The Vanished Man

audience to his home for dinner afterward.
    She was confident of her routine—Mr. Balzac had her practice, even for these small shows, for weeks. And now, during the last few minutes before curtain time, she didn’t think about her tricks but gazed at the audience, enjoying this momentary peace of mind. She supposed she had no right to feel this comfortable. There were a lot of reasons why she shouldn’t be so content: her mother’s worsening condition. The growing money problems. Her slow progress in Mr. Balzac’s eyes. The brunch-in-bed guy who’d left three weeks ago today, promising he’d call her. Definitely. I promise.
    But the Vanished Boyfriend trick, like Evaporating Money and the Wasting Mother, couldn’t touch her here.
    Not when she was onstage.
    Nothing mattered to her except the challenge of materializing a certain look in the faces of the audience. Kara could see it so clearly: the mouth faintly smiling, the eyes opening wide with surprise, the eyebrows narrowing, asking the most compelling question in every illusionist show: How do they do that?
    In close-in magic there are sleight-of-hand gestures known as takes and puts. You create the effect of transforming an object from one thing to another bysubtly taking away the original and putting a second in its place, though the effect the audience sees is of one object becoming something else. And that’s exactly what Kara’s philosophy of performing was: taking her audience’s sadness or boredom or anger and putting in its place happiness, fascination, serenity—transforming them into people with exhilaration in their hearts, however momentary that might be.
    Just about starting time. She peeked out through the curtain again.
    Most of the chairs were filled, she was surprised to see. On nice days like this, the attendance was usually quite small. She was pleased when Jaynene from the nursing home arrived, her huge figure blocking the back doorway momentarily. Several other nurses from Stuyvesant Manor were with her. They walked farther inside and found seats. A few of Kara’s other friends too, from the magazine and her apartment building on Greenwich Street.
    Then just after 4:00 the back curtain opened wide and one final member of the audience entered—someone she never in a million years would have expected to come see her show.
    •   •   •
    “It’s accessible,” Lincoln Rhyme commented wryly, driving his glossy Storm Arrow to a spot halfway down the aisle in Smoke & Mirrors and parking. “No ADA suits today.”
    An hour ago he’d surprised Sachs and Thom by suggesting they drive down to the store in his van—the rampequipped Rollx—to see Kara’s performance.
    Then he’d added, “Though it’s a shame to waste a beautiful spring afternoon indoors.”
    When they’d stared at him—even before the accident he’d rarely spent a beautiful spring afternoon outside—he’d said, “I’m kidding. Could you get the van please, Thom.”
    “A ‘please’ no less,” the aide had said.
    As he looked around the shabby theater he noticed a heavyset black woman glance at him. She rose slowly and joined them, sitting next to Sachs, shaking her hand and nodding to Rhyme. She asked him if they were the police officers Kara’d told her about. He said yes and introductions were made.
    Her name turned out to be Jaynene and she was a nurse working at the aging care facility where Kara’s mother lived.
    The woman glanced knowingly at Rhyme, who’d cast her a wry look at this description, and said, “Whoops. D’I really say that? Meant to say ‘old folks home.’ ”
    “I’m a graduate of a ‘TIMC,’ ” the criminalist said.
    The woman furrowed her brow and finally shook her head. “That’s a new one on me.”
    Thom said, “Traumatic Incident Mitigation Center.”
    Rhyme said, “I called it the Gimp Inn.”
    “But he’s deliberately provocative,” Thom added.
    “I’ve worked spinal units. We always liked the patients best who gave us crap. The quiet, cheerful ones scared us.”
    Because, Rhyme reflected, they were the ones who had friends slip a hundred Seconal into their drinks. Or who, if they had the use of a hand, poured water onto the pilot lights of their stoves and turned the gas up high.
    A four-burner death, it was called.
    Jaynene asked Rhyme, “You C4?”
    “That’s it.”
    “Off the ventilator. Good for you.”
    “Is Kara’s mother here?” Sachs asked, looking around.
    Jaynene frowned briefly