Elixir
Authors: Ruth Vincent
For Matt, my parents, Rebecka, and for anyone who’s ever thought,
I’d like to write a book someday.
CONTENTS
T
he floater glided in front of my eyes—but I knew what it really was—and more importantly what it meant: a fairy was watching me. “Please leave me alone,” I whispered.
But the floater did not leave me alone. It glided maddeningly out of reach in the corner of my eye. “Look, I can’t see you. And I really can’t afford to be distracted right now. Will you please go away?”
I glanced quickly at the people seated around me, but no one seemed to have noticed my one-sided conversation. The lobby of the dingy office building on West 37
th
Street was so packed they had set up folding chairs in the hallway for the spillover. Everyone was in their early twenties like me: recent college grads. We sat rod-stiff in gray plastic chairs, clutching our resumes like life preservers, trying not to accidentally make eye contact with one another. Outside the dirty window I heard the groan of traffic, the wail of sirens, the nonstop noise of New York City, like the sounds of a battle raging softly in the distance. But inside the office we were all so silent I could hear my own ragged breathing.
The door opened. A man stood in the entryway, holding a clipboard. He was in his late fifties, heavyset, with big, bushy eyebrows. He did not smile. “Mabily Jones?” he called out in a gruff New York accent.
I scrambled to my feet, dropped my resume and blushed, stooping to pick it up. My sweaty palms had made dimples in the paper’s pristine fibers. I followed him into the room and he closed the door behind us.
He took a seat behind a mahogany desk, polished to such a high gleam I could see my reflection: pasty pale cheeks, snub nose, pixie-cut brown hair sticking up every which way—I tried to smooth it down with my fingers. The wool suit jacket I’d borrowed for the interview from my roommate and best friend, Eva, itched at my back.
The man extended his hand. “Chief Investigator Reggie Ruggiero,” he said, still not smiling. “You can call me Reggie.”
Reggie’s eyebrows resembled two gray, fuzzy caterpillars that moved when he talked. My nervousness was making me want to smile for no reason at all. I tried to suppress it. Reggie perused my resume. Every so often one of the caterpillars moved up or down. It was making me too nervous to look at him, so I stared out the window instead, watching the ghosts of steam rise up from the pipes on the roof below, and swiveling back and forth in my chair.
Please let this one work out,
I prayed silently. I was getting desperate. Yesterday, I’d applied for a job at Subway . . . and been turned away, because I didn’t have “two years of relevant sandwich-making experience.”
But this job could be a career! My heart thudded so hard in my chest I thought perhaps he could hear it. I couldn’t face another call to my parents—they were being so supportive, but it just made me feel more guilty.
And they didn’t even know the real reason I felt so guilty. . .
“So, Miss Jones,” said Reggie, frowning.
I stopped swiveling and sat bolt upright. Reggie had set down my resume, his caterpillar eyebrows furrowed.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, leaning back in his chair.
I paused, my mind whirring. I knew I was supposed to talk about my skills, my aptitude, my passion for this job etc., etc. . . . But all I could think was—
Well, Mr. Ruggiero, actually I’m a changeling. The Fairy Queen tricked me, and now I’m stuck in human form—so I might as well do some good while I’m here.
But you can’t say that in a job interview.
Instead, I stammered.
“Well, sir, I recently graduated from college, majoring in anthropology . . .”
Reggie snorted.
“Anthropology, huh? What kind of a job did you think you were going to get with a degree like that?”
“A job like this?” I offered.
His mouth twitched up into the barest hint of a smile.
“So tell me, why do you want to be a private investigator?”
I hesitated. There was a beat of silence between us, and I could hear the dull groan of the traffic outside.
I knew I could come up with some suave line that I thought Reggie wanted to hear. But what if I just told him the truth?
“I heard your firm helps find missing persons, sir,” I said. “I’d like to help bring missing kids home.”
“Well, that’s a very noble reason to get into this business.”
I couldn’t tell from his tone if he was being sarcastic or serious. I began to swivel in my chair again.
“There are a lot of good causes out there, Miss Jones.” Reggie surveyed me keenly. “Why missing kids?”
I hesitated, and then the words tumbled out my mouth before I could stop them.
“It’s personal, sir.”
Reggie’s furry eyebrow rose slightly. He was silent for a moment, but there was a kindness in his face, a softness, that I never could have imagined being there a moment before.
“Is there someone in your life, a family member or friend, who is a missing person?” he asked me.
It’s me who’s the missing person,
I thought. And then, a little voice in my head whispered guiltily,
and I made a little girl go missing. . .
