As she walked, she passed a convenience store with summer for sale on the sidewalk out front: lawn chairs, wind chimes, big inflatable palm trees. Inside she bought one of each, giggling to herself about the evil plan she was hatching, and thankful she hadn’t come up with this idea while Elijah was close enough to read her mind. He would have tried to stop her. This spectacle would definitely blow her cover as the daughter of a fake levitator with no real power of her own.
With her purse over her shoulder, the chair under one arm, and the boxes with the wind chimes and palm tree under the other, she walked in her high heels to the service road that led between her casino and the one next door. At a drink stand on the corner, she set the boxes down, propped the chair against her leg, and bought a frozen lemonade in a tall plastic cup with a straw shaped like a roller coaster. Now she really didn’t have enough hands to carry all this, so she held the lemonade in one hand and the box of wind chimes under the other arm, and let the chair and the box with the palm tree float in the air behind her like balloons on strings. She didn’t care one bit about the attention she drew. She was, after all, headed to a magic show.
She passed only a few people on the sidewalk beside the casino’s front wing. But the second she rounded the corner and stepped onto the paved back lot, she felt the buzz of energy from the crowd gazing up at her dad. He stood on top of a pole a hundred feet in the air that he’d welded together and Holly had decorated with glittery paper. They’d done this themselves because her dad rarely wanted to call in the props team from the casino (which would have involved Elijah, she realized) for fear of giving away his secrets. Holly felt all the irony of this now that she knew her dad’s ultimate secret: his tricks weren’t tricks at all.
Time to open the curtains.
At the back, the crowd was sparse, but spectators crowded closer together the nearer she got to the makeshift plastic fence around the base of the pole. The crowd’s whispers preceded her by a few rows as they noticed the box and chair floating behind her, and they recognized her as the magician’s missing assistant. She must be part of the act! They parted for her in an inverted V. She was able to walk unobstructed all the way up to the fence. There she hooked the cup of lemonade in the air, too. With her hands she took the wind chime out of the box and handed it without ceremony to the nearest audience member to hold up for her. She could have held it up herself with her mind, but that might get complicated in a few minutes, when she got busy. She sat down in the lawn chair, crossing her legs.
With her mind she pulled the plastic palm tree out of its box. She certainly wasn’t going to sit there and blow it up with her mouth. That would smear her lipstick, and it would attract the attention of her mom, who was still busy making presentation motions near the base of the pole and hadn’t yet noticed her. She tested blowing air into the palm tree with her mind and found that it worked well: the leaf nearest the valve swelled a little. She inflated the tree the rest of the way in a few seconds—now the whole crowd murmured and pointed at her—and she set the tree down next to her chair. She reached for her cup floating in the air in front of her and sipped from the straw. She craved the sugar, but yuck!—artificial lemon flavor. It wouldn’t do to make a face, though. She was in show business. She returned the cup to the air and set her sights on her dad, seeming so precariously balanced, but in reality completely stable on top of the pole.
She poked him in the chest.
Her dad lifted one foot and spun his arms in the air. He looked like he was fighting to keep his balance. As if. The crowd gasped and a few women screamed. Holly waited. Her dad set his foot back down and returned to his former meditative state. The crowd hushed itself.
She shoved him.
He reeled backward and, for effect, threw himself off the back of the tiny platform. Women shrieked. Men groaned. He flailed his arms in the air and miraculously managed to catch the edge of the platform with one hand. Surprise! Holly was tempted to tell the horrified crowd the end of this story to put them out of their misery.
She peeled his pinkie off the platform, then his ring finger. He was holding on with his middle finger and his pointer. She wrapped these two fingers in a sparkling sensation to let him know he’d better get his juices flowing and do something about this situation. She braced for his retaliation, his kick to her gut that would send her flying against the outside wall of the casino, lawn chair and lemonade and all.
She was counterattacked the next second, but not by her dad. Her mom finally saw her and stomped around the far side of the pole, all the way up to the fence. “Holly Ann Stuckenschneider, you stop that this instant!” she cried.
