The Hawley Book of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

toward chairs in the wings. Just then three huge displays lit up, and there Jeremy was, larger than life, his elegant, dexterous self, performing all the tricks we loved best. The girls had helped me choose the videos, but we hadn’t seen them writ large, and the girls stopped, stunned, mesmerized by their father, silvery and ghostlike on the screens. At the bottom of each ran the caption “The Maskelyne Mind, 1967–2013.” Jeremy’s stage name. Forty-six years old. The tragedy of it tore at me again, the uselessness.
    “I wish we could stay here forever, watching him,” Fai whispered.
    I hugged her to me. “So do I, honey.”
    “But we have to
go
,” Grace said fiercely.
    Caleigh said, “Shh! Let’s just watch.”
    The audience filed in, everyone encouraged to take a white rose from more big urns at the entrances. The Bijoux was packed to the rafters that night. We sat in the wings until we went on. Detectives and security guards flanked us, the stage, the exits. I scanned the audience, watched the performers with anxious eyes, searched for clues, but found none. TheFetch had to be there, somewhere. Maybe onstage performing, for all I knew. But all the magicians were good friends, and I just couldn’t believe any one of them would be involved in Jeremy’s murder.
    We watched rope tricks and straitjacket escapes and fake beheadings and flying unicycles, all performed under the displays alight with Jeremy’s smiling face. Grace and Fai were texting, their fingers flying. Each of them had friends in school, and Grace had a sometime boyfriend named Matt, whose parents were in a Cirque show. I had always trusted my girls to make good decisions, but since the Fetch’s haunting, I’d been checking their incoming texts. To my surprise, I found that they texted each other constantly, and almost exclusively. Usually they were right in the same room. I could see they were at it again, texting each other throughout the performance. Caleigh lay across my lap, looping her string, watching her father’s face.
    When Lance Burton was being hanged and resurrected, Wesley crept up. “Siegfried’s speech next. Then you’re up.” I expected him to creep away again, but he put a bony hand on my shoulder. “It was … you were … 
better
than Devant.” It was Wesley’s highest compliment, I knew, and my eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m more sorry than I can say that I let you down,” he told me. I took his hand. He squeezed mine, and left us.
    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. Isnapped 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