The Magician's Lie (27 page)

Janesville, 1905

Quarter past five o'clock in the morning

Holt asks quietly, “He never came?”

“Never.”

“So that's where you were, during the murder. In the locked railcar.”

She says nothing.

“Waiting there to kill him,” he goes on. “Not knowing someone else already had.”

“Yes,” she says, staring down at her feet, looking exhausted. Her hair seems more gold than before, which makes him realize there is a little light peeking through the high, barred window. The false dawn is here, and sunrise can't be far away. They've lost the night. What comes next?

“And then you ran,” he said.

“I ran.”

“But how could you?”

She looks at him blankly then, as if she doesn't understand what he means, but he knows she must.

He asks, more insistently, “How did you get out? If the railcar was locked? Did one of the girls come and rescue you? Did you realize he left the ax after all? Did you use the straight razor somehow? What was it?”

She shakes her head.

And then, insight comes in a flash. One part of the story doesn't add up. About what she's told him she's done, and who she's told him she is.

“You didn't escape from a locked railcar, did you? That's something only an escape artist would do. And you've told me that's not what you are. See? I was listening.”

She mumbles down at her feet, and it's so soft he has to ask her, “Say that again?”

Instead of answering she shakes her head again, side to side, so fiercely another thick tendril of red-gold hair falls across her cheek, obscuring half her face.

His triumph begins to fade. He expected her to sass back with a ready answer, like she has before. But clearly, there's something more here. “Please. I didn't hear you. It's important.”

“Is it?” she whispers.

“Yes. You're telling me your story. This is how it ends. This is the only thing I don't know.”

“And it matters?”

“Arden. You said you'd tell me everything, so tell me everything.” He reaches down and pushes the hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear, so he can see her better. “How did you get out?”

She seems to come to a decision, meeting his gaze with tears shining in her eyes, and says, only a little louder, “The door wasn't locked.”

He doesn't bother to hide his shock. They're well past that. He even reels backward a step, his single footfall audible in the quiet. “What? You said it was. You said he locked it.”

“I did say that.”

“And?”

Still meeting his eyes, her gaze burning, she says, “I lied.”

“Arden…”

“But understand! It's the only lie I've told you all night.” Her words come in a rush. “Everything else was true. The barn, my mother, Biltmore, the Iroquois, Adelaide's tiger, my healing power, every last bit of it. All true. I swear.”

He has to ask. He has to. “Then why didn't you run?”

“I did.”

“You said—”

“I mean, last night. Remember? I was running when you caught me.”

“But why not earlier? Before he could hurt you?”

“I was so goddamn afraid,” she says, the tears coming hard, running down her cheeks and neck into her high, open collar. They run over the pale, perfect skin where the bruise used to be and pool in the hollow in her throat. “My fear was all he needed to keep me there. I was too afraid to run. I didn't want to admit that to you—you understand, how shameful it was, how weak I'd been.”

She pauses for a breath, and he wants to reassure her that he understands, but she forges ahead before he can.

“He'd threatened Clyde, and that was enough. One threat and I was his puppet. I let him damage me and try to heal that damage with his delusions of magic. I talk a good game about risk, but when it all came down to it, I chose something awful and safe. He's a brute and a horror, and I was a fool to let him intimidate me into giving up everything that I cherished, but I did.”

“But you did finally run.” He wants to comfort her, soothe her. “You were brave enough, last night.”

“For all the good it's done me,” she says, sniffling. “I'm a prisoner again now, aren't I?”

He looks down at her, not sure what to say. The crying has reddened the whites of her eyes, making the blue irises even bluer, strikingly so. He reaches out silently to wipe away her tears, as he did much earlier in the night, while he thinks. Morning will be here shortly. He has to make his decision. He promised to hear her story, and he's heard it. There's nothing more to wait on.

“You're not his prisoner,” he tells her. “That's the difference.”

She takes a rasping, hiccuping breath.

He tucks the damp handkerchief back in his pocket and says, “Ray won't ever hurt you again. Whatever else happens, there's that. He's dead.”

“God, I hope so.”

“Hope?”

The telephone rings so loudly, piercing the silence, that they both jump.

He crosses the room and reaches for the telephone, mostly to quiet it, without thinking about who's on the other end. His thoughts are still a storm of uncertainty, his body reacting by reflex. He puts the earpiece to his ear without taking his eyes off the magician.

But when he hears Iris's voice, soft and hesitant, his world cracks open wide.

“Virgil?” is all she says at first.

“I'm here,” he says. “It's me, yes, I'm here. Is everything all right?”

Iris says, “I was afraid you wouldn't be there. You weren't there before.”

