come early so we could get a start. I wasn’t sure I had the ingredients right yet, but I did my best thinking while I was brewing. Potions, finding substitutions, I loved this stuff. Having Finn here though, well, I was afraid it would change things. Would I be able to focus, to brainstorm, with somebody watching? Not just somebody, but Dr. Finnegan. I’d started to get used to having the attention of the greatest potions master of all time. I wasn’t sure I could handle his scrutiny of my process.

Chapter Five

When I was showering, I realized that the chalk had a good chance of cross-contamination during the experiments due to the high likelihood of dust floating around the kitchen. I struggled to tamp down my knee-jerk reaction to freak, or worse to divide the kitchen into zones with plastic sheeting to prevent one chalk from contaminating that of another mixture. At this stage of the experiment such problems were not a real issue, although they were quick to balloon in import in my mind. No. This was my first go at the unicorn horn potion. I was doing little more than playing with the chalk at this point. I was using such large quantities of chalk anyway, that a few tiny specks, or even a hundred specks, I thought shuddering, would not impact the experiment. If I were dealing with smaller quantities or refining the substitution as I had with the toad slime right before Halloween, the contamination would render the research unusable. But I wasn’t, and I could handle the imperfections of today’s work.

I had three sidewalk chalks, and I was going to get a handle on only one thing today. Was I on the right track with the sidewalk chalk? I still thought the recipe might call for some sort of bone, and I wasn’t sure which bone would work best or be the best choice for me to try to make work.

Focus, Zoe. Right now, it’s about the chalk. Hardening it would be a priority. I had to find a way. Even if I used a one to one ratio of chalk and bone, I knew I needed the chalk mixture hardened. I knew this the way Anya’s mother knew that the chicken at The Tea Room had a touch of lemon peel in the seasoning. I had no idea what was in that chicken dish, but I had the same kind of instincts about my potion substitutions. The ideas just came to me, and the good ones felt right. I couldn’t describe it, but I could certainly do it.

I wasn’t sure who had discovered margarine as a substitution for dead man’s toe, or how witches had managed to handle the toes of dead men for potions in the preceding centuries. The whole thing about dead man’s toe was kind of weird. There was no biography of the potion master who had found it. No one even knew his name or where he lived or how it had come to him. Maybe he was like me. He wanted to help people and cure disease and didn’t want the attention or fame. Of course, I had no idea how he’d managed to convince the Council and the hundreds of people who must have known his identity to keep it a secret. For all I knew, it could have been Finn who’d done it.

The mere thought of Finn being even more impressive than I already thought he was nearly sent me running to hide under the bed. Surely, he hadn’t found the margarine substitution. If he had, his anonymity had to make him the most noble person I’d ever met. Had he done that for humankind? Had he found the substitution and kept his role in the discovery from everyone? If so, would he tell me? Would he share his deepest secret if I proved myself worthy? If I found the substitute for unicorn horn?

He might. Maybe the toad slime hadn’t been enough for him. Maybe he wanted to see more from me.

If Dr. Finnegan had discovered the margarine, wouldn’t he have continued his research? That had happened a long time ago. Decades. And nothing since. Well, not nothing. He’d done a lot of work in the field, taught, published scholarly texts and made breakthroughs in many areas, including environment disaster aversion. But could he have turned his back on the chance for finding a better way to brew potions using unicorn horn, toad slime, and eye of newt? I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to stop. I wasn’t sure I would even want to stop.

After dressing in comfy jeans and a tee shirt, I went downstairs to see if Mom was up. She had said she needed a lot of time to work on her next design. As long as she stayed out of the kitchen, we’d be fine.

I found my mother, perched on her favorite kitchen stool, with her colored pencils and sketchpad, a ruler, a color wheel and some fabric spread out over the kitchen island. The smell of brewing coffee filled the air, and I could see that my mother had almost finished her first cup of the day.

“Good morning, sweetie,” she said, not looking up from her sketch until she finished the last few strokes of her idea.

“You’re up early,” I replied, and yanked open the door to the fridge. I withdrew the orange juice and set it on the counter.

“I couldn’t get back to sleep. I meant to sleep in. Since you and Dr. Finnegan are going to get started on the unicorn horn today, I knew you wouldn’t need me for anything. Then I started thinking about the playroom I’m working on, and I couldn’t resist grabbing my drawing pad and getting some ideas down on paper.”

After pouring myself a glass of the juice, I replaced the carton in the fridge and walked over to sit opposite Mom. “Mom, can I ask you something?”

“Oh, Zoe, I’m going to move all this to the dining room table when he gets here. You don’t have to worry.”

“No, I mean, thanks. But that isn’t it. I think I might need to add bone to the chalk.”

“Bone?”

“Yeah. Like animal bone.”

“Not unicorn bone?”

“That would kind of defeat the purpose.”

“Yeah, I guess it would.”

“Chicken doesn’t sound right. Maybe something from a cow. What other bones could we get?”

She cocked her head to one side as she considered my question. Then she said, “Fish, pig, lamb, probably deer, small animals like squirrel, rabbit, turtle, certainly possum, possibly horse, turkey, duck, any rodent but that’s not much bone per animal.”

