Chapters (39)
- Cover
- Title
- TheLastIllusion
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- HISTORICAL NOTE
Thirty-one 
I couldn’t wait to get out of there and pass along this astounding information to Daniel. He’d be amazed that what we had witnessed was not a crime at all but a brilliantly executed illusion. The question, however, was why? Why make it seem that someone had been killed onstage—unless it was to get rid of Scarpelli, to make him flee from New York. What did they want to do—take over his successful forgery business? I shouldn’t forget that Sommer was possibly German and had been with Houdini in Germany, so Mr. Wilkie might well be interested in hearing about him, although how this tied in with the disappearance of Houdini, I couldn’t fathom.
I shifted uneasily in my seat, longing to make my escape. However I thought it wise not to move while they were still performing, in case they noticed me. In fact I leaned back from the front of the box so that my face was in shadow. I sat perfectly still while Summer apparently hypnotized Kitty/Lily and then removed the table that supported her so that she lay unmoving in midair. It was a wonderfully convincing illusion but I didn’t really appreciate it because my head was trying to make sense of what I had deduced.
If the “accident” during the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick was an illusion, what had they hoped to accomplish with it? What if Scarpelli was in on it? Maybe the forged money was all part of the same plot. Maybe all three were German agents. But he had seemed so genuinely upset and stunned by what had happened. He was a performer after all, so perhaps he was simply a good actor.
So what had the accident achieved? Well, to begin with it had taken Lily out of the picture so she could no longer be a suspect in any subsequent crime. But if she was supposedly dead, she couldn’t have risked coming back to the theater to kidnap Houdini. She would surely have been spotted by one of the stagehands—
As the word “stagehands” went through my mind I leaned forward again, digesting what I had just seen. The man who whisked away the cabinet and brought out the table was one of the stagehands called Ernest. And now I remembered that he was the one who helped me bring out the trunk and who placed it for me on the stage, exactly over the trapdoor, as it turned out. So Ernest was in on the plot too. He was the one who had gone for the ambulance to whisk Lily away. All beautifully orchestrated to fool us.