“I should be home with you.” He sits down in the chair behind the desk, hard, as it hits him. All this time, she's been waiting, wondering. He owes her more than that. The magician's story reminds him how fragile this all is, but also how important.

“You should. I was worried.”

“I'm so sorry,” he says.

He can tell she's crying but trying to hide it, and that touches him more deeply than he can say. He's been holding her at arm's length and it was all wrong. He can spend all his time with Iris in fear that she'll leave him, or he can spend that time telling her how important she is to him, how much he needs her. Now he knows which he'd rather do.

He says, “Oh, darling, I love you. You must know how much.”

Her voice is soft, and he has to lean in to hear it. He leans hungrily, pressing his ear against the warm black horn-shaped metal.

“What did you find out?” she's asking. “Tell me. Tell me the doctor can help you. Tell me everything will be all right.”

He can't find the words to answer her. There's no guarantee of a future, but how could he say that? He needs to live the life he can live.

Her voice comes down the line again, passionate. “Tell me you'll be here for me.”

“I will. I will.” He says it and believes it.

***

Arden watches him closely. Watches to make sure that his attention is fully elsewhere. She'll be fast, but it will take a few long moments. Misdirection. She didn't create the opportunity, but she'd be a fool if she didn't take advantage.

It would be better if it were only one pair of cuffs, but she can do it with two. It will just hurt more.

***

Half turned away from the magician with his head down, straining to listen to his wife's words, Virgil Holt doesn't hear the cracking, wrenching sounds.

All he hears is Iris, so happy to talk to him, relief plainly evident in her voice. “Thank the good Lord. I want you home,” Iris says. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” he says. “So much.”

“Will you please come home to me?”

He says, “In the morning.”

“Isn't it morning yet?”

“Almost. Once the sun comes up. I promise. There's one more thing I have to do first, and when I get home, I'll tell you all about it.”

Iris says, “That sounds ideal.”

Then he catches a blur of motion off to the side. Sequins and flesh. He sees the blur move and shift, rising up. She's getting up out of the chair. It's almost like he's imagining it. He's so tired now.

He turns to look at her, and he isn't imagining it at all. It's real. She is real, and free.

Both pairs of cuffs swing free from her left wrist. Her right hand looks awful, scraped and bloody, from being shoved against the metal. The thumb hangs off to the side of her hand almost like it isn't connected at all. And he realizes suddenly, it isn't. The bone, there's something wrong with it. The skin is all that's holding her thumb on.

In training, they told him that there were only two ways the average person could get out of cuffs. One was to pick the lock, which was harder than it seemed. The other was to break the thumb to make the hand small enough to fit through the cuff, which no one was foolish enough to do.

But she's done it, and she's not foolish. She just knows her limits, which aren't the same as other people's.

“You broke your hand,” he says.

“Whatever it takes,” she says and bolts for the door.

Dropping the telephone and leaping out of the chair, he goes after her. The chair clatters madly, falling to the floor. He grabs for her and catches hold of a fistful of her skirt.

He thinks the locked door will stop her, but even as he has the thought, she has already flung the door open and is lunging out. It should have been locked, but it wasn't; belatedly he remembers the knock at the door, the click that didn't come, too late to regret that now. He holds tight. The fabric of the skirt rips with a shriek and comes off in his hand, scattering beads, so he topples over backward onto the floor of the station, landing on her discarded boots, and it takes him a moment to scramble to his feet before he can follow her outside.

It only takes a moment to spot her. She's easy to see, her long white limbs pale against the darkness, all alone on the empty road. He gathers his strength and gives chase.

She is running fast but barefoot, and he is sure the roughness of the road will slow her down before long. The loose cuffs bounce with every step, striking her bare skin; it must hurt almost as much as her broken thumb. She's thirty paces ahead of him and he can hear her panting. She'll never be able to keep up this speed. He's a good runner, and it should be an easy matter to catch her, but with every step he remembers the bullet, unsure whether it's drifting away from his spine or toward it, and a strip of sunlight is just beginning to peek over the horizon, and it's just the two of them sprinting down the gravel road through the last minutes of the night.

He doesn't count on the third.

A young man with dark hair leans forward out of the darkness, and before Virgil Holt can think anything other than
Yes, just how she described him
, a fist comes forward and strikes him between the eyes and he goes down like a felled cow at a Chicago slaughterhouse.

Virgil lies in the roadway on his back.

“Sorry,” says the man's voice, but it is already faint. The man is running away in the same direction as the escaped prisoner. The two sets of footsteps grow quieter and quieter, until Virgil can't hear them anymore.

Maybe it's better this way, he thinks. Would he have let her go? He thinks he would, that his belief in her innocence would have overcome his need for the security her capture would win him, but he still isn't sure. He wonders if he would have really put the key into the lock when it came down to it. If after it all, he could let her get up and walk away.

