Chapter 18
Annabel is finally investigating the croak tonic, hoping to teach Addie to recognize a commercial potion, and she invited me along. She’d been putting it off, as she didn’t want to read it on a day she’d already read Damien or the goblets or anything else.
“It’s a palate thing,” she explained, when I asked. “You don’t do a wine tasting after a chili cook-off.”
She told me, for Addie’s benefit, to avoid any strong scents that may throw off the process, so I’ve showered with unscented soap and skipped my coffee. I’m now leaning against the end of the workbench and Addie is on her stool with her composition book open to a fresh page.
Bandit is on the window ledge outside, awake for once, watching through the glass.
“Is it poison?” he asks, through the gap.
“Sort of,” Addie says. “But not a deadly one.”
“Boring. Wake me if it’s deadly.”
Annabel holds the little bottle to the light. There’s a dried amber line at the bottom, and a label, printed in a swirly font:
CROAK NO MORE?
Glamoury. Look the Part.
“Look the part,” I read.
“Solid branding,” Annabel says. “The label’s the same on everything they sell, according to Tiffany.”
She uncorks it, closes her eyes, and brings it to her nose. Addie leans forward on the stool.
“Bitter. Resin. Horehound, maybe? And a synthetic aftertaste they’re using instead of blackthorn. Blackthorn is expensive.” She sets the bottle down. “And there it is. Underneath.”
“Underneath?”
“The base.” She turns the bottle slowly by the neck. “In the cup it was buried under wine and corn syrup and all the years of potions in there before that. Here it’s naked.”
“So what is it?”
“Glycerin, moonwater, and a preservative charm. It’s a base brewed to sit on a shelf.”
Addie’s pencil is going. Annabel waits for her to catch up, then picks the bottle back up and holds it out.
“This is a lesson, so both of you are going to learn. Every potion brewer has a base. It’s usually water, wine, or honey — that’s the tradition.
Mine is honey. Every single thing I make starts from it, which means every single thing I make carries it, at the bottom, under everything else.
A salve, a draught, a tincture, it doesn’t matter.
They’ve all got different tops, but the same floor.
If you know my honey, you can pick my work out of a crowded cup. ”
“It’s like handwriting,” Addie says.
“Like handwriting, sort of. And even bulk brewers have handwriting.” She taps the label. “I would bet everything Glamoury sells shares this base. Learn it once and you’ll know their work anywhere you meet it. Addie. Go.”
Addie takes the bottle in both hands, closes her eyes, and breathes at the rim. “Bitter on top. That’s the tonic part. And under it...” She frowns. “It smells like the inside of a new plastic bag. But sweet. And a little bit like rain that’s been in a bucket too long.”
“That’s the moonwater.” Annabel takes the bottle back and holds it out to me. “Mari.”
I smell it, because refusing would set a poor example for the apprentice. I get the bitterness. Under the bitterness I get… nothing.
“It smells like a bottle.”
“The bottom note is right at the—”
“It smells like a glass bottle that used to have something bitter in it.”
“Everybody’s instrument is different,” Annabel tells Addie, not unkindly.
Addie writes something in the composition book.
“The thing in Pru’s cup matches this, which we believed, and now we know. Tiffany’s story holds. Since I finally have their signature, tomorrow morning when I read Damien, I’ll know what I’m listening for. If his ‘vitamins’ came from that website, the base scent will be there, under the stew.”
“And if it is there?”
“Then our trouble came from a catalog. At least partly.” She sets the bottle in a drawer. “It won’t tell us who, but it will tell us what.”
On the shelf behind her, by the register, there’s a jar of honey with a ribbon and a tag on it. The tag says ‘Genie’.
“Did the last jar make it to Hemlock Hill?” Annabel asks, following my eyes.
“It did. She’s been rationing it like we’re in wartime.”
Annabel smiles, and before she can respond, Addie asks whether they can do the smell drill with the blindfold.
* * *
Emma calls a meeting before rehearsal, in the corner of the lobby by the trophy case.
“The dagger changed everything,” Emma says. She has the clipboard flipped to the ‘VANISHINGS’ page, which now has a second column. “We can’t just keep waiting around. We need to set bait.”
She’s pre-selected a rhinestone brooch from the costume room and left it on the props table.
“You want to run a sting?” Pru asks.
“A controlled operation.”
“With department property,” Dana says, with a nod. “The brooch is from Pirates of Penzance. It’s survived worse than a sting.”
Ms. Pelham, who has drifted into range with her knitting and absorbed the whole plan, has a better idea.
