apparition: a young man on a wildly oversize red tricycle. He was wearing white gloves and a zoot suit with comically wide shoulders. In one lapel was a boutonniere the size of a hothouse orchid. His pants (also oversize) were currently hiked up to his knees as he worked the pedals. The handlebars were hung with bells, which he rang with one finger. The trike rocked from side to side but never quite fell over. On the newcomer’s head, beneath a huge brown derby, was a crazy blue wig. David Stone was walking behind him, carrying a large suitcase in one hand and a fold-up table in the other. He looked bemused.
“Hey, kids! Hey, kids!” the man on the trike shouted. “Gather round, gather round, because the show is about to start!” He didn’t need to ask them twice; they were already flocking toward the trike, laughing and shouting.
Lucy came over to John and Chetta, sat down, and blew hair out of her eyes with a comical foof of her lower lip. She had a smudge of chocolate frosting on her chin. “Behold the magician. He’s a street performer in Frazier and North Conway during the summer season. Dave saw an ad in one of those freebie newspapers, auditioned the guy, and hired him. His name is Reggie Pelletier, but he styles himself The Great Mysterio. Let’s see how long he can hold their attention once they’ve all had a good close look at the fancy trike. I’m thinking three minutes, tops.”
John thought she might be wrong about that. The guy’s entrance had been perfectly calculated to capture the imaginations of little ones, and his wig was funny rather than scary. His cheerful face was unmarked by greasepaint, and that was also good. Clowns, in John’s opinion, were highly overrated. They scared the shit out of kids under six. Kids over that age merely found them boring.
My, you’re in a bilious mood today.
Maybe because he’d come ready to observe some sort of freaky-deaky, and nothing had transpired. To him, Abra seemed like a perfectly ordinary little kid. Cheerier than most, maybe, but good cheer seemed to run in the family. Except when Chetta and Dave were sniping at each other, that was.
“Don’t underestimate the attention spans of the wee folk.” He leaned past Chetta and used his napkin to wipe the smudge of frosting from Lucy’s chin. “If he has an act, he’ll hold them for fifteen minutes, at least. Maybe twenty.”
“If he does,” Lucy said skeptically.
It turned out that Reggie Pelletier, aka The Great Mysterio, did have an act, and a good one. While his faithful assistant, The Not-So-Great Dave, set up his table and opened the suitcase, Mysterio asked the birthday girl and her guests to admire his flower. When they drew close, it shot water into their faces: first red, then green, then blue. They screamed with sugar-fueled laughter.
“Now, boys and girls . . . ooh! Ahh! Yike! That tickles!”
He took off his derby and pulled out a white rabbit. The kids gasped. Mysterio passed the bunny to Abra, who stroked it and then passed it on without having to be told. The rabbit didn’t seem to mind the attention. Maybe, John thought, it had snarked up a few Valium-laced pellets before the show. The last kid handed it back to Mysterio, who popped it into his hat, passed a hand over it, and then showed them the inside of the derby. Except for the American flag lining, it was empty.
“Where did the bunny go?” little Susie Soong-Bartlett asked.
“Into your dreams, darlin,” Mysterio said. “It’ll hop there tonight. Now who wants a magic scarf ?”
There were cries of I do, I do from boys and girls alike. Mysterio produced them from his fists and passed them out. This was followed by more tricks in rapid-fire succession. By Dalton’s watch, the kids stood around Mysterio in a bug-eyed semicircle for at least twenty-five minutes. And just as the first signs of restiveness began to appear in the audience, Mysterio wrapped things up. He produced five plates from his suitcase (which, when he showed it, had appeared to be as empty as his hat) and juggled them, singing “Happy Birthday to You” as he did it. All the kids joined in, and Abra seemed almost to levitate with joy.
The plates went back into the suitcase. He showed it to them again so they could see it was empty, then produced half a dozen spoons from it. These he proceeded to