The Lady Vanishes

by Nicole Camden

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  For Jill

  A good friend, an excellent person. Always nice when those two things go together.

  Thank you to Kate Dresser and Lauren McKenna for giving me the chance to make my dreams come true.

  Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  THE STAGE IN THE ENTERTAINMENT ROOM at Boston Children’s Hospital was small, but Milton Shaw made good use of the space. He’d invited all six kids who’d come to see him perform onto the stage and was showing them in turns how to do simple tricks. He was wearing a suit, as he always did, a top hat, and a small black mask. They called him Shaw the Magician.

  “Hold your hands like this”—he showed them the careful placement of his fingers on the playing card in his hand—“and then . . .” He demonstrated, and the children, ranging in ages from six to eleven, mimicked him. Several cards fluttered to the floor, but a few of the kids managed it, including eleven-year-old Chuck, who’d initially claimed he had no interest in magic.

  “You have to practice,” he told them. “Again and again until the motion becomes automatic.” He made the card reappear with a flick of his fingers.

  “Why don’t you teach us something cool?” Chuck said.

  “Like this?” Milton asked, and made a small ball of flame float above his upraised hand.

  “Oh, man, is that real fire?” Chuck asked in awe.

  “That was actually my question,” a woman’s voice said from the center of the room. She was wearing bright green scrubs and had dark hair pulled back into some kind of bun, dark brown eyes, and the fullest, most sensuous-looking lips he’d ever seen. She had the lips of an anime action heroine. He could picture her in skintight leather and boots with a gun at her hip. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, which explained why his hand felt like it was burning. He quickly extinguished the flame, cursing inwardly, but he still didn’t look away.

  “Dr. Burke, this is Shaw the Magician,” Chuck told the woman, and Milton studied her more closely. She was a doctor. Doctors rarely came to the entertainment room.

  “Dr. Burke.” He bowed. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “You should probably avoid flames around the oxygen tanks.” She pointed to the tank on one of the kid’s wheelchairs.

  He scratched his cheek under the mask. “Yes, I’ve heard that before, actually. Why don’t you stay and watch?”

  “Make her disappear,” Chuck muttered. “She’s probably here to tell us we need to go back to our rooms.”

  Milton laughed and jumped lithely down from the stage. The doctor, watching him warily, visibly tensed when he came within a few feet of her.

  With a flourish, he presented her with a flower made of tissue paper and wire.

  She hesitated, but one of the girls, a dark-haired beauty named Emily with rather prominent front teeth, said, “Take it, Dr. Burke, take it.”

  With a sigh of resignation, the good doctor took the flower. “Thank you.”

  “Smell it. Smell it,” the kids shouted together.

  She glared at the magician, her dark eyes narrowed warningly, but she obediently bent to sniff the flower. It drooped comically and the children laughed.

  She straightened. “Well, that’s better than having it blow up in my face, I suppose.”

  Milton felt his lips twitch and hoped that the direction of his thoughts didn’t show on his face. He couldn’t help it; she made him think of sex, roll-around-on-the-floor sex, back-of-the-limo sex, sex with her tied and helpless on one of his workbenches.

  “Try again,” he suggested, and the children took up the call, shouting, “Try it again, try it again.”

  They were all ill, every one of these kids, but right now they were laughing, and the doctor seemed to enjoy being the butt of the joke.

  She bent to sniff again, and this time the flower darted forward to bop her on the nose. She jerked back and nearly fell, but he caught her by the elbow, hauling her upright. The kids were laughing again, roaring with it, and Milton enjoyed the look of forbearance on her face.

  She freed her elbow with an efficient twist of her arm and handed him the flower. “Thanks. I already knew better than to accept flowers from strange men, but it’s good to be reminded.”

  “I could remind you again, sometime,” Milton offered, a little surprised when the words came out of his mouth.

  She glanced at him sharply, her lips parting briefly before she took another step away from him, shaking her head. “I don’t think so, Mr. . . .” she said, trailing off.

  He removed his top hat and bowed again. “Shaw the Magician.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She nodded. “I couldn’t remember your name. The head nurse, Jackie, says that you come here every Friday.”

  Milton straightened and replaced his top hat. “At your service,” he said. And he did have quite a few ideas for how he’d like to service her. Most began with tying her up with dozens of intricate knots and undoing them slowly with his teeth.

  “Well, Shaw the Magician, I need Chuck to come with me. His mom is here. Otherwise, you can carry on.”

  On the stage, Chuck groaned but immediately started for the ramp, wheeling his IV next to him, his rounded cheeks set in a scowl.

  When he reached Milton and the doctor, he tried to give Milton back the playing cards he’d been using, but Milton shook his head.

  “Keep them. I’ll show you a different trick next time.”

  “The one with the fire?”

  Milton glanced askance at Dr. Burke, who was frowning at his side. She was beautiful even when frowning.

  “Maybe not that one, but something equally cool.”

