The Illusionist's Apprentice

by Kristy Cambron

  “Who are you?”

  Terse words greeted Elliot, along with pinched features, a tense jaw, and soul-tired eyes of a man who needed no introduction.

  Josiah Charles sat, arms crossed over a wretched dirty shirt and suspenders, eager to dislike anyone who’d walked through the door. He could boast some of his daughter’s coloring, though what looked to have once been flaming hair had dulled to tufts of ruddy gray over the ears and a beard that was overgrown with salt and pepper. He was missing any spark of kindness that could light his daughters’ features.

  “I’m Agent Elliot Matthews, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I’d like to thank you for coming in today, Mr. Charles.”

  He scoffed. “As if I had any choice in the matter.”

  “I’m sorry about the inconvenience.” Elliot clicked the door closed behind him and just stood there, hands buried in his pockets.

  Wren was all that mattered, not the posturing of two men on opposite sides of the law.

  “What does the federal government want with me?”

  “To be blunt, sir, your daughter’s whereabouts are presently unknown.”

  A cough rumbled low in Josiah’s throat, as if it had been building up for days. Or years. “Unknown, eh?” he asked, his voice gravelly. “I knew she was working with you badges. I told her to steer clear, to keep to her own affairs and stay out of it, but that girl always has been too headstrong for her own good. Never once listened to a thing I said. How do you boys know she hasn’t just skipped town? Wren’s done it before.”

  “Because she left Charlotte behind, sir.”

  “What does that matter? Wren spent much of her young years in London, away from her sister. So don’t pretend she’s got a heart all of a sudden.”

  Elliot shoved the slight away. Wren had a heart. But this man didn’t believe it. Certainly couldn’t see it. Elliot would have to try another tactic.

  “Wren’s been working with us for the last several weeks on a case that involves some persons close to her on the vaudeville circuit. Last night my partner was shot trying to protect one of our witnesses for a case involving a showman by the name of Horace Stapleton. That witness also happens to be one of your former employees—a Mrs. Amberley Dover née Green. She’s recently gone missing and we believe, because Wren is also unaccounted for this morning, that their disappearances are linked. It’s very unlikely Wren has left town. Or if she has, I’d say she didn’t do so willingly.”

  Josiah eyed him, a half-sober paternal glare easing down his face. As if he knew anything about who his daughter really was and had chosen that moment to be a knowing parent. “What you don’t realize is, a day absent in Wren’s life doesn’t mean anything. She does what she wants. Goes where she wants. And she’ll turn up eventually—if she wants to be found. She always does.”

  “Not this time.” Elliot pulled out a wooden chair opposite Josiah and sat, then opened his briefcase. “Her house is shut up. I looked in on the estate house this morning and she’s gone, when I specifically asked her to stay put.”

  “Like I said, don’t mean nothing. Not with that girl.”

  “But you see, it does.” Elliot took Wren’s book from inside and set it on the desk in front of Josiah. “Because she gave me this right before I left. I didn’t know why at the time, but I do now.”

  As expected, Josiah reacted. Just a slight pinch to the jaw and leaning back in his chair, as if hovering close to the book brought physical discomfort to him. “What’s that?”

  “I think you know it’s Wren’s. And I think you know why it’s so important to her.”

  Josiah frowned, a twisted, curvy line of his lips that showed his contempt.

  Elliot flipped halfway through the volume. Finding the page he was looking for, he stopped, then turned the book around so it was right side up to Josiah. “This is Wren’s handwriting.” He pointed to the words penciled in at the top of the page. “Yes?”

  Josiah squinted at the words, weary eyes attempting to focus.

  “Her account starts here.” Elliot indicated the elegant handwriting covering nearly all the margin space, flipped several pages, and stopped again. “And goes through to the conclusion of that story. Ending right here.”

  “An account of what?”

  “Of the last day of her mother’s life, Mr. Charles. A day in which she watched her mother die.”

