Born of Illusion (6 page)

I’d been right to avoid the board.

Another icy breath blows out the candles and the door to the sitting room slams shut. The blonde screams.

“Bloody hell,” Cole mutters next to me, releasing my hand.

There’s a moment of silence as everyone holds their breath.

“Don’t be afraid; the spirits have gone.” My mother’s voice shakes slightly as she moves to flick on the electric lamp.

Mrs. Carmichael clutches her chest. “That was my Walter, telling me to search no more. He is at peace and wants me to be at peace as well.”

My mother throws me a venomous look. Jacques is looking from me to my mother, confused. Mrs. Gaylord clings to her not-so-bored husband, her frightened blue eyes trained on me. Cole scrutinizes my face, questions in his dark eyes. I stare back, my heart thudding in my chest. I feel a magnetic pull, compelled to look deeper into his eyes to see what lies beyond such silky darkness. I jerk back, alarmed.

“My dear Madame Van Housen,” he says, rising. “I would hazard a guess that you’re not the only medium in the family. Well done.”

The hair across my neck prickles. Have I just been tested again? Does Cole know something about my abilities? I’m torn. Part of me wants to confront him to find out what he knows and part of me wants to hide under my covers.

The Gaylords gather their things.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” my mother asks.

“Er, yes,” the husband murmurs, wrapping his wife’s fur around her shoulders. “We’re heading out to the Island to visit the Gardiners for a long weekend. Our car is waiting.”

Mrs. Gaylord turns to my mother. “My friends will be so excited to hear all about you and your daughter! I’ve never seen . . .” She shakes her head and turns to me. “You are the cat’s pajamas, sweetheart!” She shakes her head again and they leave the sitting room.

Cole inclines his head toward me and follows them out. Moments later the front door slams.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mother asks Mrs. Carmichael, her voice pleading.

The older woman shakes her head decisively. “I’m at peace. Walter told me to search no more and I’m going to respect his wishes.”

“Hold on, Mrs. Carmichael, and I will walk you to your car.” Jacques turns to Mother and kisses her hand. “I will see you soon.
Oui
?”

Mrs. Carmichael wipes a tear from her eye and clasps my frozen hand. “Thank you so much, dearie. You have helped me so much.”

I smile at her, forgetting for a moment that I will soon be facing a furious mother. As terrifying as the whole experience was, for the first time during a séance, I
helped
someone. Then I turn to face my mother and I swallow nervously.
But who is going to help me?

Taking a deep breath, I avoid her eyes and begin to clear the dishes. My mother can put the stupid board away. I am never, ever touching it again.

She picks up her own glass and downs the gin in one gulp. “Just what the hell was that?”

I hesitate. I can’t tell her the truth—and if I tell her I did it on purpose, she’ll want to know why I’ve chased her clients away. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

“A séance,” I reply, avoiding her eyes. “I thought it went rather well.”

“You should have left it to me. Mrs. Carmichael would have been back.”

“But the Gaylords said they’d tell their friends. That’s good.” Desperately, I try to keep her focus on the clients. That way she won’t focus on me.

“Yes, but I would have preferred to string them along a bit. I don’t like you taking control of my performances.” She’s silent for a moment. “Why did you?”

“Why did I what?” I ask, stalling.

“Don’t be obtuse. You know what I’m talking about,” she says, suddenly petulant. Without her audience, she has no reason to act, and all the charm is gone.

I keep my face carefully blank, in spite of my racing pulse. “I was tired. I wanted them all to go home.” That, at least, is the truth.

My mother frowns but says nothing. She has done the same thing, but I’ve never before rushed a séance along, and she doesn’t like it. Not one bit.

“But how did you do it?” Her voice is more puzzled than angry now, but it still holds a skeptical note that makes me uneasy. She must not, ever, know about my abilities. The same instinct that kept me silent about them as a child sends me scrambling for an explanation that will appease her.

“I opened the window before I sat down.”

She glances at the window.

“And closed it while the lights were still out,” I add quickly. “The wind blew out the candles.”

Even to my ears, it sounds like a flimsy explanation. On the other hand, what other explanation can there be? My mother doesn’t believe in spirits. 

“And the planchette? How did you know what to say to Mrs. Carmichael?”

This is harder to explain away. I look her right in the eye, heart in my throat. “I’ve been watching you do it for years. Perhaps it’s rubbed off?”

She meets my gaze dead-on. Suspicion eddies between us for one agonizing moment before she backs down. “Well, please let me know next time you decide to take over one of my séances. It might have gone very badly. And we did lose a client.”

She’s still suspicious but is choosing to let it go—for now.

“But on the bright side, the Gaylords will definitely be back.”

“True,” she says. “And Jacques says Jack Gaylord’s family is almost as rich as the Vanderbilts. Where did he get his wife, though? Can you believe her?”

I run the evening through my mind but can’t think that she’d done anything out of the ordinary. “What do you mean?”

“She can put on all the airs and graces she wants to, but she doesn’t fool me. That girl’s so rough around the edges, she could be a ripsaw. I bet she’s only one or two generations away from the boat.” My mother gives a delicate sniff as if she hadn’t come over on a boat herself. I say nothing.

Still shaking, I take the rest of the dishes and place them in the sink. I’ll wash them in the morning. I want to ask my mother if she knows that Cole lives with old Mr. Darby downstairs, but I hold my tongue. I don’t want to start another conversation. Right now, I just want to go to bed and wrap myself in blankets—anything to warm the bone-deep chill seeping into my whole being.

“Good night, Mother,” I call, and hurry down the hall.

My stomach churns as the events of the evening sink in. Evidently, my talents extend far beyond just sensing people’s feelings and having the occasional vision of the future. I shut my eyes and tremble as the truth settles more deeply into my soul. My body had been used by a boy who had died during the Great War. He’d used the Ouija board to send a message from beyond the grave.

