The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  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.

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  Reading Group Guide

  1. The action of The Magician’s Lie alternates between a single night in 1905, with Arden imprisoned by Officer Holt, and the story of her life that Arden tells him, which ranges over a number of years. Did you find one storyline more intriguing than the other? Were you eager to get back to one or the other?

  2. As the novel opens, Virgil Holt has just received the bad news that the doctor won’t operate on the bullet lodged near his spine. How does this affect his actions? Do you think he would have behaved differently if he were uninjured?

  3. “The law is perfect. The men in charge of executing it are not.” Officer Holt decides early on that if Arden is innocent, it’s his responsibility to free her instead of turning her in, since the courts can’t be trusted to determine guilt or innocence. Do you believe this? Do you think he should have turned her in either way?

  4. fter Ray breaks Arden’s leg, preventing her from dancing for Madama Bonfanti and having the chance to enter ballet school, she says, “There were so many what-ifs.” What do you think would have happened if he hadn�
�t done this?

  5. Arden’s unique gifts set her apart from the other characters in the book, but she also has a lot in common with them. Who in the book is the most like Arden? Her mother? Ray? Clyde? Adelaide? Who is she least like?

  6. When Arden confesses that Ray has hurt her, her mother tells her, “You must be mistaken…we all depend on that boy’s father, for our lives, for everything…I think you know Ray won’t be the one he’ll punish. We will all suffer instead.” Do you feel Arden’s mother bears some responsibility for what happened to Arden at Ray’s hands? Should she have spoken up, even though it could have endangered their family’s well-being?

  7. Fleeing Tennessee for Biltmore is a huge, pivotal moment in Arden’s life. Do you think it was the right choice? Should she have stayed with her family and tried to find another way to fight Ray?

  8. In a key scene, the master of Biltmore tells Arden, “We all have agency,” and she later repeats it to Holt. What does this quote mean to you? Do you think it applies to your own life, and if so, how?

  9. Arden is surprised that Holt easily believes in magic. Did this surprise you as well? Did you believe from the beginning that the disappearance of the bruise on Arden’s throat was magical, or did you suspect some sort of trick?

  10. Ray pursues Arden for years, eventually finding her first in Chicago and then again in Savannah. “My God, Ada, I’ve missed you so much. You’re my other half. The only one like me. I haven’t felt complete without you.” Why do you think he was so obsessed with her?

  11. During their romance at Biltmore, Clyde is a slightly shadowy figure, and Arden learns that he’s not entirely trustworthy during their trip up the coast. Is Arden right to distrust him when they meet again years later? How hard is it to reevaluate your relationship with someone you’ve known for a long time?

  12. Arden is suspicious of rich people at several points in the book and feels she can only fit in at Biltmore as a servant. Yet she was raised in wealth by her grandparents. Why do you feel she identifies so strongly with the life she led starting at age twelve instead of her life before that?