***
Misdirection and camouflage are the only real weapons in a stage magician’s arsenal. Being in possession of impeccable timing doesn’t hurt, either.
Willow sat motionless, shielded by the same viburnum bush that had sheltered him for hours, since just after his wife walked out on him. He wore the matte-black elasticized jumpsuit that he had often used when working as a magician’s assistant in stage shows where he didn’t want to be seen. He’d worn it two nights before, when he’d slipped in and out of Sister Mama’s bedroom. Their current auditorium was too small for him to do invisible onstage magic, but on a properly lit flat-black stage in a large hall, this suit rendered him invisible. It made him capable of things that looked impossible from the cheap seats. Outdoors, in the shadows on a dark night, he was almost as impossible to see.
He had known Dara would come here again, looking for her mother. She was hardly out their door before he was out of the house, dressed to be unseen. Thus camouflaged, he had waited for the chance to torch another house. Anonymous hands-off murder gave the same kind of rush as a successful illusion, magnified a million times.
His wife and her aunt Myrna were the only things that stood between him and the money Marlowe was dangling for the Armistead sisters’ land. Sister Mama, too, needed to go, not because she was an immediate and direct impediment but because Marlowe wanted a little more land for his golf course’s clubhouse, and she had some. Ennis would sell it to Marlowe, and they would both enjoy the financial benefits of his pleasure, but Willow would be the only one holding the secret of why the three old ladies had died with such convenient timing.
Willow liked having this kind of private knowledge. There was power in secrecy. Secrets were magic.
Willow would have liked to continue dispatching Myrna and Sister Mama slowly and unobtrusively with medicinal potions and toxic candy, and he wouldn’t have minded staying married to Dara, as long as she shared the proceeds of selling her inheritance. She was entertaining, she kept their home and business running, and the sex was amazing. But she’d said she was divorcing him, and Dara never failed to live up to her word. Now he had to kill her, and he had to do it quickly, before a divorce court severed his claim on her inheritance.
It would have been better to find another way to kill Dara and her aunt. A second house fire was too obvious, but he was short on time and he’d gotten away with the first one. It didn’t matter if the arson inspector hiding in the shadows of Myrna’s house suspected foul play, as long as she couldn’t pin it on him. Next to him, hidden under an opaque black shroud, sat a stout board, a hammer, a jar of nails, a can of gasoline, and a large box of matches, all of them stolen from Myrna’s own storage shed. In the darkness, the shroud would serve as his cloak of invisibility while he transported these tools into the house. Dara and Myrna would be dead in an hour, and he would be the sole heir to both their estates. Whoever else sat with them around the crystal ball would be collateral damage.
But first, he needed to dispatch the arson inspector who thought she was hiding behind the porch steps. A moment ago, he had struck the ground lightly with his hand, making a sound like an errant footfall. That must have gotten her attention. He wasn’t even slightly concerned that it also gave away his position.
After giving her a moment to echo-locate him, he had reached out a long leg and shook a bush just enough for her to see it. Without moving from his original position, he had diverted her attention to a new spot. Then, to finish the illusion, he had thrown a small rock in the direction his leg was pointing. It dropped to the ground. Its impact was softened by fallen leaves, but it was still audible.
Misdirection. Human senses were so very vulnerable to its lies. Avery was now watching someone whom she believed to be moving toward the front of the house, while he remained in his original position, perfectly camouflaged. When she gave chase, he would be just behind her, waiting with a rag soaked in the tincture of many things he’d stolen from Sister Mama’s garden. They would have killed Sister Mama effectively, if the Longchamp-Mantooth women had left the soporific sponge in place long enough. All he would have had to do was sneak back into her room after she was dead and pluck out the sponge.
The tincture wasn’t chloroform or ether, but it would serve the same purpose equally as well. Applied to a healthy adult, it was a toss-up as to whether this tincture would sedate or kill. Either way, it would help him take Dara’s inconvenient guard out of the way.
***
Willow had planned his illusion perfectly. He could see Avery running. The excellent spatial skills that marked the true illusionist plotted her trajectory for him. She was headed for the precise spot he’d chosen. Once she passed his hiding place, she would have her back to him. She would be utterly blind to his attack, and the anesthetic he held would render her unconscious in seconds.
The flaw in his perfect plan was Faye’s husband. Even though Joe had placed himself in full view of everyone passing on Walnut and Main Streets, he had done so after Willow took up residence in the bushes. Before this moment, there had been no way for Willow to know that Avery had backup. Now, Willow sank back into darkness and asked himself how to handle two adversaries, one carrying a gun and the other huge, who were both running full-tilt for a spot just a few feet away from him. In a fraction of a second, he would have to decide what to do.
In addition to excellent spatial skills, talented illusionists have remarkable coordination and razor-sharp senses. These things are also true of trained law enforcement officers and natural-born hunters. Three elements of a human explosion were gathering in a single spot at the heart of Rosebower.
