Page 66 of Potion Sickness

“Then let’s spend it,” I say. “You saw the article the second it posted. Did you notice anything?”

She thinks about it for a moment.

“The names,” she says, finally. “Every name in that article is spelled right. Oleander. Duskboro. They knew Vivian ran a gallery, they knew the show, they knew the schedule. I’ve been misquoted by the Deerfield Valley News about a bake sale. Strangers get things wrong. That article was written by someone from here. Or someone with very good notes.” She picks the broom back up. “And the photo. Look at the photo. It’s perfectly framed. It wasn’t shot by accident. Somebody composed it.”

* * *

The Daytime Dish doesn’t list a newsroom number, but the article does have a byline — Kayla Rigsby — and it only takes me a few minutes to find her, because people who write for websites like the Dish always have a second, more hopeful website with their real clips and a contact form. Her real clips are from a Hartford paper that went underwater three years ago.

She calls me back inside the hour, and the first thing she says is, “M.C. Wardwell. I’ve read your work.”

“Surprising,” I say.

“I taught one of your stories in a workshop. What’s a person like you doing calling a person like me?”

“Same thing that happened to you, I’d guess, a few years later and one state north.”

Mutual respect, established.

“Okay,” she says. “Ask away. What’s up?”

“The original tip, about the Damien Carter affair. I don’t expect a name. I’m just curious about the shape of it. Was it a phone call? An Instagram DM? A napkin?”

She laughs. “It was a package. Three photos, high-res, good light, well framed. Quotes ready to lift, pre-attributed. ‘Sources close to the production’ was theirs, not mine. There was a suggested headline. A bio paragraph.” I can hear her scrolling. “It felt like a press kit. Publicist boilerplate, all that. It came from inside the talent’s own camp, I’d bet.”

“What was in the bio?

“It was flattering. Broadway credits dressed up nice, the soap history.” A pause. “You want to know the tell? The wife. The director’s wife barely figured. If somebody local wanted to blow up that marriage, the wife is the story. Whoever built the kit didn’t care about her at all. They cared about him looking like a man worth fighting over.”

I write it all down and thank her. She says to call her when I know who did it, off the record, and I say I will, and I mean it.

* * *

Conveniently, Annabel called from the Carter place shortly after we made it home, asking if I could bring her a satchel she’d accidentally left hanging on the porch railing, and I’m not one to say no to a helping out a friend… or to the opportunity to sneak around.

The Carter house is at the end of Quarry Road, a sprawling farmhouse with a lawn you could land a plane on. I’ve been inside once before, as a teenager for a graduation party thrown for Damien’s younger sister. The house hasn’t changed, as far as I can tell. Maybe the hedges are taller.

Ms. Carter greets me and lets me know that the banana bread is coming out warm in eight minutes. It would be a crime to leave before it’s sliced, she says. Somehow, I end up staying for for two hours.

While I wait, she gives me a tour.

One wall of the den is entirely Damien — framed headshots in chronological order, a Playbill under glass, and, on a bookshelf placed directly at eye level, there’s a row of VHS tapes with their labeled spines facing out.

BLAISE — DEATH #1 (the fall)

BLAISE — DEATH #2 (the explosion)

BLAISE — DEATH #3 (the twin)

“People say he died twice,” Ms. Carter says, pulling the third tape. “But he died three times. The show never came out and said the third one was really him, because of the twin storyline, but a mother knows her son’s work.”

She’s already kneeling at the VCR, which is astonishingly still connected. “Sit anywhere. I’ll show you. The fall is the best one, but the explosion has more production value.”

And thus, for a long stretch of my one wild and precious life, I watch Dr. Blaise Harlow die on daytime television three separate times while his mother narrates the craft of it.

“He came home to rest,” Ms. Carter says, during the explosion. “That’s what he told me. He was doing too much. So now he’s here, resting, between projects.” She watches her son get thrown backward through a breakaway window in 2003.

* * *