Mrs. Houdini

by Victoria Kelly

  “But—what do you do if the owner’s key is lost?” Bess asked.

  “Well, in that case, I would have to issue a new key,” the manager said. “I’m so sorry. I hate to tell you this. But it takes a week to process the paperwork through the proper channels.”

  “Oh dear,” Bess said. “I’m afraid I’m only in town for today. Couldn’t you bypass the paperwork and open it for me now? I can fill out the forms afterward.”

  Warren shook his head remorsefully. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Houdini, but I have to follow procedure.” He held out his hands. “If the bank owner ever found out, I could lose my job.”

  Gladys was studying the box with her hands. “Bess,” she said slowly. “Are you quite sure you don’t have the key after all? Harry did leave you a number of them.”

  Bess looked at the box and understood what Gladys was getting at. She felt like a dunce for not thinking of it sooner. She pulled her ring of keys out of her purse and thumbed through them. “Well, I’m a fool.” She laughed. “He did, didn’t he? It must be one of these.”

  The manager understood. “That solves the problem,” he said, nodding. “Surely it must be one of those.” He used his own key to open the top lock and then slid the box toward Bess. “I’ll leave you in private now.” He gestured toward a bell on the wall. “You can use that to call when you are finished. It rings in my office.”

  When he had gone, Charles looked at Bess. “So how are you going to open this without the key?”

  Bess smiled. “I spent thirty years with the world’s best locksmith.” She removed one of her hairpins and inserted it into the lock. “It’s not too tricky.” She closed her eyes and tried to feel around the inside of the lock as Harry had taught her. After a few moments, it clicked open. Gladys heard the noise and clapped.

  “What’s inside?” she asked.

  Bess slid open the lid. Inside, wrapped in velvet, were two dozen heavy gold coins. “Oh, Harry,” she said.

  “It’s gold,” Charles said to Gladys. “A lot of it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Bess held one in her palm and studied it in amazement. “They’re just like the ones he gave your mother on our trip to the Catskills. Do you remember? He must have set some aside.” She handed one to Gladys.

  “Are they enough to cover your debts?” Gladys asked.

  “Yes, and more.” She looked at Charles. “But you know, half of these are yours.”

  Charles stared at her. “Mine? No, I don’t think so.”

  “The box was in both our names. He intended these for us both.”

  “But you need them.”

  Bess pressed one of the coins into his hand. “There are more than enough here. Did you think I was really going to bring you into my life and then cast you aside when I got what I wanted?”

  Charles looked inside the box again. “But, Bess—there’s no photograph.”

  Bess had almost forgotten about the photograph. She turned the box upside down and examined it, but could find nothing else, even hidden inside. “That can’t be . . .”

  “There’s nothing else?” Gladys asked. “Not even a letter? Nothing?”

  Bess’s voice cracked. “No.”

  “Maybe there is no other photograph. Maybe the whole point was to lead you to find this.”

  “No, no.” Bess shook her head. “Money wasn’t the point at all. Of course, there was always the debt issue, but I still haven’t found him. He promised.”

  Gladys touched her shoulder. “Why do you want to find him so badly? Isn’t it enough to know that he loved you?”

  Bess’s hands began to shake. “It’s not enough. I need to know that this isn’t the end for us. That I’m going to see him again.”

  Gladys’s voice was soft. “But perhaps it’s time to say good-bye and move on.”

  Bess looked at the cold steel boxes, stacked around them like bricks. “I suppose I’m no different than everyone else. I’m afraid, too, of what there is after all this”—she waved her hand—“is gone.”

  “I believe you will see him again, in another life,” Charles said. “But maybe he just can’t find a way to tell you that. You’ll just have to believe it will be.”

  “My whole life, I have believed. Believe in the sacraments, my mother said, and I did. I believed. Believe we’ll be famous, Harry told me, and I did. Believe people will come see the shows. Believe Hollywood will embrace us. Believe I will come back.” Her whole body ached; she could feel herself growing older, the slight papering of her skin, the slow laboring of her heart. “But I’m tired of believing. I just want to know.”

  By the time they arrived back at Charles’s house, she felt deflated.

  Charles cleared his throat. “Of course you both must stay the night here. There’s some food in the kitchen. If you help yourselves, I’ll make up the guest rooms for you.”

  She wasn’t hungry. When she was finally alone in her room, Bess closed the door and stood looking at her case. She barely had the energy to open it. It was still early, but she wanted nothing more than to take a bath and put on her robe. In one sense, her search had been successful, but in another, she felt a long journey had come to an end. She had finally, and definitively it seemed, lost Harry.

  Charles had made the bed and placed three folded towels on top of the quilt. On the bedside table, he had leaned the cardboard photograph he had found in Harry’s library against the lamp. She lay on her side on the bed and stared at the image. His boyhood face stared out at her, a reminder that perhaps she hadn’t lost everything.

  Suddenly, she sat up. She went to the door and flung it open. “Charles! Gladys!” she called into the hallway. “Come quickly!”

  Charles rushed into her room, Gladys following with her hand on his shoulder. “What is it?” he breathed.

  Bess waved the card in front of him. “This is it! This is the last photograph! It was here all along.”

  Charles looked at her skeptically. “But I didn’t take that photograph. And there are no words in it anyway. How can that be the one we were looking for?”

  “But you’re in it. It’s practically the same thing. Look!” She pointed to the painted studio backdrop. “Here.” Behind Charles’s left arm, in the faded black-and-white clouds, was a fat-cheeked baby angel in white sleeves. On the cuff of one of the sleeves was a small embroidered heart. The little symbol seemed, somehow, out of place, as if it had been pasted on.

