I forced myself to stand and look Ray in the eye. Then I asked, because I couldn’t ask anything else: “What do you want?”
“Everything.”
Cold and growing colder, I said, “Be specific.”
“You let me do what I want. No objections, no conditions. I want to break you and heal you.”
“For what purpose?”
“Because I want to,” he said. “I’ve wanted to since the beginning. You’ve always looked down on me, and I want you to know you can’t do that, not ever again.”
“You’re insane,” I replied.
“I don’t see how that changes anything,” he said, almost cheerfully.
With that, he stood close to me and reached his hand around my back, stroking the base of my spine lightly, running his thumb along the thin skin over the bone, just as he had seen Clyde do. It was a threat and a promise, and it paralyzed me, because I knew exactly what he meant by it. He wouldn’t just break my bones. He would break me, period. That was his intent.
I hoped for a knock on the door. I hoped for a burst of inspiration. I hoped for the strength to bluff my way through and refuse him, catching him off guard so I could turn the tables. I hoped for anything and everything. Nothing came. Nothing at all.
I did the only thing I could do, then.
I gave in.
After a restless, sleepless, awful night, I sent Clyde a cable telling him we were through. I wrote and rewrote it a dozen times, searching for the right words, searching for a way to send a secret message that Ray couldn’t see through. He was watching me, of course. He watched silently the whole time, standing behind me without a word. He only moved when I crumpled up each failed attempt in order to discard it, reached across me to grab the ruined sheet of paper, and deposited it in the wastebasket.
On the thirteenth attempt, I finally settled on the right lies, simply told. No secret codes, no hidden cry for help, just a plain, clear message bringing everything to an end. I told Clyde I didn’t love him anymore. I told him I’d grown to hate him over the past months, unable to trust or forgive him for the wrongs he’d done me, and that his appalling suggestion of marriage was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I accused him of seducing me for money, doing what a poor boy with a handsome face and few other talents does best. I tried to be as horrible as possible, harsh and petty, hoping he would believe me capable of such cruelty. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was sure he could. I’d been distant lately, ever since we’d started sparring over the Halved Man, and perhaps he thought there was more to it; this explanation could easily make sense to him, even though it wasn’t anything close to the truth. I told him our business and personal relationships were now at an end. An intermediary would contact him to manage the separation of finances in due time, ensuring that he didn’t profit from our association any more than he should, by the letter of our signed contract.
I also told Clyde not to contact me, that I never wished to hear from him again. I threatened lawsuits and worse if he even tried. This was a specific instruction Ray had given from over my shoulder, but I quickly realized it didn’t matter. He had watched me write the telegram and watched me send it. I realized he would be with me every sleeping and waking moment. Even if I did receive a reply, he would be there to intercept it. My life was no longer my own, just like that.
Deep in my girlish heart, I wished Clyde would come rescue me. The rest of me knew better. If he came, a rescue wouldn’t be the outcome. Not when Ray was ready to kill him on sight if I didn’t obey. All I’d be doing was delivering my beloved more swiftly into the grave. A living Clyde was preferable to a dead one, no matter whether I’d ever see him again. This way at least I could daydream of him, imagine him free, his happiness in trade for my sacrifice. This way one of us would survive. And perhaps, I told myself darkly, he would be better off.
Then I made changes. Some were suggested by Ray, in a tone that indicated they were not really suggestions, and some I did for my own sanity. I gave the twins their walking papers, then Tabitha, then Doreen. All knew me too well to think I’d throw Clyde over. They had to go. The twins stormed out, their angelic faces dark with anger. Tabitha sobbed. Doreen begged me for a reason, and while I tried to muster a frosty, imperious voice to dismiss her, the best I could manage was a simple “Because it’s time.” Ray stepped in and hustled her to the door, patting her back soothingly, and shot me a dark look. He wanted me to be a better actress, I supposed. It was all I could do to act like a human being.
Then there was a blur of work. Shifting the less experienced assistants into new roles meant more training and more trouble, and I had to overhaul the program completely. I gave up the Halved Man for several nights, which caused grumbling in the crowd. I had come up with a new version of the illusion that didn’t require twins, but I needed a new assistant to pull it off. We held hasty auditions in Bloomington. I chose a promising deaf boy who I knew would be both grateful for the work and undisturbed by the noise of the crowd or the rumors.
I missed Clyde like I would have missed a limb.
Everyone in the company knew he and I had been together this past year. It wasn’t known by the general public because we’d kept mum when asked by the newspapers, but among our little family, we’d made no secret of it. Now I wished we would have, but it was too late. They would think me a fickle whore. I couldn’t change that. I’d prided myself on building this strange family, on sowing the seeds of warmth and trust, but now a switch had been flipped, and they weren’t family anymore. I couldn’t let them matter. I couldn’t let concern for their welfare distract me from my own. There was something far more important to be done.
I had surrendered on the outside, but on the inside, I knew there were two things I could do: I could escape and outpace Ray to New York, hoping that Clyde would still be there, or I could figure out how to kill him.
