Mrs. Houdini (29 page)

Even with the room bathed in light, she had the eerie sensation that they were being watched. She rushed to the windows and flung the curtains closed. She stood there feeling as if she was in not her own home but a stranger's, waiting for the owners to return.

“It was that woman from the circus that night, wasn't it?” Gladys murmured.

“How did you know about that?”

“Stella told me, a long time ago.”

Bess sighed. “Yes. It was her.”

Gladys pressed her hand onto Bess's. “This doesn't change anything,” she said. “He still loved you with all his heart.”

Bess laughed cruelly. “Of course he didn't.”

“He did, Bess. He loved you more than anything.”

Bess felt the tears streaming down her face. She had tried so hard, her whole life, to keep her emotions to herself. But now she couldn't help it. “If he loved me so much,” she demanded, “why would he want to hurt me so badly?”

“What do you mean? That's why he kept it from you all these years, probably. So he didn't hurt you.”

“No.” Bess stood up and began pacing the room. “You don't understand. It wasn't a coincidence that I happened to meet Charles when I was in Atlantic City. I went down there specifically to see him. Harry told me to go.”

Gladys looked at her, shocked. “What are you talking about? You mean you—you got through to him after all?”

“Think about it. Do you really think, of all the millions of people in this world, that I would have just
happened
upon Harry's lost son? It was Harry's doing.” She had been wanting to speak those words for so long that they seemed sacred, profound. She took a deep breath. “I've never told anyone this, but Harry left me a second code—in case the first one made its way into the wrong hands. No one could have possibly known the code but me—we never said it out loud, not once. And a few weeks ago, I came across pieces of this very code in some photographs—both of which were taken by Charles Radley.”

Gladys shook her head in disbelief. “It can't be . . .”

“I told you all along.” Bess stopped pacing. “I knew Harry was trying to come through to me. What I can't figure out is why the one message he would want to send would be the one that would hurt me the most.”

“Maybe he was trying to be honest with you at last,” Gladys ventured.

“I would have preferred dishonesty, I think.”

“Would you, though? Maybe there is a reason Harry wanted you two to meet. Maybe you just haven't figured it out yet.”

In a chest next to Harry's desk—the Poe desk—were albums of letters Bess had compiled when she was still a relatively young wife and had tried to bring some organization to their home. Eventually, she gave up the task, but not before she had filled over four dozen books with all the correspondence she and Harry had written to each other, and some of the photographs they'd collected together. Now, in a moment of clarity, she lifted the heavy lid of the trunk. She'd flipped through them before, many times, but she hadn't known what she was looking for then. Inside, the books were just as she'd left them, stacked neatly in three piles, the covers now black with mold.

Gladys heard the shuffling of papers. “What are you doing?”

“I'm looking for something Harry may have left behind. There must be something in here that mentions Charles.”

She began pulling out the books in stacks, rifling through the pages and tossing the albums onto the floor in desperation. Surely, if Harry had been aware of a son, there would be some sign of it in these books, something she would have missed when she put them together. Certainly there would be another photograph, which she herself might even have pasted inside unknowingly, assuming, perhaps, it was of one of Harry's distant cousins.

But she had not prepared herself for the sight of Harry's handwriting. She was beaten back by it as if by a wave. There were all the letters he had written her, all the love professed, the ink still dark as if the words had just been written, as if Harry was only upstairs, having sent the letter down with the butler.
My darling, would you run out for a new silk scarf for my act tonight? My other scarf is frayed. But my love for you is not.

There had been thousands of these notes over the years. But after Mrs. Weiss's death, the playfulness that had once characterized their marriage had disappeared. Harry had stopped writing letters to Bess and had become consumed with writing long, elaborate sermons to no one. Bess remembered how, during their last encounter, Mrs. Weiss had asked Harry to bring her back a pair of slippers from Denmark; at her funeral, Harry had stooped over the casket and placed two new pink slippers into the grave, as tenderly as if they were babies. He had become melancholy; he'd spoken often of what he called “the mortal valley of death.” He would not accept bookings for performances if they meant leaving New York, because for months he visited her grave every afternoon. His relationship with Dash, which had been tenuous over the years, had become fraught with rivalry; Harry never forgave him for being the only son present for their mother's death.

Would he, Bess had often wondered, have grieved for her the same way, if she had passed first? Looking through the early pages of their letters and all their professions toward her, she liked to believe he would have. But the truth was, she wasn't sure now. There was a part of her that feared that he was happier on the other side of death than he had been with her.

The albums brought back a rush of memories, but there was no mention in any of them of Charles, no indication even that there might have been something Harry was hiding. As she flipped through the pages, she became more and more distraught, more confused and angry, and as she sobbed she began tearing the pages out of the books. She was tired of distrust, tired of searching for things that were not there.

Then she saw it—the postcard from Atlantic City. It was a photograph of the beach outside the Royal Hotel, touched up in color with paint, as postcards from those years often were. She and Harry had returned to the city again several times after Harry's disastrous performance, when he had almost drowned. During one of their return trips he had mailed her this card so she would find it when they arrived home. It was postmarked August 1912, two months before they sailed to Europe.
You are trying to look at what I'm writing as I write this,
the back of the card said,
but I'm not going to let you see, because I am the master of surprises.
She remembered the scene vividly—Harry purchasing the card from a kiosk outside the hotel, leaning on the rail of the boardwalk as he wrote it, his back to her, laughing, Bess trying to peer over his shoulder. He had given another performance at Young's Pier, but Young himself was not present for it, having been in Europe at the time on business. After a while, she had almost forgotten him. When she tried to recall his face now she could not.

