The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  That day, the prop tables were the same as they ever were. The guns we used for Defying the Bullets lay shining in their case when I opened the box.

  Dan had outlined and numbered every item so we all knew which prop we needed to pick up for each trick. Wesley shuffled by, saluting me, as if I were a general and he a foot soldier in an army of magicians. Were his eyes bluer than usual, less watery? Did he seem taller? The silvery wisps of his hair combed over his pink scalp darker than usual? Not that I noticed. He seemed the same.

  When I examined my conscience later, I could never say for sure. What I did remember was the scent of lilacs perfuming the air near the prop table.

  Wesley called ten minutes, then five. I could hear the dancers getting ready in the big green room, the currents of gossip and laughter drifting through my dressing room as they changed into their Carnevale costumes for the second scene. The opening scene, though, was just the two of us, Jeremy and I in a kind of silent passion play that ended in a magician’s duel, our version of Defying the Bullets.

  Jeremy played the brilliant Faustian magician, the rival of my dark Mephistopheles. The interplay of darkness and light, God and the devil, was an iconic component of our magic. For Defying the Bullets, we didn’t speak at all. Later in the show, there was plenty of music and banter to set up the tricks, but for that first scene, we’d found that silence was more powerful than speech. We vied for the audience’s applause and love, until I challenged Jeremy to a duel. Two audience members were selected to act as seconds, to examine the guns that were “loaded” before their eyes. Then we would pace off, turn, and fire. I always aimed true, to complete the illusion. Anyone watching from the front row could see the angle of my aim, and its verity. Jeremy would stagger, then fall to his knees pretending to be mortally wounded while I feigned triumph. Then he’d pluck a gleaming bullet from his mouth, hold it up for the audience and the “seconds” to see, and rise to great applause. That was how it was supposed to be.

  That night, we played against each other as usual, producing all kinds of unlikely things from the air, mailboxes and tea sets, fireballs and cascades of water to quench them, until I threw down the gauntlet. We chose our seconds, took up weapons, paced, turned, and fired.

  But when I pulled the trigger, a red mist exploded behind Jeremy, spattering the gold curtain. Instead of taking a bullet from between his teeth, after he fell to his knees he kept falling, a look of surprise on his face. A woman screamed. I ran to him, caught him before he dropped to the stage. He fell into my arms, his weight already dead weight. I cradled his head, tried to hold in all the blood and bone and everything that made him my Maskelyne, my love. We were only mortal, after all.

  After all the shrieking and running for exits was over, after the EMTs had tried and failed to work their magic, Jeremy’s body was taken away. In the quiet of the nearly empty theater two police officers handcuffed me, led me out.

  There was chaos outside the theater. Detectives questioned members of the audience, and our performers in their Carnevale costumes. They all looked wilted by the heat, still fierce in the August night. Even faces I recognized looked unreal to me, lit by the twirling, flashing firework lights of the Vegas Strip, like mannequins I’d once seen come to life in a Twilight Zone episode. At the top of the theater steps I stumbled, my knees buckling. The dark velvet cloak I was wearing was heavy with its own weight and Jeremy’s blood. My body and mind throbbed dully. Nothing was familiar, or whole, or right. When the policemen pulled me to my feet again, my head jerked up, and I thought I saw Wesley Knowles walking away, his blood-red cardigan flapping, his silver hair lit by neon. Leaving the theater, which I’d never known him to do, and walking faster than I’d ever seen him walk. He glanced back once, glanced back and smiled.

  Nico, our lawyer, found me in a holding cell that stank of urine and vomit with overtones of Lysol. I was pacing, the same three steps over and over across that cell. I hadn’t spoken. I hadn’t cried, either. The closest I’d come was when one of the woman guards had told another, “Yeah, I’d kill my old man, too, if I had the guts. I wouldn’t do it onstage, though.”

  I grabbed at the sleeve of Nico’s pinstriped suit, still perfectly pressed at midnight. “The girls?”

  “Marisol is with them.”

  “Do they know?”

