Page 59 of Potion Sickness

I look up from the script and catch the house. Hannah has her eyes on the ceiling. Dana is studying her clipboard. Cody, at the light board, is examining a cable. The entire company has become fascinated by its own shoes.

Emma doesn’t have this problem, though. She’s busy scribbling on her clipboard.

“Gabriel,” Englebert says, from the wings. “The woman before you has just proposed a murder on your behalf. She is offering to handle everything. Has anyone, in the whole of your life, offered to handle everything?”

“No,” Gabe says.

“And if she did?”

Gabe looks at me and there’s a single second where he seems to be more than plywood, and everyone in the building sees it. He delivers “We will speak further” to a spot slightly above my head, and Englebert puts his face down on the stool.

“We will speak further,” Englebert repeats, muffled. “You are closing the door on your own conscience. It is more than a mere scheduling matter.”

“I’ll get there,” Gabe says.

“You had it. For one instant, you had it, and then you put it back.”

The lobby doors open.

“Don’t stop on my account,” Pru says, which gets a laugh, because that’s Damien’s line. She comes down the aisle unwinding her scarf. She’s out of her work clothes, which is new for a weeknight.

“You’re forty minutes late,” Vivian says.

“I had to get honey,” Pru pats the tote slung on her shoulder. “For my mother. She’s been leaving voicemails about it with escalating menace. If I show up at Hemlock Hill tomorrow without honey, she’ll tell the whole staff I starve her.”

Pru drops her bag on a chair.

“How far did you get?”

“We will speak further,” Gabe says.

“Mari,” she says, appraising the situation. “Have you been un-sexed?”

“With aplomb,” Englebert says, lifting his head.

I go back down to the third row of chairs, where I belong, and Pru takes the stage.

* * *

Things come apart during the snack break.

Cody is fifteen and unflappable — he’s rewired that light board twice under Englebert’s supervision without complaint — but the sound he makes from behind the castle wall as he’s adjusting a light fixture is a sound I’ve never heard.

“MS. ARCHER. MS. ARCHER, IT’S LILY, SOMETHING HAPPENED TO LILY⁠—”

Half the company converges on stage left at once. I get there in time to see Cody backed against the plywood with his phone out, thumb hovering, a nine and a one already dialed, his face gray.

Lily is on the floor behind the castle. She’s flat on her back with her limbs at four careful angles. There’s red everywhere — it’s pooled under her head, streaked down one arm, with one small handprint dragged along the base of the castle wall. Beside her lies a rubber dagger. Around her entire body, in blue chalk, someone has drawn an outline.

The corpse opens one eye to check the size of her audience. Hannah shoulders through the crowd and takes in the scene.

“Lily. Archer.”

“I’m a crime,” the corpse says.

“You are covered in corn syrup from your ears to your socks is what you are.”

She is. The bowl is sitting three feet away, scraped clean. She has presumably ignored the label, eaten some of the evidence, and worn the rest.