Bess used her elbow to push herself into a sitting position. Her head was still pounding from her injury. In the three years since Harry’s death, she had become unmoored, searching for the sparks of her own identity while continuing to cling to Harry’s. She did not want to forget him, and she did not want him to be forgotten. He had made it publicly clear before his death that when he was gone, he was going to try to come back, through the communication of a private code he and Bess had established.
Then, in 1926, he had died suddenly, and young, at fifty-two; and the world had grieved with her. But what had surprised Bess was how desperately the public clung to Harry’s vow that he would return to speak to her. In these wild and unanchored years, people needed something to believe in; religious or not, they needed to know if there was some kind of life after death. They believed Bess’s retrieval of the code would provide the assurances they were looking for.
And so, while she had spent the recent, grieving years sorting through Harry’s estate, and fielding interviews, and attempting two failed businesses of her own, she had also been participating in dozens of unsuccessful séances a month. At first she had believed she could channel Harry herself; every Sunday she set aside two still, private hours waiting for him to reach her. But nothing came of those hours. Whatever powers she, or Harry, had once believed she possessed, failed her. Finally she opened herself up to the idea that he might use someone else to speak to her. Harry had followed this same logic after his mother died, at first reaching out to her spirit himself, in the privacy of their home, then asking Bess to participate, unsuccessfully. Increasingly desperate, he had ventured into the parlors of the spiritualists.
In the three years since Harry’s death, the public’s fascination with Houdini’s legacy hadn’t waned; she still received thousands of letters from mediums claiming to know the message Harry had left her before he died—the message that would prove, once and for all, that it was possible for the dead to come back and speak to the living. But all of these claims had been false.
Only Bess knew how desperately Harry himself had wished to be certain of such a possibility. But none of the séances he had attended had ever convinced him. And she could never speak to anyone, not even his siblings, the truth that the great Houdini had died afraid of what was to come.
Then, two months ago, Arthur Ford had come into her tearoom. He was a man of God. She had sensed that there was something different about him. He had kissed her, and promised her honesty, and Bess was convinced that he, of all people, could contact Harry. In the end, it was she who had asked him for a séance.
Ford continued. “This is the code. It is ten words.” Bess nodded; that was correct. She pulled her white silk robe closer around her shoulders. “And it is: Rosabel. Answer. Tell. Pray. Answer. Look. Tell. Answer. Answer. Tell.” The room was completely silent, the eyes of all the witnesses focused on Bess. “He wants you to tell him whether they are right or not.”
Bess was still. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, they are.” There was a murmur of amazement from the witnesses.
Ford opened his eyes. “Harry smiles and says thank you. Now I can go on. He tells you to take off your wedding ring and tell them what Rosabel means.”
She had lost so much weight in her widowed years that the ring slid easily off her finger. She traced the letters engraved on the inside. She held it out, trembling, for Ford to inspect, and she heard, from somewhere long ago, the words of the song: Rosabel, sweet Rosabel, I love her more than I can tell, over me she casts a spell, my charming black-eyed Rosabel . . .
I’ll come back for you, Harry had promised. On his deathbed, he had struggled to convey a message he was unable to finish.
“And now, the words we just established—answer, tell, pray, and so on—signify another word in your code, which used common phrases or groups of phrases to indicate certain letters,” Ford’s voice went on. “And that word after Rosabel is believe. The message Harry wants to send back to you is ‘Rosabel, believe.’ Is that right?”
Bess looked at him, stunned. “Is it possible?” she whispered. “Is he really—is he really here?” The sounds of the city seemed to rush in upon her like a great wind. She could hear rain outside, sheets of it pounding on the sidewalk. “Someone close the windows, please!” she cried.
“But—they are closed,” she heard the editor’s wife say.
“Mrs. Houdini? Are you all right?” another voice asked. There was commotion in the room; chairs scraped against the floor. Someone leaned over her.
Then she heard Ford’s voice, louder than before. “He says, ‘Tell the whole world that Harry still lives!’”
Across the room, the door burst open. “What is this intrusion?” she heard Ford cry out. “What is going on?”
Bess’s eyes focused again. Her sister Stella was pushing her way through the semicircle of chairs, her hair matted with rain under a black cloche hat. She stood dripping beside Bess’s couch.
“Bess, don’t believe it!” she cried. “It’s all a hoax. This woman”—she pointed to one of the journalists—“has already sent a story to the Graphic that accuses you of faking this séance! It’s going to be the biggest scandal since the Ponzi scheme.”