  “Marisol just told them you’d be late at the theater, made them go to bed.” That happened often enough. My girls would have at least one more untroubled night. But the next day I would have to tell them of Jeremy’s death. It would be the worst thing that they’d faced in their young lives. I had shot their father. And now they would be alone, without father or mother. I’d spend their childhoods in jail. With these thoughts running through my head, the next thing Nico said made no sense. “They’re going to release you. You want to change, Dan packed your clothes.”

  I only pulled the cloak more tightly around me. Jeremy’s blood had soaked through, and I could feel it drying on my skin. It seemed like the last thing I had of him.

  “It doesn’t matter, Nico,” I told him. I started shaking. I thought I’d never be warm again. “I killed him. I belong here. I shot him.”

  “Shit, Reve, you’re in shock. Listen to me. They’re going to release you because you didn’t kill him. You didn’t have the intent, even if you did pull the trigger. You pulled it every night. It was a trick, an illusion, just part of the show. But it gave somebody an opportunity to switch your gun. Somebody who knew you always used the same one. Jeremy was his target, not yours.”

  I did always use the same gun. Mine was on the left of the case, Jeremy’s on the right. Nico told me that a different pistol had been exchanged for mine, identical to it but for a hidden chamber that housed one bullet. I hadn’t noticed the difference, it was done so cleverly. I hadn’t noticed it was any heavier or changed at all. If I had, everything would have been different. Jeremy would be alive.

  “But why? Why would anyone want to kill Jeremy?”

  Nico shook his head. “That’s anybody’s guess right now. But that isn’t all. The old guy who lives in the theater?”

  “You mean Wesley?”

  “Yeah. Wesley Knowles.”

  “What about him?” I couldn’t believe that Wesley had any part in this, but then I remembered the old man’s taunting smile.

  “The cops found him tucked in a bathtub at an abandoned motel out on Sahara. They got an anonymous call from a phone booth at the airport. The last thing he remembers was heading to the theater bathroom sometime last night. He woke up duct taped and gagged, no idea who’d taken him there, or how. But from then on, some guy was impersonating him.”

  So the Wesley I’d glimpsed that day hadn’t been Wesley at all. “That guy is Jeremy’s killer,” Nico told me. “Got to be.”

  3

  That first morning of our bereavement I woke the girls and gathered them all in Fai’s room. I tried not to cry, but my voice shook as I told them the bare facts: that someone had switched the gun I used in Defying the Bullets, that their father was dead. Grace threw herself down on the bed and howled. Caleigh latched on to me, buried her face in my hair. Fai collapsed to the floor, hugged my knees, whispered, “Please no, please no.” After that first surge of anguish, we lay curled together on the bed, suspended in grief like bees in amber.

  I had to make arrangements for the funeral, or I wouldn’t have left the house. I couldn’t bear for anyone else, no matter how close, to do those needful things. Choose a venue for the private funeral, plan for the service. Choose the coffin. Buy funeral clothes for myself, our daughters. These were the very last things I could do for my husband. My parents couldn’t get a flight until the evening, so the next day Jeremy’s cousin Nathan stayed with the girls while I discharged my terrible errands.

  Nathan Landry had come to us when he was sixteen. He was the son of Jeremy’s only American cousin. Nathan grew up in New Orleans. He also grew up gay in a family of Catholic Republicans. When he came out they disowned hi
m, and he fled west on a Greyhound, to Las Vegas, to us. We were glad to have him. We were building our act and our career, and the twins were three-year-old terrors who needed constant supervision. Nathan finished high school while learning the family trade and helping with the girls. He’d always been interested in fencing and swordsmanship, and that became his domain. After graduating with a first in Renaissance studies from Oxford, he returned to us, almost unrecognizable from the shy boy he’d been. He’d transformed into a remarkable man: a swashbuckling blond Errol Flynn crossed with an easygoing, bookish southern gentleman. Nathan could wield a broadsword or the poetry of William Blake with equal aplomb. He choreographed all the staged sword fights and dances in our shows, and tutored the girls when we went on the road. He was like a son to us. He steeped the girls in Shakespeare, and they called him “coz.”