But of course, I didn’t say that.
Instead I just nodded, swallowing hard.
Reggie didn’t press me to go further and I was glad for that. There was something very tactful about Reggie, even in his gruffness. He knew when to back off. It probably made him good at his job.
“Miss Jones, if you applied for this position because you want help finding someone . . .” Reggie started to say, but I interrupted him.
“Oh no, sir, it’s not about me.” I paused, weighing my words. “I guess you could say that case is closed.”
I let out a long exhale.
“I just figured, maybe I could help out other kids?”
Reggie eyed me.
“You do know this is going to be a pretty thankless job? Don’t get any ideas, like you’re going to be Nancy Drew or something. The sad fact of the matter is we don’t bring a lot of kids home. Sometimes you’ll get lucky. But most of the time you won’t. It’s hundreds of hours of waiting in parked cars outside apartment buildings, going through trash cans searching for receipts, spending months on leads that go nowhere for the rare kid you find, you know?”
He was testing me. But I wasn’t deterred.
“I’m very patient, sir.”
Reggie pushed his chair farther back. He fiddled with a coffee mug on his desk. It said “#1 Dad.”
“What makes you think you’re going to be good at this?”
“I’m good at observing people.” It was the truth—it was what I’d been sent to this world to do. “I never stop observing, listening, trying to find things out about people. Maybe I really am an anthropologist after all?”
Reggie gave me a long, scrutinizing look.
“Well, that will serve you well in this business,” he said slowly. Then his eyes narrowed. “You know what I’m offering right now is just an internship, a trial assignment, not a paid position. But if you do well, there’s the potential to be hired.”
I nodded. In the internship-heavy world of the recent college grad, pay had become a perk, like what benefits used to be. But I had come here expecting to pay my dues.
“What’s the trial assignment?”
“Well, funny that you should mention missing persons,” said Reggie, “because we’ve got one.”
He reached down into a file cabinet below his desk, rummaged around for a minute and then brought out a manila folder.
He opened it and I peered at the photographs inside.
The girl was about my age, maybe even younger. Her head was thrown back, laughing, and she was dressed in a sequined party dress. In another photograph, she was blowing a kiss at the camera, happy and carefree. The photo was clearly a selfie.
“Charlotte Mercado,” said Reggie. “Twenty-one years old. Been missing for over a month. The family filed a police report, of course, and the NYPD is still investigating. But the family was getting frustrated; they felt like the cops weren’t doing enough, so they hired us.”
I studied the photographs. There was something so haunting about looking into the eyes of a person and not knowing whether they were alive or dead.
“Her father just called me this morning saying we’re going to have to close our investigation soon; the family doesn’t have the funds to continue. I’d really like to find some information—something, anything—for her family, before we have to stop,” said Reggie. I could tell by his expression that, despite his gruff demeanor, he got invested in these kids’ cases.
He closed the folder and set it down on the desk.
“Now, not every missing-person case is nefarious,” he said, putting the folder back in its drawer. “An adult has the legal right to go missing. Sometimes people, for whatever reason, just want to disappear. But we have to rule out foul play. I did some interviews with family and friends, and they said she kept frequenting the same location in the last few weeks before she went missing. They gave me the address. I don’t think the NYPD made too much of this information, but I want to check it out.”
Reggie turned to his laptop. He hit one of the keys rapidly in succession.
“Load, you piece of . . .” he muttered under his breath. Then he turned back to me.
“It’s some kind of club in Brooklyn. But it’s not licensed with the city. Some sort of underground party. Now, we do know the name of the guy that runs it.” He opened a file. “All our interviews mentioned the same person.”
“Have you spoken with him?”
“No. That’s the problem.” Reggie sighed. “You see, I went down there. When I knocked on the door, this big guy I presumed was a bouncer or something answered. He wouldn’t let me in. Said I wasn’t on the invite list. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, draw attention to myself, you know? So I left.”
Reggie set his hands down on the desk, looking me squarely in the eye.
“So that’s where someone such as yourself would come in,” he said. “You see, me, I’m fifty-seven. All the people I saw come in and out of that door were about twenty, twenty-five. Young people, you know? If some old geezer like me tries to go in there, it’s definitely going to raise a red flag, if they even let me through the door. That’s when I realized I need an intern. For cases like this. Someone who can play the part of being young and hip. Someone who can pass as one of the regulars.”
My stomach did a little flip-flop. I didn’t think anyone would ever use the adjective “hip” to describe me. I was young. That was about all I had going for me.