The Magician's Lie (3 page)

Janesville, 1905

Midnight

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” asks Officer Holt.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No, you don't. I suspect you don't beg anything.”

She looks up at him, all wounded and meek. That face of hers, it's too nimble. He reminds himself what she does for a living. Day in, day out, she fools people. He can't let her do it to him.

He says, “This story of yours. It isn't real. It isn't true.”

“It is.”

“
Jeansville?
You expect me to believe that?”

She stammers, “Officer, sir, truly, I don't understand what you mean.”

“What's the name of the town we're in now, ma'am?”

She looks down at her lap. “I'm sorry, I don't remember. The last few weeks have been…trying. So I'm not entirely clear in my mind.”

Of course she understands. She's just pretending not to. It infuriates him. “I'll help you. It's Janesville.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Janesville,” he says, “and you expect me to believe you were raised in a town called Jeansville, that the two just happen to have similar names, and that you didn't just make up the name of a town like you're making up this story?”

“Believe it or don't,” she says with a little fire. “It's the truth.”

“I don't want to hear this anyway. I want to hear about the murder. Tell me that part.”

“I will. When I get there.”

“Talk about the murder or don't talk at all,” he says, disgusted. He wanted to hear her out, to let her explain her innocence, but he thought it would be the matter of a few minutes. That doesn't seem to be what she has in mind. He needs to rethink everything.

He eyes her ankles, still free. Maybe he should cuff them too. They look small enough. Onstage, her dress was long enough to reach the floor. Now that she's sitting down, he can see everything below the knees. Her fancy little silk boots are smudged and caked with dirt. Those boots probably cost more than he earns in half a year, but that's not why he's staring. He's trying to see if any of the smudges are dark enough to be blood.

He turns up the lamp, but the circle of light doesn't reach far. As small as the room is, more than half remains in shadow.

“Officer!”

He looks her in the face. “Didn't I tell you to be quiet?”

“As I live and breathe,” she says, gazing up at him, examining. “You really are rather handsome. Wasted on a town like this, I suspect. Are you married, officer?”

She keeps looking up at him as if she genuinely expects an answer. He should blindfold her. He shouldn't look her in the face. Heaven only knows what powers that eye has. If she bewitches him, all those handcuffs might as well be hair ribbons.

He crosses the room in four long strides and grabs for the telephone.

“Wait,” she says. “What are you doing?”

“Calling the sheriff in Waterloo. Turning you in.”

She bucks against her restraints, eyes wild. “No!”

He lifts the receiver and places his finger on the lower grip slowly and deliberately, making a show of it, making sure she sees. Ready to signal for the operator. Ready to change the game.

“I lift my finger, and she'll come on the line. All I have to say is your name. It'll be too late to turn back then. Now are you going to tell me about the murder, or…”

“Please don't,” she says. Fear is written on her face, in great large letters. “I'll tell you everything. I will. I promise.”

Satisfied, he hangs the receiver on the hook switch and sets the telephone back on the desk. Relief floods him at the successful bluff. He'll be damned if he hands her over to Mose without knowing what she's done. The glory should be his. Everything depends on it.

“So tell me,” he says, folding his arms. “Why did you kill him? Your own husband?”

“I swear, I didn't know there was a murder until you told me I was arrested for it. Honestly.”

“Honestly?” he scoffs.

“Yes. I still don't even know…” She trails off.

“Know what?”

“Anything! Where was he found? Who found him? What happened?”

Her desperation—wide eyes, rapid breath—seems genuine. How is he supposed to tell the fake from the real with her?

He wants to let her stew, so he opens the top drawer of the desk and rummages around, extending the silence. The only thing in the drawer is an apple. The acid in his stomach rises in anticipation, but he doesn't let himself eat it. He has a better idea. If there's an advantage to be gained from feeding her, he'll gladly stay hungry.

He stands up, polishing the apple on his sleeve, his mind zooming forward, figuring out a plan. “You're hungry, aren't you?”

“Yes, very.”

He holds the apple toward her, from a distance. “Would you like this?”

“Of course,” she says, with an edge of anger. He needs to tread carefully.

