Play Dead (11 page)

In their tours of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana they would often encounter the young people who drifted along the fringes of the shows, which were mostly county fairs. These were the strays, the unwanted, children who were not missed at home. These runaways, most often girls, became Joseph’s playmates during the long hours when his father was drunk, or searching for the local brothel.

Molly Proffitt was twelve years old when she escaped her abusive home in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Slight and agile, a tomboy with cornflower eyes and sandy hair, she joined the Great Cygne’s traveling show at a stop in Chickasha, having been on the road herself for more than a month. Karl Swann introduced her to everyone as his niece, and Molly soon became a vital part of the show, helping to dress Odette, cleaning and polishing cabinets, even passing the hat after impromptu performances on town squares.

Karl lavished attention on the girl, as if she were his own. She began to replace Joseph not only in his father’s act, but also his life.
Within weeks Molly lobbied for Joseph’s spot onstage in a particularly complex illusion called the Sea Horse, an escape trick featuring a large water tank. Every evening, before dinner, she would get on and off the platform hundreds of times, even going so far as to practice her curtsy at the end.
One evening Joseph spied on the girl. He watched her walk up the stairs to the top of the tank, pose, and walk down again. Over and over she practiced her moves. At 7:00 pm she went to dinner—a meager bill of fare consisting of beans and salt pork, eaten in the step van—then returned. She climbed the stairs again. This time, when she reached the top, the platform collapsed.
Molly fell into the tank. On the way down, she hit her head on the sharp edge of the glass, opening a huge gash on her forehead, knocking her unconscious. As she slowly descended to the bottom, Joseph approached the tank, bringing his face to within inches. The sight fascinated him, especially the plait of blood that floated above the girl’s head, the undulating scarlet shape that, to Joseph’s eye, did not look unlike a sea horse.
Later, long after the air bubbles ceased rising to the surface, long after the water turned a crystalline pink, Joseph climbed the stairs and replaced the four bolts that originally held the platform in place.
At just after midnight he peered out of the hotel window. In the dim streetlight he saw his father and Odette carry a large canvas bag out the back door. They placed it in the trunk of a black sedan, then sped off into the night.
It was the first of many times this scenario was to be repeated. For Joseph there were yet to come myriad rivals to his place in the Great Cygne’s show, as well as his father’s heart. One by one Joseph saw to it that no one replaced him.

By 1980, when magic was relegated to television specials and big Las Vegas acts, the Great Cygne had become a relic, a man reduced to roadhouse comedy routines. Karl Swann was drinking heavily, embarrassing himself and Odette onstage, sometimes missing performances altogether.

Then came “The Singing Boy.”
19 8 2

Joseph spent most of the stifling summer in the basement workshop at Faerwood, a spacious room fitted with a lathe, table saw, drill press, as well as a peg- boarded wall of the finest hand and power tools. For more than three months he was not allowed to leave the basement, although every time his father left Faerwood, Joseph picked the locks within seconds and roamed the house at will.

It was during this summer he learned the craft of cabinetry.

The Singing Boy was an illusion of Karl Swann’s invention, a trick wherein three boxes are rolled onto the stage, each in its own spotlight. In the illusion, the magician opens each box, showing them all empty. A boy then walks onto the stage, enters the center box. The magician closes the cabinet as the boy begins to sing, muffling the sound. Suddenly the voice is thrown stage left. The magician opens the box on the left to reveal the boy, who continues the song. The illusionist closes the door, and the voice instantly travels to stage right. Again, the boy is seen in the box. The magician closes the door one last time, then waves a hand. In a spectacular flourish, all three boxes collapse to reveal six doves in each, which immediately take flight.

But the singing continues! It comes from the back of the theater where the boy, now dressed in pure white, stands.

After nearly eight months of work, the effect was complete. On a brutally cold January evening, with snow drifts halfway up the windows at Faerwood, Karl Swann entertained two of his friends in the great room. Wilton Cole and Marchand Decasse were other has- beens of the magic world, a pair of third- tier card and coin men. That night they drank their absinthe poured over sugar cubes, shared more than one pipe of opium. Joseph watched them from one of the many hidden passageways at Faerwood.

At midnight the Great Cygne, in full costume, presented the illusion. Joseph—already far too big for the role of the Singing Boy— fulfilled his role. He entered the room, and stuffed his growing body into the center box. His father closed the door.

Joseph waited, his heart racing. The air became close, rich with body smells, dank with fear. He heard a muffled burst of laughter. He heard a loud argument, breaking glass. Time seemed to stall, to rewind. The bottom of the box would drop any second, as they had rehearsed. He waited, barely able to breathe. He heard sounds drifting in, the two men discussing stealing the illusion from Joseph’s father. It seemed the Great Cygne had passed out, and the men found the prospect of the boy spending the night in the box amusing.

An hour later Joseph heard the front door slam. Faerwood fell silent, except for the skipping LP record, a recording of Bach’s
Sleepers Awake.
Blackness became Joseph Swann’s world.
When his father opened the box, eleven hours later, the daylight nearly blinded him.

Over the next six weeks, after school, Joseph followed the two men, noting their daily routes and routines. When their houses and places of business were empty, he learned their locks. In late February, Wilton Cole was found by his wife at the bottom of the stairwell in their home, his neck broken, apparently the victim of an accidental fall. Marchand Decasse, who owned a small electrical- appliance repair shop, was found three days later, electrocuted by faulty wiring in a thirteen- inch Magnavox portable television.

Joseph kept the news clippings beneath his pillow for two years.

The Great Cygne never performed the Singing Boy illusion in front of a live audience. Instead, he sold the drawings and schematics to magicians all over world, claiming exclusivity to each of them. When his ruse was discovered, he became an exile, a recluse no longer welcomed or wanted on any stage. Karl Swann began his final spiral.

