08 Illusion (53 page)

“That’s how you met Dane Collins. Now tell me you don’t remember that.”

“I … met … Dane Collins?”

Joanie leaned back in her chair and just gave her a moment.

Mandy tried to imagine Dane as a young man but could see only the sixty-year-old escorting her back to her seat, getting her name, smiling at her, thanking her for coming, saying whatever it was he said, her fantasy of a reality that only Joanie was there to see. But if that was the day they met … “What are you saying?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“No.”

“This is heavy.”

“Did I—”

“Marvellini offered you a job as his stage assistant and you took it, right there on the spot. We thought it was kind of a lame move, I mean, you were dropping out of college to go on the road with a nickel-and-dime magic act, but … we could see the little sparks between you and Dane and you know, he was one hunk of a guy. He was only nineteen, no older than we were, but he was cute, real cute!

“Anyway, you were Marvellini’s stage assistant until he retired—or quit, just depends on which story you believe. He handed the whole show over to Dane and you, and by then you two were inseparable, so you got married”—she threw in a pause to let that sink in—“on June 19, 1971 … and you started up your act and you called it Dane and Mandy, and the rest is history.”

Dane and Mandy. She remembered seeing, touching those names on all those crates in Dane’s barn. All the dreams, all the years, all in the past. “I know Dane Collins!”

Joanie looked at her quizzically. “You know him? You mean, now?”

Mandy nodded.

“And how did this happen?”

“I worked for him! He coached me!”

“When? I thought you never met him.”

“I did, but not back then!” Mandy tried to explain how the Gypsy Girl and then the Hobett met up with Dane Collins and became his protégée and worked on his place and learned how to put on a show, and how he never talked about his wife unless she asked him and didn’t have any pictures of her in the house and how she just had to be around him and how she didn’t know why she had to try on Mandy’s costumes and dresses, she just had to, and by the time she got to that part she was in tears. She didn’t say anything about their parting; she just couldn’t.

Joanie dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “And let me guess: you’re in love with him.”

That was a question Mandy feared more than anything. She deflected it. “What did my dad think?”

“About?”

“About Dane and me …”

Joanie smiled. “He gave you away at the wedding. You know how the minister asks, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ Your dad said, ‘Her mother and I do,’ and he put your hand into Dane’s and just held it there for a while. He liked Dane. He told me, and I heard him say to other people, too, ‘Eloise would have liked him.’ I don’t think he was ever worried about you.” She laughed at another memory. “He helped you fix up the first house you rented, the one near Seattle. It was a rebuilt chicken coop. It didn’t have any insulation and the water came from a spring up the hill.” She shook her head at the memory. “I came by to see it once. Holy cow!”

“But we were happy?”

“It was like that line from
Fiddler on the Roof,
‘They’re so happy they don’t know how miserable they are.’ You had all your money in that old moving van with your show gear in it, and, I tell you, you ran the wheels off that thing. You’d come through Spokane and Coeur d’Alene about twice a year, and every time your show was better. I knew you were going to outgrow the little county fairs and high school assemblies and I guess you did.” Joanie found her a box of tissues, and Mandy pulled out several. “Come on, let’s go on the Internet.”

They went into the den where heads of deer, elk, and one bull moose stared into space from the walls. Joanie had a computer sitting on a desk in the corner. She placed a chair beside her own for Mandy, flipped open her Mac, and showed Mandy the steps to get online.

“Now you just type ‘Dane and Mandy’ into the search box up here …”

What came up was more than Mandy would be able to read in that one visit, but Joanie’s mission for the moment was to find picture after picture of Mandy through the years, and the earliest ones … well, they were pictures of the Girl in the Mirror. Joanie hit the print command, and the printer zip-zip-zipped out hard copies.

“And let’s see, if we go to the Social Security death index … and enter Arthur Whitacre …”

Daddy’s name came up in the little boxes on the screen along with his Social Security number and the date of his death, March 12, 1992.

Tap tap. Zip-zip-zip.

“Can you bear to see more?”

By now Mandy felt numb, unable to fight or fathom it. She could only receive it, store it, let it season. “Please.”

