Page 112 of The Girl Who Knew Too Much

“Obviously that wasn’t the case.”

“The pistol was loaded with real bullets. Two of them caught me in the thigh. Did a lot of damage to muscle and tissue but just barely missed an artery. I was lucky.”

“Lucky?How can you say that?”

“If I had not been partway out of the cage at the time, all three bullets would have gone straight into my chest.”

Stunned, Irene stopped massaging his leg. “I don’t understand.”

“I was wrapped in a lot of chains. They looked impressive but the whole assembly was designed to fall away when I unlocked a single lock. One of the assistants slipped the key to me just as I was lowered into the cage. I tried to use it as soon as the curtain was lowered around the cage. But it was the wrong key.”

“What did you do?”

“I had never really felt comfortable relying on an assistant to slip me a key. I always carried a backup hidden in my hair. But it took me a few seconds to realize that the first key was the wrong one and then a few more seconds to get the backup key and insert it into the lock. When the masked assistant fired the first two shots, I was only partway out of the cage. I normally would have been all the way out at that point.”

“So it wasn’t an accident. The rumors were true. Someone tried to murder you.”

“It was all carefully planned, from the false key to the real bullets.”

“But who would want to kill you?” Irene paused. “That pair who eloped to Hawaii?”

“No. While I was recovering in the hospital, Chester conducted hisown private investigation. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to come up with a suspect. There was only one person who hated me enough to murder me onstage in front of a packed audience.”

“Of course,” Irene said. “Your friend and partner, Geddings.”

“That is... very perceptive of you.”

“You became what he had always wanted to be, a brilliant magician who could thrill audiences. A star.”

“He had helped me become a skilled magician but he was jealous of his own creation.”

“Geddings didn’t create you, Oliver. Your talent is yours and yours alone. Geddings may have helped you perfect your skills, but he had to know that you would have become a success with or without him. That’s why he was consumed with jealousy. No matter how skilled he was, he would never be the star that you became.”

“Well, he made sure that my stardom came to an end.”

“What happened to him?”

“Geddings? He died a few days later, shortly after the doctors concluded that I wasn’t going to die or lose my leg.”

“How?”

“He put some more real bullets into the gun and shot himself in the head.”

“Suicide.”

“He left a wife and a son behind.”

“Do they know what he tried to do?”

“No,” Oliver said. “There was no reason to tell them. Chester and I let the accident story stand.”

“What about the other assistants? Did they figure it out?”

“I’m sure Willie did. Some of the others probably did, too. But we don’t talk about it.”

“A show business family secret?”

“Something like that, yes.”