He almost couldn’t believe it. He felt as if his father had died in front of his very eyes. In his despair he glanced over at the window; the car he had heard was in his neighbor’s driveway, not his own.
He rushed into his office; he had the negative somewhere, he knew. Bess had made him catalog all his photographs after they moved to California, and they were ordered by date now in neat white boxes. He prayed the negative was inside; he had never looked at it, he realized now, but he knew it must still exist. He threw the boxes on the floor and dumped out the contents, searching like a madman through the strips of miniature images. Finally, he found it, just where it was supposed to be. He held it up to the light and peered at the picture. He could make out some of the scene, even though the image itself was no bigger than a few inches across.
In his darkroom, Charles set up the enlarger head and the easel, turning on the bulb and exposing the image from the negative onto the paper. He worked carefully, dropping the paper into the developing solution, praying that Harry would still be there when he finished. What would he do if the image could never be duplicated again? He wasn’t quite sure how the magic worked. What if the tiny, eerie smiling face of his father existed only on the single copy of the photograph he had just ruined?
Underneath the solution, in the red light of the darkroom bulb, he could see the image emerging in front of his eyes. There was young Harry, standing over the water, and there was the woman in the large hat who was always standing behind him. He watched, trembling, as the right edge of the photograph came into focus. He could see the tiny figures in the crowd, and then—he was so grateful he almost cried—he saw him. The gray-haired Harry Houdini, smiling up at a little boy’s perch.
“Oh, thank God.” Charles moved the paper carefully into the stop bath and the fixing solution, and then into a shallow tray of water. Finally, he turned on the lights and clipped the paper on the line to dry, staring at the image as the water dripped off.
He was so fixated on Harry’s face that he almost didn’t see it, until he leaned in to adjust the clip. Something else was in the photograph that hadn’t been there before.
There, with her arm fastened around Harry’s waist, was Bess Houdini, smiling up at him from the center of the crowd.
Author’s Note
Years ago, on Halloween—the anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death—I came across an article about Bess Houdini’s extensive and failed attempts to contact her deceased husband’s spirit. The 1920s represented the height of the spiritualist movement, when much of the public believed (with less skepticism than they do today) that the barrier between life and death was permeable. I imagined that Bess’s inability to reach Harry, who had been the love of her life, was, for her, the most heartbreaking tragedy. I wanted to create a different ending for her—what if, I wondered, she really had managed to contact Harry? What might have led her to keep such a discovery secret, when she had been so public about her search?
Many of the details in this novel are based on extensive research into the lives of the Houdinis and the period in which they lived. In the years after Harry’s death, in an attempt to forge an identity as an entrepreneur in her own right, Bess Houdini opened a tearoom called Mrs. Harry Houdini’s Rendezvous on West Forty-Ninth Street in New York City, which was featured in The Lewiston Daily Sun. In 1928 she made the unexpected decision to participate in Harold Kellock’s biography entitled Houdini: His Life Story, granting Kellock extensive interviews about Harry and her relationship with him. Now out of print, this volume was invaluable in helping me construct an honest portrayal of their lives together from Mrs. Houdini’s perspective. To achieve as much authenticity as possible, some of the dialogue in the novel has been replicated as she remembered it. I have, however, slightly altered the chronology of certain events and have taken other novelistic liberties throughout.