I can do what so many say is impossible—I can communicate with the dead. My stomach rolls and I hurry to my room.

Once there, I shut the door and wedge a chair under the handle. With that done, I kneel and pull out several large hatboxes from under my bed. The first one contains a dozen or so handcuffs and a ring of keys and picklocks. I have several Giant Bean handcuffs from the 1880s that all open with the same key. Silly. Then a pair of Iver Johnson cuffs with their funny round keys, and a pair of Lovell cuffs. I can get out of all of them with the picklock, no matter how I’m cuffed. I also have a special pair for Mother that have been gaffed, so they’re easy for her to open. They’re used to fasten her to the chair in the spirit cabinet. She doesn’t know about the rest of them and I want to keep it that way. It would give her too much satisfaction to know that I share the same obsession as my father.

Of course, it’s lucky for her that I do. I was thirteen the first time I broke my mother out of jail. After that it got easier, though I have to admit, even I had trouble getting the door unlocked while hanging off the back of a paddy wagon. It’s not an experience I wish to repeat.

I don’t even recall which small town it was, but I do remember how terrified I was as I hid behind a truck and waited for the paddy wagon to pass. They hadn’t placed a guard with my mother, figuring that one pretty little woman wouldn’t give them any trouble. As soon as the timing was right, I leaped, as quiet and quick as a cat, onto the back. I’d clung to the bars, and remember thinking that my mother, in her champagne-colored lace dress, was too beautiful to be stuck in the back of a police wagon.

“Mama,” I’d called softly, to let her know it was time to go.

“What took you so long?” was all she said as she removed her shoes to make the jump to the street easier.

I was already working on the padlock and didn’t answer. It took two tries but I soon pulled the lock out and the door opened.

I pray that’s the last time I’ll have to do that.

I sigh and move on to the next box, which contains the straitjacket I bought from a homeless man in Kansas City. I shudder to think where he got it and remember how long it took me to learn to escape from it. Swineguard the Magnificent helped me in and out of it for weeks before I finally had it down pat. Mother doesn’t know about that either.

Then, slowly, I remove the cover from a box filled with newspaper clippings on my father’s many exploits. A familiar sadness takes over, the same childlike yearning that has been with me since I first realized my father couldn’t possibly want me. If he did, I would be with him, right?

I stare down at a handbill I’d picked up in San Francisco when the circus was doing a California tour. Harry Houdini’s fierce eyes stare back at me. “Did I get this curse from you?” I whisper to the most famous magician and escape artist in the world.

Because I don’t want it. Any of it. Not the visions of the future, not feeling the emotions of others, and certainly not the ability to talk to the dead. All I’ve ever wanted was to be a regular girl with a regular life. Talking to the dead or seeing the future cannot, in any way, be considered normal.

As I tuck the handbill back in the box and shove it all back under my bed, a band of pain tightens around my chest like a straitjacket.

My father wouldn’t know me if he passed me on the street.

He has never claimed me for his own.

He doesn’t even know I exist.

But I can’t help but wonder, as I ready myself for bed, if my abilities are the curse I must bear as Harry Houdini’s illegitimate daughter.

Six

I
n spite of my exhaustion, it takes forever for me to fall asleep, and when I do, I’m restless. I keep waking up, half fearful of a repeat performance from Walter. But slowly I feel myself relaxing as sleep finally overtakes me.

Electrical flashes. Image after image. Inky black water surrounds me. Disoriented and confused, I can’t find the surface. My arms are useless, bound tight behind my back, and my lungs burn for air. Death circles me like an approaching shark, but it’s not myself
I’m terrified for. My mother’s lovely face flashes in front of me, nostrils flared, eyes wide with fear, and I hear her screaming my name over and over.

I sit up in bed, gasping, my heart racing. The scent of burned sugar still lingers in my nose. Trembling, I toss off the covers and tiptoe down the hall. Only after I see my mother still sleeping peacefully and hear her quiet breathing does the pounding of my heart begin to subside.

Was it just a nightmare? Or a premonition of things to come? What is happening to me? I’ve never had recurring visions like these before and certainly none about me and my mother. Visions of the Great War, the Spanish influenza, and the
Titanic
were horrific enough, but these are frightening in a whole new way. Maybe they’re not really visions? But what else could they be?

Of course, I’ve never talked to a dead boy before either.

I blink heavily and rub my hands across my face, trying to dispel the dull ache in my head. Perhaps Walter’s brief sojourn in my body has left more than just a bad memory. How many times have my mother and I found disgusting traces of the previous tenant in the hotels we’ve stayed in? Perhaps, at this very moment, my insides are smeared with some kind of spirit scum.

Shuddering, I wash, don a blue and white sailor dress, and quickly run a comb through my dark hair. It’s certainly easier to care for now that it’s bobbed. Mother fought against the cut, claiming that the long hair made more of a contrast between us onstage, but I think it has more to do with her reluctance to see me as an adult. Because if I’m a young woman, what does that make her?

I slip on my shoes and my blue wool wraparound coat before grabbing the shopping basket and heading out the door. I make sure to check the lock twice before running down the stairs. I’m usually a cautious person—you have to be in my line of business— but now, I’m out-and-out spooked.

I hear the door below me open as I come down the stairs. “Good morning, Mr. Darby,” I call.

Mr. Darby grunts and shuts the door. So far he hasn’t been very open to my friendly advances, but I’m nothing if not persistent. I’m dying to get a peek inside to find out what causes all the banging in his apartment, though I’m not sure I’m ready to face Cole again. I have too many questions, and I’m afraid of the answers.