The Hawley Book of the Dead (5 page)

Siegfried’s speech moved the audience to tears. I heard sobs as I led the girls to their marks behind the curtain, and talked them through the trick one final time. So I missed most of his ode to Jeremy, his fallen comrade. The story of his life and his death.

Then Siegfried introduced us, “the magical Maskelyne family,” and the curtain opened to thunderous applause. We all bowed from our platform set high above the stage. When the audience settled, I began, “Just over a month ago, my husband was performing a trick called Defying the Bullets.” I walked down the stairs to the spot Jeremy had died. “This is where he fell.” Some audience members groaned. One man yelled, “I was
here
!”

“Many of you were,” I gestured to include them all. “And so was his killer. Someone took my husband from me, and from our children.” I pointed to my girls standing square on their marks, their hair flaming under the lights. “And from all of you.” I strode to the edge of the stage. I
snapped my fingers. “Abracadabra. But one of the cardinal rules of magic is that you can’t just make something disappear. You have to bring it back. Now, for my final illusion, on this or any stage.” A scrim was lowered behind me, a gauze curtain that blurred the outlines of the girls, but through which their three shadows could still be seen.

My eyes scanned the gleaming gold of the boxes, the swags of velvet curtain, swept up to the catwalks. I gazed out at the audience, my audience. It might be the last time I ever stood before them, at the intersection of stage magic and real magic.

“You have been …” My eyes filled again, and for a moment I couldn’t speak. The audience erupted, clapping and cheering, throwing their white roses at my feet. I picked one up, held it to my cheek, its petals cool against my burning skin. I signaled for quiet.

“You have been so good to us. You didn’t just buy tickets to our shows. You gave us your attention, your wonder, your amazement. It is with a full heart that I say thank you, and good-bye. For we will
not
obey that cardinal rule of magic.” I raised the rose high above my head. “We will never be seen again, myself or my girls … until my husband’s killer is found!” I lowered the rose, and as I did, the images of the girls shimmered, then faded away.

Instead of applauding, the audience held its collective breath, waiting for my next move. I saluted them with that one rose, one last time. I walked down the steps, up the center aisle, among them. They reached out to touch me, they called my name. When I could feel their fingers brush the fabric of my clothes, smell their perfume, their sweat, their belief, I performed my last and finest trick. I vanished.

Our plane landed in Boston midday. The city was languid, hushed in the heat of Indian summer. The cabdriver’s pace was slow as a dream. The office workers walking to lunch downtown slung jackets over their shoulders, loosened ties. An old ivory haze hung over the city.

We rested at the Park Plaza, our haunt from the days Jeremy and I played Boston, when my Maskelyne and I made orange trees grow before our audience, then picked the perfect golden fruit and tossed it to the crowd. An illusion of both production and of time control. I wished again that I had the gift of true time control, that I could travel back to those days before I smelled the lilacs in the desert, and keep us all safe somehow. Keep my husband alive, walking on the earth next to me.

Time travel was not my forte, though.

The girls were passed out on smooth, cool white sheets after three flights—from Las Vegas to New York to Iceland, then to Boston. The crazy flight pattern had been part of our escape. After the girls had gone through Harry Houdini’s trapdoor in the Bijoux, Dan had smuggled us out of the theater during all the uproar over my vanish. Nathan was waiting with a car to drive us all to the airport. I’d wanted to get the girls out of the country, hoping it was less likely the Fetch would follow. Not that I put much faith in airport security, but flying out of the country and back in added another hurdle, and I needed to put as many as I could between him and my girls.

But at the hotel, I was restless. Nathan stayed in the suite with the girls while I went down to the restaurant in the Park Plaza lobby. Boston is not
a city of magic, not like Las Vegas, where it reigns supreme, or even L.A. No one came up to my table to murmur, “Your Metamorphosis was the best illusion I’ve ever seen” while presenting me with a limp napkin to autograph. Although Jeremy and I had appeared on Leno and Letterman, had our own few television specials, performed nightly for months at a time to packed houses, we were not usually recognized outside Las Vegas.

And now no one stared at me because they’d seen me splashed all over the nightly gossip shows and the tabloids after Jeremy died. No one remembered the face of the lady magician who had killed her husband. So I sipped my tea in peace, while a man with a crew cut played Cole Porter songs and sweated onto the piano keys. No one watched me, no one at all. What a difference three thousand miles makes. No police, no magic fans. And no Fetch. I just hoped it would last.

