Chapter 21
Ms. Carter sets us up in the den and brings a tray nobody touches — cups of juice, a loaf of bread, and one saucer of cream, because Englebert came, of course, because Englebert insisted. He’d argued it out with me in the kitchen while I was still trying to find my keys.
He’s on the arm of the sofa now with his feet tucked, saying nothing. Ms. Carter, I realize, thinks this is about the play. She put out the good napkins and asked whether we’d like the lamp for reading, then turned it on before anyone answered.
Skye comes down and looks to Annabel first, then to me, and then, inevitably, notices the little bottle on the table. She stops on the second-to-last stair.
“Where did you find that?”
“Under a porch,” Englebert says. “A raccoon took it out of your tote.”
She comes down and sits on the ottoman.
“Skye,” Annabel says. “I know what’s in it.”
“Okay,” Skye says nervously.
“I need you to tell me the rest anyway.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Skye says, to the carpet. “It’s just… I don’t know. Things felt off, and I was afraid to lose him, so I did some research and found this website—”
“Glamoury?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t hard to find. Just an easy web search. And it’s got this whole quiz. What are you looking for. And there’s a section for—”
“Devotion,” Annabel cuts in. “I checked it out the other day.”
“Devotion. Yeah. It’s not even in like, a scary part of the site. It’s between the hair thickener and the confidence one. It was forty-one dollars. There’s free shipping over fifty, so you buy something else you don’t need to get the free shipping. I got a night cream I’ve never opened.”
“How much were you giving him?” Annabel asks. “And how long has this been going on?”
“Since March, maybe. I was giving him four drops every day in his morning juice.” She’s talking quickly.
“The bottle says two to four for maintenance. I did four because I figured… I figured he’s a big guy, you know?
He’s, like, a lot of person, and two seemed like it wouldn’t do anything.
” She shrugs. “I kind of didn’t think it was real.
Half of me thought it was just, like, rose water and a scam and I was doing something pathetic but harmless.
Like a horoscope or burning sage or whatever. ”
“And the other half of you?” Annabel asks.
“I don’t know. I was skeptical, but figured I’d try it.
I checked the reviews,” she says. “There were, like, four hundred reviews. Women writing paragraphs about their husbands suddenly treating them so much better than they were before. People talking about how they managed to win over crushes they’ve been pursuing for years. ”
“You were doing this every morning?” I ask.
“Yeah. Since we got here, I’d dose them in the car because his mom is always in the kitchen.”
“Why, though? What made you think you needed a heart philter when you were already together?”
“I don’t know. I was afraid. He was hesitant about moving in together, and I feel like he just thinks of me as… a little kid, I guess. I got afraid he’d leave me for someone more grown up. More worldly. I mean, you’ve seen the way he looks at Pru.”
“I have.”
“He does it in front of me. He tells all these stories, acts like it’s charming. Everyone thinks it’s charming. And everybody has known her since she was born and I’m some new girl, some dumb young thing.”
“To be fair, I don’t think anyone thinks it’s charming,” I say.
Englebert hasn’t moved.
Annabel has her hands folded in her lap. “Tell me about what happened at that rehearsal. The night that he fell, I mean,” she says.
“That week was bad,” Skye says, picking at a thread on the ottoman.
“The article came out and everybody looked at him different, and even though it was like, a bad thing, he loved it. He was glad to finally be in the news again. And he kept doting on Pru. And I just kept getting stuck in my head and I did the math on my life and like. I’m twenty-four, I’m living with him in his mother’s house, I don’t have a job here, everyone I know is so far away, and…
I don’t know. He’s all I have going for me. ”
“So you increased the dose?” I say.
“I stopped counting.” She says it plainly. “Only for a day or two. I just tipped it in. I don’t know how much. Not too much.” She looks at Annabel. “And then he collapsed and I knew it was my fault. That’s why I kept asking you so many questions. I needed to know if I’d broken him permanently.”
“You didn’t,” Annabel says. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I wasn’t asking because I was worried I’d get caught. I’ve wanted to get caught, almost. I’ve been sitting up there telling him what I did. I tell him every night. I keep telling him I’m going to fix it.”
“Skye,” Annabel says. “It isn’t your fault. Not completely. A secret heart philter is a bad thing to do to a person, but it also wouldn’t do this much damage. Not on its own. Not matter how much you pour in.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was taking other things. Other potions.”
“His vitamins,” Skye says.
