Chapter 24
The Community Center parking lot is full, so I park on the grass.
Englebert is up on his hind legs against the passenger window, surveying the lot.
Cars with New Hampshire plates, with Massachusetts plates.
There’s a charter van from Hemlock Hill idling in the fire lane while a driver unloads walkers one at a time.
“Look at this, Marigold,” Englebert says. “Look what we’ve made.”
The whole town is here, it seems, along with a decent slice of several other towns. Dorcas walks past our car with a sheet cake. Mayor Blackwood is stationed at the door, greeting everyone as they come in.
Emma is sitting at the card table in the lobby manning the cash box, her clipboard open to a fresh page titled ‘OPENING NIGHT – INCIDENTS.’ There’s nothing written under the heading.
“No incidents yet,” she reports, when I stop at the table.
“The night is young.”
“I know,” Emma says. She takes two dollars from a man buying a brownie slice and carefully counts his change.
Rupert Buchanan is just inside the doors, holding a program.
“You drove eight hours?” I say.
“Seven and a half,” he says. “And of course I did. Bert practically insisted on buying me a ticket.”
“Lucky,” I say. “I hear they’re a hot commodity.”
Backstage, Dana is running the deck. “Goblets are set. Cody, cue sheet. Ms. Pelham, that’s not your entrance, come away from the curtain.”
At the props table, Lily is on standby. She’s been given an official title — Blood Assistant — and it has gone directly to her head.
Dana allowed her to practice at the last dress rehearsal, where she stood at Hannah’s elbow with a paintbrush and a cup of corn syrup blood and applied gore to Jackie’s hairline with intense precision.
Hannah had told her to ration more carefully.
Lily’s rebuttal was that, quote, “he got stabbed a lot.”
“Remember, Lily. Don’t touch anything until it’s time,” Dana says, passing behind us without stopping.
“Blood Assistant is a supervised position,” Hannah says. “Heavily supervised.”
Tiffany is in the stage-left wing, in her full Third Witch costume. She’s turning the cape’s clasp over and over in her hands. Tonight, she once again has two jobs, and once again, the audience will only know about the smaller one.
Englebert crosses the wing to her.
“Mrs. Reagan,” he says.
“Maestro.”
“I have no notes for you. Your role tonight has no rehearsal process, no understudy, and will receive no applause.” He sits and looks up at her.
“Every production rests on people the house never sees. Tonight I have the privilege of being carried by one of them. Whatever happens on that stage, the finest performance in this building will be yours.”
“Stop,” Tiffany says. “You’re going to make me cry off my witch eyeliner.”
“That would be unprofessional.”
“Then quit talking and get in the cape.”
* * *
I find Pru in the storage-room-turned-dressing-room with her script open on her knees, in full costume, reading the sleepwalking scene one last time.
“You know it,” I say.
“I know I know it.” She doesn’t look up.
The crown sits on the costume trunk beside her on its stand, the band catching the light off the makeup mirror. Pru has done her own eyes tonight, dark and severe, and between the green gown and the pinned hair she looks like a medieval portrait.
“I have a message to deliver,” I say. “Two, actually. First one’s from Vivian. Ten minutes to places.”
“And the second?”
“The second is from your mother, technically.” I sit down. “Don’t worry about the play.’”
There’s a knock, and Emma’s head comes around the curtain.
“Pre-show report,” she says. “No incidents. Nobody’s said the name. I checked the decaf personally.” She produces from behind her clipboard a piece of paper folded into careful quarters. “Also Lily made you something and she said I had to deliver it before you got famous.”
Pru unfolds it. It’s a drawing in marker of a tall figure in a green triangle of a dress, yellow circle on her head, standing on a brown rectangle of a stage.
Around the stage there are dozens of small pink blobs, which I take to be the audience.
Every blob has its arms up. Lily has labeled it in enormous, tilting letters: ‘GOOD JOB, QUEEN.’
“Tell Lily,” Pro says, looking at the drawing.”Tell Lily the queen says thank you, and that this is going in my office, in a frame, next to my diplomas, where clients can see it.”
