Mrs. Houdini(68)

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.