The Magician's Lie Read online

  He says in a clear, firm voice, “I’m Officer Virgil Holt of the Janesville Police Department. I’m placing you under arrest, ma’am. On suspicion of murder.”

  “Murder!” she exclaims, blinking, her hand flying to cover her lips. “Sir?”

  “Don’t be alarmed, ma’am. Just come with me and we’ll discuss it,” he says, reaching for her elbow, which he almost manages to hold for a moment before she bolts.

  They struggle in the doorway, and the bell jingles madly as he maneuvers her outside. As they jostle and his shoulder slams into the door frame, the thought strikes him—he shouldn’t be doing this, it’s dangerous—and he relaxes his grip just a little.

  She breaks free and runs as he stumbles, righting himself quickly, but not quickly enough to hold her. When he looks up, he sees her untying his horse and neatly balancing on the rail to hop up onto its back. He lets her. Because when he whistles for his horse, it brings her over to him, and he smoothly mounts up into the saddle behind her while she’s still figuring out whether to jump. The horse knows him well enough that he doesn’t even need the reins. He locks both arms around the magician.

  “Don’t fight,” he says. “We both fall off and get trampled, that helps no one.”

  She still struggles for a moment but seems too afraid of falling off the horse to put her whole self into it. She seems even smaller to him now. The top of her head is just under his chin, and her hair is twisted into ropes and knotted together. A clove hitch, like a hunter would use.

  “I didn’t murder anyone,” she says, her voice hoarse and uncertain. “Who’s murdered?”

  He doesn’t answer. Back in the restaurant doorway, he can see a shadow. Either the waitress coming out to see what’s happened, or that other patron, if the noise woke him. Best to go before anyone sees. He can’t stay here and conduct an interrogation on the back of a horse. He needs to find out what she knows, what she did.

  North then…or south? If she’s guilty, he should take her back to the theater in Waterloo immediately and hand her over. Mose is probably still there. But the horse, eager for his hay bed, starts moving in the direction of Janesville, and Holt lets himself—lets both of them—be carried. He’ll sober up on the way. He can always bring her back. He’s an officer of the law and bound to do the right thing, except he’s not sure what the right thing is just now.

  If she’s guilty, she’ll be the most famous criminal in the state in years. And he’ll be the one who brought her in. They won’t be able to force him out then, wounded or not. He needs all this to go his way. She could change everything.

  Holt’s head is buzzing and clouded, but the horse knows the way home.

  Janesville, Iowa

  Half past eleven o’clock in the evening

  The station is a single room, not much more than a wooden box with a door on it. There’s a chair and a desk and a window. Only the gas lamp on the street outside gives any light to see by. He drops her into the plain wood chair like a heavy bag of feed, a solid dead weight. She sags forward. Her reddish hair, now escaped from its intricate knot, is a nest. He pulls away her cloak and valise and throws them near the door, which he locks, then grabs his uniform belt from the nearby hook and buckles it on in haste. Wearing his gun helps clear his head a little. He turns back toward her and sees she isn’t moving. As he steps closer to examine her in the dim light, his foot slips on loose sequins. He loses his footing a moment, unsteady.

  She is up out of the chair on her feet, a blur of motion. Instinct kicks in. He throws himself at her, arms around her knees, and brings them both crashing to the floor. Again he tells himself these exertions are dangerous. It’s exactly what the doctor said not to do. But the doctor couldn’t have foreseen this circumstance, and anyway, now he’s in it.

  He hears the air go out of her lungs. He’s breathless too but recovers faster. A second chance. This time, he’ll do better. He hauls her body up onto the chair again, shoves her against its back, and secures her wrists to the chair with the pair of handcuffs from his belt.

  Will it be enough?

  Officer Holt goes to his desk, feeling his way in the dark and shoving his own chair out of the way, and retrieves four more pairs of handcuffs. He’d use more if he had them. He affixes all four pairs to her slim wrists, one after another after another, to total five. He loops the chains through the chair back’s straight wooden slats as he goes.