  Josiah froze, then slammed the book closed. He pushed it back across the desktop. “I want this on the level. No funny police work or tricky angles.” He leveled a firm, though oddly glassy-eyed glare at Elliot. “Do you intend to prosecute me for my wife’s death?”

  “Should we?”

  Josiah leaned in, incensed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  “No. I don’t.” He tapped his index finger atop the book. “But she does. Wren’s words are an indelible eyewitness account of your wife’s death.”

  “From the storied eyes of a child.”

  Anger flashed in Elliot’s mind. He suppressed it, gritting his teeth. “From the guilt of a woman who’s blamed herself for two decades. She’s recorded it all here. How she watched her sister push her mother down the stairs, and because Wren had fallen asleep that day, she was too late to stop it. I’ve read the newspaper archives, Mr. Charles. And the old police file. It makes sense now, why you and Wren have worked together all these years. She was protecting Charlotte from possible prosecution because she misinterpreted what she saw. You are correct. This account is from the storied eyes of a child. But you—you—let her believe in a lie her entire life!”

  The truth of what Wren had been through stung. Her pain was held so close, chaining her to a wound that would never heal. And this man was directly responsible.

  It made Elliot sick to look at him.

  “Now, Mr. Charles, I have a few questions for you.”

  Josiah leaned back in his chair, scratching at the scruff on his chin while he calculated in the muddled confines of his drink-soaked mind. “You said I’m not here for prosecution. So what do you want with me?”

  “I need to know everything you can tell me about Amberley Dover and Wren’s stage manager, Irina. Knowing their association to Harry Houdini and yours to vaudeville, you were the one person I thought could make some useful connection for us.”

  “I don’t know that I can tell you much of anything.” He glanced up at the corner of the ceiling, as if his memories had drifted there. “Amberley came to work for me in 1920, after she’d been let go from the Houdini show. By then she’d lost any star power she might have had.”

  “But you hired her anyway.”

  “Yes. She was a terrible flirt from the stage, but that drew in the gents enough to fill some seats for a time.”

  “What did she do?”

  Josiah snickered low, as if the answer were obvious. “What do you think? She swished her skirts, of course. What other talent could that cat have except to shimmy around on a stage?”

  Elliot’s hand drifted to Wren’s book before he could stop it, his palm resting on the cover. It felt like a part of her was here somehow, still beside him. The pain raw and her past so near, he wanted to hold it close. To protect it in some way.

  “And what about Irina? We can’t find anything definitive on her—not even a last name. But I didn’t question her at the start because Wren had explicit trust in her. She put me off of it.”

  “That woman showed up with Wren when she came back to Boston, during the war. All I ever heard was that Wren met her somewhere overseas. Beyond that I didn’t care enough to find out.” He exhaled on a deep sigh. “That Amberley is a piece of work, though. She didn’t take to Wren coming back here at all, especially since she’d made a name for herself, even without Houdini’s help. I assume Amberley hated her for being pushed out. But she still doesn’t know that Wren came here and demanded I give that rotten little socialite a job.”

  Elliot did a double take. “What did you just say?”

  “Yo
u didn’t know?” Josiah took a tin from his shirt pocket and opened it. He rolled tobacco in paper as he talked. “The Castleton was going under years ago, long before we closed down. Wren swooped in. Saved it with the money she’d inherited from my dear, departed brother. I hated to do it, but the theater needed the funds. I swore I’d never take a cent from her again and I haven’t. She owns the ramshackle building now, she and my Charlotte, though the girl is addle-brained and can’t make any decisions for it. It’s why I always ran the books.

  “Wren said she wouldn’t get in the way, except for two things: that Amberley would have a job there for as long as she wanted and that she’d never know the reason why. So my daughters inherited a small fortune from my brother’s estate and I inherited a prima-donna dancer with superior airs. Figures. Thankfully, that rich Dover fella came in for a show and liked what he saw—enough that they were married a month later and I was finally free of her.”