  Chuck shrugged as if he could care less and started from the room.

  Dr. Burke started to follow him, but Milton caught her arm again. “Thank you for playing along, Dr. Burke. Do you have a first name?”

  “Do you?” she tossed back and shook free of him again. “Try not to burn the place down, Shaw the Magician,” she said crisply as she left.

  Milton watched her go, enjoying the way her efficient march highlighted her round butt. He wondered how long it would take her to notice the flower he’d pinned to the front of her scrubs, just above her right breast.

  “Do you have a crush on her?” a small voice said beside him. It was Emily, the dark-haired girl with the large teeth. She sounded bummed about the idea, her lower lip beginning to form a pout.

  Milton pretended to consider it. “I think it would be stupid to have a crush on her. She looks like she’d break my heart.”

  The girl nodded vigorously. “She’s tough. She doesn’t smile like the other doctors.”

  Milton pretended to shiver. “Why don’t you think she smiles?” He took her hand and led her back on stage, where the other kids were still trying to get the trick to work correctly.

  Emily looked slightly ashamed. “She does, but not like those fake, bright smiles. She never does that. It’s pretty cool, actually.”

  Milton knew what she meant. Sometimes adults thought that by smiling brightly and talking in a cheerful tone, they could lessen the impact of the often horrible news they had to tell their patients. He was gl
ad to hear that Dr. Burke didn’t do that, but he did wonder what made her seem so serious.

  “All right, guys,” he said, rolling a cart from behind the stage. It was piled high with boxes, all covered by a sheet of black fabric. He put it in the center of the stage and said, “I need some volunteers to open presents.”

  The children grinned and stepped forward in unison. Some of them had seen his show before, and the rest had undoubtedly heard that he was known for bringing presents: Xboxes, games, iPads, 3-D TVs, and strange pieces of technology the kids had never seen before.

  “On the count of three, I’m going to remove the cloth, and you guys pick what you want. Ready? One, two, three.”

  He pulled the sheet, and there was nothing underneath, just empty space.

  “Oh, man,” Emily groaned.

  Milton laughed and pointed to the room behind them. The gifts were piled up throughout the room, shiny bows on everything.

  The kids squealed and hurried as much as they could down the ramp toward the toys.

  Nick Cord, Milton’s business partner and friend, stepped out from behind the stage. He often came to the hospital with Milton to help with the tricks. He was not a tall man, but he was well muscled from running and kept his blond hair cut short and close to his head. He dressed more like the dockworker and fisherman his father had been—in jeans and cable-knit sweaters—than the billionaire he was now, which suited him.

  “Who’s the doc?” he asked Milton. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  Neither had Milton. “I saw her first,” he muttered.

  Nick laughed and held up his hands. “Got it, got it. You have dibs.”

  “That’s right.” Milton didn’t give a shit if it was childish. He didn’t often find women he was this attracted to. The difficulty would be in convincing her to spend time with him. She thought he was a magician, after all. For some reason, most women found that about as sexy as a man dressing up in a Star Trek costume.

  “Think you can get her to go out with you?” He’d known Milton in college when talking to women had rarely gone well for his friend. It wasn’t the case now that he was rich, but Milton never wanted women to date him for his money.

  “I’m going to try,” he said simply, and Nick groaned.

  “God help the woman, she doesn’t know what she’s in for.”

  DR. REGINA BURKE SAT DOWN behind her desk with a sigh and glanced out the window to her right. It overlooked the small glass-enclosed tropical garden attached to the family wing of the hospital, where the children visited with their parents. The garden was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees, much different from the snow and freezing rain they’d been experiencing this winter. While it looked nice, she would rather be riding her bike along the river, taking in deep breaths of crisp air.

  She couldn’t do that, either. She had paperwork to finish, and a date to go home and get ready for, but she found herself thinking about the magician instead. He’d been . . . naughty. The word drifted through her mind. He hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate, but she could have sworn that in the eyes behind that mask she saw more than a little kink. She’d bet he was a man who’d be all too willing to tie a woman up, cover her with whipped cream, or trace the lines of her body with ice cubes. His eyes said that he was a man who’d enjoy whatever she wanted as long as she was naked and he got to put his dick inside her.

  She realized she was rubbing her bottom lip with her fingers and straightened abruptly. With a decisive headshake, she focused on her computer. He also spent his time playing magician. She was imagining things. For all she knew, he was a pimply-faced twenty-year-old right out of college, although he’d seemed older. Her therapist was right; she needed to get laid if she was turned on by a magician, of all things, complete with mask and top hat. She could have sworn she’d even seen stuffed rabbits, although the trick with the fire had been fairly cool. Dangerous, but cool.

  Something pink caught her attention. She glanced down and saw the paper flower that she’d pretended to sniff earlier. Somehow he’d pinned it on her lapel, and she’d walked around wearing it all afternoon.

  She touched the paper petals gently with her fingertips. How had he pinned it without her noticing?

