“I didn’t cheat,” I said.
“What?”
“I was still being a magician.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I told you,” I said. “It’s Magic 101. You don’t do a trick until it’s ready.” I shrugged. “I wasn’t ready.” I watched her face as she tried to make sense of what I was saying. “I thought I was ready, but when the moment came … I didn’t do it. I didn’t false deal.”
I had told myself I was ready, but once again my hands knew better and thought faster than my brain did. Or maybe not being fully satisfied with my technique was only part of it. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to be a cheat yet. Or I knew that stealing all that money from Victor Flowers and his poker buddies wasn’t going to bring my father back.
Maybe I was just afraid.
Ellen’s face, already gaunt, was now drained of color. “And then Victor accused you.”
The moment that happened, I knew I’d been set up. And the only explanation was the woman now sitting across from me. She had told Victor in advance that she was bringing a card cheat to the game. Who knew what reason she’d given? Maybe she told him I’d cheated her in the past and this was payback. Whatever the story, she had tipped him off to exactly when I would be false dealing the cards. Our weeks of preparation were nothing but a big con with me as the mark.
I was terrified, and so I had protested exactly as I’d been taught—loudly, vehemently, which helped me not at all—but I wasn’t only terrified. I was also desperate for the secret. I wanted to know what was behind this wildly elaborate deception. To know what the prize was. So I didn’t beg everyone to show their hole cards (not that it would’ve helped—even ordinary cards can become a winning hand, and a good cheat would avoid anything obvious). I didn’t try to throw Ellen under the bus as the mastermind (not that they would have believed me). I protested, like we’d planned in the event of disaster, and then I shut up.
So Victor, stealth filmmaker, led everybody over to that giant TV screen to watch the recording of my deal. And this, too, was all part of Ellen’s misdirection, a great big distraction to get everyone together, staring at that big screen as intently as jewelers in search of the flaw. Victor was told I had planned to cheat him, and so he convinced himself that I had. They all did. They watched my honest deal again and again. They watched, and rewatched, and watched in frame-by-frame slow-motion—slowly convincing themselves and one another that they were seeing me cheat—the subtle “hitch,” in Ian’s words. There was no hitch. They were searching for it, and so they found it. They worked themselves into a murderous froth, but it was all based on nothing other than Victor’s accusation, which Ellen had forced on him just the way I forced playing cards on unsuspecting volunteers show after show.
And all this watching and rewatching of my deal on the TV screen, convincing themselves they were busting a card cheat, gave Ellen ample time to steal the Revere bell. No one saw her do it, because what was happening on the screen was probably the most compelling thing they had ever seen in their lives. They dared not miss a single frame, a chance to catch, red-handed, a cheat, their new guest, this woman with the short bleached hair who had waltzed into their high-stakes game and tried to rob them all, these men of strength and savvy, these self-described winners.
“You didn’t cheat,” Ellen said, as if trying out the words in her mouth.
“No. I didn’t.”
And because I hadn’t, there’d been no reason for me to watch the TV. I knew I’d been set up, and I knew that the men were being distracted for a reason, so I watched Ellen step across the plush carpet to the fireplace and push aside the picture of the blue heron. It was a gas fireplace. There was no flue and plenty of space for the small safe that Ellen had opened in a few fast twists of her wrist.
“But you didn’t rat me out,” she said.
“No.”
“You didn’t cheat, but you”—she glanced at my hand—“you let them do that to you?”
I hadn’t seen exactly what small object she had removed from the safe, but I saw her slip it into the pocket of her pants before shutting the safe again and sliding the picture back into place. And whatever it was, I knew it had to be worth a hell of a lot more than the million dollars she and I could have won together at the card table.
“I can’t believe you dealt straight and let them do that to you. God, Natalie, you let them—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I was there.” I’d had several months already to understand the implications of my own actions on that snowy January night. She had set me up and risked my life, and I was going to either take whatever it was she had slipped into her pocket or die trying.
I decided to put it into words she would understand. “I told you I was all in.” When she didn’t reply, I added, “And don’t forget, you did the same thing in my kitchen.”
That came to me only later—how cutting her own thumb had been part of the plan. She had needed me to deal the cards with just a couple of days of preparation so that when Victor accused me of cheating, I would have reason to second-guess my own performance.
She grimaced. “That isn’t the same thing at all.”
One small disappointment: Ellen had exaggerated her own injury. In my apartment, despite my own agony and the beginnings of shock, I remember seeing her exposed thumb as she helped lay me down on the loveseat. I took no notice of
