08 Illusion (54 page)

She shook her head, but there was that twist in her stomach again. “
Guy
, you have a lot of confidence.”

He put his arm around her. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. But it’s all up to you. We’re going to need all your thoughts, all your senses, everything you are, and everything you have directed this way and nowhere else. This is your career. You’re on the rise now and you can be unstoppable if that’s what you choose. You understand what I’m saying?”

She regarded the splinters of wood littering the parking lot and the dizzying height of the Orpheus Hotel. “Oh, I understand.”

“Good, very good.” As he walked away he looked back and pointed at her. “Eloise.”

The lady who arrived at Priscilla’s boardinghouse drove a Mercedes but her eyes were empty as if the soul were gone, and her clothing was plain, like any unknown person on the street. She introduced herself to Priscilla as Mandy Whitacre’s Aunt Betsy. When Priscilla didn’t quite buy it, she said, “Oh dear, yes, I forgot. She would probably use her real name here: Eloise Kramer?”

Priscilla let Aunt Betsy into the house, but only as far as Eloise Kramer’s door. Aunt Betsy slipped a little pink envelope under the door, said thank you, and left.

That evening Mandy ducked into her room at Priscilla’s like a rabbit evading a hawk. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it as if she could hold everything at bay and then stood there, eyes closed, breathing, just breathing, hoping for a break, just one tiny moment of respite from all that, that
stuff
out there.

Time out,
she prayed.
Time out,
please.

Dane. I’m gonna call Dane and I’m just gonna tell him, I’m gonna tell him everything and I don’t care what he thinks.

She reached into her shoulder bag …

There was an envelope at her feet. It was small and pink like the envelopes for thank-you cards or baby shower invitations. She cringed. Judging from the last time she saw an envelope like this, it wasn’t good news. She picked it up and tore it open. Inside was a note, same handwriting as before.

Dear Ms. Whitacre:

Though our personal acquaintance comes no closer than that moment in the hallway at Clark County Medical, I am familiar with the circumstances that have befallen you since September 17 and was, I regret to say, one of the instigators who brought them about.

As such, let me settle some questions I’m sure have haunted you:

Nothing you’ve seen or experienced is illusory or delusional, but the result of procedures performed upon my recommendation, but without your knowledge or permission, in the basement of Clark County Medical Center. It is all explainable and you are not mentally ill.

You had nothing to do with Doris Branson’s accident or Ernie Myers’s injuries, nor are you in any way responsible for their deaths; those were our doing. The obituary I sent was to warn you, but I’ve since come to realize that neither I nor anyone else can stop what has already happened.

I have kept something safe that belongs to you. If you will show this letter to the man whose address and phone number I have included, he will guide you to it.

I have destroyed everyone and everything I desired to save, including you and lastly, myself. All that is left for me is to destroy the lie I’ve become and hope the truth will help you put things together. I won’t ask you to forgive me. Maybe God will.

Yours truly,

Margo J. Kessler

The lady drove her Mercedes to a nice house on the west side, brewed some tea, then spent an hour at her kitchen table finishing a letter on her laptop. Leaving the letter open on the computer screen, she printed a hard copy, then folded and concealed it in the old family Bible she had stored away in a box in the basement. The wrong people were certain to find the letter on the computer; hopefully, they would be content in destroying that. Someday the right people would find the printed copy, and then the world would know.

Satisfied, she went to her bedroom, said a rosary, then injected herself as she lay upon her bed.

It was cold enough to wear a jacket, dark enough to make street signs and address numbers hard to read. Mandy used a penlight to consult a map and Dr. Kessler’s directions on the passenger seat and, after one wrong and one missed turn, found her way to an ugly, bumpy street on the outskirts of town. At this hour, her Bug was only one of the occasional cars, so she shifted down a gear, eased off the pedal, and carefully eyed the boxy, weathered-walled, single-story businesses she passed:
USED FURNITURE, APPLIANCE LIQUIDATORS, RECYCLING CENTER.
She passed a vacant lot, a redneck bar, an old school with plywood over the windows, and then came upon a high chain-link fence with hundreds of hubcaps hanging on it. This had to be it. Yep. There was a sign in customary black on yellow wired to the fence next to the gate,
J & J’S AUTO WRECKING.
Mandy pulled up to the sagging chain-link gate and beeped her horn, as Mr. Jansen had instructed her.

He turned out to be not as scary as he sounded on the phone. Sure, his voice was gruff, his coveralls were greasy, and the bill of his “J&J all the way” cap was finger-smudged to a nearly even black, but he had a friendly smile with all his front teeth still there; he didn’t chew and spit, at least in her presence; and his dog, a half lab and half everything else, was friendly, the licking sort.

“So you must be the one,” he said, touching the bill of his cap. “Pardon my not shaking hands, I’ve been working.” He showed her his hands.

No further questions. She gave a little bow and touched the brim of an imaginary hat. “Pleased to meet you, and I don’t really know what this is about.”

“Do you have the note from the doctor?”

She had it in her hand and gave it to him. He opened and read it with the aid of his flashlight, his face darkening with each line. “Holy cow.” Then he asked, “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a magician. I’m going to be opening a show at the Orpheus in three weeks.”

He nodded, satisfied. “You’re the one, all right.” He handed the note back, now bearing his fingerprints. He pulled a rag from his hip pocket and wiped his hands. “And I don’t know what this is about either, but let’s get her done.”