Fish bones would splinter. The turkey and duck weren’t likely to be much different from chicken bone. Pig, cow, and horse sounded more likely.

“Okay. Thanks. You kind of know how to cook, right?”

Mom just gave me the glare.

“I didn’t mean to offend you. I know you can cook. I love your lasagna.”

“Can we skip ahead to the part where you needed to know something about cooking?”

“Um, yeah. If you are trying to make something harder, how do you do it?”

“I let you help.”

“No, not that kind of harder. Harder like,” I knocked on the counter, “that.”

“I guess you might try egg whites… or a sugar glaze.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“I’ll think about it for a while.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

I ate some cereal, helped move my mother’s stuff into the other room, and got set up for Dr. Finnegan.

Dr. Finnegan arrived exactly ten minutes early with his new, navy backpack hanging from his shoulder. Today, he wore running shorts and a Nike T-shirt. My tutor had gone uber casual today.

“Good morning, Zoe,” he said as he walked past me to the kitchen.

“Morning,” I answered. I followed him to the kitchen, unable to stop myself from glancing at his pale naked legs as he walked ahead of me. Dressed like this, he could have been my age. He looked like any hot guy from my school.

Dr. Finnegan removed his backpack from his back and carefully placed it on the counter. Then he moved it until it was squarely in front of him, and with more care than anyone had ever before shown a backpack, he unzipped the largest compartment and removed a large notebook. Not so much like a hot guy from my school after all.

“So, my dear. Where do we start the search for the elusive unicorn horn substitution?”

I jumped up and fetched the three glass bowls from last night.

“Some sort of pastel powder,” he said.

“Sidewalk chalk.”

“Chalk designed for drawing on sidewalks?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Finnegan frowned.

“Not what you expected?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “I would have thought the search might begin with another type of horn. Rhinoceros for example.”

“I think the substitution probably can be found by starting with an animal horn as a base. I don’t want to spend all this time and have the ingredients be expensive and hard to find. I have a good feeling about this approach. It may not work, but I feel like I’m close with the chalk.”

“An inexpensive and readily attainable ingredient would certainly be the ideal,” Dr. Finnegan said. “I wonder though, if you can explain your good feeling. How did you arrive at the sidewalk chalk?”

“I wanted something that seemed the right texture. I want something gritty, something hard that breaks down into smaller bits.” I told him about my theory that I may need bone as well.

“What will your initial testing involve?”

“I’m going to do a series of basic tests using the chalk and three cat’s meows. Once I have documented any reactions, I’ll work on hardening the chalk itself. Then I’ll go to the bone mixture. I’ll repeat the basic testing to see if I am getting anywhere.”

“And what responses will you consider to be positive?”

“The function of the potion of course. And then any color change, movement, change in consistency. Any sort of reaction by the mixture will mean something.”

“You did this with the toad slime experimentation?”

“Yes.”

“And you nosed your way through it? Trial and error and a sense of feeling like something might work?”

“Yes. Pretty much.”

“All right then. Can I assume you have an ample supply of cat’s meow?”

“I have some. I need to order more.”

“Thankfully cat’s meow is affordable.”

I removed the plastic wrap from the first bowl of powdered chalk. “I thought the first potion I would brew is the anti-radiation potion. It’s pretty simple, even though it’s expensive. I’m going to brew the real one first with the actual unicorn horn. Then I’m going to use the substitution ingredients to see if it reacts in any way like the real potion does. I’ll look at the change in the cauldron in order to see if I made any progress.”

“You won’t approach a radioactive site will you?”

“Oh no. One of the online Witch’s boards has a request out for the potion for a cleanup in North Carolina. I was going to give the potion to a friend who will deliver it there.”

“Solid thinking as always.”

“If you’ll measure the cornstarch and the yeast, I’ll start on the other ingredients.”

“How big of a batch are we making?”

“A gallon.”

Dr. Finnegan pulled up the potion recipe on his iPad. I had printed mine out already, so I consulted the paper. For the comparison potion, I wanted to be precise in the mixing. First, I needed it to work for the radiation clean-up, and second, I knew that the potion had been extensively tested and that this particular mixture had the maximum effect. When I got to my experimentation with the substitution ingredients, I’d carefully document what I did, but I would go by instinct in the amounts.

We had the potion mixed and simmering in the cauldron in minutes. This particular potion had to cook for twenty minutes. While it was cooking, I got three cans of cat’s meow. Witches had found that these were best packaged in the little cans used for cat food. They were the perfect size for the meow, and the meow was not able to escape.

As the radiation potion cooked, it flashed from purple to green to pink. The mixture then reduced to half its size, my cue that it was ready. I removed it from the heat, because this could only be packaged in glass, and only when cool.

Flashes of color plus the reduction. It was something to go on. Of course, I could come close to a completely wrong potion and think I was on the right trail. But in science, and in magic, one learned something even from heading down the wrong path.

At the last second, I decided to add four egg whites to the chalk, brown it in a frying pan, and then add the chalk and egg mixture to the cauldron. Getting the cat’s meows in was going to be tricky, but I’d used them a couple of hundred times.