Chapter 8
The first thing I see when I pull up to Annabel’s shop is the raccoon on the window ledge.
Bandit is stretched out along the brick sill below the display window, tail hanging off the edge. He’s asleep in the direct sun with his mouth slightly open.
“How uncouth,” Englebert says.
“What?” I ask. “He’s just napping.”
“He’s loitering, as always. Just horizontally this time.”
The bell above the door announces me as I carry the first box in.
Adelaide is on a stool at the workbench on the apothecary side of the shop with a mortar and pestle, wearing an apron that has been rolled at the waist twice and is still too long. She lights up when she sees me.
“Are those the goblets?”
“Some of them,” I say.
“Ms. Annabel said I can help.”
Annabel comes through from the back hallway drying her hands on her own apron. She’s showered and changed since I saw her this morning, but the weight of the night is still on her, clear from the slouch of her shoulders.
“How many got washed already?”
“Most of them.” I set the box on the bench. “Dana feels terrible about it.”
“She shouldn’t. She didn’t know.” She lifts out the top goblet, wrapped in its newspaper. “We’ll check out the washed ones first, then. Scrubbed residue fades much more quickly. The unwashed ones will last longer.”
I bring the rest of the boxes in. On my third trip, Englebert follows me as far as the doorway, where he sits down on the welcome mat. Behind him, through the glass, Bandit has woken up. He rolls over, sees the activity inside, and presses his face to the window.
“Good morning, Bandit!” Addie waves.
“What’s going on in there? Are we having breakfast?” Bandit’s voice comes through the window, propped open a few inches to let in the summer breeze.
“We’re investigating some goblets,” Addie says.
“Goblets full of food?”
“It’s evidence, you dolt,” Englebert says.
“Why does he get to come inside and I don’t?”
“You know why, Bandit,” Annabel says, without looking up. “Don’t play the fool.”
“He’s banned,” Addie tells me with a somber nod. She’s clearly rehearsed her neutrality on this point.
“Banned?” I raise an eyebrow.
“Until the weight comes back,” Annabel says, unwrapping goblets and setting them in a row. “I have a set of brass scale weights. They belonged to my grandmother. Two weeks ago the smallest one disappeared.”
“We don’t know for sure it was him,” Addie argues.
“I don’t know anyone else with a penchant for shiny objects and a documented history of thievery.”
“I didn’t take it,” Bandit says through the gap.
“Then it will turn up.”
“Things go missing all the time,” Bandit says.
“Of course they do,” Englebert says. “When one plays host to burglars.”
I unpack while they argue. Dana numbered the base of every goblet with a strip of masking tape.
Folded into the top of the first box, she left a diagram of the banquet table, every place marked with a number and a name.
A note in the corner says that any unnumbered cups were spares, not set at the table.
Annabel studies the map. “I want to hire her,” she says.
“Get in line.”
Annabel sets the map where both of us can see it, pulls her stool up to the bench, and picks up the first goblet.
Her method isn’t what I expected. I think part of me was braced for candles, or handwaving, or at least some sort of chant. Instead, she holds the cup in both hands, closes her eyes, brings it to her nose, and breathes in slowly.
“The rim tells you what went in last,” she says.
“The bowl tells you what’s been in before.
The base tells you about the hands, about the intent behind the magic.
” She sets the cup down and opens her eyes.
“Number six. There’s been a sleep draught in this cup.
Valerian base, decent work.” She turns the cup over and reads the tape.
“But it’s old. Whoever lent this cup to the theater dosed a nightcap in it, sometime before last summer. ”
“You can smell a sleep draught from a year ago?”
“It’s not smelling, really. Not quite,” she says, handing the cup to Addie. “Shelf by the window. That’ll be the done pile. Mari, next.”
I hand her number eleven, and we find a rhythm. I unwrap and pass, she reads, Addie ferries and keeps the log. Annabel dictates, Addie writes, tongue between her teeth, in pencil, in a composition book, in letters that started too large that have to shrink to fit as she goes along.
The problem becomes clear within the first few cups.
“Number three. A cold remedy. Elderberry and pine, maybe twenty years back, and under that, something older I can’t pull apart.
” Cup down, next cup. “Number nineteen. A blessing of some kind, the kind you’d say over a toast. Faded almost to nothing.
And a cordial, and some cough syrup, I think.
The kind from the drug store, which is definitely not my area of expertise.
” Next. “Twenty-two. Oh, this one’s been busy.
” She holds it out to me. “Do you get that?”
I smell it. It smells like a metal cup.
“There are at least five different workings in that cup, but the newest one is older than we are.” She takes it back and looks down the row of wrapped shapes still waiting.
“That’s the trouble, I guess. We’re in Duskboro.
