Adelaide said, “So get on with it. You’ve brought me a question.”
“Yes.”
“The answer matters to you. It matters to you more than anything ever has.”
“Yes, of course!” the man said, sounding impatient. “Why would I ask you otherwise? I thought you said you weren’t going to give me the empty show!”
“I just want you to be sure. That you want a true answer, not just one that will make you happy.”
“Yes!” he shouted.
“Spirits, hear my call!” she shouted back more loudly. “Answer this man’s question, with absolute truth, for he insists on the absolute.”
The man said, “Forget the mumbo jumbo! Tell me now!”
Adelaide walked forward to the very edge of the stage, stared down at the man, and said, “Very well. No.”
“No?”
“The woman you love,” said Adelaide. “She doesn’t love you.”
I could hear Scarlett take in her breath. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. I’d seen the second sight act over and over, and I knew the news was always, always good. If she couldn’t find something nice to say, Adelaide would either shake her head and complain that the spirits wouldn’t come clear tonight or she would make some vague pronouncement about a journey, one that shouldn’t be undertaken without purpose. It had never happened like this.
The man’s voice sounded strangled as he said, improbably, “Thank you.”
Adelaide raised both arms, turned like a whirlwind, and said, “The spirits are with us tonight! Shall we see what else they have in store?” It was the cue for the Hindoo dancing girls, and they all swirled out of the wings to the sound of a high piping flute, spinning almost too fast to follow.
Adelaide herself exited the stage on our side, and I didn’t see until then how deathly pale she was. But there was no time to talk. She turned her back on me and shrugged into the gown Jeannie held out for her, checking the hidden pockets for props, making sure everything was in place. Then she was dressed and out onstage again, weaving in and among the dancing girls.
Jeannie and I looked at each other, worried.
“Is it real?” I asked her.
She said, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t.”
That night was a quiet one, so quiet that when the sound of a brandy glass breaking against the side of Madame’s railcar came much later, it rang out almost like a gunshot. None of us slept well.
***
Two days later at breakfast, I was tearing a roll in half and wishing for butter when the mostly recovered Miranda slid carefully onto the bench beside me. She set a newspaper on the table.
“Is this him?” she asked without preamble.
“Who?”
She pointed, and I picked up the paper. The front page headline screamed: Native Son Slays Fiancée, Self in Tragic Murder-Suicide. There were two pictures. The woman was unfamiliar. She had a heart-shaped face and was pretty in the way that all rich girls are pretty, smooth-skinned and unmemorable. The man, on the other hand, I recognized instantly. His receding hairline, his remaining brown hair woolly and uncombed.
It was the man who’d asked the question in Hartford and gotten his answer.
I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, the paper bowed in the middle and crumpled, torn from my hands. I looked up to see who’d done it. The person holding the remains of the crumpled paper was Adelaide.
“Bad luck to read bad news,” she said. “I’ll take this.”
I knew I should remain silent, but I was still in shock. I’d never known anyone who died. I didn’t really know this man—I had only ever seen him the one time—but I felt responsible for him somehow. I wondered if Adelaide felt the same way. She’d told him the woman he loved didn’t love him. She’d said it flat out. It seemed he’d taken action, in the most terrible way.
“What happened?” I asked her.
I didn’t expect an answer, but she gave me one, of sorts.
“Too much truth is dangerous,” said Adelaide. “For all of us.”
Chapter Eighteen
Janesville, 1905
Three o’clock in the morning
She looks distraught now. The tears on her face are different from her earlier tears. Her whole face seems to blur with sadness. He reaches out with his handkerchief to dab her tears without being asked. She doesn’t thank him.
“Was it real?” he asks intently, standing over her, staring down.
“I thought about it a lot, for a while,” she says. “That man, that answer. I don’t know how she could have known what he was asking, but she did. On the other hand, none of the rest of her magic was real, so why would that have been?”
“None of the rest was real?”
She nods. “Nothing she did onstage, none of her illusions. Lady to Tiger, the Dancing Odalisque, Light and Heavy Chest, all of them were mechanical. Different secrets, but knowable ones. Mirrors, misdirection, sets, costumes. She taught me the tools to manipulate the audience’s reality. It’s amazing how you can make people think they’re seeing something they’re not. Especially when they want to believe. Then there’s nothing easier.”
He prods, “And then what happened?”
“After the second sight act?”
“Yes.”
Her shoulders sink. “Nothing was the same. Adelaide just—she just—didn’t care anymore. She didn’t say why, but it was obvious. Two people had died because of her words. Because of what she’d said to him in that theater. Had she said something different, or nothing at all, he might not have killed himself and that poor young woman.”
“She thought it was her fault? But she couldn’t know for sure, could she?”
“She was sure enough,” she says grimly. “It was like a light went out inside her. She did all the same illusions, with all the same results, but they didn’t make people want to stand up and applaud. Audiences lost interest. Somehow there was no magic in her magic. And of course, she never did the second sight act again.”