Joanie did a little more searching and brought up an obituary from the
Coeur d’Alene Press.
There was a photograph of Daddy, so much older than she remembered him. Joanie scrolled down to the part that read, “He is survived by his daughter, Mandy Eloise Collins …”

“That’s you,” said Joanie. “Do the arithmetic and you were … forty-one when he died. And I remember you inherited the Wooly Acres Ranch, but there hadn’t been any cattle or horses or llamas on the place for quite a while. Your dad got so he couldn’t keep up with all that.” Tap tap. Zip-zip-zip. “How’re you doing? You okay?”

What could Mandy say? It was more than she could contain, and it all rang true. “What … what became of the ranch?”

“Uh, all I know is, you eventually sold it to a developer and now it’s stores and parking lots.”

Oh, that stung.
How could I?

“You okay?”

Mandy couldn’t say yes—she couldn’t say anything—but she couldn’t stop, either. She wordlessly asked for Joanie to go on.

“Okay then. Here’s where the story ends. Here’s the part I have to be honest about, just put it in front of you and hope you figure it out. I’ve been to this site plenty of times, printing out copies.” She entered Mandy Collins, got a list of results, and scrolled directly to the one she wanted. It was a news story from the
Las Vegas Sun
:

Mandy Eloise Collins, best known as the witty and offbeat wife and partner of Dane Collins in the magical duo Dane and Mandy, was killed yesterday and her husband, Dane, injured when the Collins’s car was sidestruck by another motorist, also killed in the crash. Dane Collins, riding in the passenger seat, escaped and was subsequently injured trying to rescue his wife from the burning vehicle …

Joanie printed a hard copy so Mandy could take all the time she needed to read it. “It’s hard enough trying to explain how you weren’t at the fair when you were, and you didn’t see Marvellini when you did, and you didn’t meet Dane when you did and you even married him. Now we have to explain how you can be sitting here right now when you’re dead.”

Mandy’s head was spinning. When she met Dane he was a widower still mourning his wife, and now she was his wife? Were there two Mandys? Had one of the other Mandys she’d seen or become or even been, met Dane in 1970 while she, the Mandy sitting here, was wandering around the fairgrounds in a hospital gown …

Hospital gown.

She read more of the article and let out a gasp, then an audible whimper when she saw where Mandy Eloise Collins had died: “… rushed to the Clark County Medical Center, where she died of extensive burn injuries …”

Clark County Medical Center. She’d just recently visited those hallways, rooms, names, and faces she knew as if she’d been there a thousand times. Dr. Kessler knew her, too, that was plain to see.

“Mandy?” Joanie asked. “What is it?”

She scanned the copy looking for the date. “When did I die in the hospital? Is there a date anywhere?”

She found it at the top.

September 17, 2010.

She put her head down between her knees. Joanie ran for a glass of water.

She died in the Clark County Medical Center and awoke in a hospital gown at the Spokane County Fair on the same day.

chapter

44

D
ane sometimes wondered if Parmenter would have been happier hiring a Pony Express rider to carry their messages back and forth. Four days—four days!—after their last phone conversation, Dane got another letter by U.S. Mail and made another call from a pay phone in Athol, Idaho, this time wearing a raincoat and a billed cap and feeling overtly melodramatic.

The phone call lasted half an hour, most of which Parmenter spent in backstory about a painter named Ernie and a hotel manager named Doris and preparatory remarks leading up to something dire that he never quite said but Dane could guess.

Dane finally cut him off. “All right, all right, you sold me twenty minutes ago, which is twenty minutes we just gave
them.
Give me specifics. I need locations, calendar dates, names of all the players, what kind of budget they’re talking about, who’s in charge …”

Parmenter responded, “How soon can you get down here?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Dane returned home, went straight up to his loft, and pulled some rolled-up drawings from a large round basket next to his drafting table. He hadn’t even finished these—there had been some interruptions—but now they’d become important. He rolled the sheets out flat on the table, weighting the ends, and looked them over, mind open and fishing for ideas, any ideas.