Half of these goblets have been in witch families for generations.
Everybody in this town has, at some point, drunk a potion out of a goblet, and the goblets remember all of it. ”
“How can you tell what’s new and what’s old?”
“Newer remnants are louder,” she says. “Old residue is like… faded wallpaper. New residue is like a fresh coat of paint.”
We work through the boxes cup by cup, and the log fills up with a detailed history of Duskboro’s potion consumption patterns. More cold remedies, more sleep draughts. A courage tonic. There’s one cup that makes Annabel pull back and laugh through her nose.
“What?”
“Thirty-four. Somebody’s great-grandmother took a love potion.” She holds it up to my nose before I can decline. Under the metal, there’s a hint of sweetness gone slightly wrong, and beneath that, a taste in the back of my throat like old blood.
“That’s what love smells like?”
“That’s what a heart philter smells like. Rose, honey, and copper. They all share those ingredients, no matter who brews them. It’s one of the first smells I teach, because it’s so distinctive.” She passes the cup to Addie. “Here. You try.”
Addie closes her eyes the way Annabel does and breathes at the rim.
“It smells like flowers that are also pennies.”
“That’s exactly it. If you ever smell that on a cup, or on a person, you come tell me, because nobody has any business giving anyone else a heart philter, ever.”
“Why would they?”
“To make somebody love them.”
Addie thinks about this while she carries the cup to the shelf. “Why would anyone want that?” she says. “You’d know it wasn’t real love. You’d know it was just the potion making them do it.”
“You’d think that would stop people,” Annabel says. “Next.”
Englebert has migrated from the mat to the top of a book cart. Bandit has given up on the argument and gone back to sleep.
The bell rings and a customer comes in. She wants to know if a certain salve is gluten-free, and ends up leaving with a tin and some pressed flowers.
I unwrap number fourteen and check Dana’s map. 14 — D. CARTER. It’s a wide pewter cup with a dented lip. Damien drank the toast out of it just before he collapsed.
Annabel reads it the way she’s read every other cup.
“Well,” she says.
“Well what?”
“Well… nothing.” She sets it down and looks at it.
“There’s nothing there. It’s muddled, same as the rest. This cup’s been around, like all of them, but there is nothing new in it.
Even after it was washed, if a fresh dose of anything had gone into this cup last night, or any time recently, I’d be able to tell.
” She turns the cup slowly by the stem. “Whatever tipped him over didn’t come out of this goblet. ”
“But he drank the toast and then went down instantly.”
“I believe you. But the dose wasn’t in the cup, which means it was already in him when he raised it. The banquet was the last straw, maybe. The excitement or the exertion or something. But whatever it was that took him out was consumed before he ever got to that table.”
“Should we keep checking?” I ask. “Maybe he drank from the wrong goblet.”
“We’ll keep checking,” she nods.
The unwashed cups come out sticky. The corn syrup has set into a red-brown varnish exactly the way Dana said it would, but Annabel reads straight through it. “Sugar is just sugar,” she says. “It doesn’t hide anything.”
There’s nothing of note, at least for a while.
“These are clean,” Annabel reports, and Addie writes it down. “Clean, clean, clean.”
We get to the bottom of the box, where there’s one last cup — Lady Macbeth’s cup. Annabel doesn’t get past the rim. Her eyes open wide.
“There’s something here,” she says. “A fresh working. It went in on top of the drink, or with it.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she says, slowly. “I can tell you what it isn’t, though.
It isn’t a heart philter. It isn’t a sleep draught.
It definitely isn’t anything in my inventory.
It’s bitter. Sort of resinous. And the base feels wrong, somehow.
Every potion I know starts from water, wine, or honey.
This started from something… different.”
“That’s Ms. Pru’s cup,” Addie says. “Number nine is Pru.”
“Did she drink?” I ask. “At the toast. She raised the cup, but did she actually drink?”
“I wasn’t there, remember?”
“I was there and I don’t know. Everyone was watching Damien.”
My notes from that night are in my bag and I know without checking that they say nothing about whether Lady Macbeth took a drink.
“They could’ve been switched at the table. Whoever did the prop blocking could’ve made a mistake.”
“But everyone knows Pru gets the big cup,” Addie says.
“People make mistakes,” Annabel says.
“But that would mean whoever dosed the cup would’ve had to know that it would be in the wrong place. That Damien would drink out of it instead of his own.”
“They could’ve done it after the stage was already set,” Annabel says.
“Marigold,” Englebert says. “My word. We can return to this later. I think it is perhaps more pressing at the moment that we check on Prudence.
I pick up my phone and call Pru. She picks up and starts talking before I can.
“If this is about Englebert’s rehearsal schedule, the answer is—”
“Pru,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Why,” she says, “would I not be okay?”