Emma nods, satisfied, and withdraws. Pru refolds the drawing along Lily’s creases and tucks it inside her script, and then she picks up the crown and turns to me.
“Well?” she says.
I take it out of her hands and set it on her head myself.
“Verdict?” she says.
“Genie called it,” I say. “Very slimming.”
“Places,” Dana calls from the hallway, “means you, Lady Macbeth.”
* * *
The house is nearly full when I slip out front to find my seat. As I’m sidestepping through my row, the doors swing open, and through them comes Ms. Carter, and Skye, and in between them, in a wheelchair borrowed from Hemlock Hill, a man in a bucket hat and enormous sunglasses.
They set up along the back wall. I drift over.
“Mari,” the man in the hat whispers. “You haven’t seen me.”
“You came in a wheelchair and you’re wearing sunglasses indoors. Everyone has seen you.”
“They’ve seen a mysterious man with an unknown disability.
Possibly a wounded veteran. Who is to say.
” He tips the sunglasses down and surveys the house.
“Look at it. Sold out. Standing room only. You know what fills a house like this in a town this size?” He taps the program against his knee.
“Press. Say what you want about that article. The article sold tickets.”
“Well, thanks,” I say. “But I can hardly take all the credit. I just wrote what I saw.”
“No, no. Not your article. The tabloid article.”
“Oh,” I say, taken aback. “That’s a strange way to think about your own scandal.”
“It’s the only way to talk about a scandal,” he says. “Ask anyone who’s had a good one.”
Skye tucks the blanket over his knees. She has her phone out, already filming the crowd, and she’s smiling. It seems like an actual smile.
At seven sharp, Vivian walks out in front of the curtain in her tallest heels, and the room quiets for her.
“A few short months ago, this was a basketball court,” she says. “It’s still a basketball court. If you look up, you’ll see the hoop. We ask that you not look up.” She pauses, waiting for laughter, and she actually gets it.
“Every board, every costume, every light — everything in this room was built, sewed, wired, or at the very least paid for by someone in this building. Someone who calls Duskboro home. So whatever happens in the next two and a half hours, we’ll always have that, and that’s something to be proud of.
” She smiles. “Thank you all for coming. Enjoy the Scottish play.”
The lights go down. The fog comes up.
Tonight, instead of emitting any strange sounds or clouds that envelop the front row, the fog machine produces a low silver creep, ankle-deep, that arrives when the witches need it and withdraws when they’re done.
Damien Carter walks out of the smoke.
I helped plan this. I stood in the salon when Tiffany agreed to it.
I watched the cobbled together run-through this afternoon.
I thought I was prepared, but then when Englebert-as-Damien-as-Macbeth comes downstage into the light and says “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” the hair goes up on my arms along with everybody else’s.
In the back row, the real Damien Carter watches his own face do the best work of his life. During the banquet scene, Skye takes his hand, and he lets her, and neither of them looks away from the stage.
Dana calls intermission and the house lights come up.
* * *
The lobby at intermission is a spectacle.
There’s a line for cookies and a longer line for the bathroom.
Mayor Blackwood is working the room in full costume.
Duncan has been dead since Act Two, which has freed the mayor up considerably.
He’s evidently elected to spend his afterlife at the concessions table in burgundy velvet, shaking hands.
“The robes stay on,” he’s explaining to a couple I don’t recognize. “The king dies, but the office endures.”
He spots me. “Mari! On the record: attendance figures like these vindicate everything I’ve said about this town’s potential as a regional arts destination. You may quote the late King of Scotland.”
Bert and Rupert are standing by the door, programs in hand.
“The 1911 boundary dispute,” Bert is saying, “was settled by a hedge. I’ve told you this. The surveyor used the Whitcomb hedge as his line, and the hedge had moved, because hedges do, and half of what’s now the Reagan property—”
Bert catches my sleeve as I pass. “Marigold. Settle something. The gentleman drove seven and a half hours for this production. I say that constitutes the longest journey ever undertaken to attend an event in this building. He claims your grandmother’s cousin came from Halifax for a wedding in 1958. ”
“She did,” Rupert says. “It’s in the Grange minutes. I read them in April.”