  Elliot leaned forward, resting his elbows at the knees as he sorted through his thoughts.

  What was he missing?

  Amberley didn’t seem the type to have orchestrated Stapleton’s show. She wouldn’t have had the know-how or, frankly, cared enough to get involved. She was tactical but not trained, unable to give a man a lethal dose of anything. And while she harbored obvious resentment against Wren, she didn’t seem the type to do much but attempt public humiliation. At that she’d failed miserably.

  His thoughts bounced around, mentally taking him over the last moments he’d shared with Wren in the library. Of her tears and the insistence that he take the book with him . . . Of the time they’d spent backstage at the Bijou and in the sitting room of the seaside cottage. Everything they’d talked about came down to one thing: Wren didn’t trust anyone easily, but she’d trusted him. She’d given him the book for a reason, and it wasn’t until that moment that Elliot finally understood why . . .

  “She didn’t trust Irina.”

  “What kind of thing is that to say? Of course she trusted Irina. Worked with her for more than ten years, letting her in the backstage area of every show. You’d have to trust a person to make her your manager—especially as an illusionist.”

  Wren had said it backstage at the Bijou—even Irina didn’t know everything. She didn’t know about the cuff links and she certainly didn’t know about the book, because no suspicions were raised when Wren handed it off to him right in front of Irina.

  “She knew . . .”

  “Who knew what?”

  “Wren. She had to have known Irina was involved when she gave me the book. She wasn’t asking me to look after Charlotte because of a would-be threat. There was one right in the room.”

  Josiah exhaled, as if the exchange was draining his patience. “Involved in what?”

  “She was trying to get me out of the house before she confronted Irina. She was trying to keep me safe, too, at the expense of herself.”

  When Irina had burst in the library with the news about Connor’s shooting and Amberley’s disappearance, she couldn’t have taken a telephone call. Wren told him herself she’d disconnected the phone weeks prior, because they’d tired of the press calls.

  Elliot ran a hand through his hair, regret boiling over. “She was saying good-bye.”

  Wren had done it for him.

  The endearment of it made him want to shake some sense into her for putting herself at risk but still kiss the life out of her at the same time. She’d given him the book and let him walk right out the back door, leaving her alone in the grasp of a monster.

  “The toxin used in Victor Peale’s death comes from a bird found on the Fiji islands. That’s why Wren gave me the book on the South Pacific, because it was familiar to her once I’d given the description. She was trying to tell me that Irina was involved.”

  “I don’t know what that all means, but could it be you’re finished with me? I have things to do.”

  A resurgence of energy claimed Elliot. Irina had to be involved in Peale’s death, and she couldn’t let Wren walk away from the estate house with that kind of information. She’d keep Wren close. And she’d have had to make a decision quickly, meaning that she had help. Help that would have taken Wren from the estate house.

  Help that had to be right here in Boston.

  “. . . hidden, in plain sight.”

  Elliot jumped to his feet. “Mr. Charles, where did Wren get this book? Was it a gift from someone—your wife, perhaps? I need to understand why she chose this one. I don’t know why, but I think it could lead us to her somehow.”

  Josiah licked the paper on his cigarette, taking his time about answering. For once, it didn’t seem an act of defiance, but he did show evidence that the mention of the book had affected him. Elliot could see long-protected bitterness clawing to the surface.

  “Franklin,” he grumbled, opening his desk drawer to root around for something. He scattered things in the drawer with his fingertips, creating a minor racket. “My brother. He brought it for her.”

  “Wren’s uncle . . .” Surprise tinged his thoughts. “How old was Wren when she received it?”

  “How should I know?” Josiah barked out. “And what does that matter now?”

  Elliot reached in his pocket and retrieved his lighter, then flipped the flame to burn before his face. Josiah stopped, leaned into the flame, singeing the end of his cigarette until it caught fire. He took a long draw.

