Page 63 of Potion Sickness

“Nobody touches the spout,” Emma announces. “It’s quarantined. If you drank decaf tonight, form a line by the piano.”

Nine people form a line by the piano, and they form it fast.

“It’s the curse,” Ms. Pelham says, with a rasp of satisfaction under the fear.

“Nobody said the name,” a lord protests, hoarse. “Nobody’s said it in days. We’ve been so careful⁠—”

“I told you alL. It’s found another door,” Ms. Pelham says. “Curses do that.”

Vivian arrives, looking weary. “Talk to me.”

“Addie caught a potion signature in the decaf,” I say.

“A potion?” Vivian looks at the nine people by the piano, several of whom are checking their own pulses. “Is anyone in danger? That’s the only question I have tonight. Everything else can be a question for another day.

Dorcas clears her throat. “They’re fine,” she says. “Nobody’s in danger. It’s mine.”

The gymnasium lets out a collective breath.

“It’s a calming blend,” Dorcas says. “It’s lavender and chamomile and, I don’t know, whatever else. It’s from that website. Glamoury. I’ve put four drops in the coffee, every rehearsal, since the first night the fog machine went awry.”

She keeps her arms at her sides and addresses the room at large. “I stand by the decision. You people were going to kill each other before the curse got the chance. I saw Ms. Pelham threaten a teenager over a folding chair. The Mayor and Jackie had words about parking that I would describe as un-Christian. Somebody — I won’t say who — cried in the supply closet over a wig.”

“You drugged us,” says one of the lords.

“I seasoned you,” Dorcas says. “It’s a cheap bottle of flower water with a moon on the label.” She folds her arms. “Since then, has there been one single fight? There has not. Maybe it was the drops, or maybe it was people maturing. We’ll never know. That’s between me and God and the coffee urn.”

“Why only the decaf?”

“I put it in both most nights, but I’ve been running low. I figure the decaf drinkers are the problem population. The young ones aren’t getting into fights about chairs.”

Pru appears at my shoulder with her arms crossed.

“Everyone shops at this website,” she says. “We thought we could track our suspect that way. But Tiffany was right. Everyone shops there. Dorcas shops there. Dorcas, Mari. Dorcas is seventy years old and pays cash for everything.”

Vivian rubs her temples and issues rulings. The urn goes home with me tonight, to have Annabel double check. Dorcas will give me the bottle. The coffee service will henceforth operate under Dana’s supervision.

“So that’s it?” the lord demands. “She confesses and we all just⁠—”

“It’s the second confession of the season,” Vivian says. “We have a process now.”

The company turns, in one motion, to Englebert.

He’s been sitting on the bleacher shelf through all of this, letting the moment ripen. Now he rises, descends, and crosses the floor to Dorcas, and sits, and looks up at her from the height of her apron hem.

“Dorcas Logan,” he says. “You acted, I believe, from love. Misguided, unlicensed, chemically presumptuous love, but love. This tribunal” —he means himself— “notes it. It further notes that intent is the concern of the law, and the law, as ever, is not what governs this building. What governs this building is the play. And you, madam, introduced an unvetted substance into a production of the Scottish play, nightly, in secret, during a plague of vanishings, beneath a working curse, and told no one.”

“The parking lot,” Dorcas says. She’s been to enough of these to skip the question mark.

“On principle,” Englebert says.

Dorcas takes off her apron, folds it once, and hands it to Hannah. She walks up the center aisle in no hurry whatsoever. Outside, she turns three times, at the approximate speed of a rotisserie chicken.

The whole company is in the lobby with its collective nose against the glass. Well, the whole company aside from Moonbeam, who did not come to watch the ritual because, as she’ll explain shortly, she was “holding space for the room” and Emma, who wasn’t about to be distracted from her stakeout.

Per Emma’s report, Moonbeam drifted to the props table, stopped at the brooch, looked at it for a moment with her head tilted, then she picked it up in both hands and set it on the east windowsill, in the rectangle of parking-lot floodlight.

As the company pours back into the room, Moonbeam turns from the windowsill with her hands still cupped and takes in the crowd without a flicker of guilt.