  He hadn’t been in the theater that night, but when he heard what had happened, Nathan left his apartment in town to stay with us. “You’re the only family I have left,” he told me. “At least the only family who ever stuck by me. Let me return the favor, Reve.” I let him. I needed to surround myself and the girls with people I could trust. However final it seemed, Jeremy’s death wasn’t an end. It was the beginning of a kind of hell I was not prepared for, beyond the usual grief and shock when one loses a spouse too young.

  I was still a suspect in his murder. Nico told me the police would have me followed, hoping I’d lead them to Jeremy’s killer. Maybe they were thinking they’d catch me in a tryst, or a business arrangement that would explain my husband’s death. They still believed I was involved, especially since I’d inherited money, as well as our Henderson, Nevada, home, Jeremy’s family home in England, and the cottage in Ireland where we sometimes spent summers. I was hardly on the Forbes 400 list, but it was a tidy sum, one that a woman less completely in love with her husband, less destroyed by losing the father of her children, might have thought worth killing for.

  Nico was right. I spotted the unmarked car as soon as I pulled out of our driveway. It was parked in a less prominent place than the Las Vegas Star News van that had been there since the previous day. They both followed as I made my way from the Desert Palms Funeral Home to the District to pick up the girls’ funeral dresses. A caravan for God’s sake. But I didn’t really care. I didn’t feel much, couldn’t feel much. I moved from choosing the coffin to choosing the service to choosing dresses for the girls mechanically. There was a veil of grief and shock between me and the rest of the world.

  What I remember about that day, besides the despair that clutched me, was being cold. The District in Henderson is an open-air shopping mall, pretty enough on a fine day, but that day was not fine. It was too chill for the desert in summer, too wintry for Henderson. Rain threatened; the sky was gray as ashes. I’d thrown on clothes without thinking, had no coat, only a thin sweater. After I was done buying the girls’ clothes, I had a long walk to the end of the shops for my widow’s weeds. I was frozen at the core by the time I’d got to the café in the complex. I ducked in for something warm. I just wanted to hold a hot cup. The plainclothes policewoman followed me in at a discreet distance. I’d been pretending not to notice her as she’d pretended to shop for children’s clothes. Maybe she’d pretend to get a coffee now. The boys in the news van had more respect. They just snapped pictures of me with their long lenses from inside the van.

  I went up to the counter, ordered a large tea. A duck-tailed barista was moving in slow motion, listening to Elvis on his iPod. A wisp of “Love Me Tender” escaped his earbuds. The barista mouthed the words. A Young Elvis impersonator. I looked around. A man sat near the gas fire, in one of the leather chairs. His face was turned from me, toward the flames. He was dressed in a dark suit, reading a newspaper. Dark hair, I thought, but it was hard to tell in the shifting firelight. It was eleven in the morning, a strange time of day for an office worker to be lolling in a café, so the suit was probably the woman detective’s partner.

  When my tea arrived, I held it with both hands, made my way to the hearth, sat in the other leather chair. The woman detective fluttered near us, pretending to linger over her choice of milk or cream, raw or fake sugar. Still the man by the fire did not turn to look at me; he kept his eyes focused on his paper. I wondered how he could see to read. There were no windows in that corner of the shop; the fire was the only source of light.

  “Not a very nice day,” the man said.

  I looked away, looked out the glass doors at the flat gray sky. I had no intention of engaging in conversation. I wanted only the warmth of the fire, and no detective could keep me from it.

  “The weather’s changed since last week,” he persisted, his gaze fixed on his paper. I didn’t see a headset for a cell phone, though, so he had to be talking to me.

  “Now, last week,” he continued, “it was sunny. Sunny altogether. Not too hot, either, for once. Last week you could think you were living in a kind of paradise.”

  I flinched. It was strange that a detective would bother to give me a weather report, but the man was right. It had been warm. It had been paradise. I’d been in the District, too, the week before, looking for a new bathrobe for Jeremy, and was informed at the menswear store that bathrobes were seasonal items. Not for summer. That night, when I told Jeremy bathrobes were seasonal, we’d laughed at the silliness of it. He flung his old terry cloth one off with a grand gesture. “A pox upon the man who wears bathrobes out of season. I will not be that man!”

  My Jeremy. My Maskelyne. He’d be in the ground soon, where it was always cold. I rose, grasping my cup, the only heat I had. My hands were not steady, and it almost slid through my fingers.

