Chapter 18 #2
He’s been sitting on the bleacher shelf through all of this, letting the moment ripen. Now he rises, descends, and crosses the floor to Dorcas, and sits, and looks up at her from the height of her apron hem.
“Dorcas Logan,” he says. “You acted, I believe, from love. Misguided, unlicensed, chemically presumptuous love, but love. This tribunal” —he means himself— “notes it. It further notes that intent is the concern of the law, and the law, as ever, is not what governs this building. What governs this building is the play. And you, madam, introduced an unvetted substance into a production of the Scottish play, nightly, in secret, during a plague of vanishings, beneath a working curse, and told no one.”
“The parking lot,” Dorcas says. She’s been to enough of these to skip the question mark.
“On principle,” Englebert says.
Dorcas takes off her apron, folds it once, and hands it to Hannah. She walks up the center aisle in no hurry whatsoever. Outside, she turns three times, at the approximate speed of a rotisserie chicken.
The whole company is in the lobby with its collective nose against the glass. Well, the whole company aside from Moonbeam, who did not come to watch the ritual because, as she’ll explain shortly, she was “holding space for the room” and Emma, who wasn’t about to be distracted from her stakeout.
Per Emma’s report, Moonbeam drifted to the props table, stopped at the brooch, looked at it for a moment with her head tilted, then she picked it up in both hands and set it on the east windowsill, in the rectangle of parking-lot floodlight.
As the company pours back into the room, Moonbeam turns from the windowsill with her hands still cupped and takes in the crowd without a flicker of guilt.
“Oh, good,” she says. “You’re all here. I want to talk about the props table. Everything on it is depleted.”
It comes out over the next few minutes under Emma’s questioning.
Moonbeam, of course, has never taken anything out of the building.
She would never. But she has, for a while now, when an object on that table ‘asks’ been moving things to the windowsill to recharge and returning them by end of night.
The brooch asked loudly, she explains. “Rhinestones are hungrier than real stones,” she says. “They know what they are.”
“The dagger,” Emma says, pencil ready. “Did you move the dagger?”
“The wooden one? No. It’s like, the least depleted object in this building.” She looks around at the crowd. “I would know. I write these things down.”
She opens the notes app on her phone, where she does indeed have a log, with dates.
Emma checks it against the ‘VANISHINGS’ page.
Car keys. A hair pin. Two of Ms. Pelham’s stitch markers went to the window sill.
They’re still there. Moonbeam forgot to return them.
“They barely hold any energy anyway. I only did it as a courtesy.”
The dagger has no entry. Annabel’s brass weight, of course, is on Emma’s list, but not Moonbeam’s. It wasn’t in the building. She never saw it.
“I’d like to hold a circle,” Moonbeam announces.
Moonbeam apologizes to the company for moving objects without consent.
Emma, invited to apologize for the sting, declines on procedural grounds — “It was a controlled operation with official sign-off” — and Pru backs her, stating something about entrapment doctrine.
Moonbeam accepts this “with openness.” Ms. Pelham asks whether anyone has considered that the curse could be moving things through people.
“Two confessions in one season,” Englebert says, at the close of the circle. “A quarantined beverage. An exonerated mystic with superior record-keeping. A constitutional lecture. And at the end of all of it, our suspect pool has not thinned. It has fattened, Marigold.”
“I know.”
“Anyone in this town could have bought what felled our Macbeth. The evidence no longer points at a hand. It points to a catalog, with any number of buyers.”
“I know.”
“Very well,” he says. “Tomorrow we obtain Glamoury’s customer records.”
“I’m not so sure it works that way.”
“I’m sure we can pull some strings.”
“We’ll see, Englebert.”
* * *
Hannah stays late to check the castle wall and I stay because Englebert is holding a post-rehearsal debrief with Vivian in the dressing room and I’m his ride. The gym empties out around us. Dana kills the stage lights on her way through and leaves us the work lights.
Hannah walks the wall with her palm flat against the plywood, listening.
“Still standing,” I say.
“Still standing.” She stops at the arch and crouches at Lily’s magic stone. “You know, I tried to paint over this twice.”
“Tried?”
“The first time I ran out of time. The second time, I got the brush wet and then Dana needed me for the light rig and by the time I came back I’d decided I liked it.
” She stands up and dusts her hands on her jeans.
“The wall hasn’t leaned a quarter inch since the day we cut the door.
I’m not saying it’s the stone. But I am saying I’m not painting over it a week before we open. ”
“No reason to tempt fate.”
“Can I say a thing?” Hannah asks, in the tone she uses when she has already decided to say the thing.
“Historically I can’t stop you.”
“You’ve been here for months and you’re still telling people you’re house-sitting.” She racks a chair. “You have a magazine column about this town. You have a byline on the refrigerator of every third house on this street. You drive a cat to rehearsal six nights a week.”
“And?”
“I’m not pushing,” she says. “I’m making an observation.”
“I keep waiting to feel like I decided it,” I say. “Boston I decided. I picked the school, I picked the job, I picked the apartment. This just all just accumulated. There’s a life here, and I don’t remember choosing it. Some part of me keeps insisting that if I didn’t choose it, it doesn’t count.”
“That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, and I was there for eleventh grade.”
“Thank you.”
“Nobody chooses a life on purpose. I didn’t choose to be a single mother with a truck full of lumber. Annabel didn’t choose whatever she left in Providence. You think Gabe chose to be the funeral guy? Life shows up and then you decide to keep it.”
From the dressing room hallway comes Englebert’s voice informing Vivian that the porter “cannot be permitted to improvise a knock.”
“Your dependent is ready,” Hannah says.
We walk out through Hannah’s arch instead of around the wall, simply because it’s there. Hannah taps the green stone with her boot on the way through, twice, the way you’d knock on wood.