“Or,” she says, “at the end of rehearsal, we turn out everyone’s bags. Everyone, all at once, no warning. Whoever has my stitch markers, we’ll know in five minutes. I’ll go first. I have nothing in mine but wool and my pills.”
“No,” Pru says.
“It’s efficient.”
“You are proposing a general, suspicionless search of two dozen people’s personal effects, on no probable cause, conducted without any authority.
” Pru puts down her script. “This is a community production, and, while Duskboro might not be a typical town, we are still in America. If somebody wants to rummage through my bag, they can come back with a warrant, a subpoena, or a court order, and I will still make them wait in reception.”
“We do the brooch,” Dana rules, and that’s the end of it.
The brooch glitters under the stage lights. Emma takes up her post on the bleachers with a juice pouch and settles in for the long haul. She’s read about stakeouts, and she’s prepared.
* * *
Rehearsal itself goes almost suspiciously well. Gabe gets through with a detectable amount of wanting, which Englebert declares “a foundation.” Vivian calls the snack break halfway through, and she almost sounds confident about things.
The snack table, now separate from the props table, has Dorcas’s muffins, a tower of paper cups, and two coffee urns.
The big urn is regular. The small urn is decaf, labeled with a strip of masking tape.
It is beloved by the over-sixty contingent of the production, and also by Hannah, who says caffeine after five gives her nightmares.
Addie gets in line for hot cocoa. I’m three people back in the queue, so I have a clear view of the moment the apprentice goes still next to the decaf urn, leans toward the spout, and smells it.
She backs up two steps, finds me in the line, and says, quietly, “It’s in the coffee.”
“What’s in the coffee?”
“The floor. The bottom note. From this morning.” She points at the decaf urn. “The plastic-bag one. It’s in there.”
Ms. Pelham, mid-pour, looks down into her cup.
Hannah swoops in like a lifeguard and takes the cup out of Ms. Pelham’s hand in one fluid motion.
Two lords put down their muffins. Emma comes off the bleachers with a roll of blue painter’s tape from her mother’s toolbox already in hand, and by the time anyone else converges on the snack table, she’s taped over the decaf spout and is starting on a perimeter.
“Nobody touches the spout,” Emma announces. “It’s quarantined. If you drank decaf tonight, form a line by the piano.”
Nine people form a line by the piano, and they form it fast.
“It’s the curse,” Ms. Pelham says, with a rasp of satisfaction under the fear.
“Nobody said the name,” a lord protests, hoarse. “Nobody’s said it in days. We’ve been so careful—”
“I told you alL. It’s found another door,” Ms. Pelham says. “Curses do that.”
Vivian arrives, looking weary. “Talk to me.”
“Addie caught a potion signature in the decaf,” I say.
“A potion?” Vivian looks at the nine people by the piano, several of whom are checking their own pulses. “Is anyone in danger? That’s the only question I have tonight. Everything else can be a question for another day.
Dorcas clears her throat. “They’re fine,” she says. “Nobody’s in danger. It’s mine.”
The gymnasium lets out a collective breath.
“It’s a calming blend,” Dorcas says. “It’s lavender and chamomile and, I don’t know, whatever else. It’s from that website. Glamoury. I’ve put four drops in the coffee, every rehearsal, since the first night the fog machine went awry.”
She keeps her arms at her sides and addresses the room at large.
“I stand by the decision. You people were going to kill each other before the curse got the chance. I saw Ms. Pelham threaten a teenager over a folding chair. The Mayor and Jackie had words about parking that I would describe as un-Christian. Somebody — I won’t say who — cried in the supply closet over a wig. ”
“You drugged us,” says one of the lords.
“I seasoned you,” Dorcas says. “It’s a cheap bottle of flower water with a moon on the label.” She folds her arms. “Since then, has there been one single fight? There has not. Maybe it was the drops, or maybe it was people maturing. We’ll never know. That’s between me and God and the coffee urn.”
“Why only the decaf?”
“I put it in both most nights, but I’ve been running low. I figure the decaf drinkers are the problem population. The young ones aren’t getting into fights about chairs.”
Pru appears at my shoulder with her arms crossed.
“Everyone shops at this website,” she says. “We thought we could track our suspect that way. But Tiffany was right. Everyone shops there. Dorcas shops there. Dorcas, Mari. Dorcas is seventy years old and pays cash for everything.”
Vivian rubs her temples and issues rulings. The urn goes home with me tonight, to have Annabel double check. Dorcas will give me the bottle. The coffee service will henceforth operate under Dana’s supervision.
“So that’s it?” the lord demands. “She confesses and we all just—”
“It’s the second confession of the season,” Vivian says. “We have a process now.”
The company turns, in one motion, to Englebert.