He would never set foot outside Faerwood again.
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It was a year of transformation for both Joseph Swann and Faerwood. As the exterior continued to fall into ruin, the interior went through many renovations, changes to which Joseph was not privy. He entered through the kitchen, ate his meals and studied in the dining room, slept on a cot in one of the many rooms in the warren- like basement. Month after month the cacophony was endless—sawing, sanding, nailing, demolition, construction.

Finally, in September, the canvases and temporary partitions came down, and what Joseph saw both excited and confused him. Where there had once been a wall there was now a mirror, a silvered glass panel that turned on a central pivot. Cabinets opened into other rooms. In one of the bedrooms, the switch plate set the walls in motion, forming a separate room, bringing up electric lights outside the frosted windows, giving the room the appearance of being at a seashore, complete with the recorded sounds of gently crashing waves just beyond the glass. In yet another room on the third floor, the movement of a lamp opened a portal in the floor; the movement of a sconce lowered a panel, revealing a round window.

Faerwood had become an echo of the fury swirling inside Karl Swann. On that day Joseph saw his father standing at the top of the stairs, wearing his stage costume for the first time in years. Karl Swann looked like a ghost—his pale skin and dyed hair giving him a funereal look that young Joseph had only seen in horror films.

On his eighteenth birthday, with news of his acceptance to college in hand, Joseph returned to Faerwood to find his father in the attic, hanging from the roof beam. He had used the same noose Artemus Cole - ridge used nearly eighty years earlier.

Joseph cut his father down, then took a secret staircase to the kitchen.
Faerwood was his.

It turned out that his apprenticeship to Karl Swann, building finely crafted magic boxes, served Joseph well. After college he began a small business building one of a kind custom cabinets and furniture. He worked with the finest materials, sometimes not emerging from the workshop for weeks on end. He soon found that his passion for cabinetry and furniture making sprang from his obsession with puzzles, that the elements of joinery—from dovetails to mortise and tenon to dowel joints—all fed his passion for the solving of conundrums, and yet he knew all the while that there was within him a magnum opus, a great and terrible creation yet to come.

JANUARY 2008

Now in his late thirties, the dark exhortations of Joseph Swann’s youth had passed into the realm of sporadic flame, but he had not forgotten the fascination of that day so many years ago, the shimmering chimera of Molly Proffitt and all who came after her. There were small patches of brown grass and mounded earth on the Faerwood grounds that would attest to this.

In late January, while cleaning the attic, he came across a box he had not seen in many years. Among the books on magic and illusions, beneath his father’s many notebooks of gibberish, he found the old eight- millimeter film
The Magic Bricks.
He ran the movie in the attic at Faerwood, not far from where his father had thrown a rope over a roof beam. Tears streamed down his face as he was coaxed down a long corridor of remembrance.

The seminal film had been made in 1908.
One hundred years,
Swann thought. The significance of this centenary was lost on him until, just before dinnertime, the doorbell rang. On the way downstairs he made himself presentable.

On the porch was a girl, a maiden of sixteen or so, soliciting for a nonprofit human- rights group. She had short brown hair and roan eyes. She talked to him, trusted him. They always did. Her name was Elise Beausoleil.

When she stepped inside Faerwood, Joseph Swann saw it all in his mind.
She would be the first of the Seven Wonders.

AUGUST 2008

Swann’s showroom was in the Marketplace Design Center at TwentyFourth and Market Streets. The building was home to a number of showrooms for the design professional, including Roche- Bobois, Beatrice & Martin, Vita DeBellis.
Swann’s small, elegant space on the fourth floor was called Galerie

Cygne.

From the moment he had leased the space, eight months earlier, he knew he had found a home here. It was part of the vibrancy that was downtown Philadelphia, but not quite in the beating heart of Center City. It was easily accessible from every city on the eastern corridor of the United States—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Atlanta. Most important, Marketplace Design Center was just across the Schuylkill River from the Thirtieth Street train station, the hub of Philadelphia’s rail traffic, the home of Amtrak.

Elise, Monica, Caitlin, Katja. He needed just three more pieces to his puzzle.
One day after the woman was found buried in Fairmount Park, Joseph Swann stood in the gallery, looking out the window, thinking of all the lost children, the night children. They came to the city by the hundreds, filled with hope and fear and promise.
They arrived every hour.

SEVENTEEN
J

essica looked at the file. It was thin, but that was to be expected. The Eve Galvez case had just a day earlier gone from missing person to homicide. It would be a while until they even had a cause of death, if ever.

It wasn’t their case, but right now Jessica’s curiosity was outrunning her priorities. Especially now that she knew Kevin Byrne had a past with the woman.

Jessica got onto the PPD website and checked the Missing Persons pages. The section was divided into four parts: Missing Children, Other Jurisdiction Missing Persons, Unidentified Persons, and LongTerm Missing Adults. On the Missing Adults page Jessica found a dozen entries, almost half being elderly residents suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s. A few people on the page were missing since 1999. Nearly a
decade.
Jessica considered the strength needed for family members and loved ones to hold out hope for that long. Maybe strength wasn’t the word. Maybe it was something more akin to faith.

Eve Galvez’s entry was halfway down the web page. The picture was of a striking, exotic woman with dark eyes and hair. Jessica knew the entry would soon be removed, only to be replaced with another mystery, another case number.

She wondered if Eve Galvez’s killer had ever visited this web page. She wondered if he came here to see if his handiwork was still a puzzle to the police. She wondered if he scanned the daily newspapers looking for a headline that told him his secret had been uncovered, that a new game was afoot, that a body had been discovered buried in Fairmount Park, and that authorities “had not yet identified the remains,” that a new set of adversaries had been conscripted.