“What for?” Holly casually lowered the lemonade to sip level. “He’s a magician. Let’s see him get himself out of this one.” She used her power to place the straw between her lips.
Her mom leaped over the fence in her high heels and grabbed Holly’s shoulders. She hissed in Holly’s ear, “Female levitators’ powers are much stronger than men’s. All levitators lose power as they get older. You’ll kill him!”
Her dad let go.
Elijah drove Shane’s Pontiac toward UNLV, his confusion increasing the farther he got from Holly. Furious as he was with her, he was left wanting desperately to get near her again, and—oh—also fearing death when she squashed his throat like a bug.
And on top of all this, he had to drive? He’d spent a good portion of his time in the last four years on this campus, yet he’d never driven, never parked. Even on a summer morning, he knew Shane’s grad student parking sticker wouldn’t get him anywhere near the fine arts building. Fuck this. He pulled into the space reserved for the dean of fine arts. If the car got towed, Shane deserved it.
After staring at the glove compartment for a moment, Elijah grabbed the Glock. He didn’t load it. But if Shane didn’t have a mind-reading ability, he wouldn’t know whether the gun was loaded. One way or the other, Elijah would have his answer.
The fine arts building was quiet and hollow with most students gone for the summer. An office provided the gentle voices of secretaries, but Elijah preferred not to announce his presence. Outside the office door, a bulletin board listed practice room reservations. He found “Tuesday, 11 a.m., Sligh, S” and hurried in search of the room, watching the numbers on the plaques beside the doors.
In a desolate corner of the building he found it. A tangle of electric guitar music wafted into the hall through the half-closed door. Elijah had thought Holly’s plan to interrupt her dad’s act was asking for trouble, but she was right about the element of surprise. Elijah pointed his gun in front of him. Took one last deep breath. Kicked the door open.
Shane sat in the tiny windowless room with four tween girls, two on each side of him. All of them held electric guitars in their laps with small amps at their feet. Shane stared up at Elijah with wide eyes, and two of the girls let out squeals.
Elijah blocked out their fright. He concentrated on Shane, examined Shane’s mind for any inkling that he knew about Elijah’s power. But Shane’s thoughts focused on the four girls. He needed to calm them and simultaneously get Elijah away from them.
Without taking his eyes off Elijah, Shane said, “Ladies, this is my friend Mr. Brown, who is an expert in drama.”
“Oh!” The girls cooed and sighed their relief and mentally compared who was more dreamy: Mr. Brown the drama instructor or Mr. Sligh the music instructor.
“I need to talk to Mr. Brown alone for just a moment,” Shane said, standing up and placing his guitar on its stand, watching Elijah all the while. “Practice that last riff, and I’ll be right back.” He walked past Elijah and out the door.
Elijah followed Shane down the hall, farther into the labyrinthine building. Elijah took a quick glance behind them to make sure the corridor was empty. As Shane drew even with the entrance to another hall, Elijah grabbed him and forced him around the corner. Backing him against the cement-block wall, he pressed his forearm over Shane’s throat and the gun to Shane’s forehead.
Shane inhaled sharply through his nose. “You’re welcome for the gun.”
“Good point,” Elijah growled. “Why did you let a mentally ill person borrow your gun and your car to kidnap a girl and drive to Colorado?”
“Because you asked me,” Shane said carefully. Elijah searched Shane’s mind, but he couldn’t find any incriminating evidence. Shane was thinking that he did not want to get shot, but better him than the four tween girls back in the practice room.
“Doesn’t Holly have the same disease as you?” Shane asked. “Isn’t she on the same drug? I figured if it made sense to you, it probably made sense to her.”
“You know I’m on medication because I’m crazy,” Elijah insisted. “You know my medication has run out. Yet you allow me to borrow your car and your gun just because I ask politely? What kind of idiot does that? One who’s in cahoots with the casino.”