We set out for our new home in the afternoon. Before we’d left, I bought an SUV online, had it delivered to the hotel. I drove it toward the westering sun. As the hours passed the trees became thicker, the air cooler, the houses fewer, the voices of my children more strident.

“Oh, my God! Where are you taking us?” Grace whined when I turned onto the main street of a classic New England town.
HAWLEY VILLAGE
, a white sign with stark lettering told us,
FOUNDED 1741
. She flipped her red hair back. I could see it spark in the rearview mirror, bouncing like Slinkys released. The twins had my fierce curls. Their faces were identical, down to the constellations of freckles that spangled their delicate noses, but it was otherwise easy to tell them apart. Although both were just starting to come out of a Goth phase, Grace was still partial to ripped black jeans and black leather jackets, with black eye paint in swaths up to her eyebrows. Fai, less inclined to denim and makeup, wore long fringy things that made her look as if she’d stepped fresh-faced out of a fairy tale, a milkmaid in mourning. Because they always dressed in black, they’d wanted white for the funeral, white for mourning their father. Now each of them always wore something white, a scarf or a shirt. The black clothes were ceding to white, but their clothes still reflected their personalities, Grace’s sleek, Fai’s princess inspired.

Caleigh inherited my russet coloring but Jeremy’s stick-straight hair,
was solid where her sisters were lean as greyhounds. She played her usual never-ending string game, her hands busy leaping from her warm-up patterns—“Cat’s Cradle” to “Cup and Saucer”—then to the patterns of her own devising. Her patterns were now called things like “Falling Leaves” and “Maple Candy.” “Missing Dad” was still in the rotation, but she wove it a little less frequently. Maybe it was a sign this move was good for us all, even though my heart hurt when I thought how Caleigh was getting used to a world without Jeremy, how we all were.

“Hey, look, a fair!” In spite of her concentration on the string, Caleigh didn’t miss much.

A large wooden cutout of a pumpkin proclaimed
HARVEST FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 19, 20—FOOD, FUN, MUSIC
.

“Hey, it’s next weekend! Can we go?” Caleigh was a lover of caramel apples and fried dough, like most ten-year-olds. “Mom, will you take us?”

“I don’t want to go to some raggedy-ass fair,” Grace sniped.

“Language, Grace.” Although I knew that far worse words than
raggedy ass
could, and did, come flying from their mouths.

“Yeah, you didn’t hear her
language
at the hotel.”

I sighed. “And I’d rather not hear it now, Faith.”

“Don’t call me that. You know I hate the
thh
. It makes people spit.”

I was almost grateful for some grumbling and crankiness, the times my daughters reminded me of their old unguarded selves. We had all been trying too hard, and I could see that Grace and Fai felt the strain of it. Fifteen is a vexing age. All fifteen-year-olds want to grow up faster than they have a right to. Without their father to brace them up, I was afraid for the twins, balanced on that cusp where a child can become a woman overnight. I wished I could wave my magic wand and make everything better. But the magic was gone from our lives, along with Jeremy.

In a strange and horrible way, the Fetch had made us closer. My daughters could have turned away from me after Jeremy died, blamed me as I blamed myself. But now it was all of us against the Fetch, against their father’s killer. The sad truth was that not one of us was the same person we had been. Maybe fighting this battle together would get us through to some other side, where we were scarred but still ourselves, still there for each other, still a family. I could hope for that, cling to it while everything
in our lives was changing, shifting in the wind like drifts of fallen leaves in the yards of Hawley Village.

I turned off Main Street, past the church, the row of stores that included Pizza by Earl, the Suds & Stuff Laundromat, a drugstore, and Elmer’s, the tiny grocery that proclaimed
FRESH CURED BACON, DAVE
’
S EGGS, LAST OF THE SILVER QUEEN
from a blackboard on the sidewalk.

“Dad would love this place,” Fai said. “It would crack him up.”

I had a flash of longing for Jeremy. He
would
laugh, Fai was right. The town was a caricature of New England quaintness, a caricature of itself. But in a moment we were beyond houses, beyond sidewalks and stores. The sharp light caught and flamed in the saffron-colored leaves of maple trees.