  “The thing is, Mr. Agent, my brother always loved those girls. My girls. And my wife. All because he’d missed his chance. When he finally realized it, he came back from his fancy life across the sea and thought he could swindle them away from me.” He pounded his fist on the table. “But I’m a man who keeps what’s mine.”

  “What do you mean, your brother missed his chance? His chance for what?”

  “To have a family.” Josiah leveled a direct glare at Elliot, his eyes piercing through the curls of smoke rising around the desk.

  “But he could have had a family. Why would any of that stop him?”

  “Because Wren is his daughter.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It shouldn’t have been a great surprise, though hearing the truth confirmed was something altogether different from Elliot relying on instinct. Suddenly dominoes began to fall into place, laying questions flat along with them.

  “Does Wren know this?”

  “Of course not. I’d never give either of them the satisfaction of telling her the truth about where she’s come from.”

  “But surely Wren deserves—”

  “Deserves what? To know that my wife always pined for another man? She tried to hide it but I knew. We were a comedy act together, Franklin and me. In the early days, pratfalls and gags, that sort of nonsense. But some producer of a London show took a liking to Franklin’s smile and offered him a contract with a performance company in England. So he broke up the act and away he went to strike his fortune, leaving Olivia behind. By the time he came back, she was already married to me and carrying her first child—by the name of Jenny.”

  Elliot listened with a guarded ear.

  He’d read the newspapers.

  He knew of the rumored physical abuse Olivia Charles suffered, that she’d taken a fall down a flight of stairs and broken her neck one night, but that the fall itself likely wasn’t the cause of a swollen eye and bruised ribs already pronounced on her body. No matter what Josiah said, his words couldn’t explain that away in Elliot’s mind.

  He balled a fist under the edge of the desk where Josiah couldn’t see. Much more of this and he’d be thrown in jail for letting his own punches fly on an aging drunkard.

  Elliot refocused his thoughts, turning back to the front cover so he could open the first page to Josiah. Block letters spelled out WREN LOCKHART.

  “Then where did she come up with this? Why would she choose that name in particular?”

  “How should I know? The girls had a whole line of trees that grew up from the garden to their second-story bedroom windo
w. Maybe they liked those stupid birds that always flew around, building nests in the eaves that I had to climb up and rip out. Why else would she choose such a silly name?”

  Elliot’s heart stopped.

  The trees . . .

  They’d covered every angle of the case, from Victor Peale’s book and the scrap of paper with the names, to the pinpoint-precision of the man’s wardrobe and the doctor’s testimony that Peale was dead before he’d been brought back. Even the ticket stub found on the body had been authenticated and the photo in the paper a perfect likeness for Peale. Every base had been covered—but one.

  And now Elliot had a feeling he knew exactly what it was.

  He gathered up the book and turned toward the door, rushing through his excuses for leaving in such a whirlwind.

  “Wait just a minute.” Josiah stood with such force it toppled the aged chair behind him. “I want to know one thing before I let you leave,” he demanded, his voice rough. “Why are you really going after Wren?”

  “Because she has information that is paramount to this investigation, Mr. Charles. She’s also an innocent citizen, and I believe her disappearance is the result of foul play. It would be an injustice if we didn’t find her as soon as possible, especially when she could be in grave danger. So the reason I’m going after her is because it’s my job to keep her alive.”

  “No. I’m not asking why you Federal Bureau folk are looking for her. I asked why you are. Seems to me there’d be better things for the federal government to do.” Josiah took a last draw before extinguishing the end of his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the table. “It’s more than that, isn’t it? You care for my daughter?”

  Even if someone had stolen his tongue, Elliot couldn’t have said less in that moment.

  The last thing he expected was to have a heart-to-heart with a man the likes of Josiah Charles. He stood taller somehow, even for his medium stature, and waited with some pitiful attempt at paternal authority in place. “Well?”