Mrs. Houdini(86)

Bess bent over and rubbed her eyes.

“Do you see it?” Charles pressed. “Bess, do you see?”

Through the glass, clear as day, she could make him out. The man looking at the camera—staring right at her, now, as she sat there beside Charles—was, unmistakably, Harry.

Bess let out a small cry. Her eyes went back and forth between the two men in the picture. They were different, but they were the same man. There was a young, dark-haired Harry, dangling perilously from the pier. And there was an older, gray-haired Harry, standing in the crowd.

“Charles,” she said softly, “how is it possible?”

Charles pointed to the image. “This is my theory: I think he’s living still—in another place, another plane—and he’s coming back from the other side, through my photographs.”

Gladys sat on the bench beside Bess and took her hands. “Don’t you see, Bess? Don’t you see what he’s done? He’s found a way to come back to you!”

Bess started to cry. “I don’t understand. How does this keep his promise? What is he playing at here?”

Charles, pacing in front of them, was almost electric with excitement. “You were right about the message!” he pressed. “I think Harry is waiting for you—just not in the way you thought.” He swept his hand in front of him and gestured toward the crowded pier. “You came out here thinking you would find him here, in the present. But he can’t get to you that way. He can only come back through the past. And he’s using my photographs to do it.”

“So you think . . . he is going back in time?”

Charles nodded. “To when these pictures were taken. We didn’t think about this, but all of those photographs were taken before he died. He’s been able to alter the landscape, just slightly, enough for the coded words to come through. You were right about the message—you just didn’t interpret it correctly.”

Suddenly, it became clear to her what Harry had meant, what Charles had discovered. I am waiting for you at Young’s Pier. Harry had used the song they’d chosen to relay this message. But the problem was, he couldn’t reach her in her own, current, time. Perhaps, in the limbo one entered after death, one could only cross back to the years one had lived, and could go no further. And so Harry was prevented from coming back in all the ways she had been anticipating—through a medium, say, or as a ghost, because he couldn’t move beyond 1926. And he wasn’t trying to tell her where he would be waiting for her, now, on this side; he was trying to tell her where he would be waiting on the other side. He was telling her that, when she died, he would be waiting for her here, on Young’s Pier, in 1905. And they would go on, together, to what was beckoning.

Bess recalled the agony of that afternoon, the interminable minutes as she’d watched the seething, throbbing blue ocean that had swallowed Harry whole. Afterward she could not get the sound of the crowd out of her head, the small cries of the women as he failed to appear in the water, the shrill voice of the newsboy as he called out the news: “Extree! Houdini dead!”

“I thought I’d lost you,” she’d murmured, over and over that night.

“Oh, no,” Harry had assured her. “You didn’t lose me. I was right there all along.”

I was right there all along . . .

It made even more sense now, why Harry had chosen this place to come back to her.

Gladys felt Bess’s face. “You’re crying,” she said softly. “Are you sad because you wish he was here with you now?”

“No.” Bess wiped her face. “I’m crying because I don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because now I know he’s there, and I’ll be there with him, too.”

Somewhere far away, in a time she’d already lived, the rest of the song was playing:

I’ll take you home again, Kathleen

Across the ocean wild and wide

To where your heart has ever been

Since first you were my bonnie bride.

The roses all have left your cheek.

I’ve watched them fade away and die

Your voice is sad when e’er you speak

And tears bedim your loving eyes.

Oh! I will take you back, Kathleen

To where your heart will feel no pain

And when the fields are fresh and green

I’ll take you to your home again!

To that dear home beyond the sea

My Kathleen shall again return.

And when thy old friends welcome thee

Thy loving heart will cease to yearn.

Where laughs the little silver stream

Beside your mother’s humble cot

And brightest rays of sunshine gleam

There all your grief will be forgot.

She saw now that the song itself was a love letter from Harry—a promise to take her home again. In his death, he had performed the greatest escape of all. And he had freed her, too, from the glittering loneliness, just as he had freed Charles.

In death he had corrected the two biggest regrets of his life—leaving his son fatherless and leaving his wife childless. He had performed one last remarkable feat, by bringing them together.

“You really love him still, don’t you?” Charles marveled. “In spite of finding out about me, and all that.”

“No,” she said. “Not in spite of.”