Ford stood up. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Bess,” Stella urged, wringing the bottom of her dress, “Ford’s known the code all along. He didn’t get it through Harry just now. The message has already been printed in Rea Jaure’s story. And the story’s going to say that Harry and I were sleeping together, and that he told me the message, and I gave it to Ford, and you knew all along, and we’re all a bunch of fakes.”
Bess shook her head. She swung her body around to look at Ford and then back at Stella. “But—that’s impossible. That was—our private message. No one knew it but Harry and me.”
“No.” Stella shook her head. “Someone else knew. One of the nurses heard him say it in the hospital, and she sold the information to Ford.” She glared at him from across the room. “Rosabel, believe. That’s it, isn’t it?”
The editor’s wife gasped. “How could you know that? We’ve only all just heard it for the first time.”
Bess looked at Ford, her eyes steely with anger. “Is this true, Arthur? Were you just manipulating me this whole time?” She felt like a fool. How could she have been so na?ve?
Ford learned toward her and reached for her elbow. A combed-back strand of hair fell over his forehead. His eyes were wide with disbelief. And yet there was a glimmer in his voice of something she hadn’t recognized before—the overenunciated diction of a lie. “Darling, no. It’s real, I promise. Harry was here.”
“It’s all going to come out tomorrow, Bess,” Stella said.
“Everyone get out!” Bess cried. She looked at her agent. “Vernon, get them out! Get them out! I want everyone out!” She threw the covers off the couch and stood up, the neckline of her robe slipping down her shoulder. Ford reached toward her to pull the edge back up, but Bess pushed him away.
“Darling—” he protested. “You need to lie down. You’re not well.”
Bess’s voice was frigid. “Don’t call me darling; I’m not your darling. I never should have believed you—Harry never would have believed you! You’re nothing but a fraud!”
The room was in an uproar. Bess’s agent pushed everyone toward the door, and in the chaos somebody knocked over a vase, which shattered on the floor, sending shards of clay skittering across the tile mosaic B that Harry had had installed. Her agent stooped to pick up the pieces.
Bess waved him away. “Please, just leave me with Stella.”
He looked at her. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.”
When everyone had gone, Stella sat down on the couch beside her. “I never slept with Harry,” she said. “That would have been—practically incestuous. And he never told me about the message.”
“Of course not. It’s preposterous.”
“They’re going to slander us both in the papers. It’s going to be horrible.” She picked at a run in her green silk stockings.
“Yes, I know.” Bess’s whole body ached. It seemed as if everything she had tried to accomplish over the past three years had crumbled. She hated looking like a fool, but she hated even more having Harry’s legacy slandered. Would she be able to continue with the séances after this? Or would she and Harry be the laughingstocks of the press? She needed to reach him, notoriety or not. The public wanted Harry’s code revealed because it would be proof that one could live beyond death. But to Bess, the code was only a stepping-stone. Before Harry died he had told her that there was some kind of essential message, some private knowledge, that he could communicate to her only after he had gone; now, she needed to hear the code first, so that she knew it was truly Harry coming through.
She hoped they wouldn’t go after Harry’s sister, Gladys, as well. She must telephone her immediately in the morning.
“Will you be all right?” Stella asked. “It’s going to be a madhouse around here for a while.”
“I’ll be fine. Maybe the scandal will rustle up some more business for the tearoom.”
Stella laughed. “Always the silver lining.”
Bess stopped herself from saying more. Even in the aftermath of another disastrous evening, she still had one last secret to propel her onward. Not a soul on earth—not Arthur Ford, not even Stella or Gladys—knew that Harry, who had always been one for contingencies, had left her with two codes before he died. Yes, there was Rosabel, believe, and soon the whole world would know about that. But there was a second code, too, which went back to one of their very first nights together. And when she heard those words—which she surely would, she had to—she would know, with certainty, that Harry had found her. Because it was impossible that anyone could have heard the second code; it had not been spoken out loud in decades.