A tight cocoon, a pod, a capsule … hoisted on a crane … wood construction might be better … But how would she ever get out of it?

“Eloise Kramer, may I introduce Emile DeRondeau. He’s the best in the business.”

Mandy extended her hand to a red-haired, red-bearded gentleman in unpretentious work shirt and jeans. His hand was rough, indicating that he not only designed award-winning magical effects, he also was closely involved in building them. “You can call me Mandy.”

“That’s her stage name,” said Seamus, clarifying the obvious.

“Of course,” he said with a smile. “I’ve seen your work. I love it.”

“Thank you.” She wanted to be more conversational, but the chatty neurons in her brain just weren’t firing.

It was the first Wednesday in March. The sun was out, the temperature was getting comfy. Mandy, Seamus, and the Orpheus stage crew were having a concept meeting with Emile DeRondeau in the hotel’s back parking lot, now blocked off and void of cars. While they watched from a safe distance, Big Max hooked a cable to an appropriately sized shipping crate, and a huge crane began hoisting it aloft.

“You might stick with the name by which I introduce you,” Seamus whispered sideways to her.

“I prefer Mandy,” was all she cared to whisper back. She shifted her focus to the ascending crate, trying to concentrate on one solitary thing without her mind spinning off in a hundred directions, reviewing, reliving, sorting,
fearing.
These people were planning her life, and it was all she could do to park herself in this meeting and pay attention.

Andy and Emile were watching the crate and noting where the sunlight was coming from.

“An afternoon show, definitely,” said Emile.

Andy looked toward the south side of the parking lot. “We could place the bleachers over there. They’d be in the shade of the parking garage by about two, and the sun would be behind the audience.”

Seamus leaned down. “Try cashing a check under that name. There’s a reason you have the name Eloise Kramer and a reason I created it for you: survival. Mandy is not the answer, it’s the problem. It’s the name for everything you need to put behind you.”

“Assuming it’s all a delusion.”

He half laughed with a roll of his eyes. “I thought you confirmed that with your ‘old friend’ who never met you before.”

She took the rebuff, letting him have the last word. She’d led him to believe that her visit with Joanie had come to nothing, that it was no more than a same-name coincidence. Compared to the truth, it hardly seemed a lie. Besides, there was no aspect of her story that he wouldn’t see as an excuse for an airheaded, career-threatening infatuation with a sixty-year-old man. If it took a lie to keep from going there … well, it did, didn’t it?

She let it go and watched the crate, now looking very small as it neared the mast of the crane some 150 feet off the ground. The thought of being locked inside that thing gave her stomach a twist.

“What do you think?” Seamus asked Emile.

Emile squinted as he studied the crate, now stark against the sky. “Any higher and it’ll be too small for the audience to see. You’ve got enough thrill for the money.”

“Great. We can’t afford a bigger crane.”

Andy asked, “Ready to drop?”

Emile and Seamus exchanged a glance and then Seamus said, “Okay, let her go.”

Andy signaled the crane operator. The crate came loose and dropped for an awesome stretch of time before smacking into the pavement and exploding into splinters.

“Doable?” Seamus asked Emile.

Emile nodded. “We can work with that.”

Mandy checked out the tops of the buildings around the parking lot. The Orpheus was the tallest, but now it would be to the audience’s right instead of behind the event. Not a problem, she supposed. “So then I rappel down that side?”

“Oh, no,” said Seamus, “we’re working the big room now. Big room, big stunt.” He gave her a whimsical look, shot a side glance at Emile, then said, “You’re going to hang-glide.”

Her mouth dropped open, but she immediately liked the idea, looking up at the hotel, envisioning it.

“I have an instructor lined up. We can get you started on that right away.”

“So …”

Seamus traced the imagined spectacle with his hand. “You’re trapped in the crate, the clock is ticking, the time runs out, and the crate drops into the pit, BOOM! But then your doves appear, they circle to draw attention, then they fly up … up … to the top of the hotel, where you cast off from the roof on a hang glider with the doves flying in formation with you. You circle down, make a pass in front of the bleachers, you come in for a landing right in front of them, the doves land on your arms, ta-da! Big finish!”