“If you'll answer my questions, it's yours,” he says.

Gently he brings the apple close to her mouth, and she leans as far forward as the cuffs will allow. She takes a great large bite, and he feels the sensation travel all the way up his arm, an invisible vibration.

“You're toying with me,” he says in a neutral voice.

She chews and swallows. He can see the knot of it in her pale throat.

He offers her another bite, and she takes it, sinking her teeth in, tearing off a sizable chunk.

“You can take smaller bites,” he says. “I'm going to let you eat the whole thing.”

She makes a noncommittal grunt and keeps chewing with gusto.

Holt brings the chair from the desk and turns it to face away from her. He slings his leg over the seat and sits down in it backward, folding one arm across the top, extending the other toward her, with the apple in his hand.

Trying to sound gentle but confident, he says to her, “You're not telling me what you did.”

She mumbles around a mouthful of fruit. “I'm telling you who I am.”

“Let's try something different. Tell me who
he
was. Your husband, I mean. The one they found under the stage, after the show, in Waterloo. Dead and bloody, stuffed into the Halved Man apparatus, right where you left him.”

She stops midchew.

“Your dead husband,” he continues. It's time to put on more pressure. “Blood everywhere. Bruises, cuts, broken bones. Someone hit him and hit him hard. You, I suspect. It's amazing what damage a woman can do when she wants to.”

She turns her face away, looks down. He offers her the apple again, its hollow white side, but she makes no move toward it.

Quietly she says, “He was beaten?”

“Badly.”

“Did you see the body?”

“Yes.”

She asks, “Did you see his face?”

Something in him makes him reach out for her chin and pull it forward again. He wants to look her full in the face. With his other hand, he puts the white, bitten side of the apple in front of her mouth. He says, “Eat.”

She takes a smaller bite this time. Her eyes don't leave his as she chews and swallows it, her nimble face a storm of emotion. She looks angry and pleading and hungry and confused. A faint sheen of sweat is starting to form on her brow, under the tendrils of reddish hair. She takes a second small bite and chews it, his fingers on her jaw feeling every movement of muscle and bone, and he sees again the knot in her throat as she swallows.

Then she says, “Please. Did you?”

“No,” he lies.

She drops her chin toward her shoulder, and he lets her. He thinks she looks queasy, but he might be flattering himself, thinking he has some effect on her.

In silence, he feeds her the rest of the apple. She eats it all, down to the core and the seeds. At last, he is holding only half an inch of stem between his thumb and forefinger. He reaches out with his handkerchief and wipes a spot of apple from the corner of her mouth, and she says softly, “Thank you.”

The air in the room is already stale and hot. He wishes the one barred window, eight feet up the wall, would give him fresh air to breathe.

He makes a decision and rises from his chair, moving it away to give himself room. Then he drops to his knees at her feet, putting one hand on each ankle.

“What are you doing?” She edges back, rocks herself against the chair. The legs move a little. She inches back but he holds on. Then she wrenches hard and pulls one leg free, trying to kick him.

“Easy!” he shouts.

Her dirty boot catches him in the shoulder, causing a sharp hot pain, which he hides. He shoves the kicking foot down hard and shifts his body sideways so he's sitting on it, pinning the wild leg between his body and the chair. He prays the exertion won't damage him, but if it does, so be it. He's gambling anyway. He's betting that she's a prize rich enough to win him security, the security that began slipping away three months ago when he interrupted a man robbing a bank and slipped away even further this afternoon in a doctor's office in Waterloo.

She tries to kick again, wrenching her body around, straining against all five pairs of handcuffs. When none of that works, she lets out a howling, piercing scream.

“Easy, I said! I'm not going to hurt you! Be quiet!”

“Get away!” she shouts.

He uses one hand to hold her foot in place while the other unlaces the boot. She keeps moving and shifting and twitching. He could explain to her why he needs to remove her boots, but it wouldn't soothe her, so he isn't going to waste the words.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he says one more time instead.

“You don't understand,” she says. She says it over and over again, quieter and quieter, “You don't understand, you don't understand, you don't understand.”

