Book Six, Chapter 46: Daphne Part III

The woman known as Homibride, and occasionally referred to as Daphne Sinclair, stood on a wooden walkway in a seldom-visited section of the seventh floor. It was under construction. She had read about it in the manager’s office. There were always a handful of locations for a good interrogation here at the Carousel Casino.

In front of her, the cook, whose name was supposed to be Chef Champlain, was strung up by the feet, her hands bound, her head bouncing gently off the floor, swinging from a banister of a beautiful balcony above.

There were skylights in this room. It was technically a sort of high-ceilinged living room, but Daphne liked to imagine it for what it could be. With its wide open floor plan and beautiful wooden floors, it could have been a ballroom. The ballroom danced in gloom and gray, lit only by the wick of her lighter and the steely blue of the storm, but Daphne saw only radiance and possibilities.

That was always what Daphne saw.

She pushed on Chef Champlain, and the woman swung back, her screams muffled by a piece of cloth stuffed in her mouth.

She was waiting. She did her best work On-Screen. Off-Screen people broke character too much. She didn’t like that.

As she waited, pushing the cook back and forth like a child on a swing set, she thought about Riley, her husband.

He needed her now more than ever. Things had really gone amok.

Was he doubting their love? She could hardly think the thought. Was it too late to give him one perfect moment, one happy day? It felt too late. But if she couldn’t give Riley the happiness he deserved, then what was all of this for?

Well, her parents, of course.

She had missed them so much. Time was a four-letter word in Carousel, a topic too rude to discuss, but she felt it had been a very long time since she had seen them.

She still remembered the moment she came home to them the first time. They were so happy to have their daughter back. And the look on their face when they got to see her on her wedding day! They deserved that a million times over. They were such good people.

She wondered how many times they had seen their daughter’s wedding now.

She thought back to the first time, and tears rolled down her face. It wasn’t every day that you could raise the dead, but for Beth and Robert Hutchins, she had done it. Their long-lost daughter was getting married. It was the best and happiest day they could ever imagine, the pinnacle of their lives, and now they would never be disappointed. It would never be stolen from them.

Not that the blackmailers hadn’t tried. Threatening to expose her. She wanted to give the cook an earful.

So she grabbed her letter opener, a wedding gift from years back—silver with a pearl handle.

But she couldn’t give it to the cook just yet.

She had to perform.

She smiled, reveling in what she had done for her adoptive parents (well, she had adopted them), wondering if there was any chance she might be able to pull it all off again.

Riley could be so frustrating sometimes. She just wanted him to look her in the eye and tell her he loved her so that she could truly know she had done her life’s purpose. But it was like he didn’t even care about the wedding. It was just part of the plot for him. After she had given him all of her love and, more importantly, the love of the man he was portraying in the storyline, Riley swore he could feel that love, right in his chest. But Daphne wondered if that was true. Most of her grooms in this storyline were overwhelmed by love. Riley was suspicious of it.

What was she going to do about him? The question plagued her. She couldn’t bear the thought of denying him true love and happiness.

Finally, after too much fretting, she was On-Screen.

As the cook swung back toward her, she walked over to the column where the rope was tied off and cinched it up a bit so that she could get a better look at the cook. She tied it back quickly and efficiently.

“A woman needs to know her knots,” she said with a smile.

But she wasn’t smiling at the cook. She was smiling at all of her adoring fans, wherever they were. They loved her. They watched her with rapt attention.

She walked over to Chef Champlain.

“Ooh, what a fun thing to say. Chef Champlain. Chef Champlain. Rolls off the tongue,” she said. “That is your name, right? That is what you filled in on your employment application.”

The cook didn’t answer.

She stared wide-eyed at Daphne, struggling to breathe because of the sweat and snot that clogged up her nostrils. Her tears fell like rain onto the floor, leaving little droplets in the dust, making mud, Daphne observed. She couldn’t think of a more apt metaphor for what these blackmailers were doing.

Making mud.

She rushed toward the cook and started patting her down, looking for hidden pockets, concealed caches of money, or weapons. And she found one, sewn into the back of an apron that flopped up over the cook’s torso lazily, as if inviting her to reach into its pocket and pilfer its contents.

She reached her hand in, careful not to get nicked by any blade or needle. But she didn’t find any blade. She found something else.

“What is this?” Daphne said as she pulled a small, cylindrical bottle out of the woman’s pocket. She tapped her fingernail against the glass object, being careful not to tamper with the stopper at the top. The label had numerous scientific terms on it, but those did not concern Daphne. The only ink on that label that mattered was the giant skull and crossbones, black against red.

Carousel was so simple.

“Poison!” she exclaimed. “Why in the world would you need to carry around poison?”

“Please,” the woman said. “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was my medicine. Let me have a look at it.”

She had difficulty speaking as Daphne spun her gently while she stared at the poison. But not just any poison, she thought. This poison had a trope on it.

How strange.

She had been finding these trope items all over the place. Of course, they were probably made for the players, but finders keepers. Now, what did this one do? She relaxed her eyes and stared at the red wallpaper, pretending to read the contents of the label so the audience would think her clever.

The trope was called Infection by Implication, and it simply allowed the user to infect, hex, or poison a target by providing the audience with a visual cue that they had already done so.

Now, she pondered, how might that be used?

The realization came to her suddenly. All the cook would need to do was serve food, pick her target, and then simply show the audience a clip of her sticking the stopper back into the top of the vial.

Abracadabra. Her target would be poisoned. How nifty!

“But what does a blackmailer need poison for?” Daphne asked aloud in her most thoughtful tone. She continued digging through the cook’s pocket.

“Oh, I see,” Daphne said as she grabbed a very similar vial with a very similar stopper. This vial did not contain poison. It contained a white milky substance.

“The antidote?” she asked aloud.

With a quick snatch, she grabbed onto the cook’s arm and stopped her from spinning.

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“Poison and an antidote. Why, I wonder, is your scheme poisoning someone and then promising them the cure for money?”

“Please, I just want to go home. I have children and I—” the cook started to say, but Daphne bent down and grabbed her cheeks, squeezing them inward until the cook couldn’t move her jaw.

“There’s no need to lie to me. Call it professional courtesy. How well does this scam of yours work?” she asked.

The cook, sensing perhaps that she might be able to make a friend of this crazed bride, spat out, “It’s marvelously successful. No one wants to die, not the way that poison kills you.”

Daphne stared back at the label.

“No, they wouldn’t,” she said. “Very clever. I have no doubt it is a successful trick. The question for me is, who did you poison?”

The cook seemed to consider whether to be defiant or pliant. She chose the latter.

“No one,” the cook said. “I had a plan, but the storm ruined everything.”

Daphne chuckled.

“Tell me about it, sister,” she said. “Everything that can go wrong has been.”

She mimed as if she were about to unstick the stopper of the poison. Her mind delighted at how she might use its wonderful little trope. Could she simply show herself struggling with the cook and let the audience infer that she had poisoned her? Would that be sufficient? The possibilities were endless, and she revelled in the idea of thinking up all kinds of little plots. But now she needed answers.

“How much do you know about me?” she asked.

“Nothing,” the cook said.

“No, don’t lie. That won’t help you. Professional courtesy, remember? I received a nasty little letter from someone. It threatened to expose my identity to my dear husband and parents,” Daphne asked, her voice spun like a spider’s silk. “What did that mean exactly?”

The cook looked at her, lips quivering, face red from being hung upside down, and said, “That isn’t my trade. I’m not a part of it.”

“Of course not,” Daphne said. “You were only going to poison some rich victim and coerce them into paying for the cure. But you do know the person who sent me that terrible little letter, don’t you?”