Page 60 of Potion Sickness

“You drew a chalk line around your own body?” Hannah asks. “How did you—” She stops herself, because the answer doesn’t matter and she doesn’t actually want it.

Cody sits down on a crate and puts his head between his knees. Dorcas brings him a cup of water and a muffin.

“I almost called 911,” he says, to the floor.

“It’s the outline,” Moonbeam says, gazing down at the scene with real appreciation. “The outline is what sells it. She’s telling a whole story. The death and the investigation.”

“She’s six,” Hannah says.

“Spielberg was six once.”

Vivian arrives at the edge of the circle, and I brace for a speech, but instead she looks down at the crime scene and starts to laugh. She laughs until she has to hold the castle brace, and beside her Dana starts in too, and the two of them stand there, howling, leaning very slightly toward each other in a way I haven’t seen them do since the article.

“We needed more blood mixed anyway,” Dana finally manages.

“Put it in the program,” Vivian says, wiping her eyes. “Crime scene by Lily Archer.”

“I want it in the program,” Lily says, sitting up. Corn syrup has bonded her hair into a single clump.

“Bath first,” Hannah says. “Program never. Up.”

* * *

Dana is mopping up the corn syrup when we discover another problem.

“The dagger!” She calls out.

“What about it?”

“The good one. The wooden one that Hannah painted. It lives here.” She taps an empty outline on the prop table with the mop handle. “It was here when I did my check.”

“Lily had a dagger.”

That dagger is already back in its outline, sticky and rubber and accounted for.

“It’s started again,” Ms. Pelham announces to the gym. “The curse. It let us rest and now it’s started again. First the man, now the blade.”

“Nobody said the name!” Emma calls out. “I’ve been listening all night! Nobody said it!”

“Then it’s worse,” Ms. Pelham says. “It doesn’t need the name anymore.”

Two lords go out to spin preemptively. Through the lobby glass I watch them, turning in the evening breeze. Moonbeam offers to smudge the props table. Dana refuses her, using fire code as an excuse.

Emma arrives at my elbow with her clipboard. She flips to the ‘VANISHINGS’ page and holds it out for me to see. The list has grown since I saw it last.

“It doesn’t fit,” she says.

“What doesn’t?”

“Everything else on the list is little.” She holds her hands apart, dagger-width. “This is big. It’s the first big thing. Either whoever’s taking things changed, or this one’s different.” She clicks the pen. “You’re supposed to notice when a pattern breaks. That’s when it’s information.”

“Who taught you that?”

“You did,” Emma says.

Behind us, Vivian claps twice and gets the room back. Rehearsal will resume from the top of Act Four the moment the lords come in from the parking lot.

CHAPTER 18