Page 30 of Potion Sickness

CHAPTER 10

The third installment of Countdown to Curtain is taped to the wall behind the register at the bakery, printed out on home-printer paper. The ink goes stripey halfway down the page. Dorcas has highlighted a sentence in yellow where I quote that the Second Witch’s scones “have kept this company alive.”

“The lemon scones sold out by ten,” Dorcas says, boxing my loaf. “A woman drove down from Burlington. From Burlington, Mari, for a scone, because your post on the internet told her to. I’ve had to institute a limit.”

“A scone limit?”

“Two per customer. I made a sign.”

I glance down and there is indeed a laminated sign. Dorcas has clearly been waiting her whole life for a rationing crisis.

“Now — the next one. The blog, or whatever you call it. Am I in it?”

“I’ll make sure of it.”

Behind me, the door swings open and Mayor Blackwood strides in.

“Mari! Just the woman. I’m loving the blog. Wonderful stuff. Tremendous for the town. I wonder if you’d caught what I said at Tuesday’s rehearsal — about Duncan. As a unifier.”

“I caught it.”

“Because I’ve been developing the character,” he says. “A king, yes. But at his heart, a convener. A builder of consensus.”

“The character dies in Act Two, Terry,” Dorcas says.

“Legacies don’t die, Dorcas.”

The door opens again and Emma enters, alone, clearly on a mission.

“Aunt Mari,” she says. “I found an error.”

“Emma? Where’s your mom?” I ask.

“In the truck with Lily,” she says. “I saw your car and made her stop because I had to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That I found an error.” She squints at me as though I’m the one not making sense.

“What kind of error?”

“On Wednesday’s blog. You wrote that the witches’ cauldron is ‘a working antique cauldron.’” She turns her clipboard around to show me how she’s printed the offending sentence and underlined ‘cauldron’ twice. “It’s a sap kettle. Dana told me.”

“For the purposes of the play, it’s a cauldron.”

“The magazine says you welcome corrections.” She produces a second page. “It says it at the bottom. I printed that too.”

“I’ll run a correction.”

“Excellent.”

Emma makes a check mark and Dorcas, unprompted, hands her three scones, evidently waiving the limit.

“I don’t make exceptions for law enforcement, but I can make an exception for this corrections officer,” she says. The joke goes over Emma’s head, but Mayor Blackwood lets out a hearty laugh.

My editor wanted ‘behind-the-scenes color.’ If only they knew how much color I’m leaving out.

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