At first, he's afraid it's a spell. Some kind of incantation. But it goes on and on, as if she's compelled. It doesn't seem like she's trying to bewitch him; she doesn't even seem to know he's there.

When she finally pauses, breathless, he says, “That's right. I don't understand. Why don't you explain it to me?”

In a low clear voice, she says, “Okay.”

1893–1894

Invisible Knots

The following June, I turned thirteen, an unlucky number. I was becoming a young woman. Mother showed me how to fashion my hair into a neat, low chignon instead of a braid down my back. My hips and breasts grew, and although I would never be a violin, I was no longer a flute. These changes didn't bother me. But other changes did.

When the harvest began, not long after, a slight adjustment was made to the bargain we had made with Silas. He and his wife continued to rent the house in town, but because their son Ray spent long days working on the farm, someone decided—it was never clear who—that he should come live in the farmhouse with us.

Ray was sixteen that summer. Before he moved into the farmhouse with us, I could count on a single hand the number of times I had seen him. All I knew of him was that in childhood he'd narrowly escaped dying of a fever that had carried away his three younger sisters. Whether the fever had made him more precious or he had always been so, his parents fawned over him like a little prince. Like Victor, he worked for Silas as a general farmhand; unlike Victor, he seemed perfectly suited to it. He was built for physical labor, his arms and legs as thick as tree trunks. You could see his mother in the pale hair and aquiline nose, his father in the broad frame and cleft chin. His head was topped with an unruly crop of blond curls. As the summer went on, they got blonder in the sun. In the evenings, he ruined the triangular pleasure of our after-dinner entertainment by sitting in a chair and staring silently.

I admit that I disliked him from the beginning, before I had much reason to do so. I'd caught my mother's attention but feared I could lose it again at any moment, so I didn't want his competition. In the beginning, he spoke so rarely that I thought perhaps the fever had left him touched in the head. Therefore I was equally annoyed whether he stared at a spot on the floor, or at my mother's hands on the cello, or—as he most often did—at me.

As the weeks went on, it seemed that he was always nearby, always lurking. The character of his attention changed. Every interaction with him was fraught. I would pass through the hall toward my room, flushed and exhausted from a solid hour of rigorous pirouettes. He would appear soundlessly to block my path, the sour tang of a day's sweat on him, forcing me to stop short. He wouldn't touch me. He reached out as if to lay his palm against the side of my cheek but then would pause just an inch or two away. He stared into my left eye, the flawed one, as if he could unlock a secret from it by staring. I blinked as little as I could. He didn't say a word, and when I stepped away, he let me go.

I thought I might mention it to my mother, but what could I say? It sounded silly to complain that he sometimes looked at me and, on occasion, almost touched me.

It sounds silly even now. Even now that I know what was coming.

***

For my birthday, my mother had bought me a rather extravagant gift. It cost enough that I later heard her and Victor arguing about it, him cursing that it was too much money, which it no doubt was. The gift was the tallest mirror I'd ever seen, a breathtakingly flat and large piece of silvered glass in which I could see the reflection of nearly my entire body. My room was otherwise unadorned, only a faded hand-me-down quilt on the bed and a thin gray rug covering perhaps a third of the floor, so the mirror seemed all the more remarkable. The oval frame was dark wood, simple and lovely, with a subtle pattern of carved leaves. Mother insisted that it would help me correct my posture and perfect my positions. It did both of these things, but I also just liked to look in it and see myself, examining the tiniest details of my own appearance. I stared at the shape of my earlobes, one of which seemed ever so slightly higher than the other, and at the faint short hairs along my hairline, which stirred with my breath. I could finally see how odd my eye looked, how clear the dividing line was between the brown and the blue. I could see the speckles of shifting color in the iris and watch the pupil grow larger when the sunlight from the window faded at dusk. I brought my face so close to the mirror my breath fogged its surface, then made a game of holding my breath to see how long I could keep it clear.