“But what happened? Did people stop coming to see her? Did she quit? Did something else happen to her, once she stopped caring?”
The magician gathers herself and speaks more crisply, shaking off the rough, wet sound of her earlier tears. “What happened was nothing. She performed the shows that were already booked, but she didn’t book any new ones. She wrote off the future. I asked about it once, and she told me to mind my own business, that if she wanted to drop off the edge of the world, she’d drop off on her own time and thank you very much, so I never asked again.”
His exhaustion strikes him then, out of nowhere. The adrenaline and the story have been carrying him. But there’s something about knowing that a successful woman like Adelaide Herrmann—the name sounds familiar, this part of the story must be true—could just crumple into nothingness. It reminds him that he, who is far less, has little to hope for.
He thinks about sneaking a look at his pocket watch but resists. He knows what he needs to know about what time it is. Evening is long gone and the night is headed toward morning. Time is running out.
He says, “She was like a mother to you.”
“She was. Like a mother isn’t the same as a mother, is it?”
“No.”
She eyes him, saying, “Tell me about your mother.”
“She’s dead,” he says. “She died in childbirth. I never knew her at all.”
“I’m so sorry, officer. I mean that. I can’t think of anything sadder.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can,” he says gruffly and walks back to his desk while he collects himself. He makes another decision. He crouches down behind the desk, pretending to look for something, so she can’t see. He unbuckles his holster and slides the whole thing, holster, gun, and all, into the bottom drawer. He uses the key from his belt to lock the desk. Hiding the gun l
eaves him defenseless, but he’s not worried about that. He’s far more worried about her using it against him. He can’t think of a way she could possibly escape the wrist cuffs, but then again, he couldn’t think of a way she could escape the ankle cuffs, and she’s already done that. He has to calculate the risks, and based on the calculation, do the best he can.
At length, he turns back to her and says, “Adelaide’s magic wasn’t real then. But yours is.”
“Not what I do onstage.”
“Even the man you heal at the end of the Halved Man?”
“No. That’s a trick. I told you already.”
“Always?”
“Always. But you would believe me if I told you it was real, wouldn’t you? You believe in magic.”
“Does it matter?” he stalls.
She says, “It’s interesting. I just wouldn’t think it of you. A practical young lawman. I would’ve thought you more—skeptical.”
He’s surprised when an explanation comes easily to his lips. This, like the truth about feeling like Iris’s second choice, he’s never told anyone. “My mother believed in it. I was told so, anyway. Small magic. The idea that people can sometimes do little things, for themselves or each other, that make life easier. Soothe babies. Encourage crops. Calm disagreements. Each according to their particular gifts.”
“Did you get Iris with small magic? Pry her away from her suitor? Put the other girl in his way?” she asks with a glint of mischief.
He knows her motives. He knows she wants to distract him, get him off the subject of her healing powers. He looks down to where her wrists are still linked tight to the chair and allows himself to feel superior for just a moment. Concentrating, he keeps a neutral expression on his face.
“She knew how I felt about her, even when she was together with Mose. I was patient. Then after Mose’s family announced his engagement to Prudie, she became much more receptive. I saw my opportunity, and I took it.”
“I think she’s better off with you,” she says, which surprises him, largely because it’s certainly not true.
Had she chosen Mose and he her, Iris would be married to a county sheriff instead of the only lawman in a one-horse town, a lawman who might not even keep that position for long, given what’s happened. Their family is still just the two of them, two years after the wedding, and she’d give anything for the baby that Prudie has. No, she’s not better off at all. He recognizes the magician’s empty flattery for what it is.
“Oh, ma’am. Don’t be obvious,” he says.
“Just so.” She bobs her head, a quick nod of acknowledgment. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all to be found out. “But right now, I’d like to ask you to do one kind thing for me. Would you?”
He braces himself but asks innocently, “What thing?”
“Take one pair of cuffs off my wrists?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re kind. Because they’re cutting me. Because there are still two left, so it doesn’t make any difference. It’s a favor. If you could do me just this one favor, I’d owe you, wouldn’t I?”
“Do you ever expect to be in a position to do me a favor?” he asks. Then his heartbeat begins to speed up as he answers the question for himself before she even speaks.
“Never know,” she replies.
“It would have to be a big favor, wouldn’t it?”
“I imagine it would.”
He knows it’s unwise, but his mind is churning and churning. If she can do the favor he wants her to, it will change everything. Too soon to ask now, but not too soon to start laying a foundation. Doing her a kindness can’t hurt his case. If they can be cordial with each other like this, it’s a breakthrough.
Pulling the key on a long string from his belt, he unlocks the bottom cuff from her right wrist, then her left. Now only two steel circles are stacked on each wrist, with two chains stringing the distance between them.
“Thank you,” she says softly.