  “It’s the expression—wear your heart on your sleeve. Where your heart has ever been . . . They’re the words from the song.” She waved the photograph at him. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you think I’m reaching. But this is exactly the kind of game Harry loved. He loved wordplay like this.” Riddles had thrilled him. He’d hid them in the notes he passed her from floor to floor of their house, always trying to stump her: palindromes, double entendres, puns, and rebus puzzles, messages hidden in pictures. He would write out the letters of the alphabet, for example, leaving out the letter u, to mean missing you. Or he would hide their dinner plans in an acrostic disguised as a love poem.

  Charles examined the photograph closely. “I suppose . . .”

  Bess shivered with excitement. “There’s something to this, I’m telling you.”

  Gladys turned to the light coming through the window. “Let’s say you are right—what does it all mean?”

  “It means there’s a message here.”

  “But how do you know there are only four pictures you’re supposed to be using, and not more?”

  “I don’t. Can you fetch the other three?” Bess asked Charles. “I need to look at them all.”

  When he came back, she spread the four photographs on the floor in front of them, in chronological order, starting with the most recent, and squinted at them. She felt a curious energy surging through her. “Charles, help me. My eyes are failing. Do you see anything else on these? Any other words?”

  Charles opened a drawer in his desk and rummaged through its contents. A
fter a moment he pulled out a magnifying glass and knelt down beside the picture of the yacht. In the far corner was the back half of another boat, mostly obscured.

  “I remember this . . .” he mused. “This was the only boat I’ve ever come across named after a male. The William, it was called.”

  “But the only letters visible in the photograph are the last three,” Bess said. “I-A-M.”

  “Do you think there’s something to it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  In the pageant article, there were a number of other words. A scripted sign on the boardwalk advertised the Velvet Soap Company in tall white letters. Another spelled out “Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum,” and “Frostilla fragrant lotion.” And then there was the caption: “Kathleen O’Neill of Philadelphia, waiting for the pageant results.” And Charles’s own name in the corner.

  Bess rubbed her eyes. “What do you see?” she demanded. “Damn it, it’s all a blur to me.”

  Gladys leaned in. “What is it?”

  Charles shook his head. “I’m not sure. Let me see the others.” He peered down at the postcard. Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide, the card read. “I have to admit, it’s such a singular phrase, it does seem like more than a coincidence.” He flipped the card over. “The caption on the back says, ‘Young’s Pier, Atlantic City.’” He ran his finger over the card. “It’s not possible,” he said quietly.

  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.

  “I lost my mother, too, you know,” Bess had told him. Why couldn’t Harry see, she wondered, that she could grieve as well as he could? She simply managed to hide it better. Moreover, she felt she had, in many ways, lost her God by marrying Harry. She had once gone to church weekly, but now she rarely attended. Over the years she had turned to Harry for comfort, when she had once turned to religion. God had become secondary to her marriage. She wasn’t sure whether she could ever be forgiven for giving false séances—false hope to grieving widows and parents—during their earlier stage days. Sometimes, memories of her betrayals still rose up to greet her in the middle of the night, like gray ghosts.

  When they gave up their California house they traveled to Europe, looking for a change in scenery. In the Suicides’ Graveyard in Monte Carlo—where those who had lost their fortunes and killed themselves were buried—Harry wept, and told Bess he loved her, and she forgave him. It didn’t seem worth it to be at odds any longer, in the face of all the devastation around them. An obsession with the dead
had swept Europe and America, especially among those families mourning sons lost in the war. It seemed every household had purchased a Ouija board and everyone was conducting their own spiritualist experiments. People, it seemed, were possessed by the paranormal.

  Harry had begun a correspondence with the noted writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, like Harry, had started dabbling in spirit photography and embarked upon a quest to contact the dead. “Where are they?” he asked Harry in a letter. “What has become of all those splendid young lives? Are they anywhere?” He told Harry he had been able to reach his son Kingsley—lost to influenza—through a medium. “I am a true believer now,” he wrote to Harry, “and I also believe that you are harboring occult powers which you may not even realize.”

  This, Harry laughed at, but he was impressed by Doyle’s steadfast belief that the other side existed. But Harry told Bess he himself was struggling between two opposing forces, that he was both a “skeptic” and “a seeker of the truth.” He detested fraud but desperately wanted to find an authentic medium who could prove him wrong.

  Bess was frightened by Harry’s obsession. Along their European route she searched for Catholic churches on narrow side streets and attended masses in languages she didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure that the spirits he was attempting to contact were entirely good. Had he forgotten all the trickery they had performed during their early years onstage together, and the eerie power they had seemed to possess despite their fakery—their predictions that had come true? There seemed to be forces at work that they could not control, and Bess was hesitant to rouse them. She bent her head and prayed into the candle smoke and tried to find the faith she’d had as a little girl, but she felt like an impostor, like someone who did not quite belong anymore. She tried to pray, but the words sounded empty.

  But Doyle promised he could contact the late Mrs. Weiss. His wife, he claimed, had “a gift.”

  And so Bess and Harry sat in a small circle across from Sir Arthur and Lady Jean Doyle, who had begun to tap the table with her pencil. She did not look the part of the medium; she was wrapped in a cascade of white fur and filigreed jewelry. “This is the most energetic the forces have ever been,” she announced. She drew a cross at the top of the paper laid out in front of her, to ward off evil spirits.