  She’s breathing. He can see her shoulders rising and falling. Mose told him all about her on the way to the theater. That half-brown eye is believed to be the source of her power. She uses it to hypnotize the audience into swallowing her illusions. He should avoid looking into it, just to be safe.

  Just as the last cuff clicks into place, her voice ragged, she says, “I am not an escape artist. Perhaps you’ve mistaken me.”

  “I know what you are,” he tells the magician.

  “You have the advantage of me then,” she replies.

  “I told you, I’m a police officer.”

  “And yet you wear no uniform and you smell like a wet dog drowned in gin.”

  It stings that she’s right. Now that his hands are free, he lights the lamp. “I’m a police officer, and you’re a suspect in my custody. Those are the facts.”

  “Are they? And what am I suspected of?”

  “As I told you when I arrested you, ma’am, you are suspected of murder.”

  “Whose?”

  “Your husband’s.”

  “Husband? Me? That’s a laugh.” And she does laugh, a short dry bark. But she shifts in her seat.

  “Not a laugh. A fact. Your husband was murdered in Waterloo.”

  “Clearly, we’re not in Waterloo anymore, are we? They have buildings. And electric lights. And a police force that isn’t made up of twelve-year-olds. Is that a mustache on your face or a pigeon feather?”

  He opens his mouth to strike back and then shuts it again. He shouldn’t be in this situation, but he is, and he needs to make the most of it. Whether he finds her company unpleasant doesn’t matter. Whether she is a murderess is the only question. Once he has his answer, the right course will be clear.

  “I’ll thank you not to insult me, ma’am,” he says and moves his hand a few inches, resting it on the butt of his gun.

  Her eyes flick down and then up again, and he knows she gets his meaning.

  “Please,” she says, in a softer voice. “No more ‘ma’am.’ Call me Arden.”

  “Due respect again, m—” He swallows the end of the word. “Due respect, I’m certain that’s not your real name.”

  “It’s the only name that matters, isn’t it? The one on the posters. The Amazing Arden, the Alluring Arden, the All-Powerful Arden. Depending on the poster, depending on the town. And what town is this?”

  “It’s called Janesville,” he says.

  “Not very big, is it?”

  “Big enough.”

  She says nothing for a few moments, and then her bravado seems to crumble all at once. “This is ludicrous,” she says, sounding half strangled. “I don’t—I don’t even know—if it’s—I didn’t kill anyone, officer.”

  He expects to find her looking up at his face, watching him, reading him. But she is only staring down at her boots.

  “Ma’am?” says Officer Holt.

  When she meets his eyes, he sees the wetness on her cheeks. She’s crying. Now that she’s still and silent and facing him, she doesn’t look like a powerful enchantress. She looks like an exhausted young woman in the grip of enormous sadness, helpless beyond words. It almost melts his heart. Almost.

  He pulls the handkerchief from his pocket but immediately sees his mistake. He can’t offer it to her. With five pairs of handcuffs holding her wrists fast to the chair, she doesn’t have a hand free to take it.

  “Just dab at my eyes, please,” she says and raises her face
toward him. “The salt stings.”

  He can’t help but notice, while wiping the tears from her cheeks, that her skin is smooth and lovely. There’s something childlike about her, though she’s certainly not a child. If he had to guess, he’d put her about halfway between twenty and thirty. A little older than he is, but not by much.

  “Thank you. Now, due respect, Officer Holt,” she says, sounding resigned. “Let me say this again. I am not an escape artist. I am an illusionist. I could conjure a dove from nothingness if you like. Or I could pour a glass of milk into a hat, which will later prove to be empty. That’s my business.”

  “You know your business. I know mine.”

  Her soft voice turning more insistent, she says, “Look, you’re a lawman. I understand. You think you need to do this. But you don’t. We can end this now. Let me go.”

  “And why would I?”

