Chapter 19
Ihave a crime I can’t solve and a suspect pool that now includes anyone in Duskboro with a credit card, so in the morning, I circle back to something I am qualified to deal with.
I go back to the tabloid.
“The article,” Englebert says, from the passenger seat. He’s coming along, because he heard the word ‘interview’ and all but materialized in the car. “We settled the article ages ago. Malice. Local malice.”
“Sure. But we never solved it. Somebody handed a celebrity gossip site a story about a town that isn’t on most maps, and then we let it slide because there was a bigger issue to attend to.” I back out of the driveway. “Potions aren’t my beat. But leaks are.”
* * *
Mayor Blackwood receives me in his office at Town Hall and before I’ve finished saying the words ‘Daytime Dish’ he’s already misunderstood the entire purpose of my visit.
“The follow-up,” he says. “I wondered when someone would do a follow-up. Sit down. Coffee? No contaminations, I promise.”
“Mayor, I’m not writing—”
“Because I’ll tell you what I told Carol at the Reformer, who hasn’t returned my calls. That article was the best thing to happen to this town since the covered bridge was on that calendar.” He’s up now, walking to the window, gazing out onto Main Street.
“Was it accurate? No. Was it kind to Vivian? It was not. But Mari — thousands of people read that article. Thousands of people now know Duskboro exists. Are we on the record? You can quote me, if you’d like. Make sure you use my full name. Terrence Blackwood.”
And there it is. I came in with a list of questions, hoping to walk him gently toward a confession, but he disqualified himself before I could ask the first one.
The man is fully incapable of anonymity.
If Mayor Blackwood had tipped off a gossip site, the tip would have included his headshot, his office hours, and a paragraph about the Harvest Festival.
Whoever fed the Dish went to real trouble to stay invisible.
“The week the article ran. Did anyone ask you about Duskboro? Anyone from away. A reporter, a photographer, anybody sniffing around?”
He thinks about it, genuinely. “No. And I’d remember, because I’d have offered them the tour.” He sits back down. “You’re trying to find who did it? The leak?”
“I am.”
“Then when you do,” he says, “before anyone strings them up — ask them if they want to do a follow-up. Thousands of readers, Mari. Think of the tourism dollars.”
* * *
Tiffany is between clients, sweeping hair.
“No,” she says, before I’m through the door. “I didn’t do it.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re about to.”
“I’m here about the article.”
“Exactly,” she says. “It wasn’t me, and you know it wasn’t me. I confessed to the last crime. Voluntarily. Aside from Dorcas, I’m currently the only person in Duskboro with a verified track record of admitting to the things I actually did. My credit has never been better and I intend to spend it.”
She’s right, of course. There’s a lesson to be learned here about the local economy of shame, and I suspect Dorcas is already benefiting at the same exchange rate.
“Then let’s spend it,” I say. “You saw the article the second it posted. Did you notice anything?”
She thinks about it for a moment.
“The names,” she says, finally. “Every name in that article is spelled right. Oleander. Duskboro. They knew Vivian ran a gallery, they knew the show, they knew the schedule. I’ve been misquoted by the Deerfield Valley News about a bake sale.
Strangers get things wrong. That article was written by someone from here.
Or someone with very good notes.” She picks the broom back up.
“And the photo. Look at the photo. It’s perfectly framed.
It wasn’t shot by accident. Somebody composed it. ”
* * *
The Daytime Dish doesn’t list a newsroom number, but the article does have a byline — Kayla Rigsby — and it only takes me a few minutes to find her, because people who write for websites like the Dish always have a second, more hopeful website with their real clips and a contact form.
Her real clips are from a Hartford paper that went underwater three years ago.
She calls me back inside the hour, and the first thing she says is, “M.C. Wardwell. I’ve read your work.”
“Surprising,” I say.
“I taught one of your stories in a workshop. What’s a person like you doing calling a person like me?”
“Same thing that happened to you, I’d guess, a few years later and one state north.”
Mutual respect, established.
“Okay,” she says. “Ask away. What’s up?”
“The original tip, about the Damien Carter affair. I don’t expect a name. I’m just curious about the shape of it. Was it a phone call? An Instagram DM? A napkin?”
She laughs. “It was a package. Three photos, high-res, good light, well framed. Quotes ready to lift, pre-attributed. ‘Sources close to the production’ was theirs, not mine. There was a suggested headline. A bio paragraph.” I can hear her scrolling.
“It felt like a press kit. Publicist boilerplate, all that. It came from inside the talent’s own camp, I’d bet. ”
“What was in the bio?
“It was flattering. Broadway credits dressed up nice, the soap history.” A pause.
“You want to know the tell? The wife. The director’s wife barely figured.
If somebody local wanted to blow up that marriage, the wife is the story.
Whoever built the kit didn’t care about her at all.
They cared about him looking like a man worth fighting over. ”
I write it all down and thank her. She says to call her when I know who did it, off the record, and I say I will, and I mean it.
