Escape Artist

“And you and Fannie will always be devoted to each other, bound by love, but each of you is cut from steel. You need to be apart from each other.”

“Since I joined the Crescent…”

“It’s what you have to do. You know, Edna, when you took the job last year, something shifted in the house. I noticed it. Fan can’t understand you. She looks at the four walls of the house and says to herself: ‘This is where a girl belongs.’”

“And I look at the four walls of the house and say, ‘What’s on the other side?’”

“Exactly.” A quick laugh. “You got the same fever Houdini has, you know.”

“What?”

“You want to move through walls.”

“Father, I don’t like to see you hurt or caught in the middle of these shouting matches.”

Again, a ripple of laughter. “You two have the same fight over and over, and it’s always as though it’s brand new.”

I peered into the subterranean windows of the Crescent office. A light gleamed. Someone was working. Perhaps Mac? I shuddered and surveyed the street, expecting to see the mysterious man watching me. But my father and I were alone.

He read my mind. “You’re determined to find Frana Lempke’s killer, Ed.” A declarative statement, headlined.

“What?”

“I do listen. And the talk with Mr. Houdini was telling.”

There was so much I wanted to tell him now, but I had trouble sifting through the whirl of thoughts. Images of Matthias Boon at the office-his criticism, his coldness, his diminution of my assignment sheet. I had no future at the newspaper. Even Sam Ryan, a kindly old man, found my writing overly effusive, flowery. He was losing faith in me. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to leave Appleton and study elocution. I felt I was being followed. Houdini made me feel special. Houdini was not telling me something…

I was haunted by Frana’s death. “The investigation drags on. The police do nothing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, I don’t. But it’s been a week.”

“They wouldn’t tell you, Pete.”

“Bill, I’m just asking questions.”

“I repeat-we do have a police force.”

“Yes, we do.”

“But you feel you can help.” Was that wonder in his voice?

“I’m a reporter.” God, how often and cavalierly I hurl that sentence around. Surely, should I die now, it would be etched on my gravestone and some merry prankster would pass by and draw a question mark in chalk over the period.

“But you’re not happy being a reporter.” My father spoke into the darkness.

“What?” Now I stopped.

“At least not at the Crescent. I’ve sensed a change in you.”

“The atmosphere there is different now.”

“How?”

“You know, things change. The new editor, Matthias Boon…”

“You like to write?” he interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Then be a writer. A novelist. Books. Stories. You have it. I think of the times you’ve read to me from your reporter’s pad. The way you describe people you meet. Those snippets of overheard conversation. Write.”

“I can’t do that.”

I saw him smile in the darkness. “Ferber women don’t use that line.” He waited a bit. “Mr. Houdini likes you.”

“I know he does. I’m a curiosity to him.”

“Not true. You’re more than that.”

“I know.”

“He says you have ‘a lightning-flash imagination mixed with a wide-eyed wonder about the world around you.’”

“He said that?”

“But he’s worried about you.”

“I know. I don’t understand that.”

His voice rose. “I do. It’s because he knows you want to solve this murder.”

I blurted out, “It’ll prove something to me, Father.” A stupid line. With all the coolness and dismissal at the Crescent office, with all the battles raging in the house of Ferber, somehow I needed-what? I searched for a word. Definition. I needed to define myself. Frana’s murder had changed everything.

My father was talking. “The murderer is not a drummer staying for a few days at the Sherman House.”

“Why, Bill?”

“I’ve listened to the stories you and the others tell. Frana was an ambitious girl, pretty everyone says, a head filled with silly notions, a girl who wanted something to change in her life. There’s nothing wrong with that. She was like you in some ways. But she came from a strict home where the men are the taskmasters-her father, her uncle. Maybe her brothers. She didn’t know how to escape that world. It seems to me that Frana would only have listened-and planned that foolish escapade-with someone who represented similar authority.”

“An older man?”

She knows someone who lives across from a theater in New York.

“Yes, certainly not a footballer boy like Jake Smuddie. But someone she saw as stable, a community figure, someone people trusted.”

“Some man who lives in Appleton.” I got excited. Maybe someone with roots in Appleton.

“Yes.” A pause. “And that’s a scary thought. That’s why I worry about you.” Tension in his voice. “Like Houdini, I hear something in your voice. I heard it when you talked to Kathe. I’m afraid someone might hear you and think you know something.”

“That murderer is among us?”

“I can’t win, can I?” He smiled. “But, yes, I think so. You know, that flight through that unused storeroom at the high school-the idea of it-is telling, no? Someone, but not Frana, thought that up.”

“So the murderer…”

My father shuddered. “We all know him. And that terrifies me.”

That night I lay in my hot bed, unable to sleep. The talk with my father had unsettled me, and I wrestled with bits and pieces of it: my job, the murder, my sister-a trio of weights that pressed me to the ground. I was at a crossroads and that notion frightened me. Just that afternoon Matthias Boon, walking past me with an armload of copy, glanced down at me while I was idly typing my copy. A smug look, as though he had a secret he knew I’d not like. And Fannie, sleeping across the hallway, had glowered at me before bedtime, a look that suggested the war would continue on the morrow. And the murder: my father’s cryptic words. The passageway as a clue…to something. Trust. Authority. A stalwart citizen of the placid town.

Though I drifted off, I suffered a nightmarish rest, images of the Fox River overflowing its banks, floods washing over Appleton. And there, glistening and gigantic, stood Jake Smuddie in his football togs, a bulwark against the raging river. Herr Professor stood nearby wagging a finger at me. Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin and Principal Jones and Homer Timm surrounded me. I woke in a sweat and struggled to fall back to sleep.

I dreamed of the Deputy Sheriff Amos Moss sneaking back into the high school where he’d once been a student. Everyone had gone to Ryan High School. I dreamed I took refuge in my own house, but the house had been moved back to Ottumwa, Iowa, that hateful, coal-mining hamlet. Drunken revelers followed me home: “Oy yoy,