Read The Ambitious Card (An Eli Marks Mystery) for Free Online

should stay with my boyfriend, signed Rene T.” He smiled at her as the audience applauded. He held the slip of paper over the candle and it began to smoke and then burned down to an ash. He held on to it for a long time, the flames flickering at his fingertips, before dropping it onto a large ashtray on the table.
    He reached into the bowl and withdrew another envelope, as the audience appeared to lean forward as one in anticipation.

      
    And so it went for over thirty minutes. Grey took envelope after envelope out of the bowl, identifying the owner and their question—and offering a detailed answer as well as other facts about the person and their life—before opening the envelope and reading their actual question aloud. Then he’d burn the question and move onto the next envelope.
    “How the devil is he doing this?” Clive asked in a raspy whisper. “It’s extraordinary.”
    I shrugged. “He’s good, but it’s all pretty simple stuff, really. He’s one ahead, that’s for sure. The rest is just a mix of cold reading, deductive reasoning and a solid understanding of human nature.”
    “One ahead? One ahead of what?” Pete asked, not taking his eyes off Grey, who was in the midst of giving a fellow a message from the man’s recently deceased father. The guy was nearly in tears, his head bobbing up and down along with everything Grey was saying.
    “Somehow he got a hold of the first question ahead of time,” I explained quietly. “Probably a switch of some kind—the Al Baker or the Moldavian—and so every time he appears to be opening an envelope to read the question he just answered, he’s actually reading the next question.”
    “One ahead,” Pete repeated.
    “Yeah, it’s used all the time in magic. In cards, coins. Hell, even Cups and Balls is a one-ahead. It’s all about having a piece of information the audience doesn’t know you have…You can work tons of variations on it and the audience is none the wiser.” I was going to explain further, but something Grey was saying snuck into my consciousness and grabbed my attention. In fact, for a brief moment, it sounded like he was talking about me.
    Here’s a little secret about how mentalism works—the audience plays the primary role in its success, much more than the performer. That’s because the human brain, in all its evolutionary glory, insists on filling in any gaps. If you give the brain A and then follow it up with C, it’s going to do its darnedest to connect the two with some form of B.
    Consequently, all the mentalist really has to do is toss out random words that your brain can grab onto and try to make sense of. If he says, “I’m getting a very powerful feeling about apples,” then the average brain immediately searches for any connection it can make to apples, and pretty soon you’re thinking, “Hey, I just had an apple last Thursday. This guy is pretty good.”
    The trouble is, even when you understand the principle, it’s difficult to keep your brain from getting caught up in it. Which is exactly what happened to my brain when it heard Grey say, “Who here had something taken from them by someone named Ed? Or someone that sounds like Ed, maybe Ted?”
    That immediately struck a nerve in my brain, because I did in fact have something taken from me by a guy named Fred, which my advanced brain immediately recognized as rhyming with Ed. Fred took my wife and he was the reason I was now living in a third-floor apartment above my uncle’s magic shop.
    Of course, on a purely intellectual level, I knew that wasn’t the case. Fred hadn’t actually taken anything from me. My now ex-wife, Deirdre, had left our marriage and married someone else. I might be angry about the manner in which she had done it, allowing the two relationships to overlap inconveniently, but nothing had been stolen. One husband had simply been exchanged for another. Not unlike taking one automobile and trading it for a new one. The only irregularity, of