Page 62 of Potion Sickness

“The thing in Pru’s cup matches this, which we believed, and now we know. Tiffany’s story holds. Since I finally have their signature, tomorrow morning when I read Damien, I’ll know what I’m listening for. If his ‘vitamins’ came from that website, the base scent will be there, under the stew.”

“And if it is there?”

“Then our trouble came from a catalog. At least partly.” She sets the bottle in a drawer. “It won’t tell us who, but it will tell us what.”

On the shelf behind her, by the register, there’s a jar of honey with a ribbon and a tag on it. The tag says ‘Genie’.

“Did the last jar make it to Hemlock Hill?” Annabel asks, following my eyes.

“It did. She’s been rationing it like we’re in wartime.”

Annabel smiles, and before she can respond, Addie asks whether they can do the smell drill with the blindfold.

* * *

Emma calls a meeting before rehearsal, in the corner of the lobby by the trophy case.

“The dagger changed everything,” Emma says. She has the clipboard flipped to the ‘VANISHINGS’ page, which now has a second column. “We can’t just keep waiting around. We need to set bait.”

She’s pre-selected a rhinestone brooch from the costume room and left it on the props table.

“You want to run a sting?” Pru asks.

“A controlled operation.”

“With department property,” Dana says, with a nod. “The brooch is from Pirates of Penzance. It’s survived worse than a sting.”

Ms. Pelham, who has drifted into range with her knitting and absorbed the whole plan, has a better idea.

“Or,” she says, “at the end of rehearsal, we turn out everyone’s bags. Everyone, all at once, no warning. Whoever has my stitch markers, we’ll know in five minutes. I’ll go first. I have nothing in mine but wool and my pills.”

“No,” Pru says.

“It’s efficient.”

“You are proposing a general, suspicionless search of two dozen people’s personal effects, on no probable cause, conducted without any authority.” Pru puts down her script. “This is a community production, and, while Duskboro might not be a typical town, we are still in America. If somebody wants to rummage through my bag, they can come back with a warrant, a subpoena, or a court order, and I will still make them wait in reception.”

“We do the brooch,” Dana rules, and that’s the end of it.

The brooch glitters under the stage lights. Emma takes up her post on the bleachers with a juice pouch and settles in for the long haul. She’s read about stakeouts, and she’s prepared.

* * *

Rehearsal itself goes almost suspiciously well. Gabe gets through with a detectable amount of wanting, which Englebert declares “a foundation.” Vivian calls the snack break halfway through, and she almost sounds confident about things.

The snack table, now separate from the props table, has Dorcas’s muffins, a tower of paper cups, and two coffee urns. The big urn is regular. The small urn is decaf, labeled with a strip of masking tape. It is beloved by the over-sixty contingent of the production, and also by Hannah, who says caffeine after five gives her nightmares.

Addie gets in line for hot cocoa. I’m three people back in the queue, so I have a clear view of the moment the apprentice goes still next to the decaf urn, leans toward the spout, and smells it.

She backs up two steps, finds me in the line, and says, quietly, “It’s in the coffee.”

“What’s in the coffee?”

“The floor. The bottom note. From this morning.” She points at the decaf urn. “The plastic-bag one. It’s in there.”

Ms. Pelham, mid-pour, looks down into her cup.

Hannah swoops in like a lifeguard and takes the cup out of Ms. Pelham’s hand in one fluid motion. Two lords put down their muffins. Emma comes off the bleachers with a roll of blue painter’s tape from her mother’s toolbox already in hand, and by the time anyone else converges on the snack table, she’s taped over the decaf spout and is starting on a perimeter.