  He must have clever fingers, she thought.

  Unpinning the flower irritably, she started to throw it in the wastebasket underneath her desk, but stopped at the last minute. She hadn’t expected to be charmed, hadn’t let herself be charmed by anyone or anything in a long time. Her father had been charming, and just look what he’d done.

  With a decisive flick of her wrist, she tossed the flower in a desk drawer and gathered her things to head home. It was already snowing, and she wanted to get on her way before it got too dark.

  “Shaw the Magician,” she murmured to herself as she walked out of her office.

  Jackie Keen, the head nurse, had told her about him when Regina questioned allowing the children to go off with a man claiming to be a magician. Jackie didn’t like being questioned; she didn’t seem to like much of anything. She certainly didn’t care for Regina and had refused to tell her any more about the man behind the mask. Regina didn’t feel wrong for asking. There were all kinds of crazies in the world.

  Detouring to the locker room, Regina took a few minutes to change into her winter riding gear. She didn’t own a car and preferred the exercise of riding her bike to the hospital. It wasn’t far, but in the winter she usually froze her ass off before she was halfway home.

  Today was no different. She walked quickly to the covered area just outside the employee entrance, where those people stupid enough to ride in this weather parked and locked their bikes. When the weather was too bad, she usually carpooled with a friend. She just didn’t see the point in buying a car when she lived so close to the hospital and spent all her time there, anyway.

  Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, she began riding quickly in the direction of home, along the bike path that ran through the Emerald Necklace, a park that basically encircled the hospital. Her loft apartment—where she lived with her sister, Celeste, and a cat named El Greco since she’d started working at Boston Children’s—was built in the early 2000s and near the Charles River. Prior to that, she, Celeste, and El Greco had lived near the campus at Harvard so Regina could get to school. Celeste, six years her junior, had been her ward since Regina was sixteen, since their father had fled the country after he was indicted for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

  He’d disappeared shortly after his indictment and never been caught. Without him to focus everyone’s anger, her family had been left with nothing and vilified in the media. The damage her father had done to thousands of investors—mostly in the Boston area—had been covered extensively, and since her father wasn’t around to be cursed, the public had settled for her, her mother, and her sister. She’d gone from being a spoiled pain in the ass who’d played competitive field hockey, stayed out too late, dated inappropriate boys, and had a bad habit of raiding her father’s liquor cabinet to a hyper-responsible, perpetually serious young woman who had to care for her younger sister, her addict mother, and her ailing grandmother. She’d pushed everything wild about herself deep inside and locked it up. And she hadn’t let it out since.

  The bike path on which she rode had been cleared of snow, but heaping piles of it surrounded either side. Snow covered the limbs of the trees and clumped on rocks in the river as she rode over small bridges, lit by the dim glow of the setting sun. She’d covered her mouth with a scarf, but the thick wool barely warmed the icy air before it went into her lungs. She rode on, relieved when her muscles began to warm, and she stopped feeling numb from head to toe.

  When she finally pulled up in front of her house it was full dark, and she was breathing quickly. Without pause, she hauled her bike onto her shoulder and started up the stairs to her loft. She was about to se
t the bike down and get her keys when Celeste opened the door, El Greco—the gray beast cat—twining himself around her legs.

  “Reggie, guess what?”

  Regina set her bike down and pushed it through the open door, forcing her sister and the cat to move out of the way. “You’ve decided to move out?”

  “No.”

  “Finish college?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t care.”

  “I met this gorgeous man today. He’s staying at the hotel.”

  Celeste had attended college for four years, hadn’t graduated, and now worked as the assistant manager at the Hotel Commonwealth, a five-star luxury hotel near Fenway. In Regina’s opinion, it was a waste of the money she’d spent to send her sister to school, but Celeste truly believed that she’d be able to find a wealthy husband and never have to work again. Regina had long since quit trying to convince her darling sister that a wealthy husband was not the answer to life’s difficulties.

  “Is he married?” Regina asked, not really sure why she bothered. She was still breathing hard as she opened the door to the postage-stamp balcony that overlooked the river and rolled the wheels of her bike into the stand she kept there.

  Celeste shrugged. “Probably. He’s from Russia or the Ukraine or something like that. Handsome. Very dark and brooding.”

  Regina thought about the magician. Dark and brooding he was not, but handsome, yes. “Sounds like too much drama.”

  Shaking her head, Celeste followed Regina as she stripped off her scarf and unzipped her jacket. El Greco began meowing loudly, demanding his dinner. “You know, you should go out with me tonight. I can borrow Katie’s car, we’ll get dressed up, and go out on the town.”

  “You’re out of money again, aren’t you?” Regina asked as she walked through the living room, which was mostly just a gray Ethan Allen sofa that had belonged to their grandmother, a Persian rug that had been her aunt’s, and a deep red leather chair that one of Celeste’s boyfriends had given them when Regina had complained about sharing the couch with two people who wouldn’t stop making out.