Teri Brown - Born of Deception

Cole shakes his head. “No. I knew them all before I went to the States. I would have been able to tell. What did you think of them? Did you sense anything?”

I shrug. “I was too busy being a nervous wreck to get a clear read on anyone.”

He nods. “That’s what I thought might happen.” He’s silent for a moment. “Do you have rehearsal now?”

“Not until this evening.”

The taxi stops in front of my hotel and Cole leaps out to open my door. I exit and shiver as a gust of cold wind hits me. He reaches down and pecks my cheek. Returning to his country seems to have increased his shyness. I wish he would just take me in his arms to reassure me, but he only pats my arm distractedly.

“I’ll call the hotel tomorrow and leave a message once they get back to me. You get some rest before your rehearsal, all right?”

I nod and watch as his motorcar chugs off. My nerves are as unsettled as the weather, and for the very first time I almost wish my mother were here. Then I shiver, knowing how uneasy I must be feeling to wish such a thing. Superstitiously, I take it back, knocking quickly on the wooden doorjamb of the hotel door before entering.

Mother is the last thing I need right now.

Itry resting as Cole suggested, but I’m as jumpy and out of sorts as if ants are running up and down my spine. From Leandra’s strange undercurrent of rage to my condition at tea, I’m feeling harassed and exposed. Not that my abilities don’t usually leave me feeling uncomfortable. The capacity to see catastrophic events before they happen and to talk to the dead aren’t exactly conducive to a serene existence. But things just feel different now that people know about me. I feel . . . unsafe. As someone who grew up craving safety above all else, the sensation is disturbing.

Impatiently, I scoot off my narrow bed and run a comb through my hair. The old mirror over the bureau is pitted and makes my face look wavy. Only the blue-green eyes staring back at me seem familiar.

The hotel is more of a boardinghouse than a hotel, minus the bad boardinghouse food, which is fine with me. But it’s still small and dilapidated and the walls are probably more paint than wood.

I riffle through the chipped wardrobe for something to wear to rehearsal. Because I do so many sleight-of-hand tricks, I usually wear some kind of oriental-inspired dress with loose sleeves. I change into a China blue silk and settle a black gigolo hat with a blue feather on my head. My call isn’t until tonight, but I might as well go to rehearsal early. I’m not accomplishing anything and I’m too twitchy to stay here alone.

Snatching up my wool coat from the back of the faded print chair where I’d tossed it earlier, I head out the door and down the stairs. I generally avoid the elevator, which creaks alarmingly as it makes its slow, torturous way up and down the building. At least the hotel is clean, I think, crossing through the run-down lobby. During our traveling years, my mother and I stayed in hotels and boardinghouses so bad that even the rats had left in a mass exodus.

The best thing about the hotel is that it’s a half block from our theater, so it takes me no time at all to get there. Tiptoeing out to the front, I slip into a seat to watch the other acts. The Little Sisters are performing and I watch their rapid interplay. I have to hand it to Martin Beck, the famous manager who put together the troupe—he certainly knows talent. Sally and Sandy soon have me laughing with their physical pratfalls and quick exchange of jokes. The act is even more hilarious once you realize that Sally is actually Sal, a brother dressed as a sister. So convincing is his costume and mincing voice that only those in the front row would wonder if he were male or female.

Louie claps his hands and the “sisters” come down the stairs. After a brief conference, he slaps Sally on the back and yells for the next act to come out.

I watch until it’s my turn to go on. I’m nervous the way I always am before a performance. Even though this is just a rehearsal, a lot is riding on it. I know that Louie is watching from somewhere in the back of the auditorium, judging whether or not he made the right decision to move me up on the bill.

Once backstage, I check my props. The hinge on the dove’s cage stuck last time I used it and I want to make sure the stagehand lubricated it correctly. Everything I use has to be in perfect working order. I’d hate for the hoop trick to fail because one of the hoops is bent and they won’t link together properly. Or for an escape trick to flop because the door squeaked.

Once my props are checked, I run through my act. I’ve mixed older tried-and-true tricks, like my disappearing doves and connecting rings, with new ones such as the dollar-in-a-lemon trick, where I borrow a bill from an audience member and make it appear in a lemon. The tricks increase in both difficulty and pizazz until my grand finale—the levitating table. The assistant, a woman Louie hired before I arrived, wheels my iron maiden out onto the stage.

“Stop!”

Louie’s voice reaches me from the back of the auditorium, and I pause, swallowing hard. What did I do wrong?

He walks up to the edge of the stage. “Beautiful, doll, but let’s switch the iron maiden escape with the levitation trick. The effect is more stunning.” His cigar wags up and down as he speaks, but his eyes are narrowed, considering. His comical looks hide a shrewd mind.

But still . . . the levitation trick is my closing illusion as it’s so visually stunning. “Why would you want the escape trick to be last? I think the levitation trick leaves a better impression.”

“I’m looking to try something different, sweetheart. Let’s turn the iron maiden bit into an escape-gone-wrong trick to make it look as if you’ve failed.”

I raise my eyebrows. For this trick, my hands are cuffed and I’m placed in a modified iron maiden—a box shaped like an upright human body with a hinged section that swings outward. The front of the box was supposedly painted to look like me, but the face is so ugly, I prefer not to think about it. The interior of the box is lined with wicked metal spikes. Once inside, my ankles are cuffed, then my assistant closes the box and secures it with metal bands placed through the hinges. She encircles the box with a red curtain that only parts at the front. To escape, I have to remove the cuffs from my hands (easy), grip one of the spikes at the hinge side of the cover, and lift upward a fraction of an inch. Slowly, the ratchet pin on the hinge comes loose, and it’s just a matter of opening the box at the side using the padlocks as hinges. After getting the box open, I remove the cuffs from my ankles and replace the pins by pushing them through the hinges from the bottom. Then voilà! The box is secure and ready for an audience member to inspect.

“I don’t understand. What do you mean you want it to look as if I’ve failed?”

A slow smile plays about his lips. “Blood.”

I swallow. “Blood?” My stomach churns as I recall the last time I saw blood. It had been pooling around a dead man at the going-away party Cynthia had thrown me. The time before that, it had been from a bullet wound in my own shoulder. I don’t have the best memories of blood.

“Yeah. Fake blood. Once you’re in the box, you can squeeze some blood on the floor and let it ooze out. Then you come out with bloody hands, looking as if you barely made it. It would be a sensation!”

I tilt my head, thinking. It’s very good, my aversion to blood notwithstanding. And he’s right, I couldn’t do the levitation illusion afterward if I’m supposed to be hurt. So I give him a nod. “I’ll do the escape trick last.”