Mrs. Houdini(29)

There were photographs of the subsequent competitions, too, as they had gained notoriety, even amid the harsh protestations of women’s groups. In one of the photographs, a full-figured blond girl smiled in a black bathing suit, her hands on her hips. “Kathleen O’Neill of Philadelphia,” the caption read, “competing in the 1924 pageant.” Behind her, a poster advertising the film Walkin’ Home, Again was plastered on the side of a bathhouse, the word Walkin’ cut off by the girl’s elbow.

Bess sat back, startled, before leaning in to look at the picture more closely. Was she really seeing what she thought she was seeing? There were the words from Harry’s second code, in plain sight in front of her eyes. I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, the song began. Their wedding night was the first and only time she’d sung it to him, but it had stayed with him, until his deathbed. And somehow she had stumbled across the photograph of this girl, Kathleen—who had not even won the pageant—the words “Home Again” clearly visible behind her.

Harry had always protested the idea that photographs could reveal spirits that could not be seen by the naked eye, at the same time conceding that there was something eerie and almost otherworldly about the idea of using light and darkness to capture a moment in time on paper. He had wondered, privately to Bess, whether some part of a person was left behind every time their photograph was taken. But the spiritualists’ use of photography to show fake ghosts and spirits angered him; in one public demonstration, he showed how he could manipulate the development of film to portray Abraham Lincoln’s “ghost” behind him. He always insisted that his own magic was different from the spiritualists’ endeavors. His magic was an illusion—something clearly impossible becoming possible. But it didn’t claim to be more than that—not divinely sanctioned or preordained. He and Bess had once flirted with that kind of deception, and they could never shake the feeling that there was a darkness behind their fraud.

Bess thought back to her vision of Harry in the silver tray. She had been fooled, she thought, by his photograph on the wall; but then she was not so certain. Was it possible that there was something about that photograph that tied in to the photograph of Kathleen O’Neill?

She thought back to the afternoon of his death. It was definitely possible that a nurse had overheard the first code; but Harry had only ever referred to the second code as “the song you sang for me on our wedding night.” They had never spoken the lyrics out loud. No one knew the details of that night.

She shook her head. She had to get some air and think of something else. “I’m going to get you some water,” she told Gladys.

Gladys shook her head. “Please, I’m fine.”

“It’s no trouble.” Bess stood up and bumped into a man she didn’t recognize, slightly younger and shorter than herself. The underarms of his shirt were damp with sweat.

“Hey, you’re Bess Houdini,” he said, grabbing her arm. “I’ve seen you before. Three times actually. When your husband performed here in New York. He was something else.”

She hated when conversations began like that. She never knew whether people were being polite or fishing for information about Harry. She looked around desperately for someone to pull her away. Another of Niall’s friends, whose name she had forgotten, was walking past; she grabbed his hand and pulled herself toward him. “Oh, Burt! I’ve been looking for you.”

The man looked at her, surprised for a moment, and then put his arm around her jovially. “Well,” he said. “Here I am.”

“Come with me into the kitchen.” She took him by the hand and led him through the double doors. “Oh, thank you,” she breathed, collapsing into a chair. Her mind was still racing over what she’d seen in the magazine.

He laughed, bending to turn on a lamp. “You actually almost got my name right. It’s Robert. Bobby.”

She looked up at him distractedly. “What’s that? Oh. That is funny. I’ve never been very good with names, especially ones I’ve made up myself.”

“What’s yours?”

“My what?”

He smiled. “Your name.”

Bess blinked at him. “You mean you don’t know?”

“We’ve never met before, have we?”

“No.” She wondered if she should tell him. As soon as they left the kitchen it would become embarrassingly obvious. She stood up.

“Don’t go yet,” he said. “I was beginning to enjoy myself.”

Bess looked at him skeptically. “I’m sure you know you’re handsome, but I’m also almost twenty years older than you. If I had to guess.”

He shrugged. “I prefer older women.”

“Are you married?” she asked him.

“No. Are you?”

Bess hesitated. She touched her hand instinctively, for the wedding ring she’d left at home after the Ford disaster. “Not anymore.”

“Well, that’s good. We must keep up the pretense of decency, mustn’t we? We wouldn’t want to do anything to get people talking.”

Bess was amused. She liked his humor; it took her out of her head. There had been a period after Harry’s death, in the haze of grief and champagne, when she’d lost her way with a number of men, many of them younger than she. There was a certain thrill to an affair with a man who was young, especially one who didn’t know who she was. But after a while it had only made her long for some kind of real love.