Masters of Illusions Read Online Free PDF Page A

did Margie. “What did you tell them?”
    “I told them that Sylvia and I had broken up.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “They just sat around wondering what they should say, but then my brother Michael—he’s kind of a comedian—he said, ‘Is it
     too late to change the cake?’”
    “What cake?”
    “The cake that says ’Charlie and Sylvia on it. For the party. Half the department’s coming down from Hartford tonight.”
    “Oh.” She waited, but he didn’t say any more. “Charlie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What did Sylvia say?”
    He leaned back into the wood bench, put his head back, and looked up at the drifting clouds. “She just started crying. She
     tried to say something but she was crying too hard to talk. Then her father got on the phone so I told him, too.”
    “Pretty hard, I guess.”
    “Not really. I mean, well, it was. He kept saying, ‘These things happen.’ But then he started crying, too.”
    “I’m sorry, Charlie.”
    “I know.”
    He hugged Margie to him. She put her hand under his shirt and rubbed his chest. “What about the cake?”
    “Well, Michael has this kind of protective attitude toward me so he said to the guys, ‘When the cake comes, just scrape off
Sylvia
and write in
Margie.
’”
    “Making a joke of things isn’t especially protective, I don’t think.”
    “I guess that isn’t what I meant, then. He tried to get our minds off it.”
    Margie would not make a joke to ease Charlie’s responsibilities. But, like his brother, she would divert him. It seemed like
     a good time to satisfy her own curiosity.
    “Charlie?”
    “What, honey?”
    “Why do you not believe that maybe—just maybe—a lit cigarette butt started the fire?”
    “Margie, the cigarette theory is bullshit.”
    Then he took his arm down from around her shoulders, touched her chin, and she turned her face to his. He tried to tell
her
a story. She watched his expression change from deliberation, to frustration, to sadness. A great story was going on in his
     head. She said, “Go ahead, Charlie, tell me.”
    He said, “Someone tried to murder you. Murder you and all those other people who went to the circus just to have fun.”
    She began to protest, but his finger slid up from her chin to her lips.
    “See, it wasn’t just the worst
fire
in Connecticut’s history. It was the worst
crime
in Connecticut’s history. A hundred and sixty-nine people murdered. Over a thousand maimed.”
    Maimed? That was Margie he was talking about. She said, “I don’t feel maimed.”
    When she said that, Charlie grabbed her into his arms and hugged her so tightly she thought he’d break her ribs. But she let
     him hug. Once he’d calmed, Charlie gave her more details, just like all of Aesop’s details in “The Fox and the Grapes.” He
     told her he’d spoken to a few firemen who had been involved with the Hartford circus fire. One of them had been a rookie at
     the time and for some reason had gotten in on the experiment. They’d set up a sawhorse on a day that had the same weather
     conditions as the day of the circus. They had coated a piece of canvas with the paraffin-and-gasoline mix and had thrown the
     canvas over the sawhorse. They couldn’t get it to light until they used matches, and not only did they need matches, they
     had to hold a match to the canvas for a good while before it caught. And the flame needed a tiny breeze to get it going, too,
     the same tiny breeze there had been on the day of the fire. The firemen said they all had to blow on it. Inside the circus
     tent, the air had been stagnant. Charlie said, “No way that tent would have caught from a flipped cigarette. Not from inside
     the tent. The guilty party here wasn’t a careless person flipping a lit butt, Margie. It was an arsonist.”
    And Margie imagined a cruel and evil man whistling far and wee, with a name like Uriah Heep, slinking along the tent, finding
     a quiet spot to torch it, while inside, the children laughed. She