But the magician was right. Everyone has will. It's time for him to start using his. He has a wife at home who loves him and wants him with her, and nothing else matters in the same way. He should be with Iris as long as he can, whether that's a day or a year or a decade. If a slip of a girl can live through more abuses than he can count, through misfortune and abandonment and fire, he can endure this one little knot of metal slumbering under his skin. And he is so exhausted by everything, by the uncertainty of the bullet and the long night and the long story and the girl who has fought so hard against her enemies, including him, that it takes him a long time to rise.

Woozy at first, he pulls himself up to sit and then to stand. He'll take it one slow step at a time. He looks in the direction he heard the suspects running, east toward the sun, already out of sight. Once he feels strong enough, he puts one foot forward, then the other, and walks west instead, toward Iris, toward home.

Janesville, 1905

Half past five o'clock in the morning

Arden looks back over her shoulder as she runs, even though there's nothing to see now, and it makes her sad. In different circumstances, she might have liked Officer Virgil Holt, and he might have liked her. All she can do now is wish him well and keep running.

Alongside her, Clyde runs, matching his stride to hers. She wants to stop and swoon and melt into his arms, let the rest of the world go hang, but there isn't time for it, not now. If they're caught, she doesn't want it to be like this, with so many questions unanswered on both sides. If they can get away free, there will be hours and days and years yet for kissing. If. She glances back again, hoping for an empty road.

“Don't look back,” he says. “It slows you down.”

“I know.”

They run on the hard-packed road, past squat dark houses one after another, houses full of good people still asleep. Her hand hurts, her feet hurt, her lungs hurt, everything hurts. But the pain doesn't stop her from relishing the feeling of running. She is going forward with a freed mind and a freed body, and Clyde is beside her, and there is so much they are leaving behind.

“He'll be all right, won't he?” she asks, her breath coming harder but not so hard that she can't form words.

“Yes, of course. I barely touched him.”

“He thought I killed Ray,” she says.

“I know.”

“But I didn't.”

“I know.”

“Because it was you,” she says, even though she doesn't want to say it out loud, but if she doesn't say it now, she'll always be thinking it, for the rest of her life. The rest of their life together, if they're going to have one.

“Ah,” he says, slowing then stopping. He stares down into her face. She looks away, looks behind him. Have they run far enough, for now? They're at the edge of this small town. It seems like a lovely place to live. A haven. But because of the choices they've made, it's a place to be escaped. Behind her are sleepy, closed-up houses. Behind him are trees and the open road.

“You shouldn't have done it,” she says.

Instead of responding, he looks behind them and says, “Was it just one officer?”

“Yes.”

“There's no one else chasing us?”

“No.”

“Just to be safe,” he says and nods toward a stand of trees off to the side of the road. She shuffles into the shelter of their covering branches, Clyde following closely. The sun is nudging up over the horizon now, but its light is blocked and scattered by the leaves, so they stand in a pocket of shadow.

He says, “I wasn't sure. That's why I didn't come in. I didn't know how many there were, whether we were outmatched, and I couldn't take the chance you might get hurt.”

He kneels down at her feet silently, and something small and silver flashes in his hand, and she feels the first of the cuffs on her ankles give way. Instead of throwing the cuff away, he tucks it into a small bag at his waist and then starts on the next.

Now that they are safe, at least for now, she feels a dizzying relief everywhere in her body. The worst she feared hasn't come true, and the best thing she could hope for—Clyde, here, alive—is right in front of her. She begins to cry, and when she can reach up to her face freely with both hands to wipe away the tears, the joy makes her cry even harder.

“I wasn't sure it was you, at the door,” she tells him. “He kept talking about a dead man, but he couldn't tell me what the dead man looked like. I thought it was probably Ray. I prayed it was. I was terrified he might have meant you.”

“It wasn't me,” he says, head down. He picks the lock on the second ankle cuff, it pops open with a soft clang, and he tucks it away. “At the door, knocking, that was me. I would have figured something out, you know. I would have gotten in to rescue you.”

“No need,” she says. “Rescued myself.”

“It's not a joke.”

“I wasn't joking. Now I want to know what happened.”

He doesn't look up, still crouched at her feet, turning the silver stub over and over in his fingers. “I heard there was a man with you on the road. Doreen came back to New York, after you sent her packing. I thought I was stupid for not seeing it, that the reason you didn't want to marry me was that there was someone else. We were apart so often, it made sense that you'd seek comfort in another man.”

“Never.”

“That's what I thought. But I wasn't sure. That seed of doubt got in, and—”

“I know.” She breathes out. “I know.”

“So I needed to see for myself. Who you'd chosen over me.”

