I Died the Day My Husband's Girlfriend Did a Magic Trick novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Box
At the Rialto's April Fools' talent show, Imogen calls Cora up for the sawing trick, the blades are real, and Cora dies while her husband tells her not to embarrass herself; only a man in the back row sees her, and Imogen stops a stagehand from calling 911.
On April Fools' Day, three hundred people watched my husband's friend Imogen Rask saw me in half, and they laughed.
It was the Harlan Springs Spring Talent Show, in the Rialto Theatre on Main Street.
Imogen had headlined it four years running.
She met us in the lobby with two coffees and a blanket for our son, because the theater always ran cold.
"You're my favorite person here," she told me. "Don't tell Keegan I said so."
Linus hugged her around the waist before she could even bend down.
He is nine, and he has a white streak in his dark hair, just above his right ear.
Imogen has the same streak in the same place, hidden under her auburn curls.
A woman in the ticket line smiled at them. "Honestly, they could pass for aunt and nephew."
Keegan laughed, put his hand on Linus's shoulder, and steered him toward the front row.
I took the aisle seat beside him.
Keegan had left the house at six that morning for a client meeting.
I didn't remember him saying anything about the theater.
Imogen's act was last.
She came out in a sequined jacket and did the card tricks first, and Linus shouted the names of the cards before she could turn them over.
Then a stagehand wheeled out a long dark wooden box with a hinged lid and a small brass latch.
"I need a volunteer," Imogen said into the microphone. "Someone I trust with my whole heart."
She looked straight at me.
"Cora Winslow. Come up and help me."
The audience clapped.
"Go, Mom!" Linus yelled.
Keegan nodded at me, smiling. "Go on."
I didn't want to.
I have never liked being looked at by that many people.
But my son was watching, so I walked up the steps.
In the wings Imogen squeezed both of my hands. "It's only a trick. You won't feel a thing."
"Are you sure it's safe?"
"Keegan checked the blades himself this morning. He's so careful."
She smiled and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. "Just lie still and smile for me."
I lay down in the box with my head sticking out of one end, and she closed the lid over my body.
Wood pressed on both sides of my ribs.
The spotlight made it hard to see the crowd.
I heard the blade slide into its slot.
Then it came down, and I understood that it was not a prop.
Pain tore through my side so hard that my mouth opened, and nothing came out but air.
Imogen was laughing into the microphone. "Cora is such a good actress. Doesn't it look real?"
The audience laughed with her.
A second blade came down, and then a third.
Warm wetness ran under my back and dripped through a crack in the wood onto the stage.
Someone in the dark said, "That fake blood looks so realistic."
"Cora, stop it," Keegan called from his seat. "Don't embarrass yourself."
Linus was clapping. "Mom is the best actor ever!"
I tried to turn my head toward him.
I couldn't make my neck move.
The lights above me turned white, then gray, and went quiet.
When I came back, I was floating near the ceiling.
Below me was the stage, and the box, and my own head sticking out of the end of it, with my eyes half open and my skin the color of paper.
I was not in it.
I was dead, and I knew it.
Imogen glanced down at my face, and for one second her smile slipped.
Then she lifted the microphone. "Doesn't our guest look incredibly convincing?"
"Cora, get up," Keegan hissed. "You're ruining her act."
"Mom, get up," Linus said, in the same voice he uses when I'm late to pick him up.
"I'm not angry!" I screamed at them. "I'm dead!"
Nobody turned their head.
Nobody but one man in the very last row.
He had stood up. He was tall, in a black jacket, and he wasn't laughing.
The old woman beside him, Hattie Quincy from the funeral home on Cedar Street, grabbed his sleeve.
"Abel, sit down," she said.
He didn't sit. He was looking at the box.
Then he looked up, past the lights, directly at me.
"That isn't an act," he shouted. "Somebody call 911!"
People laughed again, softer.
He vaulted the rail at the foot of the stage and landed on his hands.
Imogen stepped in front of the box. "Sir, please sit down. You'll spoil the surprise."
He moved her aside, ripped the lid open, and put two fingers on my neck.
His face changed.
Every other face in that theater was still turned toward me with a smile on it, and his was the only one that understood.
I had no hands, no voice, and no body left to fight with.
But he was looking at me, so I grabbed on to him with everything I had.
A stagehand pulled out his phone.
Imogen leaned toward him and whispered, very softly, "Not yet."
I heard it from the ceiling.
The stagehand put the phone back in his pocket.
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