Using his flashlight, he led her through a meandering canyon of misshapen, dismembered automobiles piggybacked on either side. His dog, at home in this place, disappeared into the blackness ahead and occasionally looked back, retinas shining in the flashlight beam. Mandy, unsure of where she was stepping and kicking against rattly, tinny little things in the dark, pulled her own penlight from her pocket and put it to use. “The doctor had a hulk brought here,” said Jansen. “It’d been in a wreck and I guess she bought it from the insurance company. They trucked it in on a flatbed and she’s been paying me to keep it safe, keep anybody from touching it or crushing it until a lady magician comes looking for it. Guess that’s you.”

They rounded a corner and came to an open space near the back fence. Parked up against that fence were what Mandy assumed to be Mr. Jansen’s keepsakes: a street rod with great paint but no engine; a mid-40s Dodge power wagon with no windshield or seat but with a winch on the front; a half-size yellow school bus … and the fire-ravaged, caved-in, cut-open remains of a BMW sedan, its paint seared away, its crooked body ashen gray.

“That’s it,” said Mr. Jansen, sweeping his light over it.

She knew he was waiting for her side of the story, her explanation, but all she could think of was the distance between herself and that twisted cage of metal and how afraid she was to cross it.
No,
she felt.
I’m safe over here, away from you. I’m alive. You have nothing to do with me.

But
, it seemed to say,
you want to be
her,
and I have everything to do with
her.

Your story … is her story? Mine?

Fear pressed her back, but longing pulled harder, drew her closer. The driver’s door was gone forever, the driver’s seat a blackened, metal outline with chunks of foam clinging like mold.

But I’m alive. This never happened to me.

Walk through
, it said.
Find out. Know.

Longing against fear, knowing against hiding. She went closer, her penlight playing over the soot-blackened windows. The rear passenger window on the driver’s side was shattered. Someone must have tried to get in.

… Dane Collins … was subsequently injured trying to rescue his wife from the burning vehicle …

The frame on the driver’s side was smashed in, the floor buckled, and the seats askew.

… when the Collins’s car was sidestruck by another motorist …

She
was
here?
The girl in the mirror, the dancer in the blue gown?

… Mandy Eloise Collins … wife … of Dane Collins … killed yesterday …

Mr. Jansen stayed alongside, holding his light for her. The covering on the dashboard was split open, peeled back, exposing yellow foam beneath. The center console had folded in upon itself, sagging, wrinkled, the gearshift a blackened stalk. She could smell the stench of burned cloth, leather, plastic … flesh? She knew that smell. She shied back.

This is death, where the story ends.

But how else can I ever live as me?

She made herself reach and touch. The metal was rough with paint blisters, rust, and corrosion. She felt like running but took hold of the doorframe so she would stay.

“Careful,” said Mr. Jansen, pointing with his light. “That metal’s sharp.”

She ran her light along the tear in the roof. It was jagged, like a bread knife. She placed her foot on the bottom of the doorframe, her hand on the frame of the seat back.

“Whoa, here, wait a minute,” said Mr. Jansen. He dashed to the street rod and brought back an old seat cushion. While she waited, he set it on the frame of the driver’s seat and stepped away, holding his light for her.

In a slow and careful process, placing a hand here, a foot there, watching for sharp edges, she settled into the creaking skeleton of the driver’s seat, into the center of the ashes and smell, steeling herself to look at the warped and bubbled instrument panel, the black crumbles of melted handles, buttons, and air vents on the seats and floor. In the beam of Mr. Jansen’s light, she placed her hands on each side of the out-of-round, skeletal steering wheel and looked into the dark through a misshapen void that used to be the windshield.

A good space of time passed before Mr. Jansen said anything. “You all right?”

She was, and it bothered her. She tried to imagine the hood and grille of another car plowing into her left side faster than she could react, the scream of tires, the slam of metal, the flying particles of glass and the brain-jarring impact, how it must have sounded and smelled, how it must have felt to be trapped in this crumpled cooker while the smoke and flames roasted her alive… .

But she’d never been here. This was all part of another story she’d never lived.

“Well,” she said at last, “it happened to somebody. That’s a fact.”

She would have climbed out, but Mr. Jansen stood on the ground immediately to her left and didn’t move. He was shining his flashlight at the floor of the car, at the ashes and crumblings around her feet.

“What?” she asked.

He just wiggled the flashlight to draw her attention, so she looked.

With each wave of his light, something amid the ashes sparkled. Something pretty in the middle of all this ugliness? She bent over, reached for the sparkle, and felt a small, crusty chain between her fingers. At first it was just another forlorn piece of someone else’s tragedy, but when she lifted it from the ashes and spread it across her palm …

A silver chain, stained by ash and smoke, the tiny links wilted by the heat, the ends broken and burned away, and in the center of its length … one indistinguishable lump of silver, and one intact silver dove.

“I saw it there when they first brought the car in,” said Mr. Jansen. “But Dr. Kessler said, ‘No, don’t touch it, leave it right where it is.’” He tilted his light to study her face. “Looks like it was this that she was keeping for you.”

chapter

45

P
armenter was driving the car. “Fortunately, it’s after eight. The main crew’s gone home and Moss is the only one there.”

Dane was lying on the floor in the back. “What does he know about your contact with me?”

“Just about everything. I had to contact you first. You had knowledge of the past forty years, you already knew who Mandy was, you know who she is—with a little explanation, of course …”

“Of course.”

“While Mandy is, or
was
, a young girl with no idea in the world that she’d been married to you for forty years, no way to fathom or believe what we would tell her. We needed you to help us contact and communicate with her, which meant contacting and communicating with you, which meant letting you in on all the pertinent details. That much he knows.”

“Do you trust him?”