Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

When Charles returned to the office, he was surprised to see Mallory there during daylight hours. She stood at the kitchen counter putting together a plate of sandwiches garnished with the finesse of a professional chef.

"Hello, Mallory." He never slipped and called her Kathleen anymore. She was Mallory in all his thoughts, spoken and not. She had trained him well. And she fed him well and simplified his life. Even Arthur, the accountant, had praised her for making his own life easier; no more messy shopping bags of papers with coffee and tea stains washing out the figures in the amount-due columns.

Yet something told him life was just about to get more complicated.

"I had a long talk with Edith Candle," she said, ever so offhand.

He supposed it was inevitable that she should meet Edith. Every tenant in the building was drawn to that apartment at one time or another. But that was another puzzle and low on his list of priorities.

"She's like a prisoner in that apartment," said Mallory. He looked fondly at the roast beef on rye with crisp lettuce and parsley garnish. "It does look that way, I know." The coffee-maker, haunted by Louis Markowitz, gurgled and dripped, insinuating itself into the conversation.

Perhaps he should give the puzzle of Edith more immediate consideration. Mallory was hideously single-minded, and her all-consuming interest was Louis's murderer. What was the connection?

"Do you know why she never leaves the building?" she asked.

Mallory was not given to small talk. She couldn't ask an offhand innocent question; it just wasn't in her. Well, if he never learned anything from her responses, there might be something to be had from her questions.

"She's still in mourning for her husband." And now he noticed the pastrami with mustard and mayonnaise, and he was torn between the two sandwiches.

"Nobody mourns for thirty years, Charles." One corner of Mallory's disbelieving mouth slipped into a deep dimple of skepticism, and Louis's coffee machine sputtered. "Maybe there's a little more to it?" She set the plate of sandwiches on the checked tablecloth. "Something to do with her husband's accident?" 'She told you about that?"

"Sit," she said, pointing him to a chair by the kitchen table while she turned back to the coffee-maker where Louis abided.

He had shared many meals with her, and not one of them had been in a kitchen. As he recalled, her father had been a kitchen-sitting person – but to a purpose. In Louis's opinion, conversation was greased by a kitchen atmosphere and hampered by a more formal setting.

It occurred to him that the poker-players had steered him wrong. Her behavior might be more predictable if he concentrated on what she had learned from Markowitz and not Helen.

"Thirty years," said Mallory. "It's like jail time."

"I guess it does seem like a penance." He picked up a sandwich and suddenly forgot his appetite. Penance. Why had that never occurred to him before? Memories were surfacing, but still vague yet. "She might feel responsible for the accident."

"Because…" Mallory prompted him.

"I'm not sure. I was only nine when Max died."

"You have a memory like a computer. Now give."

"Eidetic memory doesn't work that way. I can recite chapters from books and even tell you if I spilled any coffee on the pages, but I'm not good at recalling conversations that went over my head when I was a child."

"I don't think much has gone by you since you left the womb, Charles. These conversations you can't remember, did they happen close to the day your cousin died?"

"Probably. Max lived with us for the last three days of his life."

"Only Max? He left his wife?"

"Yes, I think so. Oh, right. They'd had a quarrel. It was something to do with the new act. Edith thought it was too dangerous. I think she wanted him to give it up. But he couldn't. You see, the're was a time when he'd had top billing as Maximilian the Great. Then later, he became the husband of the great Edith Candle. All of his brilliant illusions, his own gifts had gotten lost somewhere."

"So this was his comeback? He was taking another shot at it?"

"Yes. He created a fantastic new set of illusions for this act. I remember all of us, Max and my parents, sitting around the table reading the reviews the morning after his opening." His photographic memory was calling up the newspaper column which had so impressed him as a child, it had remained with him for thirty years. "The New York Times called him a maestro." Now he was on familiar ground as he called up the printed word from another newspaper column and read the lines as though he held the paper in his hand." "The master is incomparable at the height of his creative powers", they said. His star was on the rise again."

The following morning, after the second performance had ended in tragedy, the newspapers had been kept out of his sight.

"So Max's career was on the rise. What about Edith's act?"

"Well, she still had a certain stature in psychic circles, but in one night, Max had eclipsed her, quite literally with his hands tied. It was amazing. There were lots of reviews. New York had more newspapers in those days. They all used the words death-defying and dangerous to describe the act."

"Dangerous? It was all a sham, wasn't it?"

"Oh, no. The new tricks were very dangerous. The finale required all his skill and mental discipline. While he stayed with us, he refused to give interviews. He wouldn't take any phone calls or messages."

"Not even from Edith?"

"Especially not from Edith." Why had he said that?

"Must have been quite a fight between those two."

"Well, the illusion required great concentration, no distractions."

"Like Edith predicting his death?"

The writing on the wall. What had his mother said about that?

"Yes, I suppose that was it. A few days before the opening of the new act, he found a message scrawled on the wall of his apartment. It was red lipstick."

"What did it say?"

"No idea. I'm putting this together from what I overheard. No one ever spoke to me about it. It was odd. Trance writing had never been part of the old routine."

"Trance writing?"

"Yes, something written without conscious thought, while in a trance. She never denied having written it, she only said she had no memory of doing it."

"Did you believe her? Whose side did you take?"

"I don't know. I was only nine years old then. I'm sure I loved them both." No, that was not true. One was loved and one was adored. "Perhaps I was closer to Max. He spent a lot of time with me. He had other things to do, I know. It was a busy period for him. But he took time out to play with me. I loved him very much."

He picked up an olive from his plate and closed it in the palm of his hand. When he spread his fingers again the olive was gone. He reached up and appeared to pull the olive from his eye socket, handing it to her with one eye closed. She laughed. Though the trick played on the simple humor of a small child, the love of all things gross and gory, she laughed as he had done all those years ago when Max was alive and beloved.

"Max died on the second night he performed the new routine with the water tank. The next day, when my parents told me about the accident, I wouldn't believe them. I just knew it had to be a trick. Edith went into seclusion after Max died. She didn't even go to his funeral. I did. The services were held in the cathedral. Magicians came from all over the world. They came in uniform, but not magician's black. They all wore white top hats, white capes and suits. The women wore white satin dresses. All the flowers were white. And later, at the cemetery, when the casket was lowered into the ground, a thousand doves flew out from under the magicians' capes. The sky was white with doves' wings. I will never see anything like that again."