  “If you don’t, you’re killing me. Is that what you want? To be my executioner?” She stares up at him fiercely, and he wants to feel superior, looking down on her, but he doesn’t. It’s the eyes. The half-brown eye, to be specific. As if she can see him on the outside and the inside at the same time. He doesn’t want to be seen.

  “It’s not up to me. You’ll get a trial.”

  “The supposed witches of Salem got trials,” she says with obvious bitterness, “for all the good it did them.”

  He unfolds and refolds his damp, streaked handkerchief. “I can promise you a fair shake.”

  “Can you? Some think a trial with a judge and jury is justice, sure. Other people have a different idea of it. People who’d lock me up with vagrants and violators and let things take their natural course.”

  He can hear the edge of desperation in her voice now but can’t tell whether she’s put it there on purpose. He answers firmly. “Ma’am, I’m sorry; I have no choice.”

  “We always have a choice. Sometimes it’s just the will we lack. And again with ‘ma’am’? You won’t call me Arden?”

  “No.” He folds his arms and avoids her gaze. He stares out the room’s only window, as if she’s not even interesting enough to look at, which of course she is. All else aside, she’s a beautiful woman. But there is too much else to put aside.

  Beyond the window, it is pitch-black. Darker than it should be. The gas lamp must have gone out, and now nothing is visible. No grass, no streets, no trees, no town. Just black. They call this the dead of night for a reason.

  “Officer,” she says at last, “could you at least do one small thing for me? Could you unbutton my collar? I—it’s a little difficult to breathe.”

  It could be a trick, of course, but he wants her to trust him. So he reaches out for the buttons at her throat, taking care not to look her in the eye and keeping the hip with the gun on it on her far side, well out of reach.

  There are three tiny buttons on the high lace collar of her gown, and once all three are open, he can see the vulnerable hollow at the base of her throat. He can also see a deep bruise across the front of her neck, a spreading purple mess roughly an inch high and several inches across. He spreads the lace of the collar open with his fingers to get a closer look. The bruise is a single thick line running side to side, as if someone had tried to behead her with something blunt. It is more pink than blue, with no yellow or green at the edges.

  “Is this fresh?” he says. “It looks fresh.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He takes out the handkerchief to dab lightly at her tears, which have started again.

  “It’s entirely your choice, officer,” she says. “To turn me in or let me go.”

  She’s right, of course. He has to make the decision. Capturing a notorious murderess would change everything for him, but at the same time, what if she’s innocent? The truth of what she’s saying can’t be denied. The law is perfect. The men in charge of executing it are not.

  “Tell me then,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

  She does something he has not yet seen her do. Not in the posters. Not onstage. And certainly not since he recognized and apprehended her in that restaurant.

  She smiles.

  The Amazing Arden looks at him out of her half-brown eye, tilts her head, and asks, “Where does a person’s story begin?”

  Chapter Two

  1892

  A Night’s Alteration

  Where does a person’s story begin? Mine starts with a hole in the middle, a hole where a father should have been. I must have had one, but the truth was that no one wanted to say out loud who he had been, if they even knew. I was raised in my grandparents’ house in Philadelphia. My name was Ada Bates. There was plenty of room and plenty of money, and I grew up straight and strong.

  In my earliest memories, I remember my mother as a cello. She and her instrument fused: a deep voice, a wasp waist. She wielded her bow fiercely, the notes soaring high and plunging low until the very windows trembled in their sills. I heard her at a distance, practicing at all hours, from down long hallways and behind closed doors. As she and my father were never married, she must have been in disgrace, but she never seemed to feel it. She was always cheerful as a songbird in those days.

