Chapter 11
Pru arrives with a briefcase, sits down in her usual chair, and pulls out a legal pad.
“You have your pad. I have my pad,” I say. “This is now a two-pad investigation.”
“Mine’s for billing.” She leans back. “If I’m going to spend my afternoon reconstructing the night somebody may or may not have tried to poison me, I want a record of the hours.”
“Who, exactly, are you billing?”
“Whoever did it. Civil suit. I’ve already drafted the complaint in my head. It’s very good.”
Hannah comes in through the back with a six-pack. Gabe comes in behind her. Englebert is already installed on the director’s chair.
“Let the record show—” he says.
“There is no record yet,” Pru says. “I haven’t dated the page.”
She dates the page.
“Let the record show,” Englebert begins again, “that we convene to answer one question. On the night of our first dress rehearsal, a fresh working entered Lady Macbeth’s goblet.
We know it was not in Macbeth’s goblet, but yet Macbeth fell anyway.
We must find an explanation of how both of those things are true at once. ”
“That’s the whole problem,” Hannah says, opening a bottle on the edge of the table something my mother has repeatedly asked her not to do over the years. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
I put my notepad flat in the middle of the table so everyone can read it. I’ve been building a timeline from my rehearsal notes and Emma’s log.
“Here’s what we know for sure. Dana mixed the drinks in the Gatorade cooler in the kitchen, alone. She wheeled it out and ladled every cup herself, at the props table, before the cups went to the stage.”
“So if the dose went in at the cooler,” Gabe says, “everyone at the banquet goes down, not one.”
“So it must’ve happened at the props table.”
“The props table is off stage, half in the dark once the show’s running,” Hannah says. “Everyone uses it. Everything lives on that table. My drill lives on it. Half the cast leans on it between entrances.”
“Typically, when we look for suspects,” I say. “We’re looking for opportunity, motive, and means.”
“But everyone had the opportunity,” says Pru.
“And everyone has the means,” Hannah says. “Anyone in Duskboro can find somewhere to buy a potion. Half of them can brew potions themselves.”
“So that leaves us with motive.”
“And who, pray tell, has motive?” Englebert asks.
“Dana,” I say.
“You’re not serious.”
“You never know. The article humiliated her in front of the whole town. It named her wife and Damien. Maybe she believed it. Maybe it was true. If anybody wanted to hurt Damien, it would be her.”
“She washed the goblets,” Gabe says. “The morning after. Before anyone asked her to.”
“Dana gets everything done before anyone asks her to.”
“She is the most conscientious stage manager in New England, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t scrubbing away a crime.”
“Okay, sure, maybe she has motive against Damien. But why would she poison Pru’s cup?”
“Exactly,” Pru says, “I can’t build her a motive for that. I’ve never done anything to Dana. I babysat her Jack Russell once.”
“Everyone has done something to everyone in this town,” Englebert says. “It’s how we entertain ourselves.”
“She was the one to set the stage,” I say. “She could’ve switched the goblets on purpose, to throw off the trail.”
“That’s a possibility,” Hannah says. “Good instinct.”
“She is the investigator here,” Gabe says.
“I’m not convinced,” Pru says. “Who else do we have?”
“Tiffany.” I don’t have to explain this one, but I do it anyway. “She’s Pru’s understudy. She’s told me several times, unprompted, that ‘things happen’ to people in this play.”
“She also has a mouth,” Hannah says. “Tiffany’s been announcing her grievances at full volume to anyone who will listen since she could talk. Would a person about to do a crime all but tell you she’s about to do the crime?”
“Sometimes that’s exactly who does the crime,” Pru says. “In my professional experience, people love to incriminate themselves. Regularly. Under oath.”
“But Annabel didn’t sense whatever was in your cup in her reading of Damien,” I say. “Even if Tiffany dosed your cup, she didn’t put Damien on the floor.”
“Then either she’s not our poisoner,” Gabe says, “or she’s a poisoner, and there’s another one.”
“There’s a thought,” Englebert says. “We have been assuming one villain because there was one body on my stage, but the evidence has been telling us two stories from the start. The working in Prudence’s cup did not fell Damien.
The thing that felled Damien was never in a cup at all, at least not one of our cups.
There are different weapons, different methods, and I would stake my whiskers on different hands, and we keep trying to fold them into one. ”
Pu draws a line down the middle of her page and writes a heading on each side.
“Okay. Let’s try that theory out. We have two crimes.
Crime one, somebody dosed my cup at the props table during the run, for reasons that are presumably about the play, because I can’t think of anything else in my life that anyone would care about beside the play.
Crime two, somebody has been feeding Damien potions for days or weeks, somewhere that isn’t the theater, and something finally set him over the edge. ”
“Or he’s been feeding himself,” Gabe says. “Annabel said that fits too. A man his age, in his business, buying a little help from multiple sources.”
“His ‘vitamins’,” I say, with air quotes.
“Which brings us to Skye,” Pru says, and looks at me.
“Hm,” I say. “She has motive against you, I suppose. But not Damien. He’s chased you around in front of her. I heard Tiffany pour poison in her ear about it. If a twenty-something wanted her problem to be out of the picture—”
“Then crime one is Skye,” Hannah says slowly, “and crime two is still open.”
“Or crime one is Tiffany and Skye is nothing but a girl with bad taste in men. I can build it either way, and that’s the problem. Maybe we do have different hands, but every idea we have is ambidextrous.”
“Then we need facts, not ideas,” Pru says. “What would settle it?”
“Evidence,” I say. “We need to find whatever Damien’s actually been taking. We need to find his ‘vitamin’ bottles. Annabel could read them in a minute.”
“They’re likely at home, with him, and Skye is holding his hand around the clock,” Gabe says, “in front of his mother. If she’s crime two, she’s guarding the evidence, and if she’s innocent, she’s a grieving kid you’d be accusing at her boyfriend’s sickbed.”