Killing him should have been easy. I’d stabbed him before in desperate anger, and now I was twice as desperate and infinitely angrier. Could I do it with the straight razor again, do it right this time, in an unguarded moment? Stab him in the gut if I needed to, when he bent over my body to hurt me in whatever way he pleased? Or better yet, wait until he was asleep. He had to sleep sometime. Didn’t he?
But Ray was smart. Always had been. He was with me all the time, at every moment, when we were awake. He installed a new lock on the railcar door, and when he slept, he locked it from the inside, with the key hidden on his person, in a place he knew I’d never reach willingly. Everything sharp disappeared from the railcar. I searched in vain for the straight razor, a knife, a knitting needle, anything. He laughed, watching me hunt over every inch. He’d even stripped the car of mirrors so I couldn’t break one for a sharp edge to use against either of us.
With the mirrors gone, he did my makeup himself before each show, wielding brushes and powders with what I had to admit was a doctor’s skill. Every night, we went through the ritual. First was the flesh-toned cream, which he spread across my nose and cheekbones and blended with fluttering fingertips up to my hairline and down over my chin. The brush of matching powder danced lightly over my entire face, followed by a lighter variation of the same dance, softer, smaller bristles applying peach-colored powder to the apples of my cheeks. Gently, he held each eyelid closed with a thumb while he drew a kohl pencil along the very edge of my lashes, one eye and then the other. Last, and possibly worst, was the feeling of another, sharper pencil outlining the tender nerve endings of my poor lips, and then a wet brush of waxy lipstick filling in the outline. I was vulnerable at every moment, and I never knew if the precise, methodical application of these paints and powders would be interrupted with sudden pain, which could come from any direction. He might jam the brush down my throat, or curl his hand around a paint pot and slam it into my gut, or slowly work the point of a hat pin under my fingernail. Some nights there would be pain every minute; some nights, none at all. I
t seemed impossible that after such torture, I always looked beautiful. I had never applied my own makeup with such care. Ray was a brute with the hands of a surgeon, and I would have admired him if he hadn’t been as dark as the devil himself.
I knew what the future held, at least for a few weeks. The tour schedule was already in place; Clyde had set us up through the end of July. The tail end of the circuit was set. Indiana, then Illinois, then Iowa. Three states to live through, I told myself. Only three states. By then, I’d figure out my exit, one way or the other.
At first, I had plans. I’d slip out through the stage door, the moment before the show was to begin, and run for my life. I’d call for the doctor and wheedle him for laudanum, with which I could drug Ray’s coffee. I’d buy a gun from someone in the company, secret it in my blouse, shoot him dead in the railcar. But quickly, too quickly, the pain took over. I hadn’t realized exactly how, and how much, it would hurt.
The physical pain was bad enough, but the other pain, deep inside, was worse. I hurt because I’d lost. I had fought so hard to get away from that girl I’d been, the one who’d let herself be brutalized, who had accepted for a long time that she wasn’t worthy of being saved, and now I realized I’d never stopped being that girl. All those years, all that money, all the gleeful crowds, and I was still exactly as weak as ever. She had finally caught up with me.
Within a week, I had dark circles under my eyes. After two, I moved more slowly, my legs and arms turning to lead. At my best I was exhausted, and I was rarely at my best. In a town called Flora, I almost missed the show altogether, because he’d knelt on my forearm and slowly, slowly bent my right pinkie back until it cracked. The pain of the broken finger was excruciating, but just as bad was the pain of knowing he could do that, or anything else, to me that he wanted. I’d given him permission. To save Clyde, I’d signed on for that deal.
And as bad as each act was, the anticipation of the next one made it worse. Because I knew he would only escalate. Cuts and bruises were the opening act. Bones came next. Small bones first, and then larger. And after that, along with that, I knew one night he would violate me in a way that didn’t show at all on the outside, a way that I would never be able to heal. He could have done it the very first night or any night after, but he knew that I expected it, and he held back, waiting. He tortured me with the things he hadn’t yet done as much as with the things he had.
He climbed on top of me, over and over, always looking for something new to bend or crush or break. If I wasn’t looking at him, he’d lock his fingers around my forehead and twist my head around until I did. I thought I could probably recover from a broken neck, and some nights it was bad enough I thought it might be better if I didn’t, but he seemed to know just how far to press or pinch or wrench to have the effect he wanted. He’d made a lifetime study of bodies, and before long, he knew more about mine than I would have thought possible.
Perhaps the rumormongers were more right than they knew about me. In the end, I did just what they’d accused me of. I sold my soul to the devil.
No one knew what a nightmare my life had become; I doubt they even suspected. The ones who might have read the signs and guessed my misery were gone. Of those left, none were inclined to rock the boat. It was easy, too easy, to see it with their eyes. To them, Ray was charming and jovial, a pleasant man to have among the company. If we spent rather a lot of time alone together in the railcar, well, that was easily explained away as the thrall a new romance—a honeymoon, perhaps—could bring. He had only kind words for anyone in the company. By all outward appearances, he was no one’s enemy.