  She taught me music herself, though I was at best a middling student. From her, I had inherited milk-white skin, large eyes, and a cleft in my chin, but the other side of the family delivered a tin ear. My singing was perpetually flat and my piano clumsy. I still looked forward to the lessons, because I rarely heard or saw her otherwise. Once a month, we both had our hair dyed from its natural red-gold to a more sedate brown, a tradition my grandmother had started when my mother herself was a child. I looked forward to those days, when we sat side by side for more than an hour, but they were all too rare. The rest of the time, a freckled governess named Colleen woke me, managed my days, and bid me good night, and I took my daily meals with her instead of in the dining room with my mother and grandparents. Except for music, my education was conducted by a series of tutors: French, history, grammar, drawing. All my tutors were so alike in demeanor—pale, cool, severe—that I believed when I was very young that they were all brothers and sisters from the same family. When not engaged in lessons, I was nearly always reading, my bookcases filled with Shakespeare and Seneca, Emerson and Donne. Reading was learning, and learning was a matter best conducted in privacy. My grandmother never trusted the schools.

  As it turned out, my grandmother would have done well to be even more distrustful.

  In 1892, when I was twelve years old, my grandparents arranged what was to be the greatest opportunity of my mother’s life. At considerable expense and trouble, they secured passage for her to travel to Europe for an audience with Franco Faccio of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, for whom she was to perform. If she impressed him, she might have a place with the orchestra as a first chair and soloist, appearing before large audiences to great acclaim.

  And she might have amazed Signore Faccio with her skill at the cello, and she might have been a great star, except that she sold the tickets and traded away her best jewelry and gave the money instead to a man named Victor Turner, who had been her music teacher for several years and would later be a frustrated farmhand, my stepfather, and the love of my mother’s life. The day that she would have left for Europe became, instead, the day they ran away.

  And that day, they took me with them. Heaven knows why. Someone else could have stood witness at their wedding, which was the only service I seemed to perform on the journey. I stayed silent and didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want them to think better of the choice.

  Our destination was Jeansville, Tennessee, where Victor’s brother Silas owned a small farm outside the town, growing hay and breeding horses. Victor was a versatile teacher, a master of everything from singing to piano to woodwinds and brass, and his plan had been to teach music to the families of the town. It took only two weeks for this plan to fail. The people of Jeans
ville were suspicious of newcomers. No one owned instruments, of course, and even if they’d had the money to pay a singing master, it would have been seen as too frivolous. He may as well have been selling champagne coupes or china shepherdesses. With unwise optimism, they had paid ahead a full year’s rent on the house, and the rest of the money wouldn’t stretch far enough to make a stand in a different town. Therefore there were only two possibilities: crawl back to Philadelphia in supplication, or stay. Had this been my mother’s first misadventure, supplication might have been more tempting. She’d been forgiven the first time and given another chance. But she knew she was no longer welcome in her parents’ house. With the second chance squandered, there would be no third.

  A new plan was hatched. Victor’s brother Silas was a fat man with a thin wife, and she had been complaining about the isolation of their farmhouse, which was too far from her friends’ houses in the town. She was as dedicated to the art of complaint as my mother was to the cello, and her virtuoso work had finally reached Silas’s ears. So they and their son Ray moved into the rented house, and my mother and Victor and I took occupancy of the farmhouse. It seemed like a fair trade. With no job prospects that matched his skills, Victor began working for his brother as a farmhand, and in this way, our cobbled-together household found its new equilibrium.

  I began attending school for the first time, which I did not enjoy. I was an indifferent student at best and insolent at worst. My manners, so carefully inculcated by my high-society grandmother and the etiquette experts she had paid to reinforce her, were unraveling rapidly. Never having set foot in a classroom with other students, I didn’t see the point of sitting still or waiting to be called on. Even when these things were explained to me, I resisted. They seemed silly. If I knew the answer, why shouldn’t I say so? If the lessons bored me, as they often did, why shouldn’t I find something better to do? My teacher wore her hair in two braids over her shoulders like a girl, and she seemed to know only answers that had been written down for her by someone else. Besides, the classroom was always too warm. It stank of chalk, spit, and cheap slate. I missed my shelves of books, all of which we’d left behind. I missed the idea that behind those cloth covers lurked endless surprises—spare slashing lines of poetry, or the rhythmic cadence of a play, or characters who, despite being only invented, sprang warmly and fully to life. There was none of that in our simple schoolroom primers, none at all. Their singsong phrases were, only and always, exactly as expected.