Girl in the Shadows (33 page)

epilogue

Two Months Later

The theater I was playing in wasn’t a dump, but it wasn’t the Menagerie either.

I’d decided to strike a happy medium between Dad’s level, where I was being courted, and Raleigh’s, the bar circuit. The publicity I’d gotten from “the great Ferris wheel vanishing,” written about in all the best magician specialty publications, and my time at the Cirque had given me enough cred for my new booking agent to set up a small sold-out tour of medium-sized theaters. Now that my bruised ribs—and Dez’s cracked ones—were all healed up.

I was doing my illusions from the summer and introducing some new ones. No one was any the wiser about having seen real magic, but they started calling me the Queen of Miracles.

This particular theater was in a used-to-be-happening city. But no matter where it was, seeing my playbill in the window never failed to give me a moment of pride.

T
HE
M
IRACULOUS
M
OIRA
M
ITCHELL

Q
UEEN OF
M
IRACLES

Thurston had let me borrow one of the images the Cirque’s artist had done of me catching bullets in my hands.

“Milady,” Dez said, opening the front door. We were early, bringing in our gear to set up.

“Tone it down, eye candy,” I said.

He laughed and gave me a kiss. As much as he could while trying to juggle the bag with my gear in it.

So, it wasn’t exactly the pretend dream we’d dreamed. Oh, sure, Dad had offered to set me up with a job on his show or whatever I wanted. But it turned out what I wanted was to make my own way. I believed that I could now, and no one would ever be able to accuse me of coasting to fame on Dad’s name. That was the whole point of this.

When we went back to Vegas, maybe he’d even let me snoop in that secret warehouse full of goodies. I’d never gotten the chance.

Frankly, I’d become a little disenchanted with magical objects. But I kept the fragments of the coin in a locket around my neck; it seemed a fitting way to honor them. I didn’t think they should be thrown away, not after the things they’d seen and done.

“Your dad sent you a present,” Dez said, once we were inside the theater. He produced a manila envelope seemingly from thin air.

“You’re getting better,” I said.

I’d suggested if he was making this a career, he might give his sleight of hand some work.

“I wonder what this is.” I took the envelope and pulled the open tab free as we made our way into the backstage dressing room.

There was a document inside in a plastic covering. I squinted at it, but as I started to remove it, a card fell down. Dez picked it up and read it aloud: “‘Dear Moira, it took me a while to track this down. Consider it a congratulations present. I think she’s one of your favorites. Love, Dad.’”

I stared at the page, realizing what I held. “This
is
a good present,” I said, with a low whistle.

“I’m dying here,” Dez said. “What is it?”

“A page from Addie Herrmann’s diaries.”

“Boring!” he said, but gently.

I rolled my eyes at him.

This was
my
fairy tale so far, with its unexpectedly happy ending:

There was a woman, the loveliest of the lovely assistants, and so talented she could have been a magician herself. No one knew she was a witch. But she was a leader too—sometimes a benevolent queen, sometimes an evil one. She left her daughter with a man she knew would make a kind father. The daughter was thus born lucky, and almost didn’t realize it. The mother and daughter fought for a magic coin, and in the end, the coin saved them both. The daughter won, though.

Her daughter was not a witch.

She was a magician.

acknowledgments

I’ve been fascinated by stage magic as long as I can remember, and just as fascinated by the lack of (save a few exceptions) women magicians. I hope in the coming years we’ll start to have more reference material about the amazing women who have contributed to magic history, past and present. Too often they’ve been left in the shadows. I’m also hopeful we’ll see many more female magicians to come.

In the meantime, resources that helped me greatly were Taschen’s
Magic: 1400s–1950s
; books by Ricky Jay; pretty much everything Penn & Teller have ever done; Jim Steinmeyer’s
Hiding the Elephant
; way too many YouTube videos of amateur and professional magicians all over the world; the documentaries
Box Jumpers
and
Make Believe
;
Adelaide Herrmann,
Queen of Magic: Memoirs, Published Writings, Collected Ephemera
(edited by an incredible magician, Margaret Steele); and the various magic message boards I spent too much time lurking on. I’d also like to thank the wonderful Timoney Korbar for scoring me an invite to visit the Magic Castle, and Kelly Link for being the best-ever companion for a friend writing a book to take to the Magic Castle.

The Praestigae are entirely my own invention and not based on any real group.

Some books come easy; some books are harder. I hope, like a good magic trick, this one looks easy now, but it was hard to master. As always, thanks go to my husband, Christopher Rowe, who listens to my despair and tells me the story will be there, and to my pets, who listen to my despair and then insist on walkies anyway. Immense gratitude to the amazing aerial daredevils at Bella Forza studio in Lexington, who’ve made me love the circus arts in a whole new way. A world of thanks to two different sets of writers at the Bat Cave workshop, who helped spitball this one early on, and to my magical agent Jennifer Laughran. And, of course, to the publisher and everyone who worked on the book: my wise and dedicated editors, Courtney Miller and Marianna Baer; my fabulous copyeditor, Elizabeth Johnson; cover designer extraordinaire M. S. Corley; and the whole team at Skyscape. You went above and beyond to make magic happen. I’m lucky to work with all of you.

Finally, the biggest thanks to my readers. I love hearing from you.

about the author

Photo © 2016 Sarah Jane Sanders

Gwenda Bond is the author of
Girl on a Wire
and
Girl in the Shadows
, whose daredevil young heroines discover danger and passion lurking beneath the big top. Her previous books include the young adult novels
The Woken Gods
and
Blackwood
. Her writing has also appeared in
Publishers Weekly
and the
Los Angeles Times
, among other publications. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and their menagerie. Visit her online at
www.gwendabond.com
or
@gwenda
on Twitter.