“He was clever,” Bess said. “He must have told John he was the son of his mother’s cousin and enlisted John to help find him.”
The next letter was dated a few months later: Inquired of some neighbors, Bess read, and discovered the fate of the boy—he was sent west, it seems, by rail, to be adopted. Have not been able to find him. The records are ill-kept. It seems many of the children are given new names upon arrival. So Harry had gone as far as to send John, in person, down to Atlantic City, to continue the search. Bess knew the import of this; Harry had relied on his secretary so heavily to manage his correspondence that he rarely liked for him to leave New York, even for business matters.
After that, the letters from John stopped. All future letters were signed by a man named Henry Fletcher, who appeared to be a private investigator of some sort.
“Harry must have worried that John would find out the truth,” Bess said. “There was only so far he could take the story of a lost cousin with John.”
But with Fletcher, Harry had apparently continued the ruse. Fletcher continued to refer to Romario as Harry’s cousin. He had written Harry a letter on January 1 of every year from 1908 to 1926. Each letter detailed the progress, or lack of progress, of the previous year’s inquiries.
“Listen to this,” Bess said, holding up the letter from 1910. “It’s the first time he had a real lead. Mr. Houdini, I am writing to you with promising news. I have finally managed to trace Romario’s journey west, to Des Moines, Iowa.” But he hadn’t been able to locate any more information. The records from that period had been destroyed in a fire.
“So Harry found out about Charles in late 1906 or early 1907,” Gladys said thoughtfully. “When he was eleven years old. Clearly Evatima must have decided for some reason to send Harry the photograph and tell him the truth. For what? Money? Fame?”
“Maybe she had a foreboding about her death. She was involved with some dangerous people, it seems.”
“Well, she was right. She must have died shortly after she sent the photograph, because by the time Harry began his search, Charles was already on the orphan train.”
“And, of course, his new family changed his name. And he decided to keep it, even after he went back to New Jersey.”
“These explain part of the mystery, at least. Harry never revealed himself to Charles as his father because it seems he was never been able to find him.”
Bess continued reading the letters from Fletcher. By 1915 Harry began including carbon copies of his own replies. It seemed he was growing desperate. Fletcher had gone out to Des Moines to interview everyone he could find. There is a girl here who remembers Romario, he wrote to Harry. She says she was in the same train car. She remembers he went to a childless couple, but she never saw him after that. The next sentence was scribbled out, and then, it appeared, Fletcher changed his mind and decided to include it after all. She said he was a nice boy, and he did not seem too afraid.
Harry’s response was anguished. Damn it, man, he wrote. Go back out there if you’ve got a lead. The expense is no concern.
In 1918 there was more news to report: Fletcher had located Romario in an archived newspaper photograph taken when the train arrived. He had included a copy of the picture in his letter. Bess held it up to the light. She recognized him from the photograph Charles had shown her; he was standing among a group of children, a cap pulled over his head, looking at something out of view of the camera. Bess stared at the picture for a long time. How might their lives have changed, she thought, if they had found him?
Harry must have kept his discovery a secret, Bess realized, not only because he didn’t want to risk damaging their marriage but because he knew how much she had wanted a child. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that the fault lay in her own body, not his; all those years, he could have left her for someone else, had more children with another woman, but he chose not to. And he couldn’t bear to tell her that there was an orphan out there who could be theirs, if she wanted him, only to have her hopes dashed when the boy was never found.
But he had never given up hope; he had looked for Charles for the rest of his life. In the 1926 letter—the last from Fletcher, as Harry had died that year—the trail had grown completely cold. Romario would have been thirty years old by then, and he could have been anywhere. Fletcher suggested dropping the investigation. Harry’s response was tortured. How can I continue my life, surrounded by wealth and fame, knowing somewhere out there this boy is alone? To me, he is not thirty; he will always be a little boy. I will find him, even if it’s not in this life.
His prediction was eerily accurate; it was only in death that Harry had located Charles after all.