The Magician's Grift

By DeAnna Knippling

Secrets:  Everybody's got one or two...

Even before the stock market crash of 1929, Eliza lives in a world of secrets as a legal secretary to a wizened old lawyer in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.  If she admits that she's practically engaged to be married, she'll lose her job.  

Then one day she notices that Foshay Tower's shadow has turned into impenetrable ink. She's pulled off the street by a grifter who claims that the tower is cursed and that if she can see such a thing that she must have magical talent...a little bit, at least.

The grifter lies about a lot of things, but Eliza really does have magic...and Foshay Tower really is about to fall. 

Unfortunately taking Eliza's boss's money--and therefore Eliza's job--with it.  

How can Eliza use a smidge of magic and a handful of secrets to get her boss's money back?

By drafting a grifter to do her dirty work!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wonderland Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386201182

DeAnna Knippling

DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer, editor, and book designer living in Colorado.  She started out as a farm girl in the middle of South Dakota, went to school in Vermillion, SD, then gravitated through Iowa to Colorado, where she lives with her husband and daughter. She now writes science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and mystery for adults under her own name; adventurous and weird fiction for middle-grade (8-12 year old) kids under the pseudonym De Kenyon; and various thriller and suspense fiction for her ghostwriting clients under various and non-disclosable names. Her latest book, Alice’s Adventures in Underland:  The Queen of Stilled Hearts, combines two of her favorite topics–zombies and Lewis Carroll. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Penumbra, Crossed Genres, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and more. Her website and blog are at www.WonderlandPress.com.  You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Copyright Information

The Magician's Grift

Copyright © 2017 by DeAnna Knippling

Cover image copyright © sepavone and Subbotina | depositphotos.com

Cover design copyright © 2017 by DeAnna Knippling

Interior design copyright © 2017 by DeAnna Knippling

Published by Wonderland Press

All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.

The Magician’s Grift

1. The Shadow of the Tower

When I first met Professor Zuber, he told me he was the greatest magician of all time.

At first I didn’t trust him further than I could throw him, and then I did trust him, and then I didn’t again, and now? I’m not sure.

It was 1929 in Minneapolis. The whole world was just about to get its heart and soul and back broken over the stock market crash. Things had been getting bad before that, but it wasn’t until the crash of 1929 that the people who mattered started to notice. When the have-nots don’t have anything, that’s the normal state of business. When the haves start to become have-nots, people get worried—but they tell themselves that it’s because of incompetence. If only some folks would handle their money better, they wouldn’t have been in such a bad situation. Case closed.

Well, after the crash, it was so bad that the haves were starting to think that there would never be haves again. And things changed, for a while at least.

Before the crash, though, we were all living in a kind of shadow. We knew that something was going to happen—we just didn’t quite know what, because it was being kept secret. That was the real spirit of the times, you know? Everyone had a secret or two that they hid in order to get by. I know I did.

I had a job as a legal secretary. I had a steady beau but we weren’t engaged. I mean, we had an agreement, but because of the economy we were putting off getting engaged and the more serious kinds of hank-panky even, because as soon as I announced that I was involved with anyone seriously I was gonna get fired. That’s how I got my job. My boss, Mr. Kumpke, had let his old secretary go the week after she told him she was getting hitched. He gave her a fifty-dollar bonus to help outfit her kitchen, which was nice but it wasn’t a job. It was like he had a horror of marriage and he was worried about it rubbing off on him.

Miss Malmquist, he’d sigh. Don’t ever get married. You’re the best secretary I’ve ever had. I’d hate to lose you.

Mr. Kumpke had an unfortunately regretful face, as in no matter what his mood was, he looked like he was just about to say, Unfortunately I regret to inform you… His eyelids drooped. He had jowls and thin, almost lipless lips, a long nose, and eyebrows that were two gray spots above his watery green eyes. In short he looked like a Basset hound. But I’d been working for him for two years already, so I automatically took statements from his sad-faced, gently sorrowful visage for what they really were: threats.

What he was really saying was, Nice job you have there, Miss Malmquist. I’d hate to see anything happen to it.

So that was the situation the morning that I met Professor Zuber. I had just gone to the bank to withdraw my savings, and let me tell you, I got a real talking-to from a bank manager about how I was helping to destroy the economy. In the end they wouldn’t let me take out all my money, just twenty dollars so I could buy myself something nice. They tried to make it look like they were doing me, and the rest of the country, a favor.

I might have been steaming mad at that point, stomping as I walked back to Mr. Kumpke’s office, trying to let off enough steam that Mr. Kumpke wouldn’t give me a look as I tried to look like not a single independently-minded thought would ever cross my mind. But me and my Robert, we were determined to get married and move to Iowa—near our families, but not too near. Anyhow I started crossing Marquette and stopped dead in the middle of the street.

There was a shadow across the pavement, a shadow so dark that I