  “You’d better hang on to that,” the man warned. “It’s going to be colder soon, I’d say.” His face remained in the shadows, his eyes now riveted on the fire, watching the lick of flames. I turned and rushed out the door.

  When I was finished with my last grim chore, I jogged to the car. The woman detective followed at a distance. I threw my bags in the backseat, started the engine, turned the heat all the way up. Then I saw the piece of paper fluttering under the wiper blade. I thought of turning on the wipers, letting it fly away altogether. But I leapt out again and grabbed it. A copy of an old handbill for a magic show. CHUNG LING SOO, DEFYING THE BULLETS. A scream rose nearly to my lips before I bit it back. I ran to the car my detective friend had just stepped into. She and her male partner looked at each other in confusion when I signaled to them. The man rolled down the window. He was dressed in gray sweats, had a shaved head, might have been trying out for a remake of Kojak. Definitely not the stranger by the fire.

  “It was him,” I said, and held out the flyer. “It was the guy sitting by the fire in the café. He killed my husband.” I don’t know how I knew. I just did. But the man was gone. Young Elvis hadn’t noticed him leave. He wasn’t a regular, either. I found out later that when my new detective friends had analyzed the flyer and the cup that remained on the table by the fire, neither held fingerprints, DNA from saliva—anything at all that might identify him. The man in the dark suit had vanished.

  4

  The funeral was a blur. My parents had come from Massachusetts. My aunts, Viv and Gwen, flew in from California. Jeremy’s parents had both died when the twins were small: his mother from cancer, his father from grief-fueled alcoholism a few years later. Only one Maskelyne relative came over from England, Jeremy’s cousin Bertie, who had to fly back immediately for his own wedding. We left Hope in the Desert Church after the brief service. It was finally raining, a rare desert rain that splattered up mud from the dry ground. The smell of the air was electric.

  I knew I’d need a few minutes alone before I could gather my strength again. The girls were with my parents and aunts, talking to the pastor under the church portico. I slipped away, walked through the rain toward the car. I tried to ignore the photographers and news vans clustered outside the church gates, the police detail assigned to keep them out.

  Before I
could reach the car, a man appeared from the labyrinth walk beside the church. He was big-boned and tall, and so dirty he might have come through the desert on foot. Or perhaps was homeless. One of the funeral directors stepped between us, but I asked him to move aside. I had recognized the breeks the dirty man wore, the long wool socks, the pocketed waistcoat. Homeless or not, this man was dressed as a falconer. The only thing he was lacking was a bird on his leather glove. He held a small blue envelope instead of a hawk, and I reached for it, recognizing Nan’s handwriting. My Nan, my mother’s mother, at ninety-seven years old did not travel, although she was a master falconer and still held falconry clinics. Since Jeremy’s murder I had been hoping for some word from her. I’d grown up in Nan’s imposing presence. But as close as she and my mother had been when I was a child, a breach between them opened after I was grown and gone away from home. A breach I couldn’t fathom, although I tried for years to understand it. They held an uneasy truce at holidays, but I’d hardly seen or heard from Nan other than at Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. Now here was a letter from her, brought to me in this strange way.

  “You’re to open that before no one,” the falconer told me. I looked down at the turquoise envelope, the letters running in the rain, and when I looked up, the man was gone, had melted back into the desert. I tucked the letter into my bag.

  I meant to read it when I was finally alone in the funeral limo, but I broke down instead. The leather upholstery smelled of other people’s grief, and I added mine to it. My sobs were drowned out by the howl of the wind, and I let myself keen along with it. Just for a moment. Just as a rest from the stunned shock that had gripped me since the night of Jeremy’s death.

  When I looked up, I saw Grace stumbling toward the car. She was crying, too. Her flaming hair was wild, and the white dress she’d wanted for her father’s funeral clung to her long, stockinged legs. Our beautiful girl, undone by her grief. She seemed impossibly fragile. Of our girls, Grace was closest to Jeremy, but most resembled me. Grace had my temper. Only Jeremy could stanch our sudden flares of anger, soothe us, turn us to our best selves. What could I do for her? We were too much alike.