Page 34 of Potion Sickness

CHAPTER 11

Pru arrives with a briefcase, sits down in her usual chair, and pulls out a legal pad.

“You have your pad. I have my pad,” I say. “This is now a two-pad investigation.”

“Mine’s for billing.” She leans back. “If I’m going to spend my afternoon reconstructing the night somebody may or may not have tried to poison me, I want a record of the hours.”

“Who, exactly, are you billing?”

“Whoever did it. Civil suit. I’ve already drafted the complaint in my head. It’s very good.”

Hannah comes in through the back with a six-pack. Gabe comes in behind her. Englebert is already installed on the director’s chair.

“Let the record show—” he says.

“There is no record yet,” Pru says. “I haven’t dated the page.”

She dates the page.

“Let the record show,” Englebert begins again, “that we convene to answer one question. On the night of our first dress rehearsal, a fresh working entered Lady Macbeth’s goblet. We know it was not in Macbeth’s goblet, but yet Macbeth fell anyway. We must find an explanation of how both of those things are true at once.”

“That’s the whole problem,” Hannah says, opening a bottle on the edge of the table something my mother has repeatedly asked her not to do over the years. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

I put my notepad flat in the middle of the table so everyone can read it. I’ve been building a timeline from my rehearsal notes and Emma’s log.

“Here’s what we know for sure. Dana mixed the drinks in the Gatorade cooler in the kitchen, alone. She wheeled it out and ladled every cup herself, at the props table, before the cups went to the stage.”

“So if the dose went in at the cooler,” Gabe says, “everyone at the banquet goes down, not one.”

“So it must’ve happened at the props table.”

“The props table is off stage, half in the dark once the show’s running,” Hannah says. “Everyone uses it. Everything lives on that table. My drill lives on it. Half the cast leans on it between entrances.”

“Typically, when we look for suspects,” I say. “We’re looking for opportunity, motive, and means.”

“But everyone had the opportunity,” says Pru.

“And everyone has the means,” Hannah says. “Anyone in Duskboro can find somewhere to buy a potion. Half of them can brew potions themselves.”

“So that leaves us with motive.”

“And who, pray tell, has motive?” Englebert asks.

“Dana,” I say.

“You’re not serious.”

“You never know. The article humiliated her in front of the whole town. It named her wife and Damien. Maybe she believed it. Maybe it was true. If anybody wanted to hurt Damien, it would be her.”

“She washed the goblets,” Gabe says. “The morning after. Before anyone asked her to.”

“Dana gets everything done before anyone asks her to.”

“She is the most conscientious stage manager in New England, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t scrubbing away a crime.”

“Okay, sure, maybe she has motive against Damien. But why would she poison Pru’s cup?”

“Exactly,” Pru says, “I can’t build her a motive for that. I’ve never done anything to Dana. I babysat her Jack Russell once.”