The days and nights became a blur. I was no closer to figuring out how to get away. My body was weakening from the abuse. My mind was clouded by exhaustion and fear. I was healing myself over and over, muttering a wish for every wound, letting him believe that he was the one with the healing power, the reason my cuts and bruises could disappear in a matter of hours. Yet I had to keep up an illusion greater than any that had come before: the illusion that nothing was wrong.
In Terre Haute, the reporter asked me all sorts of prying questions about my life, and I smoothly answered him back with the usual vague claptrap. No, I wouldn’t say where I’d come from, before I’d come up through the ranks with Adelaide Herrmann, as everyone knew. No, I wouldn’t reveal the source of my powers, nor comment on the rumor that the brown part of my eye was a sign from the devil that he had taken one quarter of my soul as a promise of payment of the rest. No, I wouldn’t discuss the inspiration for the Halved Man.
The reporter, persistent, began to follow me back to the railcar, and I was so distracted I didn’t notice him until I was almost to the stairs.
The door swung open and Ray leaned out, clad only in a long, purple silk robe, cooing, “Welcome home, my dearest darling. Did you bring any more brandy? We’re fresh out.”
Before I could say anything, the reporter called out behind me, “Oh, is this your husband?”
“You caught us out,” said Ray. “That’s exactly who I am.”
The reporter was behind me and couldn’t see my face. I stared up at Ray with hatred. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Rightful or not, there he was. He’d already taken his place.
Chapter Thirty
Janesville, 1905
Five o’clock in the morning
“It was Ray,” says Virgil Holt, realizing. “Your husband.”
“He wasn’t my husband,” she mutters.
“I realize that. But people thought he was. That’s what matters. It wasn’t Clyde. You didn’t marry Clyde.”
“No, I didn’t.”
He doesn’t think he’s imagining the sadness in her voice.
He says, “But the reporter from Terre Haute put it in the paper that you were married and your husband was with you on the road. And the rest of the company thought it was true. So when the body was found, they said it was your husband’s body. That’s what they told the reporters. He was your victim.”
She protests weakly, “He wasn’t…I didn’t,” and rattles the two remaining pairs of cuffs.
He believes her now. Fully and completely. He’s had doubts all night, but the story has gone to his core. She would never make up something so outlandish to sell him on her innocence. If that were her goal, a simpler story would have done. The fabrication is too elaborate to truly be fabricated.
But now he needs to decide what to do with the truth she’s told him, which is the harder part. And there’s still one gap to fill.
“But who killed Ray? Who beat him, and broke him, and sank that ax into his gut? Who made him into the Halved Man and left him there?”
She glares up at him, her gaze burning brighter than ever, but he doesn’t stop. They’re at it now.
“It’s your specialty, Arden. Your illusion. Your idea.”
“You can’t hang a woman for her ideas,” she says, a note of hysteria in her voice. He knows she doesn’t believe that. She thinks they’ll hang her no matter whether she’s a murderess. She’s almost certainly right. “In any case, I wasn’t there.”
“If you weren’t there, where were you?”
“I don’t know.”
He pushes. “How is that possible? You remember everything.”
“Not everything.”
“Everything else. This whole night, you’ve proved it. You remember what happened when you were twelve and fifteen and twenty years old. You can recall conversations word for word with people you haven’t seen in a decade. You remember what you want to remember. It’s all in there, every bit.” He reaches out and lays a finger in the center of her forehead, a firm quick tap. “So only last night, not twelve hours ago, you expect me to believe you can’t remember where you were?”
“I don’t know what time he was killed. How could I know?” He hears the edge of desperation in her voice, the trembling uncertainty.
“No.”
Generously, with a broad gesture of his arm, he says, “I don’t know if I’d even blame you for it. The world is probably a better place. You already thought you killed him once. Wouldn’t it be easier the second time? Like running a sword through a ghost.”
“Look at me, officer. Please.”
He avoids her gaze. He stares instead at her discarded boots next to the door, laces trailing, one fallen on its side. Beautiful things now smeared with grime that will never come out.
“I didn’t kill him. I can only tell you that so many times until you have to decide if you believe me. And it’s time, Virgil. Make up your mind once and for all. You have to decide whether you’re going to let me go. Just you. No one will make that decision for you. Like Mr. Vanderbilt said. You have agency. Use it.”
“I remember you telling me he said so.”
“And now I’m saying it. To you, Virgil.” She leans forward as far as she can, her shoulders straining, her chin thrust out. “You want to set me free? Do it. You want to turn me in? You can do that too. You’re the only one with the choice. And that bullet in your back doesn’t mean you’ve got any less choice than you ever did. Live free of fear if you want to. We all carry something inside us that could kill us; yours just has a name. You want to change your life? Change it. You have no less of a right to be happy than the rest of us.”
He’s reeling from what she says. It’s too much. He snaps at her instead, with sarcasm. “You’re the perfect example of happiness?”
“Not at the moment.” She smiles ruefully and shrugs a little, as best she can. “But whatever happens, I’ve been happy. I’ve been loved. I’ve amazed crowds and drunk in their applause. Not because of luck or favor or magic. Because of will. My will. I’ve been willing to do whatever it takes. That’s the closest thing I have to a secret. And now it’s yours.”
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