Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Miranda was visibly fascinated by what she saw in the library below her. She seemed to forget the audience for a moment. She slipped off her stockings and put a toe in. She stood and paced along the top of the bookcase, looking into the pool, and as she did she loosed herself from the corset and stepped out of the petticoat to reveal a bright orange two-piece bathing suit. Then she ran back along the top of the bookcase, sprang into the air, executed a flip, and knifed into the water.

Through the row of tall windows the audience could see her swimming underwater with the bright blue and yellow fish. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. There was a creaking, tearing sound, the walls collapsed outward, and the water poured onto the stage to be sucked away by invisible drains. Miranda was left lying on the carpet near the table. She stirred, then stood up suddenly, bowed, and blew kisses. Then she bowed very low. Her face assumed that strange, playful, mischievous look as she picked up something from the rubble on the floor and held it up.

It was a big painting from one of the collapsed walls. It was a painting of Lady Godiva riding on her white horse.

Miranda looked down at her bright orange bathing suit, then at the audience. Now her smile was naughty. The audience roared, urging her to do whatever she was contemplating. She propped the painting against the table, picked up the old leather-bound book that still sat beside the bottle. She quickly leafed through the pages, found the right one and read it, and set the book down.

Miranda stepped back a few paces, gestured portentiously at the painting, and then, with a final mischievous glance at the audience, slowly raised her hand and pointed down at her own head.

There was a brilliant flash, a puff of smoke, and Miranda was gone. In her place stood a graceful white Arabian horse. Braided into its mane was a swatch of bright orange cloth that could have been the top of Miranda’s bathing suit, and into its long tail, the second piece of orange cloth. The audience was laughing, shrieking, applauding its approval: if Miranda had been a horse, this was the horse she would be.

The horse walked to the table, nosed the old book thoughtfully, as though it were Miranda trying to discover her mistake, then turned to face the audience, extended its foreleg, and lowered its head in a final bow. There was another flash and puff of smoke, and when it cleared, the horse too was gone.

Seaver sat on the folding chair beside Miranda’s technician and watched him engage the hydraulic lift, bringing the white horse the rest of the way down under the stage. The gleaming ten-inch cylinder shortened as the hole in the stage floor above snapped shut, the noise of it covered by the deafening music of Miranda’s exit. As the black platform moved down to eye level, he saw Miranda was standing on it with the horse. She swung her leg up over the horse’s back and mounted it, but she didn’t sit up. Instead she clung to it, her hands caressing the horse’s face, patting its neck while she spoke into its ear, crooning soft words into its dumb animal brain to keep it from remembering to panic.

When the hydraulic lift reached the level of the concrete floor she swung down from the horse, and now he could hear her words. “Great job, baby. Wonderful show. You made mama have a lot of fun.”

A woman who had to be the horse’s handler stepped forward with a halter in one hand and a few lumps of sugar in the other. Miranda took the sugar and watched the horse’s big prehensile lips nibble them off her palm, then hugged the horse again.

Like a wild animal, Miranda seemed to smell the unfamiliar presence. Her eyes swept the dim concrete enclosure filled with machinery and electronic devices and found him unerringly. Her voice hardened. “Take the horse, Judy.” She stepped to Seaver and stopped. The wardrobe mistress expertly slipped the black velvet robe up her arms and onto her shoulders, then receded. Miranda brought the belt around her and cinched it, hard.

She did not speak to him, but her sharp, angry eyes never left him as she called out to her staff, “Who is this?”

Seaver stood up and smiled. “Calvin Seaver. Vice president for security at Pleasure Island.” He had known she would be difficult, so he already had in his hand his plastic-coated identification card, along with the backstage visitor’s badge he had been issued at the Inside Straight. “Will King and I sometimes get together to check out each other’s operations. Professional courtesy.”

She studied the badges and looked back up at his face. “Sorry. You could have been a reporter or a trick thief. Real magicians don’t do that to each other. Professional courtesy. If you saw anything you didn’t know already, please keep it to yourself.” She took a step away.

Miranda’s stagehands and technicians all seemed to have been held frozen in a spell, not breathing. Now she released them. “Great show, everybody.” They relaxed and began working again, moving around each other without pausing.

Miranda took a second step. “Your secrets are safe with me,” said Seaver. “For the moment, anyway.”

She turned on her heel and faced him. “What do you want?”

“Three minutes,” he said. “Five at the most.”

“Come on.” She walked to the far end of the area below the stage, around two more hydraulic lifts and a console that seemed to have been set up to control the explosive charges wired on stage. She stopped. “What’s your pitch?”

“I’m looking for a woman.”

“Smile more. They’ll like you better.”

“A particular woman. Dark hair, pretty, in very good physical condition. Three months ago she helped a gentleman named Pete Hatcher disappear. You might recall the evening, because you slipped him out the back door for her at the start of your midnight show.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “Did I?”

“Yes. At first, I thought the dark-haired woman might be you. What you do on stage makes strolling out the door in a dark wig and getting two security men to look the wrong way seem like a small thing.”

He reached into his coat pocket, snatched out an envelope, and handed it to her. “So I did a background investigation. All of your legal papers—licenses, birth records, Social Security—say your real name is supposed to be Katie Mullen. Even your union records and personnel file. You’re from Ohio. But—funny thing—there’s nothing on Katie Mullen that goes back more than eight years.”

He watched her look at the credit report, then at the Social Security earnings report, then at the two lists of avenues checked, with “none” or “not found” beside them. She shrugged. “Not much happened to me before then.” She folded the papers, tucked them in the envelope, and handed them back to him.

Seaver slipped them into the inner pocket of his coat. “No record of enrollment in a high school class in Ohio.”

“You can’t get that.”

“I use a company that arranges class reunions. They feed all the names into their computer for mailing lists. They ran three years of them for me.”

“I lie about my age.”

“Your birth certificate says what you say. But I’ll bet the paper the original is printed on isn’t more than eight years old.”

“I’m not the dark-haired woman.”

“No, you’re not. You’re somebody she helped one time. There never was a Katie Mullen. She helped you disappear from someplace, so you helped her.”

She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. “So who did I used to be?”

He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I want to know is who the dark-haired woman is.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Then good night.” She pushed off the wall and took a step toward the corridor.