The albums brought back a rush of memories, but there was no mention in any of them of Charles, no indication even that there might have been something Harry was hiding. As she flipped through the pages, she became more and more distraught, more confused and angry, and as she sobbed she began tearing the pages out of the books. She was tired of distrust, tired of searching for things that were not there.
Then she saw it—the postcard from Atlantic City. It was a photograph of the beach outside the Royal Hotel, touched up in color with paint, as postcards from those years often were. She and Harry had returned to the city again several times after Harry’s disastrous performance, when he had almost drowned. During one of their return trips he had mailed her this card so she would find it when they arrived home. It was postmarked August 1912, two months before they sailed to Europe. You are trying to look at what I’m writing as I write this, the back of the card said, but I’m not going to let you see, because I am the master of surprises. She remembered the scene vividly—Harry purchasing the card from a kiosk outside the hotel, leaning on the rail of the boardwalk as he wrote it, his back to her, laughing, Bess trying to peer over his shoulder. He had given another performance at Young’s Pier, but Young himself was not present for it, having been in Europe at the time on business. After a while, she had almost forgotten him. When she tried to recall his face now she could not.
After the show, she and Harry had sat together on the sand, watching the boardwalk lights, like tiny moons, turn on one by one.
Come enjoy the beauty of the ocean, wild and wide, the front of the postcard said, in flowery black script across the top.
Bess caught her breath. Wild and wide . . . They were words from the code. The tune rang in her ears: I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, across the ocean wild and wide . . . She held the card flat in her palm, like a relic, and read it again. The ocean wild and wide. The words had not changed; they were still there, engraved into the face of the card. She flipped the postcard over and searched the back for some other clue—anything that would give her an indication of what kind of message was being communicated—but there was nothing but the brief, casual note Harry had jotted to her, which really said nothing at all.
The postcard was written in 1912, before their trip to Europe. She had stood with Harry as he wrote it and placed it in the postbox. She had pasted it in the album herself, years later. It was impossible that Charles, or anyone, could have manufactured its presence.
Gladys felt her way over to where Bess was seated. “What did you find?”
Bess pressed the postcard into her hand. “Another piece of the code. But this postcard was mailed fourteen years before Harry died. All the other clues were in photographs I just discovered. But I’ve had this for over a decade, and it’s unchanged.” She touched her hair distractedly. “I’m not sure what this means about how Harry is communicating with me . . . how he’s managed to use something that’s been in my possession for years.”
Gladys ran her fingers along the cardboard. “This code you think you’ve found—are you sure about it?”
“I think I am.”
“I never thought . . .” Gladys began, but her voice trailed off. “I never believed you, Bess.”
Bess’s mind was racing now; it was as if Harry had somehow plunged into her psyche and was pushing her thoughts forward. His desk . . . Why hadn’t she thought of it before? It was Edgar Allan Poe’s desk . . . Poe, who had written many times in his stories of secret compartments. Of course his own desk must have had one, or more. But she had never bothered to check. How could she have overlooked something so obvious? She ran her hands along the underside of the desk. She felt a ridge where the wood split in two. As she pressed her fingers along it, the wood slid back, revealing a space beneath the bottom drawer.
“Gladys,” she breathed. “I just found a hidden compartment in Harry’s desk. There are papers in here.” The possibility of finding some kind of hidden money seemed unimportant now; she would give it all up if what she found led her to Harry himself instead.
She lifted the papers out gently; some of them felt very old and brittle. “They’re letters.” Inside the envelopes, the notes were all handwritten, and they were all from John Sargent, Harry’s late secretary, and mailed to the various parts of the country or the world where Bess and Harry had happened to be at the time.
“What do they say?” Gladys held her hand out tentatively to touch them.
The first, at the top of the pile, was dated January 1907.
Harry, you said this lost cousin of yours lives in Atlantic City. I can imagine the shock you must have had to receive the news that a child existed at all. But I searched for his mother and I’m sorry to tell you she has died. No word of the boy’s whereabouts. He seems to have disappeared. I’ll keep searching. He referred to the boy as Romario Tardo.
Gladys listened with her hand on her mouth. “So Harry knew,” she whispered. “He knew he had a son, but he never found out where he was.”