***
In the bedroom where she had slept since she was twenty-nine years old, Sister Mama lay quietly. There was no light in the room and no sound. The only sensory stimulus was the downy softness of the quilt covering her twisted limbs. In such comfort, she should have slept straight through until morning, but something troublesome brushed through her dreams. Her eyes opened suddenly, dark and wise. She studied the ceiling and wondered what kind of trouble was afoot.
***
Only one magician’s tool was on Willow’s side now. It was the element of surprise.
He allowed Avery to run three steps past him, until Joe came within arm’s length. With an arcing swing of his hammer, he brought the big man down.
Avery swung her weapon around in a very similar arc and tried to point it at him, but no one can take perfect aim while running and Willow was prepared for her. The hammer knocked the gun far out of her reach and his. It also broke two bones in her hand, and its impact sent her sprawling. She lay curled on the ground, cradling her hand, and her violent collision with the ground left her unable to even look up at her attacker.
A killer who sets fires and delivers poisons to helpless octogenarians is not of the same breed as the killer who beats a human being to death by hand. Arsonists don’t like knives. Poisoners don’t like guns. Neither breed is likely to strangle. They are as evil as the hands-on murderer, but they prefer the remote exercise of that evil.
Willow needed them both out of his way while he dispatched his wife and her aunt. He could have ensured this by bashing Avery’s brains out with his hammer, then doing the same thing to Joe. Instead, he held the dripping cloth over their faces until they slept almost as deeply as the dead. Perhaps they would never wake up. Willow didn’t care. He merely didn’t want to be involved in the messiness of it all.
He gathered his instruments of death and draped the dark shroud over them. Then he mounted the rear steps of a house where four people sat in a claustrophobic little room. He should have been invisible as he went about this task. He thought he was invisible. He would have been invisible, if there hadn’t been someone unexpected coming his way. A magician cannot misdirect a person when he doesn’t know that person is watching.
***
The voice wasn’t Dara’s. It wasn’
t Amande’s. It didn’t sound like Myrna’s, but it had to be, because Myrna’s lips were moving. The words were slurred but Faye heard power in her voice.
“The viper in the bed…broken trust…you are not safe. No one is safe.”
She shook her head back and forth, fighting for words. Faye was not prepared for the words that came.
“Get the hell out of this house.”
Amande stared, wide-eyed. Dara and Faye both instinctively broke the circle and reached a hand out to Myrna. They had lived long enough to know the symptoms of brain injury, and Myrna was showing a lot of them. Her face had lost expression. Her vocal quality had deteriorated. Raving uncontrollably in a spiritual setting was beyond inappropriate for a woman of her religious background. And cursing? Faye wouldn’t have thought Myrna knew how.
“Can’t you people hear? I want you gone. Get my sister out. And my daughter. Keep her safe.” Myrna’s head lolled onto Dara’s shoulder. “Keep her safe.”
The repeated impact of a hammer striking wood reverberated. It told them that it was too late to heed Tilda’s warning. An oily scent penetrated the room that was organic but not herbal, and it was unmistakable. Nothing else smells like gasoline.
“Get the door,” Faye barked, and the other three women obeyed in an instant. They lunged together at the door. Even Myrna threw herself at the stout slab of wood, but it was no use. The door was nailed shut.
No one had to be told to hit the floor. They all had recent and painful memories of the things fire-hot smoke could do to a human being’s lungs. Faye pressed her cheek to the time-worn oak and reached out for her daughter’s hand.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The tiny oil lamp still rested on the table, casting its weak light around the room. Even from the floor, Faye could see that the crystal ball was gone. She looked at Dara, lying three feet away. She was clinging to Myrna with one arm and the crystal ball with the other.
The ball taunted Faye. Several scenarios had been proposed that attempted to explain how Tilda and her crystal ball had escaped her burning house. Faye didn’t believe any of them.
She didn’t believe that Tilda ever removed it from its spot in her séance room. It had sat at the heart of her house as if it must always be there.
The practical part of Faye also understood that it was heavy and awkward to carry. Moving it would have required a second stand to hold it, or something else to keep it from rolling around in its new location. When Faye pictured Tilda’s actions after she and Amande and Myrna left on that fatal night, she imagined her leaving the room and closing the door with the ball still inside. Or she imagined her lingering there to spend a few more moments in spirit. She didn’t picture her hauling a heavy lump of crystal out of the room for no reason.
This meant that the ball was still in the room when the killer nailed the door shut. Tilda was in one of two places, outside the room or inside the room. If she’d been outside the room, the question was, “How did she get the ball out?” And if she’d been inside the room, the question was, “How did she get the ball and herself out?”
Since Faye needed rather desperately to get herself, her daughter, and her friends out of an identical room, she decided to go with the second question. It implied that there was a way out of her predicament. If Tilda got herself and the ball out of an identical room in an identical situation, then Faye could do the same. This room where she was trapped had served as a site for spiritual readings for generations, and she had seen letters from one of those Spiritualists to a known faker. Everybody around Faye believed in the traditional honesty of the Armisteads, but this didn’t mean that they were right. Maybe this room had secrets.
