Read Online 08 Illusion by Frank Peretti - Free Book Online

appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. That had to be prior to 1992. Mandy could have been entering her forties or still in her late thirties; it was hard to tell.
    “Now, I’ve seen you do this,” Carson was saying, sitting behind his host’s desk and holding a Rubik’s Cube. “And of course there’s a magician’s way of solving it instantly, a magical effect, but you can solve a real one—”
    Mandy, in the chair closest to Carson, gave a playful nod, “Uh-huh,” which got the audience stirring and squealing. Dane sat in the next chair, exuding full confidence. Ed McMahon sat to his right.
    “How long does it take you?”
    “Depends on my fingernails.”
    “Well, how are they?”
    She looked. “About right.”
    “Less than a minute?” Carson offered her the cube.
    Mandy rolled her eyes, but the audience cheered and goaded her and she took it from him.
    Carson, a magician himself, assured the audience there was no trickery involved; the cube was genuine. He said “Go” and clicked a stopwatch, the audience counted down as her fingers became a blur, and she held up the solved cube, every side totally one color, in thirteen seconds. Not a world record, but good television.
    Mortimer was especially interested in the family photos, the informal shots of Mandy the gal: Mandy and Dane on a fishing trip, holding some admirable salmon they’d caught; on a bike trip, although the helmet and sunglasses made Mandy’s features hard to see; a later promo photo commemorating Dane and Mandy’s thirtieth year in show business presented plenty of detail: the laugh lines around her eyes, the subtle lines in her face, the glint of white in her blond hair. The big-eyed smile was still there, just as in the photos of Mandy at eight, at twelve.
    The video was a mother lode of information showing facial expressions, mannerisms, vocal tones, reactions. In an HD clip from only a few years ago, Dane was levitating Mandy a good twenty feet above the stage at the MGM Grand when she suddenly woke up from her magical hypnotic state, looked at the stage lights, and observed, “Boy, talk about dead bugs!” and produced a portable hand vacuum from nowhere. Her playful smile came through the video as well as it must have reached the back rows in that theater, and the rest of the illusion was a well-timed, well-planned catastrophe for her husband.
    Mortimer finished up by surreptitiously recording the signatures in the guest book. It didn’t take long.
    Stone finished up by requesting a copy of the video from the tech in the sound booth.
    They stayed for the reception afterward, but only long enough to apprise themselves of Dane and Mandy Collins’s circle of friends and peers. They slipped out quietly, before they could be noticed enough to be introduced to Dane Collins.

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    8
     
    D ane limped off the plane at Spokane International and found this once-familiar piece of ground where Mandy grew up was suddenly, strangely unfamiliar. He and Mandy came to visit regularly until her father passed away in ’92. After she sold the ranch in ’98 they still returned simply because it was Idaho and Mandy loved Idaho. When they came here recently to scout out a new place to call home, it felt like home.
    But this trip felt entirely first-time.
    He’d bought one ticket, packed one bag, carried only one boarding pass. There was no one to wait for while going through security and no one to wait for him. He had no one to meet in any particular place when he came out of the restroom and no one to keep in touch with by cell phone; he bought only one Starbucks coffee and a blueberry muffin for only himself. There was no one to watch their stuff while he walked around and no one to walk around while he watched their stuff; he went through doors first with no one to open them for.
    While waiting for his one bag to slide onto the carousel, grief overcame him as it often did, on a schedule all its own, unpredictable,