“Ca— What?” Shane felt around for something to say and hit on this: “One who has faith in his best friend. One who’s always known something was wrong with his friend, and someday his friend would find a way to make it right. Get the f**k off me! I am just a f**king nice person, okay?”
“I’m not buying it.” Elijah pressed his arm harder across Shane’s throat. “Didn’t you find my requests a little strange?”
Shane squirmed under the pressure and cleared his throat. “My dad is a Frank Sinatra impersonator. You don’t scratch the surface of strange.”
Elijah looked deep into Shane’s eyes, trying in vain to read beyond Shane’s superficial thoughts. “Who are you?” Elijah asked.
Shane met Elijah’s steady gaze. “The best friend you will ever have. But when you ask me to help you blow up the Stratosphere you are shit out of luck, if this is the thanks I get.” He coughed. “One of my students is going to wander back here and freak out and tell her mom, and I’ll never teach another lesson. Let’s talk about this later.”
Elijah was beginning to doubt himself. He’d been so sure Shane was in on the conspiracy. Shane had been too helpful about Elijah’s entire quest. There had to be something else there, and Elijah was determined to find it. He asked some leading questions, hoping the information he wanted would pop into Shane’s head, where Elijah could snap it up. “Have you been trying to control me?”
“Yes,” Shane said. “That’s why I loaned you my gun.” His mind was still filled with hiding Elijah’s meltdown from the girls.
“What about them?” Elijah asked, nodding in the direction of the classroom. “Do those girls have magical power?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shane said. “They’re way too young.”
“What did you say?” Elijah exclaimed, pressing his arm across Shane’s throat until his arm trembled and Shane turned white.
“It’s a joke,” Shane croaked. He put one hand on Elijah’s forearm and pulled.
Elijah resisted. “Why exactly are you so paranoid? Why do you carry a gun, anyway?”
“Because I’m from Mississippi!”
Elijah sighed. He’d been dead wrong. He let Shane take the gun from him, and he backed up a step. “I’m sorry, man. I—”
“Later,” Shane repeated, straightening against the wall. He glowered at the gun.
“Okay,” Elijah said uncertainly. Shane had been loyal to him throughout this ordeal. Elijah didn’t want to leave things this way between them, but he had another tree to bark up. “I’ll see you at home.” He started down the corridor.
“Oh, and Elijah?” Shane called.
Before Elijah could turn, he felt a splitting pain in the back of his head, worse than anything he’d felt trying to read ten minds at once. His face hit the cold tile floor. He rolled onto his back. Shane stood over him, still gripping the gun by the barrel and wielding the butt as a weapon.
“Don’t ever interrupt my class again.” Shane threw the gun down on Elijah’s chest. His face was impassive and his mind yielded nothing but anger as he stepped over Elijah and walked away, a tall figure silhouetted against the sunlight glowing through the windows at the end of the hall.
15
Holly saw one flash of her dad’s body dropping on the far side of the pole. She leaped forward and had a vague impression of knocking both her mom and the temporary fence out of the way with her power in her effort to catch her dad, like a baseball player pursuing a hit into left field.
His hand had hit the asphalt already. She heard the smack. But she caught the rest of him. He hovered facedown an inch from the ground, cradling his hand. A wave of guilt washed over her that she might have broken her dad’s hand. Gently she released him from her power.
But he didn’t move. He continued to hover. He must have saved himself at the same instant Holly caught him. He sank the last inch.
The audience wasn’t fooled. They’d seen magicians’ acts before. They knew that the ploy of the trick going wrong and the magician barely escaping death was just another ruse Peter Starr pulled from his pocket occasionally for variety. But this performance was convincing, and they appreciated it. The applause was thunderous.
“Show’s over, folks!” the black-suited goons shouted. Holly looked around and saw that her mom was talking to one of them. Several of them parted the crowd on either side of the pole and directed the spectators through the large doors back into the casino—down the corridors and past the slot machines where they might gamble again, rather than into the street from which Holly had entered. Voices escalated to a fever pitch as the crowd discussed at what point they’d realized it was all a trick and where the wires had been hidden this time.