Read Online Trouble's Brewing (Stirring Up Trouble) by Juli Alexander - Free Book Online

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