Escape Artist

carried a heavy toll for the man. Concentration and imagination, indeed.

“Thank you,” I said. He was waiting for someone to acknowledge him.

Caleb Stone gave his thanks, and Houdini bowed. He turned to go. “My work here is done.” He smiled at me. “This was not really an escape, Miss Ferber. This was just a discovery I made. You could have done this. This is just a door in a wall. A panel. That’s all. No one bothered to look.”

Chief Stone interrupted, sheepish. “It was common sense, really. But it never occurred to me. We never came back to look.” He scratched his head. “I’m feeling a little foolish.”

Houdini interrupted him. “Why should you think that way?”

“Well, it was right in front of our eyes.” The chief’s head twisted around. “For Heaven’s sake, a storeroom door. I never thought…”

“No, it wasn’t.” Houdini was kind. “There was no latch visible from the inside, sir. You see, I’m always looking for means to escape. That’s the way my mind works.”

“But, my God, a doorway…”

Quietly Houdini assured him, “Once you’d reexamined the room, you’d have found it. Surely.”

The chief started to say something, but Houdini held up his hand. “It’s just that I got here first. And, you know, I do like to put on a show.”

“But…”

“No trickery, really. You didn’t need the great Houdini for this. You needed to open your eyes.”

I shook my head. “What was obvious was obviously not obvious.”

Boon frowned at me.

Houdini’s look took us all in. “Isn’t it strange, then? With all my elaborate escapes and tricks and illusions, I find a door in a wall…and, well…you may remember this one day as my finest performance.”

Chapter Thirteen

I headed home from the Crescent office late in the afternoon to take my father for his walk. I passed in front of the fountain near City Park, where Hosea Thigpen or Mad Otto was declaring perdition and wrongdoing and the wages of unrepented sin. No one was around to hear him and I doubted whether he knew I was there. Usually I paid him little mind, but today I paused and watched him gesturing and posturing, eyes wide and teary. I wondered what drove a man to become so monomaniacal, so maddened, so removed from reason and common sense?

A man like Houdini practiced deliberation, logic, order, discipline…and a spirit of freewheeling fancy. His geography was always the world out there. Somehow Houdini had realized that life was magic-not just the pyrotechnics he enacted on stage but the wonder of his days. He saw everything as adventure, as thrill. Though he dressed like an out-of-town drummer, when he moved through the streets he became an explorer searching for uncharted continents.

Appleton was filled with vagrant souls whom no one bothered-Mad Otto the Prophet, Minnie the Hatrack, Isaac Solid who drove hay wagons up College Avenue and hurled lumps of horse manure at fleeing matrons. Mary McGregor wandered the lanes with a bundle of toys wrapped in a blanket hugged to her chest as she told passersby of her new-born infant; Barry Knott, one hundred years old, fell asleep in the outhouse every day. They wandered and no one thought ill of them. People here assumed goodness in others, even among the lunatics. No one locked their doors at night because they believed no one would ever think to rob them.

Until now, that is.

Until now.

Frana Lempke’s murder had altered the comfortable landscape. The Ferber household was never locked, nor were our neighbors’ homes. As I walked along busy College Avenue, I noticed something new in town. A well- dressed businessman checked his gold watch, a woman shopping in Voight’s filled baskets with tonic and hairpins, an East End society matron picked over notions for whist prizes at My Store, children pumped hoops across the wooden sidewalks or played leap frog in the park-they had all become worriers now. They started when you approached quickly from behind. They watched you. Or was I just imagining it? Who do you trust when that golden bowl has just been shattered?

In my talks with folks, I sensed panic. Would this murder plague the town, unsolved, throughout the summer? Merchants worried, and I’d overheard one fussy shopkeeper berating Caleb Stone, demanding the murder be solved by the Fourth of July. Appleton’s huge patriotic celebration, barges and fireworks on the Fox River, was in jeopardy. Hordes of out-of-towners crowded the avenues, spending their money, and the specter of heinous murder might prove a damper on the festivities.

Chief Stone had muttered, “Don’t you worry, sir. Appleton will be the same old town by then.”

But at that moment I knew in my heart that Appleton would never be the same town again. The awful blemish of such a crime had stolen some of our soul.

I suspected Houdini’s revelations might have fueled Matthias Boon’s intoxication because, back in the city room, he wrote his copy in a white heat-and hummed as he did it. Somehow he’d convert that prosaic discovery into sensational headline. At my own desk, I had trouble focusing on the nonsense I was typing.

Despite the discovery, Frana Lempke’s murder still remained a mystery.

Suddenly I thought of Jake Smuddie. High school footballers lingered after school in the auditorium, running in the hallways, up and down the stairs. We all did. I sat on those very steps leading up to August Schmidt’s storeroom when I worked on my part in A Scrap of Paper. Students often drifted up there for paintbrushes, for brooms, for…I stopped. Anyone could have spotted that panel, that latched door. But most would pay it no mind. There was no reason to. No one would think it a convenient hiding place. Again, my mind flashed to Jake Smuddie, an image of the brawny, tough boy with his amazing hands around Frana’s neck. God no! I recoiled. Who else? What former student, now grown into a man, inheritor of that secret knowledge of that panel, came back to use it to lure the hapless Frana? Or…a present student. Or…who?

Even before I turned onto North Street, I heard my father’s rich laughter. He was sitting with Gustave Timm who was telling him some anecdote, his hands flapping like wild birds. My father leaned in, enjoying it. I was happy. So many afternoons I dropped back home to check on my father, only to find Gustave Timm and Jacob Ferber sitting next to each other in the parlor or on the porch, the two men huddled together, Gustave puffing on a Golden Night cigarette. He’d met my father last spring when I brought my family to the theater, my desperate attempt to connect him to something. How deeply he’d once loved the theater! But he sat stiffly throughout the evening. Unable to view the actors onstage, baffled by the laughter from the audience, he got rattled. We left at intermission, and Gustave Timm, standing in front of his theater, had offered to escort my father home. The afternoon visits began, the two men yammering on and on about politics and Appleton and even, as I once overheard, the outlandish price of coffee. Gustave confided his dislike-his nagging fear-of Cyrus P. Powell, who owned the Lyceum and was thus his boss. Once I’d heard him say, “I was brought up to respect authority, especially one’s employer, but the man always seems to find fault with me. He’s always checking on me. I turn around and he’s there.” He sounded like a whiny child, freshly reprimanded. “I fear Homer speaks against me.”

Gustave Tim spotted me. “Your reportorial daughter has returned home.” He waved a welcome.

“Hey, Bill.”

“Hey, Pete.”

I drew up a chair and told them about Houdini at the high school, filling the account with enough drama to impress Gustave as well as entertain my father.

Listening, my father shook his head. “The sad tale continues.”

Gustave joined in. “Tragic. She was just a child, such a misguided young girl.”

“You knew her?” I asked.

Gustave shook his head. “No. But she wandered into the theater some afternoons with one of her friends, another girl. I thought that they were sisters but…”

“Kathe Schmidt?”

“I don’t remember her name, the other one. She fidgeted, but kept her mouth shut. Frana did all the talking. She’d show up during rehearsals after school was dismissed and announce that she wanted to be an actress. She