If Faye were building a room where she planned to fool people into believing in ghosts, she was pretty sure she’d build some tricks into the very structure of the room. The very first trick she’d install would be a secret exit. The mysterious escape of Tilda and the crystal ball was perfectly explainable if she’d had access to a secret door.
Faye began feeling her way across the floor, looking for escape.
***
Avery always claimed later that Faye’s voice, calling her name, was the thing that woke her. Faye denied it, because she’d been frozen silent with fear.
It takes a great deal of will to shake off a powerful sedative but, whether she was goaded to it by Faye’s voice or not, Avery managed it. She rose from the spot where she had fallen, dragging herself vertical and asking her eyes to focus.
The first plumes of smoke were drifting out an open window. They were so tenuous and new that Avery thought that the arsonist couldn’t possibly have had time yet to leave. If this was true, she knew where her adversary was. She crept around the house and slipped through the back door.
***
Faye remembered Myrna saying that Tilda had assisted her father, but that Myrna herself never had. Maybe the secrets shared by father and daughter had included a way out of the room, and maybe the knowledge of that secret passage had died with Tilda, but Faye intended to use her last moments to look for it. She circled the small space, ignoring Amande’s hissed orders to “Get down!”
Completing her circuit of the room, she crawled up under the slant of the staircase. Trying each stair, she found that one of the risers shook slightly. With effort, Faye was able to remove it, revealing an opening less than a foot tall. Slender Tilda could have squeezed through it, but not Myrna.
Here was the reason Tilda had been chosen as her father’s assistant. The only “psychic ability” that had enabled Tilda to assist her dishonest father was her slender form. She could easily have sneaked into séances through this entry, performing “magic” in a darkened room before slipping out again. Myrna would have been too large for such things by the time she was past toddlerhood.
Tilda had been thin enough to sneak in and out of the room, faking the sounds and apparitions that her father passed off as spirits. Myrna was too large to help, so she’d been spared the knowledge of her father’s dishonesty. And her sister’s. On the night of her death, Tilda had performed a Houdini-like illusion. She’d been nailed into this room, but “miraculously” exited through this hidden escape hatch. And she’d brought her treasured crystal ball with her.
Tilda must have been beside herself when she couldn’t rouse her sister. Even if she’d had a key to Myrna’s door, it was probably inside her own burning house. Faye knew from experience that it took a ladder to reach the windows on both houses’ first floors, so Tilda would never have been able to break in, not in her condition. And she wouldn’t have known whom to trust. With tempers running high over the Marlowe development and all the money it represented, anybody in town could have been suspect.
An agoraphobic in her eighties who lived within walking distance of everything in her life would have needed no cell phone. If Tilda had been thinking clearly, she could have stopped at a gas station once she left Rosebower and called for help, but by then she was dying of smoke inhalation. Coming up with a new plan would have been too much for her. She was probably only capable of continuing to carry out her original plan to chase down the only person who surely had no motive to hurt either of the Armistead sisters—their brand-new friend Faye.
The brimstone smell of another newly struck match crept into the room. Lingering near the tiny opening, Faye looked at the people in the room behind her. All three of them were hugging the floor, where the little fresh air left would be driven when the house went up in flames. Amande was dialing 911, as Faye had known she would be. They were doing all the right things, but they would be dead in minutes, unless the call to 911 brought help in time.
And where were Avery and Joe? Their absence told Faye that they were probably in trouble, too.
Faye’s daughter weighed half again as much as she did. Dara’s full hips were too large to fit through the gap, and Myrna’s entire life had been shaped by the fact that she was too b
ig to squeeze through this secret exit. Faye was the only one in the room small enough to escape. If she could get out without being seen by the arsonist—by Willow, she was sure—then maybe she could get help. Maybe there was an ax in Myrna’s shed that she could use to break down the door.
There was time to kiss her daughter once, but then she must go.
***
Joe held his hands in front of his face. There were four of them. He had twenty fingers total. This could not be a good thing.
There was a knot forming at the base of his skull. It promised to be the size of Tilda’s crystal ball. Willow had swung wildly and been lucky enough to connect. If his aim had been good enough to strike Joe in the temple, his skull would have shattered like an egg. As it was, Willow had flattened a much bigger man with a single blow. Rolling onto his belly, Joe tried to convince his arms and legs to lift him. No luck.
The only part of his body that he could get off the ground was his aching head. He lifted it and scanned his surroundings, not such an easy trick with double vision. He could see an Avery or two climbing the back steps. This was good, because Joe thought it might be a while before he’d be able to get in the house to fetch his wife and child. Then he began to wonder whether he was suffering from some kind of bizarre mirror-double vision, because somebody was also climbing the front steps.
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