My pleasure in the mirror outlasted its novelty. Even three months later, when I was back in the daily routine of attending school, I often wished I was at home with the mirror instead. My behavior in the classroom grew worse, and my reputation with it. Mother was informed of my unwillingness to comply with the rules. I couldn't puzzle out how she felt about it. In front of the young teacher, she told me this misbehavior couldn't continue and promised I would be disciplined. In private, she said nothing. At the dinner table, she only told Victor that the classroom seemed to be run by a recent winner of the Harlan County Jump Rope Championship, and it was too bad the schools here weren't better. When Silas's wife remarked one evening that she had heard I was a discipline problem at the school, my mother replied archly that the brightest children were known for being the most unruly, then changed the subject to the weather.

So I continued to comply with my teacher's directions when it suited me and do otherwise when it didn't. More than once, this led to a punishment where I was placed in the corner of the classroom and made to raise my arms while holding a book in each hand. This had no deterrent effect whatsoever, since it was an exercise that strengthened my arms for dancing, and my mother complimented the improved elegance of my arm positions in fourth and fifth.

One afternoon, when I had become so annoyed with the remedial nature of the reading lesson that I simply got up and walked out of the school, I snuck back into the house and headed upstairs. I was so focused on keeping my footsteps silent to avoid detection that I didn't see that Ray was in my room, standing in front of the mirror, until I was a few feet from his elbow.

Ray had a straight razor in his hand and was drawing it along his abdomen, making a long shallow cut, and little beads of blood were beginning to well up from the flesh.

I breathed in.

His eyes opened wide and met mine in the mirror. I lowered my gaze. His cotton shirt was unbuttoned and open down the front, and in his reflection, I saw them all. Scars. Scars that followed the lines of his ribs, outlining them in ghostly white, so you could see the shape of the skeleton underneath his skin. He had cut himself again and again, neatly and deliberately, over and over. How long would something like that take, I wondered. Months? Years?

“Get out,” he said, almost growling.

“It's my room,” I said hotly. “You get out.”

He spun and grabbed my arm with his free hand, the other hand clutching the open, gleaming razor. The blood began to run down his skin but did not drip.

“You keep this to yourself,” he said. “You understand?”

I forced myself only to shrug.

He lay the flat of the razor against the bare skin of my forearm, then my neck, then my cheek. The metal was cold. The ripe odor of his sweat swarmed up around me in a cloud.

“You will keep this to yourself,” he repeated.

“I will?”

“If you tell your mother what you saw, I'll tell her that you invited me here to your room to seduce me.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said, keeping my eyes locked with his so I wouldn't look down at the blade and panic. I didn't think he meant to hurt me, just scare me, but I also knew his hand could easily slip.

“Is it? You're a lonely girl. I'm a handsome boy.”

“Are you?”

He laughed. “As you like. You're an insolent girl. I'm a well-behaved boy. I do what I'm told and you don't. You shouldn't even be here. Who would they believe?”

I was uncertain of the answer. He never misbehaved, not that anyone caught him at. I was a known troublemaker. My mother had defended me when it suited her, but this was more serious. Certainly she knew something about young girls misbehaving, or I wouldn't exist.

And the longer Ray stared at me, the less sure I was that he didn't mean me harm. There was something in his eyes. The intensity of his gaze was becoming almost too much. I forced myself not to look away.

“Now that would be a lie, of course,” he continued. “You seducing me.”

“Yes, it would.”

He tilted his head and gave me an appraising look. “I wouldn't mind a tumble, of course, if you're inclined.”

“No, thank you.”

“Lord, blades do make people polite, don't they?”

An answer didn't seem necessary. The steel on my cheek was no longer cold. It had drawn its heat out of my skin.

“Do you believe in magic?” he asked abruptly.

“No.”

“I do. I think everyone has a little. I'm trying to find mine. And yours.”

“I haven't got any.”

“You don't know that, not for sure.”

I needed an angle. I tried one. “So what do you think yours is? Your magic?”

“Not sure yet. Something to do with healing. I survived a sickness I shouldn't have survived. It killed my sisters, but it spared me. Don't you think that's a clue to something?”

I let my eyes flicker down toward the razor, still against my cheek. “Seems you're more likely to hurt than to heal.”

He smiled at that and let the razor drop. I didn't let the relief show.

