The Mechanical Marvel

About The Mechanical Marvel

Every summer the Steeplechase Pier hangs out over the water like a string of lit lanterns — the carousel, the fortune-teller's booth, the fried-dough stand, and, at the dark seaward end, the little theater where the sideshow plays twice a night. For thirty-one years Posy Tillingham has sat in the ticket booth at the mouth of the pier, punching stubs and watching every soul who walks the boards, and she knows the show folk better than her own family. The brightest of them all was the troupe's celebrated mentalist — the woman who read minds for the crowd and never once missed — and the closest thing Posy had to a confidante after three decades of the same nightly nod through the glass.

So when the mentalist collapses dead in the middle of a packed evening show, the pier reaches for the comfortable verdict: a weak heart, the August heat, the strain of the act. Everyone but Posy, who took the woman's ticket every single night and watched her climb four flights to her room without ever losing her breath. As the pier hurries to pin it on a young carnival hand who ran off the same night — the drifting summer kid Posy herself vouched for to get hired — she sets out to do the one thing she's spent thirty-one years quietly perfecting: notice what no one else does.

From her booth, with a half-deaf old sound man who reads lips and a temperamental carousel for company, Posy takes the whole glittering trick apart, piece by mechanical piece.