I nearly passed the road, had to screech onto it. The girls screamed.

“Mom, it can’t be
here
!”

“What, we have to live on a
dirt road
? No, we can’t, I’ll be
mortified
.”

“Aren’t there even streetlights?”

“You saw the pictures,” Nathan reminded them. Carl Streeter had sent photos, so we knew what we were getting into.

“Yeah, but nobody told us we were gonna be hicks.” I felt her kick the back of my seat.

Nathan turned and gave her one of his burning looks. “Save it, Gracie. And if you don’t want to be a hick, don’t act like one.” I just went on driving down the road, which was smooth as a board in spite of the lack of paving. The road dipped down, dappled with sunlight and floating leaves.

“There are so many trees,” Fai grumbled.

“Yeah, too many.” Grace resumed her complaining. “I don’t see why—”

“Here we are.” I cut her off, mid-gripe. Drove down another sweep of road, through a tall gate in a high fence, a gate that swung open after some unseen device read the bar code I’d fixed to the windshield. Past the line of huge old sugar maples, past what had once been an active Congregational church, white and imposing, in spite of needing a fresh coat of paint. Past two houses, also white, also peeling paint, old New England farmhouses, one with a rambling porch. Briars and weeds grew up around them all.

The girls just sat for a moment, awed.

“This is it? We’re gonna live here? It’s almost a whole town.”

“Well, it was a town once. A very small town,” I amended.

“Does the fence go all the way around?”

I considered the tall fence, the electric wire strung above it, and a luxurious calm washed over me, unknotted muscles I didn’t know were clenched. “It sure does.”

“Mom,” Fai said, “don’t you think it’s overkill?”

I looked back at my daughters, their fledgling faces. They waited for an answer, unaware of their loveliness, or their fragility in the world. Losing their father had tempered them, but hadn’t made them feel any less the invincibility of youth. They believed they would live forever. Always a bad assumption.

“No. I don’t think it’s overkill.”

“It makes me feel like what’s-her-name. Snow White.” Grace was staring at the cluster of old houses. “Wasn’t she the one in the castle with the thorns all around?”

“That was Sleeping Beauty. Snow White had the glass coffin.” Caleigh, closer to the years of bedtime stories, corrected her.

“Yeah, her, Sleeping Beauty.”

I recalled the story, the spell cast. If only our problem was a fairy with a grudge.

“Is this where they lived?” Caleigh asked. “The ladies that had your name?”

“Our great-great-great-whatevers,” Grace clarified.

I pulled into the drive of the farthest house, the largest, the loveliest. The paint was peeling, like the others. But the grass was mowed, the weeds subdued. And the fanlight over the massive front door was glowing, welcoming us, so at least there was electricity. The windows of the plain, vast Federal house shone bluely in the last of the afternoon light. We were home, in the land I grew up in. The land of the Revelations.

“Yes,” I told my daughters. “This is where they lived.”

The townspeople in Hawley Village knew me as only Reve Dyer, a widow with three girls. Not as the Great Revelation, one half of the Amazing Maskelynes.

I’d used my maiden name for everything, bank accounts, contracts, in my conversations with Carl Streeter; I drilled the girls that they must, too. I doubted that any of the locals were true magic fans. Even if they’d been to Las Vegas, even if they remembered the tragic death of a well-known magician, they probably wouldn’t guess who I was. They didn’t know why I’d moved to Hawley. And they wouldn’t know about my connection to the forest, to the Five Corners. None of them would remember me as a girl. I’d grown up in Williamstown, fifteen miles and a different world away. Only Jolon would remember, and he was long gone.

I might have been the first Dyer woman in over two hundred years to use my husband’s name, but I’m also the last in a series of women with the name “Revelation” twining through a few hundred years of the Dyer family. I’d heard tales of them and their magic from the time I could understand speech.

Thanksgiving was a harrowing time for my mother’s family, the time of year when the dark settled in and they contemplated the past, sowed it in the fertile ground of their children’s imaginations. Hearing the first murmured tales, my uncles and boy cousins would leave the table laughing at their witchy wives and mothers. But not me. I wanted to hear those stories. They were my birthright: I was a Revelation, after all.