Chapter Twenty-Eight
Janesville, 1905
Half past four o’clock
“You said you wouldn’t marry him then.”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“But you married him later?”
“That would be reasonable. But you know not all of this story is reasonable.”
“To say the least,” he says wryly. It all seems so plausible, and she tells it so smoothly. Reasonable, no. Believable, yes. But is it true? Now it seems he will never be sure. But his decision isn’t about that anymore. Whether he believes her innocent is less important than what she can do for him now. It’s the simplest of all trades: a life for a life. If she saves him from the bullet, she will save him from everything. He’ll keep what he has, what he treasures. That’s all he wants.
He says, “And now I want to ask you for that favor.”
She doesn’t look at him. Her eyes are downcast, modest. She says, “Virgil. You don’t have to ask.”
“Yes. I do. Very much.”
“That’s not what I mean. I know exactly what you want.”
“All right then, tell me.” The situation is so absurd but so vital that it starts to make him light-headed. This can’t be happening, yet it will change the course of his life. He lets himself be a little sarcastic. “Give me your second sight act, Madame.”
“Not like that,” she says. “You’ve all but said it. The bullet.”
“Yes,” he admits. He can feel his pulse quicken at the mere thought. “The bullet.”
“You want me to heal you. To put my hand on the small of your back, make a wish, and draw that bullet out. Science has failed you, so you need magic.”
“Yes. I need magic.” It’s a relief to admit it, to say it so nakedly. In front of anyone else, he’d be embarrassed. In this way, as in so many others, she is an exception.
“Because science has its limits.”
“Yes.”
There is no emotion in her voice, he realizes, and it worries him. It’s as if she’s reading someone else’s words from someone else’s script. There was passion in every word when she was telling her story, but now she tells the facts: bald, cold. “Magic has limits too.”
“Don’t be coy,” he says. They’re so close now. He’s so close. She can’t hold out on him; she can’t. “I said it’s a favor, and it is, but I’m not asking you just to do it out of the goodness of your heart. I’m asking it as a trade.”
“I understand perfectly. If I heal you, you’ll set me free.”
“Yes.”
She sounds almost disappointed. “So I’m telling you all this for nothing. My story makes no difference to you.”
“It’s a fascinating story. Truly.” He wants to put his hand on her arm but doesn’t dare. He can only hope his words will be enough. “But how could I care about your life more than my own? That’s what I’m asking you to give me. My life.”
The moment she waits before answering him is days, months, years long. It stretches on far longer than he thinks he can bear.
Then she finally raises her blue-and-brown eyes, meets his gaze, and says in an almost whisper, “Would that I could.”
“But you can! It’s easy! Heal me. Draw the bullet out and you’re free.” He raises his hand, snaps his fingers. The sound in the small, bare room is as loud as a gunshot. “Nothing could be simpler.”
She speaks slowly. The quiet night around them has never been quieter. It seems hard for her to choose her words.
“Virgil, when I—struck out at Ray, cut his throat—after the fire. You remember, I told you exactly what happened. I tried to heal him. It didn’t work.”
“You were in a rush,” he says without the slightest pause. He’s already thought of every reason. “You didn’t take the time to do it properly. And you hated him anyway. Why would it work on him? You didn’t really want him to get better.”
She shakes her head and leans slightly forward in the chair, intent. “I’d never been sure about the limits of my gift. After that time with Ray, I suspected I’d found them.”
“That was just—”
“Hush,” she says, not unkindly. “So I tried it out. People are always getting injured on the road—not through any acts of mine. It’s just dangerous to be moving all that equipment, especially in a rush. Since they were my family, my company, it wasn’t odd for me to insist on taking a look at their injuries. So I’d put my hands on them and whisper a little something under my breath. They thought it was a prayer. It was a wish.”
She takes a moment, squares her shoulders.
He has to prompt her. “And…?” Even then, he trails off. He both does and doesn’t want to hear the answer, to know where the story goes. If it were good news, she wouldn’t be so slow to tell it.
“I’ve tried to heal broken fingers, bruised ribs, bloody toenails, every injury large and small and in-between. It never worked.”
“But you said—bruises, cuts, broken bones—”
“My bruises. My cuts. My bones.”
The air goes out of his lungs.
She swallows, as if she doesn’t want to say what comes next, but she goes on anyway. “I can’t do it, Virgil. I can’t help you. My own body, I can do anything. Someone else’s body, I’m powerless.”
He feels like he’s fallen from a great height. This must be how she felt, being thrown from the hayloft and crashing to the floor of the barn all those years ago. Like there isn’t anything to breathe, and nothing to breathe it with.
“I’m sorry,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sorry, not at all, and her indifference is what finally leads him to reach out and put his hands on her.
He puts both hands on her shoulders and shoves her backward, and the chair tips over with a crash. The sound echoes off the wall.
The crash of the chair is the only sound. She says nothing. Doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, doesn’t move.
She lies still.
For a moment, he’s afraid he’s killed her. Any normal person would have screamed. She just lies there on her back, the chair underneath, her eyes open and staring up. The only other woman he’s ever seen lying on her back is Iris, and the sight disturbs him so much he reaches down and rolls the magician over on her side and the chair with her.
She still makes no noise, and he watches her for a moment, watches the side of her neck, until he’s sure he can see the pulse beating there under the skin. She’s alive. The noise he heard, the cracking noise, wasn’t her skull. Thank God.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
In a very small voice, she says, “I understand.”
When he bends down next to her, behind her, he sees what’s happened. The middle bar of the chair has snapped off. That was the noise, the sound of wood snapping. Both pairs of handcuffs were laced through it, and now they aren’t. She is barely restrained at all. He grabs the chain of the handcuffs in his fist before she notices that her wrists can move farther than they have in hours.
“I’ll right you,” he says, as if she weren’t completely free of the chair, as if nothing at all has changed.
He takes her silence as assent. He bends down and picks them up together, her body and the chair, to right them again. He can feel her heartbeat against his shoulder. He smells the sweat of her neck, an earthy, salty smell, not the same as his wife’s, and that tickling scent of citrus from earlier. His body holds hers in place, and his breath stirs her hair. She remains silent.
When he settles her feet and the chair’s feet both squarely back down on the floor, he releases everything but the handcuff chain, which he grips so hard his knuckles are white. Luckily, she can’t see his knuckles.
“It looks like this one has been cutting into your wrist,” he says. “I’ll fix that.”
He unlocks the right wrist, laces the chain through one of the remaining bars, and relocks it in place. He hustles to do the same with the other set of cuffs, unlocking it from the right wrist, lacing the chain behind the bar, then locking it to the wrist again. Now she’s set, back in two pairs of handcuffs holding her tight to the chair, fully secure.
Her silence and lack of resistance since the fall begin to worry him. It’s getting later, and he’s getting more vulnerable. He’s sure she must sense that. Maybe she hit her head harder than he thought.
“Are you all right?” he asks. He comes around to the front of the chair so he can look into her eyes when she answers. He’s seen a man kicked in the head by a horse so hard his eyes never did both look in the same direction again.
She locks her eyes on his. They are the same. Three-quarters blue, one-quarter brown, a strong fierce gaze, boring into him like she can see into his brain. He doesn’t know what she sees there.
“There’s really only one question. Do you believe me?” she asks.
He’s tempted to make her spell it out, but he knows what she means. The murder. She’s been telling him all night she’s innocent. All night, he’s been resisting that fact. “I want to.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“No.”