Bess nodded. “I know you want some quiet. But it was good of you to come,” she said. “Really. I’ll send Billy over with a menu.” She caught sight of the young magician hovering eagerly in the kitchen doorway. She leaned toward him. “He idolizes you.”
Standing, Bess picked up an empty tray from the sideboard. She wrapped her hands around the cool metal and breathed a private sigh of relief. Word of Lou’s appearance today would certainly get around town; it would drum up some more business, for a time. She also hoped it would help keep the papers from condemning her.
She turned toward the kitchen to go back to the tomatoes, but not before she was blinded by a momentary flash of light. When the whiteness receded it seemed everything in front of her was magnified, the colors scattering like shards of glass. And behind her, a reflection glimmering in the silver of the serving tray, she could see Harry’s ghostly face, as if it had been flung across the room. He appeared like a haunting, his face veiled in shadows, his features misshapen. But then his eyes came into view, and everything else followed, and it was unmistakably him.
She turned around, dropping the tray. The metal clattered as it hit the floor and the colors righted themselves and the light and shadows were gone.
Billy rushed to her side. “Mrs. Houdini?”
“It was Harry!” she cried, incredulous.
He squinted at her. “What was Harry?”
“His face—in the tray.” She stopped. In the mirror across the room, she saw it again—the same face she had just seen in the tray. She spun around to see a photograph of Harry, gazing at her, on the wall. It was a photograph she had hung there herself, when the tearoom first opened. His appearance in the tray had been nothing but a reflection of a photograph—something Harry himself would have laughed at her for mistaking. Not a visitation at all.
She had to step outside. She was embarrassing herself. She told Billy that she was going over to Thirty-Fifth Street to sort out the vendor problems. “You look out for Lou and Gladys while I’m gone.”
Apparently Billy had heard the commotion in the kitchen. “If you’re gonna fire the produce people, you could just call ’em. It’d be easier.”
“No, no. I like to do things in person. It’s the honorable way.” She turned toward the street, still shaken. She had never admitted to anyone her hope that Harry’s return would be more than the code revealed, more even than a message that followed—that when he came to her, he would appear physically somehow. She would see him, perhaps be able to touch him. She knew she was expecting more than death allowed; even the idea that he could reach far enough across the divide to communicate the code to her was preposterous. But she hoped. Harry had always managed to achieve the impossible.
It was already after four when she arrived back at the tearoom. The walk had served her well. After Harry’s death, she began to love the city. Its daily pandemonium was a relief from the chaos of her own mind. She loved the cathedral bells and the cramped alleys, the gold-tipped tops of the skyscrapers at dawn, the buildings lined up like army troops as far as she could see. And she loved the stone statues in the parks and the beaded dresses in the department store windows and the gnarled faces of the old men who sat on their stoops in the afternoons. She rarely went back to Brooklyn now, and only to visit Stella; she preferred Manhattan, its parade of colored taxicabs and wild energy.
The streets were crowded with gray-suited men and women walking briskly home from their offices. She could not imagine having lived a life that stuck her to a desk for eight or ten hours a day. Stella’s husband, Fred, had worked at a bank for many years, and she knew he came home every night stooped by the tedium of the business. Really, it was the business side of running the tearoom that was the most taxing. Her argument with the produce vendors had lasted half an hour. It had ended badly; they claimed the tomatoes had been perfect when they were delivered, and Bess had had no choice but to end their contract.
In the dining room, the remaining staff was clearing the tables and turning out the lamps. Gladys was sitting patiently by the window, her cane propped against the wall. Bess pressed her hand to her sister-in-law’s shoulder and sat down across from her, out of breath. “It’s me. I’m so sorry I’m late.”
Gladys shrugged. “It’s very peaceful here when it empties out.” She looked, as usual, calm and well; she had worn only black since her mother’s death seventeen years prior, but she cut a trim, stylish figure, and black seemed more fashionable than miserable on her. At forty-four, she looked ten years younger, and had a childlike innocence about her. But she carried herself with a Victorian composure that defied the flapper irreverence of the era. She wound her dark hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck and sat straight, always, two inches from the back of the chair, her ears studded with tiny pearls and her vacant blue eyes staring.