“Annabel checks on him twice a day,” Hannah says. “She’s already in the house.”
“I’m not asking Annabel to search a patient’s girlfriend’s bag. She’d say no, and she’d be right to. We’ll find another way. I’m doing interviews for the blog before rehearsal tomorrow. Maybe I’ll uncover something.”
Englebert stands, stretches, and resettles.
“Marigold will interview. Prudence will drink nothing she hasn’t poured herself.
Gabriel will learn Act Three. And I… I will watch from the wings, when I’m able.
When I’m not on stage. I am small. I am easily ignored when sitting still.
It is one advantage I have that all of you lack. ”
“You’ve never sat still for an hour in your life,” I say. “And I wouldn’t exactly call you small.”
“I sat for the entirety of Nicholas Nickleby. Eight and a half hours. I wept twice and moved never.”
“Nobody can confirm that.”
“You will just have to believe me.”
* * *
The first cast member through the lobby doors is Moonbeam, an hour early, because she likes to ‘acclimate to the room.’
She’s delighted to be interviewed. She’s been waiting to be interviewed. She settles onto the yoga mat she’s spread in the aisle, crosses her legs, and closes her eyes.
“First Witch,” I say. “How did you find the role?”
“I didn’t find it. It found me.” Her eyes stay closed. “I’d been doing a lot of work on my throat chakra this year, and then a play arrives that’s entirely about speaking things into being. It can’t just be a coincidence. The universe is doing casting.”
“Well,” I say. “Englebert did the casting, mostly.”
“Englebert is one of the universe’s instruments.” She opens one eye. “You should tell him that. He should sit with it.”
“Walk me through your process,” I say. “The cauldron scene.”
“Okay, so, the text gives you the ingredients, right? Eye of newt, toe of frog. And my first instinct was, this is dark, I don’t want to put this energy into the room.
So I did some journaling, and what I realized is…
It’s just a recipe. The witches are cooking.
We’re making something, while everything else is about destroying.
Everything else is stabbing. We’re in the kitchen.
” Both eyes are open now. “The witches are a collective.”
I write that down, because it’s going in the blog word for word.
“Do you believe the production is cursed?”
“I think the building is holding a lot right now,” she says, after a pause.
“Grief. Ambition. A lot of cortisol. That has to go somewhere. But cursed?” She shakes her head.
“A curse comes from outside. Whatever’s happening here lives here.
” She rolls up her mat and stands. “Do you want to do a group stretch before you do your next interview? You hold tension in your jaw. It’s very loud. ”
“I’m good,” I say.
“Your jaw isn’t,” Moonbeam says, and wanders off toward the stage, leaving me alone in the aisle.
* * *
Tiffany is my next interview.
“Is this being recorded?”
“It’s being handwritten.”
“Good. Recordings can be edited.” She smooths her skirt. “Ask me anything.”
“What drew you to the role?”
“I auditioned for Lady Macbeth,” she says.
“But the witches are honestly the better part, if you understand the play, which most people don’t.
The witches run Scotland. They’re the only ones who know how everything ends.
Everyone on that stage is scrambling around making plans, and we’re standing in the fog watching them do exactly what we said they’d do.
” She recrosses her legs. “I relate to that. Professionally. You’d be amazed what I know by Thursday that this town doesn’t figure out until Sunday. ”
“I thought you weren’t a seer,” I say. “Your family aren’t psychics.”
“No, not magically knowing. From the salon. Duh. People tell their hairdresser things they don’t tell their lawyer.” A nod across the gym, toward the wings, where Pru is running lines with her back to us. “Some people should keep that in mind.”
“How do you prepare? Walk me through a rehearsal day.”
“I open the salon at nine. I close at five. I eat dinner standing up, I’m here on time, and I run my track and hers, every night, both, because that’s what a professional does.”
She’s warming up now. This is her aria.
“You can put in the blog that the Third Witch knows the sleepwalking scene cold. Every line, every move. ‘Out, damned spot.’ All of it. I could go on tonight.”
“Hopefully that won’t be necessary.”
“Hopefully,” she says. “But this play doesn’t care what we hope. That’s the whole point of it, actually. People think Macbeth is about ambition, but it’s really about how the person everyone overlooked was right the whole time.”
“I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”
“It’s open to interpretation. That’s what makes it art.” She stands. “Was that everything? I have to go get ready. Some of us don’t get a private dressing room.”
“Nobody has a private dressing room. It’s a storage closet with a curtain.”
“It’s a storage closet with a curtain that Prudence gets first,” Tiffany says, and goes to wait her turn for it.
Well then.
I got a few usable quotes and one rather alarming reading of Shakespeare, but what really seems to matter to Tiffany, though, is that she wants everyone to know she’s ready.
She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen.
Either she’s the least discreet poisoner in the history of crime, or she’s just a standard understudy, yearning for the spotlight from the wings.
Both fit. Everything fits. That’s the problem.
* * *
When he’s not on stage, Englebert installs himself on the shelf of the folded bleachers and becomes furniture. His eyes stay slitted. His tail doesn’t move. When Dana calls it, he descends from the bleachers and crosses to my chair with the somberness of a soldier returning from the front.
“Report?” I say.
“No one tampered with anything on my watch. No one lingered. Dorcas dropped a muffin and served it anyway, but I will keep this secret with me for the sake of group morale.”
Across the gym, Ms. Pelham is going through her tote bag at increasing speed, taking things out and putting them back. Hannah asks her what she’s looking for.
“My stitch markers,” Ms. Pelham says. “The little rings. They were in the side pocket at intermission. How do things keep walking out of this building?”
Emma has her clipboard out before Ms. Pelham finishes the sentence.