* * *
Conveniently, Annabel called from the Carter place shortly after we made it home, asking if I could bring her a satchel she’d accidentally left hanging on the porch railing, and I’m not one to say no to a helping out a friend… or to the opportunity to sneak around.
The Carter house is at the end of Quarry Road, a sprawling farmhouse with a lawn you could land a plane on. I’ve been inside once before, as a teenager for a graduation party thrown for Damien’s younger sister. The house hasn’t changed, as far as I can tell. Maybe the hedges are taller.
Ms. Carter greets me and lets me know that the banana bread is coming out warm in eight minutes. It would be a crime to leave before it’s sliced, she says. Somehow, I end up staying for for two hours.
While I wait, she gives me a tour.
One wall of the den is entirely Damien — framed headshots in chronological order, a Playbill under glass, and, on a bookshelf placed directly at eye level, there’s a row of VHS tapes with their labeled spines facing out.
BLAISE — DEATH #1 (the fall)
BLAISE — DEATH #2 (the explosion)
BLAISE — DEATH #3 (the twin)
“People say he died twice,” Ms. Carter says, pulling the third tape. “But he died three times. The show never came out and said the third one was really him, because of the twin storyline, but a mother knows her son’s work.”
She’s already kneeling at the VCR, which is astonishingly still connected. “Sit anywhere. I’ll show you. The fall is the best one, but the explosion has more production value.”
And thus, for a long stretch of my one wild and precious life, I watch Dr. Blaise Harlow die on daytime television three separate times while his mother narrates the craft of it.
“He came home to rest,” Ms. Carter says, during the explosion. “That’s what he told me. He was doing too much. So now he’s here, resting, between projects.” She watches her son get thrown backward through a breakaway window in 2003.
* * *
The bathroom I’m sent to is at the top of the stairs, second door. As I pass the first doorway, I hear Skye’s voice.
“—and it’s going to be okay. I’m going to fix it, okay? I promise. I’ll fix it.”
Fix it? Fix what, Skye? You don’t promise to fix something you didn’t break.
The problem is that there’s a lot broken in Damien’s life at the moment.
There’s his body, but there’s also his reputation.
Did Skye leak the tabloid story? Maybe she built the press kit, and then it blew up bigger and uglier than she planned, and now he’s unconscious and she’s rehearsing an apology for when he wakes up.
I’m so lost in this thought that I almost don’t notice the medicine cabinet is ajar, just slightly. It wouldn’t hurt to open it a little more. It’s already open. Right?
Inside, there’s not much of note. A standard medicine cabinet with all the typical things you’d expect, but there is a days-of-the-week caddy.
It’s empty, but not cleaned. Each little well has a sticky ring at the bottom where a bottle stood.
The rings come in three shapes: round, square, and narrow, each about the width of a nickel.
Monday and Wednesday are round. Tuesday has square.
Thursday, narrow. It’s a rotation. Somebody was running a schedule.
Are these his ‘vitamins’?
I close the cabinet, taking care to leave it exactly as far open as it was, and then wash my hands and head back downstairs.
* * *
The kitchen smells like banana bread, of course, but it looks like a juice bar. The refrigerator door is open and Annabel is standing in front of it with Skye. The top two shelves are green bottles.
“You can check all of them,” Skye is saying. “Please. I make them Sundays, for the whole week, he likes them cold. Check every one. I want you to.”
Annabel takes them one at a time. She’s unhurried about it. Even I can smell it, from a distance — kale, apple, ginger, wheatgrass.
“They’re clean,” Annabel says, on the last one. “Juice and nothing else.”
Skye exhales like she’s been holding it for weeks.
“Okay. Okay, good. Because I know what people say. That I was giving him something. In the juices. Because I made them, and I’m the girlfriend, and that’s the story, right?
It’s always the girlfriend. But there’s nothing in there.
You can tell people that. You’ll tell them? ”
“I’ll tell them what I found,” Annabel says.
Ms. Carter cuts the loaf. There’s a stretch of kitchen small talk during which I learn the juicer cost more than my first car.
“Can I ask you a work thing?” Skye asks, eventually. “About potions. Do they wear off on their own? Like… fully. If a person took something, and then just... stopped. Does it all go away eventually, or does some of it stay?”
“Depends on the potion,” Annabel says. “Most of them, the body will clear completely. Some leave a residue for a while. A few change things that don’t change back.”
“But his will clear? Whatever is in him? You said he’d burn it off.”
“I think he will.”
* * *
Annabel walks me out to the car, her satchel over her shoulder.
“Thanks for bringing the bag,” she says. “I needed the comparison sample in it. Tiffany’s bottle.”
“And?”
“It’s there. The Glamoury base. It’s obvious he’s been drinking from that catalog for a long time.”
“There’s a caddy in his bathroom with rings from three different bottles. On a schedule.”
“That would do it.” She shakes her head slowly. “He may genuinely have done this to himself.”
“Maybe that solves it then.”
“Maybe.”
“So what’s left?”
“What’s left is whatever that girl in there is hiding,” she says.”She’s carrying something. It’s obvious. And whatever it is, it’s heavy.”
“I think I might know,” I say, and I get in the car.