“But I hadn't. I was trying to protect you,” she says, her voice trembling. “He said he was going to kill you if I didn't…”

Clyde stands up, leaning in, his eyes shining with tears. He lays his palms flat against her shoulders. She can feel the warmth of his hands. That soft welcome feeling, after the torture of the past few weeks, makes her light-headed with happiness. His touch is so gloriously ordinary that it almost undoes her completely. She puts her hand against his rough cheek and leans forward to kiss him, a soft, swift kiss, as simple and honest as their very first, under the mistletoe.

“I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you.”

“Nothing did. At least nothing fatal.”

He lifts his shirt. She squints to see in the half dark, but once she sees it, it's clear. His stomach is wrapped with something white, with a slash of dark brown cutting all the way across it. The dark stain is soaked into the bandage, a few inches above his waist. Drying, darkening blood. Only hours ago, it would have been red.

“Knife?” she asks him.

“Ax.”

She shudders. She knows the very ax he means; she'd held it in her own two hands. “Tell me what happened.”

“I watched the show in Waterloo—you were magnificent, Arden, you amazed me all over again—and I watched to see who was there afterward.” Clyde tucks his shirt into his waistband in a swift, smooth motion, in no obvious discomfort, so the wound must not be as bad as she first feared. “Everyone left, and I was afraid I'd missed my chance, but he came back in and hung that ax on the wall. So I confronted him. I asked how long he'd been your lover, and he laughed. He knew exactly who I was, and he wanted to taunt me. He boasted. He told me what he thought he was, what he thought he could do.”

“Oh, God,” she says, feeling faint.

He reaches out for her left wrist, raising the cuffed hand to his mouth, and kisses it, once, twice, three times.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he asks.

“I was sure he'd kill you.”

“Not just that,” he says. “Before. It must have been awful for you to keep that secret.”

“Talking about it wouldn't have made it less awful.”

He inserts the metal pin into both cuffs in turn and slips them from her wrist. She should feel lighter, now that she's free. She doesn't.

Clyde says, “It was him or me.”

“I know,” she says.

“We fought. I got in a few good blows; he was bigger, I was faster. Then he grabbed the ax, chasing me across the stage, swinging the whole time. I took a risk and let him swipe me with it, so he'd think I couldn't move faster. It's shallower than it looks.” He gestures down at his wound. “Because what I noticed and he didn't was the open trap door. I stepped around, and he stepped through.”

She pictures Ray falling, falling, landing hard.

“I couldn't tell if he was moving or not, so I took the long way down instead of jumping through the trap door. By the time I got there—he was gone.”

She thinks she knows what he means, but she still asks, “Gone?”

“He landed on the ax. Curled around it like he was holding it close. All the sets and props were under the stage, right there, and I thought maybe if I hid the…evidence, that I could find you before anyone found him, that everything might still be all right. But I heard footsteps. I had to run. I just got out of there, went north as far and fast as I could until I had my wits about me again and stopped at a restaurant on the road. Then I realized they were going to suspect you. I was about to double back. To turn myself in. So you'd be safe.”

“Oh, Clyde.”

“Then I saw him”—he gestures back in the direction of the fallen officer—“riding off with you. I couldn't keep up, but I kept on following, and finally I saw the horse in front of the station, and I knew that's where you were. So I waited.”

She looks up at him, his face so familiar and loved, and knows they've both done things neither will ever want to talk about. She doesn't want to think about his any more than she wants him to think about hers. That's not the person she is. That's not the person she wants to be.

She says, “I want to start over.”

“Yes, yes,” he says, stroking her cheek. “We can fleet the time carelessly.”

“As they do in the golden world?”

“But you won't be Arden anymore.”

She shakes her head. “Right now, I don't want to be.”

“Do you think you'll be happy? Without an audience?”

“Maybe I'll start again. Maybe I'll get a new name, a new act.”

“In Canada,” he says, catching on. “Or California. London, even. Somewhere far away.”

“Yes. In the meantime, you're my audience,” she says.

He whispers softly as he lifts her hand to kiss it, his lips brushing her skin with each word, “And I will applaud, and applaud, and applaud.”

She closes her eyes and savors the tickling warmth of his mouth. Then he lifts the injured hand, squeezing it lightly as he does so, and she can't help but wince.

“Arden!”

“Shh,” she says. “It's okay. We need to go.”

“Go?”

“It's morning.”

He squints through the leaves, now dappled with half sun. “Almost.” But first he takes the injured hand in his own gently, turning it over, looking at it closely.

“This is how you got out?”

“Yes.”

“It must hurt.”

“Just for now. It'll be as good as new tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Like magic,” she says.

She puts her good hand in his, and they walk away from the town, together, toward the brightening horizon.