He’s relieved she didn’t try at all to kick or bite him or dash her skull against his while he was so close to her. She knows the exact spot of his weakness, that bullet hiding in his back, waiting to kill him. Either she genuinely trusts him or she’s playing a longer con. As much as she’s told him, he still doesn’t know which is more likely.
Right now, she looks helpless. Bound to a hard chair in a small room with a locked door. Trapped, pinned down. Fragile in her useless finery.
As if she can feel him trying to read her, she says, “You still think I’m some kind of monster, don’t you? A dangerous creature? But I’m not. I’m just like you, trying to get by.”
“You’re not like me.”
“You’re a good person,” she says with enough force that he almost believes she means it. “So maybe not. You gave me that whole apple to eat instead of keeping it for yourself, which was a kind thing to do. You took off the cuffs when I asked, and I appreciate that. My wrist feels much better, by the way. I could sit the rest of the night like this now. So let me do something for you.”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I mean to say!”
“Then say it.”
She turns her fierce gaze on him, three-quarters blue, one-quarter brown, and says intently, “Ask me one question and I’ll answer. Yes or no. Any question at all.”
Without the slightest pause, he asks, “Did you kill your husband?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How do I know you’re not lying?”
There is a pause. The beads on her dress clack softly as she shifts position, tucking her legs demurely to one side, one ankle crossed over the other. She looks down at her ankles and the silver cuffs still attached to them and back up into his eyes once more.
Then she says, “I said one question, not two.”
“All right,” he says, resigned and exhausted. Maybe they haven’t made much of a breakthrough after all. “Tell me what happened to Adelaide.”
Chapter Nineteen
1900
Woman on Fire
After a final show in New York, an empty road stretched out ahead of us. Not the right kind of road, to say the least. Emptiness, loneliness, poverty, and worse, no bookings. The business lived and died on bookings. Every single person in the company could tell you of a case where that was literally true. Everyone knew someone whose act fell apart when they couldn’t get booked, ended up in the poorhouse, and then one way or another—starvation, illegal behavior, bad company—met an untimely demise.
I didn’t want to become one of those people. But I didn’t know how I would go forward, how I would forge a new life. I didn’t want to give up the nightly ritual of applause, which had become like air to me. I needed to be onstage. Perhaps I could find another job dancing on Broadway, but I wouldn’t be content in the fourth row of four anymore, and I was older now than the average chorus girl. I had turned seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, all without fanfare. If I couldn’t perform, I might be driven back to service, but that was also a poor answer. My skills onstage were unusual, maybe even unique; I was far less remarkable in a parlor or a laundry room. Given all this, I sank into a sadness. I knew a happy ending wasn’t the only kind of ending I might have.
***
We returned to New York for Adelaide’s last show. The city had changed in the years I’d been gone. Where there used to be a reservoir on Forty-Second Street, now they were building a great, huge marble palace. I couldn’t tell what it was going to be, but it was going to be grand. A new terminal for the Grand Central Railroad was also under construction, and there were so many electric lights that the city seemed to glow at night in every direction. There was more of everything. I found it just as overwhelming as I had when I rode into the city for the first time, yet the energy was undeniable, and I could understand why people gravitated toward this place
.
Our last show, at the Casino on Broadway at West Thirty-Ninth, was a celebration. Adelaide seemed to regain all that she had lost, just for the night. It was beautiful. The crowd was our happiest crowd, and our peaks were our highest peaks. Our magic was flawless, our dances magnificent, our music enchanting. Adelaide was generous and beautiful and impressive. The audience clapped for us, appreciated us, loved us.
We closed the show with the Navajo Fire. It was not our most elaborate illusion, but it always pleased the crowd. There were five of us dancers in buckskin fringe with feathers on our heads, but we looked like a lot more, whirling in a circle with long scarves. We pantomimed capturing Adelaide and tying her to a tree then danced around her in celebration, whooping and stomping. But we, foolish tribesmen, hadn’t reckoned on her magic. She got one arm free and raised it. All she needed to do was snap her fingers, and the dancing Indian nearest her vanished in a plume of fire, leaving nothing but smoke. We danced on, seeming not to notice, until she snapped her fingers again and another of us disappeared. By then it was too late: snap, snap, snap; gone, gone, gone. At the end, Adelaide stood alone. Usually, she clapped her hands and the rope holding her to the tree fell away, freeing her in a flash, and she strode out to the apron of the stage to do either the second sight act or one final card flourish to close the show. But this last night, instead, she snapped her fingers a sixth time, and she too became fire and then smoke, and she too disappeared.
The audience’s thundering applause in the dark was the loudest, most welcome sound in the world.
Everyone dispersed afterward, almost immediately. No one even lingered to say good-bye. But I knew where Adelaide would be, in her railcar. It was parked in the Grand Central yard for the night. And when I knocked on the door, she answered and poured me a brandy just like hers, halfway up the glass.
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