After the show, she and Harry had sat together on the sand, watching the boardwalk lights, like tiny moons, turn on one by one.

Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide,
the front of the postcard said, in flowery black script across the top.

Bess caught her breath.
Wild and wide
 . . . They were words from the code. The tune rang in her ears:
I'll take you home again, Kathleen, across the ocean wild and wide . . .
She held the card flat in her palm, like a relic, and read it again.
The ocean wild and wide.
The words had not changed; they were still there, engraved into the face of the card. She flipped the postcard over and searched the back for some other clue—anything that would give her an indication of what kind of message was being communicated—but there was nothing but the brief, casual note Harry had jotted to her, which really said nothing at all.

The postcard was written in 1912, before their trip to Europe. She had stood with Harry as he wrote it and placed it in the postbox. She had pasted it in the album herself, years later. It was impossible that Charles, or anyone, could have manufactured its presence.

Gladys felt her way over to where Bess was seated. “What did you find?”

Bess pressed the postcard into her hand. “Another piece of the code. But this postcard was mailed fourteen years before Harry died. All the other clues were in photographs I just discovered. But I've had this for over a decade, and it's unchanged.” She touched her hair distractedly. “I'm not sure what this means about how Harry is communicating with me . . . how he's managed to use something that's been in my possession for years.”

Gladys ran her fingers along the cardboard. “This code you think you've found—are you sure about it?”

“I think I am.”

“I never thought . . .” Gladys began, but her voice trailed off. “I never believed you, Bess.”

Bess's mind was racing now; it was as if Harry had somehow plunged into her psyche and was pushing her thoughts forward. His desk . . . Why hadn't she thought of it before? It was Edgar Allan Poe's desk . . . Poe, who had written many times in his stories of secret compartments. Of course his own desk must have had one, or more. But she had never bothered to check. How could she have overlooked something so obvious? She ran her hands along the underside of the desk. She felt a ridge where the wood split in two. As she pressed her fingers along it, the wood slid back, revealing a space beneath the bottom drawer.

“Gladys,” she breathed. “I just found a hidden compartment in Harry's desk. There are papers in here.” The possibility of finding some kind of hidden money seemed unimportant now; she would give it all up if what she found led her to Harry himself instead.

She lifted the papers out gently; some of them felt very old and brittle. “They're letters.” Inside the envelopes, the notes were all handwritten, and they were all from John Sargent, Harry's late secretary, and mailed to the various parts of the country or the world where Bess and Harry had happened to be at the time.

“What do they say?” Gladys held her hand out tentatively to touch them.

The first, at the top of the pile, was dated January 1907.

Harry, you said this lost cousin of yours lives in Atlantic City. I can imagine the shock you must have had to receive the news that a child existed at all. But I searched for his mother and I'm sorry to tell you she has died. No word of the boy's whereabouts. He seems to have disappeared. I'll keep searching.
He referred to the boy as Romario Tardo.

Gladys listened with her hand on her mouth. “So Harry knew,” she whispered. “He knew he had a son, but he never found out where he was.”

“He was clever,” Bess said. “He must have told John he was the son of his mother's cousin and enlisted John to help find him.”

The next letter was dated a few months later:
Inquired of some neighbors,
Bess read,
and discovered the fate of the boy—he was sent west, it seems, by rail, to be adopted. Have not been able to find him. The records are ill-kept. It seems many of the children are given new names upon arrival.
So Harry had gone as far as to send John, in person, down to Atlantic City, to continue the search. Bess knew the import of this; Harry had relied on his secretary so heavily to manage his correspondence that he rarely liked for him to leave New York, even for business matters.

After that, the letters from John stopped. All future letters were signed by a man named Henry Fletcher, who appeared to be a private investigator of some sort.

“Harry must have worried that John would find out the truth,” Bess said. “There was only so far he could take the story of a lost cousin with John.”

But with Fletcher, Harry had apparently continued the ruse. Fletcher continued to refer to Romario as Harry's cousin. He had written Harry a letter on January 1 of every year from 1908 to 1926. Each letter detailed the progress, or lack of progress, of the previous year's inquiries.

“Listen to this,” Bess said, holding up the letter from 1910. “It's the first time he had a real lead.
Mr. Houdini, I am writing to you with promising news. I have finally managed to trace Romario's journey west, to Des Moines, Iowa
.” But he hadn't been able to locate any more information. The records from that period had been destroyed in a fire.

“So Harry found out about Charles in late 1906 or early 1907,” Gladys said thoughtfully. “When he was eleven years old. Clearly Evatima must have decided for some reason to send Harry the photograph and tell him the truth. For what? Money? Fame?”

“Maybe she had a foreboding about her death. She was involved with some dangerous people, it seems.”

“Well, she was right. She must have died shortly after she sent the photograph, because by the time Harry began his search, Charles was already on the orphan train.”

“And, of course, his new family changed his name. And he decided to keep it, even after he went back to New Jersey.”

“These explain part of the mystery, at least. Harry never revealed himself to Charles as his father because it seems he was never been able to find him.”

Bess continued reading the letters from Fletcher. By 1915 Harry began including carbon copies of his own replies. It seemed he was growing desperate. Fletcher had gone out to Des Moines to interview everyone he could find.
There is a girl here who remembers Romario,
he wrote to Harry.
She says she was in the same train car. She remembers he went to a childless couple, but she never saw him after that.
The next sentence was scribbled out, and then, it appeared, Fletcher changed his mind and decided to include it after all.
She said he was a nice boy, and he did not seem too afraid.

Harry's response was anguished.
Damn it, man,
he wrote.
Go back out there if you've got a lead. The expense is no concern.