“Hurting and healing are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

“A funny coin.”

“You'll understand someday. For all your faults, you're a quick learner. We'll talk more about this, someday soon.”

He folded his razor, wiped the blood from his torso with a cloth from his pocket, and buttoned his shirt back up to the neck. And then he left me there. I listened to his footsteps grow fainter and fainter, the thump of work boots going down the stairs and across the floor, and when the sound of the front door closing finally came, I let out the sigh I'd been holding so close.

I looked in the mirror. No one would be able to tell I had just been terrorized. Everything about me was exactly as it should have been, except for three faint marks. In the three places he had touched me with the razor's blade—the arm, the neck, the cheek—there was a thin line of blood, not my own.

The marks were a simple matter to wipe away.

He was right, of course. I was too scared to say a word. I didn't think I'd be believed. And besides, what had really happened? He'd done more damage to himself than to me.

That time.

***

Later that year, Mother took it into her head that I could be sent to a dance school. We had settled long ago that there were no schools nearby, but she opened up the possibility that I could attend one far away and board there.

She had often told me of seeing Marie Bonfanti, the prima ballerina assoluta, dance at Niblo's Garden in New York City. Madama Bonfanti had retired from the stage some time before. But Mother had read the news that Madama had opened a ballet school in New York, where she taught the Cecchetti method. Mother thought the youngest and most tenderhearted of her New York cousins might be willing to use a little influence on her behalf, if properly approached with flattery and eloquence. There was no question of help from my grandparents. A letter from the lawyer had made that clear some time before.

In addition to New York, letters went out to Boston and Richmond and Charleston. Even to San Francisco, and once to Chicago. Abroad, they went to Moscow, Paris, Venice, Bonn. In a fit of optimism, my mother even bought me a valise, so I'd be ready to go.

It sounded like a fantasy, but I encouraged it all the same. The school in Jeansville was tedious at its very best, and I had several years left to go if I stayed. And I worried about Ray more and more. The idea of ballet school sounded like my only reasonable chance at escape. So I practiced and practiced and held out hope.

It was 1894, and I was fourteen years old when my mother received the letter from Madama Bonfanti. She presented it to me at breakfast, her cheeks pink with excitement.

“What do you think of
that
?” she said with delight, flipping the cream-colored envelope down onto the wood of the table.

She had already slit the envelope across the top, so I tugged the letter out. The faint smell of lavender wafted upward as I unfolded it to read:

We will be at the Biltmore Estate on Wednesday 13 September taking our leisure with the family. If your daughter is as talented as you say, you may bring her to dance for us on that afternoon, and we shall see her.

Mother said, “To dance for Bonfanti. This could be magic, Ada. It could change everything. If she likes you, she could take you to New York. You could enter her Academy. We're so lucky she'll be so close by. Oh, it must be fate!”

“She lives at this Biltmore?”

“Oh no, oh no. Biltmore is the home of the Vanderbilts. A palace, nearly. I've read about it in the magazines. They're still building it, but it's already famous across the country. The biggest family house in all of America.”

“And it's in Tennessee? Why?”

“Over the mountains, dear. In North Carolina. But it's close by enough, less than a day's ride. Oh, I can barely imagine. Madama will be in a relaxed mood, receptive. They're still building the home, but Mr. Vanderbilt might be there—maybe they'll even invite us to stay! Oh, I don't know what you'll wear…your practice gowns are worn to shreds…”

I heard her words but not her meaning. Estates and mountains and coach rides. Too much at once.

She grinned at me, a blinding smile. “This is your chance, Ada, your chance. You could go to her school! You could be a ballerina!”

I finally started to grasp what she was saying. “Madama Bonfanti…of the Academy…wants to see me dance.”

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

“On the thirteenth.”

“Oh. Oh!” she said, rising to pace the floor. Her bare feet made no sound. “The thirteenth! That's tomorrow! The mail must have been delayed… We'll have to leave in the dark. The note says afternoon, but no particular time? That's good. But Victor's gone with Silas to the horse fair in Montclair. They won't be back. I'll have to ask Raymond to drive us.”