Mrs. Houdini(50)

Still, a chill ran through her. “There’s something about you . . .” she said to Charles. “Something very powerful. I’m not sure what it is.” She thought of her initial attraction to Ford, her certainty in his goodness. But those feelings, she realized now, had been tinged with lust, while what she felt toward Charles was more like a friendship.

Charles put his hand on her arm. “You know, nothing may come of your search.”

“I know.”

“So why did you still want to meet me today? When you found out last night that I didn’t know Harry after all?”

“Well,” Bess said. “I suppose I was hoping I could see some more of your pictures. That maybe I would find something else.”

“You’re welcome to see what I have. But”—he held his palms to the air—“I’ve been a photographer professionally since I was eighteen years old. There are thousands. I’m not sure I even have copies or negatives of all of them.”

“My sister is here with me. She thinks we’re here for a vacation. But she’s going back to New York tomorrow. I could tell her I want to stay on. Do you think we could meet then?”

“Of course.” Charles looked out at the ocean.

Bess bent down and slid a handful of sand through her fingers. Despite the heat, it was cool to the touch. “When I was younger, I dreamed of growing old in California, in a house with palm trees and lemon trees in the yard. But now there is too much holding me to New York.”

“People probably ask you this all the time. But do you really think your husband had a spiritual connection to something when he did his magic? That, while he was alive, he had some kind of foothold in the other world?”

Bess pursed her lips together. She thought of the eerie incidents that had befallen them over the course of their marriage, the indications that they may have had some kind of reciprocity with the other side that had never quite materialized. “If those kinds of powers could be accessed so easily,” she said sadly, “I wouldn’t have spent all these years looking for him.”



At one she went to find Stella at the bathing house, but she wasn’t there. Bess only then realized how long she’d talked with Charles. She was an hour late, and Stella had likely gotten hungry and gone off in search of lunch.

It was so hot that her dress stuck to her. She trudged up the sand back to the hotel and went to the room to change into her swimming costume. Even before she went inside she knew something was wrong. The door was ajar. When she pushed it open she saw clothes everywhere.

“Stella? Stella?”

Stella came out of the bedroom, her hair wet and pulled back into a bun. Her suitcase was in her hand.

“I thought something happened! I thought someone had broken in!” Only then did Bess realize Stella was crying. She stepped back. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Abby,” Stella sobbed. “She’s in the hospital. Something’s wrong with the baby.”

“Oh, God.”

“I have to go back tonight. But I can’t find my train ticket. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

“Don’t worry about that. Buy a new one.”

“You can stay. I don’t want you to cut your weekend short.”

Bess thought of Charles. She would have to wire him immediately. She pulled Stella into a hug. “Of course I’ll go back with you.”





Chapter 9


YOUNG’S PIER


October 1906


Inside the federal prison in the district of Washington, Bess awaited the outcome of Harry’s latest stunt. The warden’s tiny office was crammed with a dozen deputies, police officials, and reporters.

Warden Harris had been skeptical of Bess’s presence. “This prison is no place for a lady,” he had explained to Harry, and it had taken some convincing to allow her inside.

It amused Bess that in the course of only a year she had become “a lady.” It had not been very long ago that they had happily slept in hotel rooms crawling with bedbugs and washed in basins stained red with rust. But Harry’s notoriety in Europe and Russia had found its way back to America, and after fifteen months overseas, far longer than they had anticipated, he was invited to open in New York’s Colonial Theatre. Bess assisted him during his act, which began with a new stunt he had perfected, in which he swallowed a packet of needles followed by a few yards of string, then proceeded to remove the items from his mouth, with the needles threaded onto the string. It was a trick he had come across, like many, in an old book of magic in a Paris antiques store.

She dressed like a lady now, too. She shopped the fur and fine dress floors at Macy’s and had the boxes delivered directly to their new home on West 113th Street. She purchased haute couture from Paris and wore it to the racetrack in Saratoga, where American designers often hired models to show off their latest designs. In their new home, Harry installed a massive eight-foot mirror in his bathroom, where he practiced his sleight-of-hand tricks, and an even larger tub to practice his underwater breathing techniques.

The United States Jail in Washington was an enormous stone fortress. Getting inside the gates alone had taken twenty minutes. Now Bess, Harry, and ten reporters filed down the hallway and stood with the warden before Cell No. 2 on Murderers’ Row. There were seventeen cells in the wing, all of them occupied, and the cheers and shouts of the inmates were deafening.