Mrs. Houdini(79)

Bess took the postcard, startled. “What is it? What did you find?” She pored over it again, uselessly. She couldn’t imagine what she had missed.

“Look—look here. The ng of Young’s has been smudged. Some kind of error in the printing I suppose.”

“Yes?”

“If you look at the photographs from latest to earliest”—he handed her the magnifying glass and pointed to the yacht, The William, and the visible letters—”IAM. I am.” He unfolded the magazine article again. “Kathleen O’Neill, waiting for pageant results.” He studied the words as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “Waiting for . . .”

Bess leaned toward him. “Yes . . .”

“And this one.” Charles pointed to the back of the postcard, where the ng was rubbed out. “The letters that are left spell you.”

“I am waiting for you . . .” Bess couldn’t believe it either. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence?

“Where?” she demanded. “Waiting for me where?” Was it possible, if she deciphered it, she could reach Harry this very night? She grabbed Charles’s cardboard portrait. There were no words at all in the photograph. “Where was this taken, Charles? Please. You must remember.”

Charles turned the card over. It was stamped with the studio name and the location: Young’s Pier. “I remember, there was an exhibition of dancing horses. I asked my mother if we could see them, but by the time we left the studio, there were no more tickets. I was so angry at her.”

“Young’s Pier again.” It seemed they kept coming back to that place. Bess could feel her heart pulsing wildly. For a moment, she could not move. It did not seem real. Had he really done it, she wondered. Had Harry managed to come back after all? She could not bring herself to stand up and go to him. Because what would she find if she went now, to Young’s Pier? Would it be Harry himself, back from the dead? She shuddered, remembering what she had done there with Young himself. How could he want to meet her in the one place where she had nearly betrayed him?

One thing was certain; somehow, from wherever he was at the moment, he was playing with time to reach her. But she didn’t know whether his present time coordinated with hers. If it didn’t, would they be endlessly chasing each other?

“I have to go there,” she said.

She looked at Gladys, whose eyes were wide, her dark hair cascading down her shoulders, then at Charles. “May I borrow your car?”

“Do you think he will be there?” Gladys whispered, incredulous. There were tears on her eyelashes.

“I don’t know.”

Charles pressed his lips together. “If he is . . . do you think it means . . . he will take you back with him?”

Bess understood what he was asking. What if going to Harry now meant leaving this world to join another? Would it happen suddenly, she wondered, like a heart attack? Would she feel anything? Or would it be simply like stepping through a fog, from one light into another?

Strangely, she was not afraid. But she looked at Charles, sitting cross-legged beside her, his expression grief-stricken, and she realized she could not leave him. She wanted to stay for him. Her life was valuable to someone else. And she had fallen into a kind of love with this lanky, beautiful, vulnerable man.

Bess took his hand. “I’ll come back,” she promised. And the look of relief on his face broke over her like glass.





Chapter 15


THE SéANCE


March 1924


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pulled down the shades, casting the room in shadow. “I always like to begin with a prayer,” he said solemnly, “to help us find our way into the Great Beyond.”

Bess and Harry sat side by side in the Doyles’ parlor in Crowborough, at the edge of Ashdown Forest in England. The Great War in Europe had blazed and dimmed and was over now, and England had already begun to pretend it had moved on, despite the staggering number of crippled soldiers in every town. Harry himself had taken on the preservation of Allied soldiers’ lives as his mission, raising millions of dollars in war bonds through his performances and teaching young men how to escape from German handcuffs. But the young and dead who haunted him seemed only to strengthen his desire to contact his mother, whom he believed was somewhere out there, trying to reach him, to reassure him that she still existed, that someone was waiting for him.

Doyle reached for Bess’s hand and closed his eyes. Across the circle from Bess, his wife—a pale, pretty thing who had been trained as a mezzo soprano in her younger days—seemed already to be in a meditative state.

“Almighty, we are grateful to you for this breaking down of the walls between two worlds.” Sir Arthur’s long mustache muffled the words but also, somehow, gave them more weight. “We thirst for another undeniable message from beyond, another call of hope and guidance to the human race at this, the time of its greatest affliction. Can we receive another sign from our friends from beyond?”

Harry, holding Bess’s other hand, squeezed her fingers with his; she could sense his nerves. She tried to stifle her own judgments of the process. She wasn’t quite sure yet whether to think of it as hocus-pocus or true communication with the other side. Harry himself was fascinated by Doyle’s beliefs, and during their time in England he took Bess to the moving pictures but went alone to the graveyards. He said he found peace there, but Bess wasn’t entirely sure. He seemed to come home from them paler and grimmer than before. She didn’t understand the comfort he claimed he received in such places; she did not think the dead resided there. She had the sense that they preferred to be present among the living.