“Do you know what they were?”
“I know they weren’t vitamins. I mean, he calls them vitamins and I let him but I know he’s lying about it.
He takes an anti-aging one, for sure, and a skin one, and there’s another one at night that he takes in the bathroom with the door shut.
I think it’s a hair thing. There’s probably others. I don’t know.”
“Where are they?” I ask. “Do you have the bottles?”
“I have them boxed up in my closet. I took every bottle in the house. Everything I could find, at least.” She’s halfway to the stairs. “Because… because I thought if anyone tested anything they’d find mine, so I grabbed all of it—”
“I understand,” Annabel says. “It’s okay.”
“You can fix him? If you have all the bottles, I mean?”
“It means I can start. I can’t purge what I can’t name, though. Go get bottles.”
* * *
Skyre empties what she’s collected out onto the coffee table —eleven bottles, a drugstore pill organizer with actual vitamins inside, a few eye droppers, and a padded envelope with a return address in Nevada.
Annabel goes through them one at a time, sorting them.
There’s one row of the ones she identifies as being from Glamoury, one row for the others.
“That’s a voice tonic. That’s the skin one, and it’s not Glamoury.
That’s home-brewed, from somebody’s kitchen.
That’s — oh, wow, Damien.” She holds a squat square bottle up to the window.
“This is a youth tonic and it’s a good one.
Expensive. He found someone good for this one. How long has he been on this one?”
“He takes that one every day,” Skye says. “As long as I’ve known him. That one’s been in his life longer than I have.”
“So, they’re all different sellers?” I say.
“For the most part,” she says, setting the last bottle down. “And none of them, technically, did anything wrong. Every one of them dosed him for a clean system.”
“The catalog seller most certainly did,” Englebert says. “Marigold, you will draft a complaint tonight.”
“What?”
“You’ll draft a report to the Council, of course. Unlicensed commercial distribution of a heart philter, over the internet, is absurd.” His tail moves once. “We didn’t escape Salem for the magical arts to become a subscription model.”
* * *
There’s one more thing left to address.
“Skye,” I say. “The article. The Daytime Dish.”
“What about it?”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Everybody’s asked me that. Everybody. Everyone thinks it was me. That I was worried about Vivian and that I leaked the story so that they’d stay away from each other, or something. I don’t know.”
“And it wasn’t you?”
“No. Why would I do that? I don’t have any problem with Vivian.
I know there’s nothing there. She’s married — to a woman — and she’s like, fifty-something.
” She looks at the little bottle on the table.
“It was Pru I was worried about. He follows her around and she’s like the only person in the world who isn’t impressed with him and it feels like he likes that. ”
“I wouldn’t say she’s the only person who isn’t impressed with him,” I say.
“I could name quite a few,” Englebert says. “Quite a few in this room, in fact.”
“The photos, though,” I say. “They were great photos. Whoever leaked the story was media savvy, to say the least. You’re the most media savvy person around.”
“I take pictures for Instagram,” Skye says. “That’s not the same as knowing how to talk to a magazine.”
“It’s closer than anyone else in Duskboro gets.”
“It wasn’t me who sent it. I swear,” she insists again. “I’ll take a truth serum, if you want me to. I swear it wasn’t me.”
“Are truth serums a thing?” I ask.
“They are, and they’re quite unpleasant,” Annabel says.
“I hardly think that’d be necessary,” Englebert says, lifting his chin. “She’s proven herself honest so far. No sane person would volunteer for a truth serum if they aren’t, in fact, telling the truth.”
* * *
We leave soon after. Annabel takes the bottles, prepared to head back to her shop to start working on a remedy. I can tell she’s already started brewing in her head.
Skye stops us at the door.
“What will happen to me?” she asks. “Am I going to get in trouble?”
“Not with any of us,” I say. “Maybe with Damien.”
Annabel shifts her bag on her shoulder. “When he wakes up, you need to tell him what you did. He needs to hear it from you. Not from me, or from Mari, or from his mother, or from the town.”
“What if he doesn’t want to hear it?”
“Then he doesn’t want to hear it,” Annabel says. “You still say it.”
Skye holds onto the door frame with both hands.
“He’s going to get out of that bed and go on that stage,” she says. “He’ll wake up, and he’ll do the play, and he’ll be good, and everybody will forget about all of this by curtain.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“That’s what I love about him,” Skye says, staring out into the lawn.