“By boat and rail,” Bert concedes. “But she was family. It doesn’t count if you’re family. The record is for pilgrims. Outsiders.”
“Then I’ll accept the record,” Rupert says. Bert shakes his hand on it.
Through the lobby windows, out in the floodlit parking lot, two lords are spinning. One of them evidently said the name in the dressing room during the costume change. The other is spinning in solidarity.
Dorcas appears at my elbow with a paper cup of the good coffee, the urn now operating under Dana’s supervision.
“Look at them,” she says, nodding at the crowd. “Eight dollars a head. In this gym. For Shakespeare. A woman asked me to sign her program.”
“The question on the table,” Emma says as we approach the table, “is whether the curse is over.”
“Nothing’s gone wrong,” Dorcas says. “On opening night. That’s basically proof.”
“Nothing has gone wrong yet,” Emma says. “And one good night doesn’t close a file. We have half the show left.” She clicks her pen. “The official finding is inconclusive for now. The file stays open.”
“Until when?”
“Until the data says otherwise.”
She looks up at a woman who has been patiently waiting to buy some concessions. “Cookie? Two dollars.”
Backstage, Tiffany sits on the folding chair Dana has positioned for her in wings, and Annabel is there, pressing a thermos of sustainer potion into her hands. Englebert stands close while she works over the clasp, feeding the picture, tightening whatever needs tightening.
“How is it?” I ask.
“Ask me again after the curtain call.”
On a nearby table sits a bouquet of flowers wrapped in brown paper, unattended.
“Whose flowers?” I ask.
“Unsure,” Dana says. “Is there a card?”
Pru rounds the corner as I’m surveying the bouquet. “They’re mine,” she says, taking them from my hands.
“Secret admirer?”
“No,” she says.
“Damien?”
“No,” she says, and that’s that.
She fills her thermos cup with water from the cooler and walks backstage.
* * *
The next act opens with the cauldron. The fog comes in deep this time, thigh-high and curling.
Englebert crosses through the thick of it toward the witches, and the glamour stutters.
It’s fast — a flicker at the hem of the cape, the wrong silhouette for half a second, a tail where no tail should be, there and then gone.
My heart is in my ears. In the wing, Tiffany comes up out of her chair with both hands up, and the picture snaps taut.
Damien Carter finishes his cross and demands answers of the witches in a voice that dares anyone in the building to have seen anything.
I scan the house. Nobody seems to be reacting.
A kid in the third row leans over to her mother, and the mother shakes her head, and the kid settles back.
In the front row Annabel’s shoulders fall back down.
In the back, the real Damien has pushed the sunglasses up onto the hat, and his mouth is open.
Then the forest moves.
In reality, it’s a line of neighbors walking slowly with sticks, but in the dark, with the fog running ahead of them and Cody bringing the lights through green, the forest really moves.
Ms. Pelham, seated in the row in front of the audience where the messengers sit, says “the wood began to move” with an impressively chilling rasp.
Eventually, we make it through. The company walks out through the fog to take their bows.
The house comes up off the folding chairs in one motion.
Pru gets a roar and looks genuinely affronted by it, which only makes it louder.
The witches get their own raucous applause.
Tiffany, hollowed out but still upright, holds the picture through the whole call.
The glamour of Damien Carter comes downstage for his bow, and the room erupts.
In the back row, against every instruction Annabel gave him, the real Damien Carter is on his feet.
Skye has him under one arm and his mother has him under the other, and he’s applauding over his head, howling “bravo” at his own face with tears running down the real one.
Around him, the standing crowd accepts this weeping stranger without a second glance.
“Bravo,” he’s shouting. “brAVO.”
Beside me, Emma consults her watch, writes the time in the log, and next to it, in the incident column, writes ‘NONE.’