They sit together in silence, two figures in two chairs, on the fringes of the circle of lamplight.
After a time, the magician says quietly, “Here in this room, while I tell you what there is to tell, it’s just us two. And these are all just words. Once I step outside that door, there’s a whole real world again, and that frightens me more than I can say.”
“I understand that,” he replies, offering his own honest response. “There are things in the real world that scare me too.”
“Such as? I’d like to hear.”
He opens his mouth to answer her, but another noise drowns him out.
The telephone is ringing.
It is a long, rattle-clanging, uneven sound, and it takes them both by surprise.
Holt freezes.
The telephone rings again. It makes a brittle echo against the close wooden walls, sounding louder and louder in the tight, small space. He feels like he’s sitting inside a drum. It wakes the pain in his head, which he had almost managed to forget. No forgetting it now.
He tries to be logical, fighting for clarity against the noise and the drink and the lack of sleep. No one from Waterloo knows he’s found her. It can’t be Mose. Or could it? There are only a handful of telephones in this part of the state, and no reason for anyone to call from farther away at this time of night.
Iris, then, it must be Iris. The telephone in his house, installed so he can be reached at any hour, is one of the handful. He’s not ready to answer the question he knows she has. She wants to know what the doctor said, whether anything can be done. He can’t tell her, not yet. Especially not with this one watching. But he wants to answer just to make the ringing stop. The sound makes it almost impossible to think.
Maybe now is the time to strike. He raises his voice to be heard over the telephone’s ring. “Did it surprise you? How much blood there was? When it was for real?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t there. I told you, I wasn’t there. I was already running.”
“If not the murder, what were you running from?”
The long, shrilling metal clang sounds, falls silent, and then starts up again. His head is beyond buzzing now. Aching. Howling.
She says, “I didn’t even know anyone was dead. You have to believe me.”
A ring and a silence, a ring and a silence, while their gazes lock.
Putting his face close to hers, he says, “Why did you kill him? Your own husband? How could you try to cut him apart?”
She blanches, visibly, and says, “Did you say cut?”
He turns his back on her then, turning as if to answer the telephone, but only to hide his face.
“Tell me!” she shouts. “How did he die?”
The telephone rings and rings. It takes all he has not to fling the door open and run outside, away from the sound and from her, gulping in fresh air. Instead he breathes his own breath again, growing unpleasantly warmer, struggling to stay put.
His mind soars and races. What does she mean? Is it possible that she’s telling the truth, that she had nothing to do with the murder? She is waiting on his answer. All the more reason to stay silent. If he waits for her to speak, there might be some clue in what she says next.
The ringing sound stops, blessedly, and the magician speaks into a longer silence. “What happened to you, anyway? The way you hold yourself. Stiff. Like you’re afraid of breaking something.”
He tries to hide his shock. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Look, I want to tell you everything,” she says, sounding sincere. “I do. I will. But it won’t make sense to you yet.”
He doubts murder could ever make sense to him, but maybe it’s time to humor her a little. For now. She seems to relax when she tells her story. If vinegar doesn’t work, he’s capable of honey.
“Then what would you like to tell me?”
“What happened next. When we arrived at Biltmore, where I was to dance for Madama Bonfanti.”
“Go on, then,” he says.
The phone blurts a strange, smothered half ring, and they both hesitate, waiting for the rest of the ring to come.
When it doesn’t, she starts her story again.