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“Oh my God,” I said to Will. “I had no idea. I swear to you, I had no idea he was going to do this!”

“I know.” Will laid a comforting arm around my shoulders. “How could you? None of us did.”

It wasn’t until I felt the warmth from his body seeping into me that I realized I was shivering, despite the warm night air. Maybe what Garrett had done was sending me into shock.

“Hey, you two.” Bernadette came up onto the stage. “Hate to crash the party, but any word on when Garrett is going to return from the spirit world? Some of us would like to head back to the hotel and hit the hot tub. And Frannie’s complaining about missing her Knicks game.”

Will instantly dropped his arm from my shoulders.

“No, no idea.” I pointed at the water. “Garrett jumped in, and now we can’t see him anywhere.”

“Hejumped?” Bernadette looked down into the water. “Yikes. That’s a little more hard core than usual.”

Will raised his eyebrows at her. “He’s done this before?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, not the jumping part, but the dematerializing thing. He usually rematerializes sooner than later, though.”

We all looked around. The restaurant staff had apparently decided Garrett’s trick was over, because the boss nova music was playing again and the servers had returned, passing out drinks and key lime pie tartlets for dessert. Members of the audience who weren’t aware that Garrett had jumped into the water had resumed their party chatter. Jasmine and Cassidy were recording dramatic reaction videos of Garrett’s trick while giggling maniacally. There was no sign of Lauren, which was odd. But I saw her mother with the other girls’mothers over by the bar, so I assumed she was around somewhere, too.

Only Garrett’s most die-hard fans—the children sitting in front of the stage—remained in their places, patiently waiting the return of Professor Eurynomos....

“I’d say it sounds like he’s purposefully pulled another one of his disappearing acts, then,” Will said. “Except that the only ladder leading up from that water is about a quarter mile down the dock. Would Garrett have been aware of that?”

“Hmmm.” Now Bernadette was beginning to share my worried look. “You’d think he’d have researched that beforehand.”

“You would think so.” Will’s dark eyebrows were lowered as he continued to scan the surface of the sea.

“As far as tricks go,” Bernadette said, “I’m not finding anything particularly magical about this one.”

“Neither am I,” I said. “Do you think we should—I don’t know—call someone?”

“Yes.” Will slipped a cell phone from his suit pocket. “The coast guard.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Ahalf hour later, I was watching as a helicopter flew low along the water’s surface a few hundred yards from the pier, sweeping the waves with spotlights. Closer by, coast guard cutters patrolled the harbor as well, the officers on board hoping to spot the missing magician.

Meanwhile, on land, deputies from the sheriff’s department had arrived to question everyone who’d witnessed Garrett’s “trick”... but most especially me, since I’d been closest to him when he’d disappeared.

“Did he fall?” the officer sitting in the chair opposite mine asked. “Or was it more like a dive?”

“Neither,” I said. “He swung his legs over the railing anddroppedinto the water.”

“So,” the deputy said, looking down at the little notebook he was scribbling into. “Deliberate.”

“Definitely. He didn’t fall. He was trying to disappear.”

The deputy looked confused. “Yeah, that’s the part I’m not getting.”

The name tag on the front pocket of his shirt saidMartinez.From the top of the same pocket peeked a cigar with a blueIt’s A Boy!ribbon around it. I’d seen Sheriff Hartwell gleefully handing them out, as well as showing off photos of his newborn son, when he wasn’t busy coordinating the search on the ground for Garrett, “in case his body washed up on shore.”

Overhearing this phrase had sent a chill down my spine. The sheriff and his fellow officers seemed pretty certain that Garrett had either fallen by mistake or purposefully jumped to harm himself. Why else would anyone go into the ocean fully clothed at night in January?

“Disappear?” the deputy repeated. “Why would he want to do that? Was he running away from something?”

“No. It was a magic trick. Garrett is a writer.”Wasa writer? No,is. Definitelyis. “He writes about magic, and he does disappearing acts to entertain the kids. The thing is,” I said to the deputy, “Garrett is the last person I know who’d ever want to hurt himself.”

I couldn’t think of a more delicate way of saying that Garrett Newcombe was a complete narcissist who thought he was God’s gift to women. Case in point, he wouldn’t even stop singing to them on the author bus when they asked him to, repeatedly.