“As in, he is reborn somehow?”
“No, no, nothing like that. But his whole body of work was so visual, you know? He built his life on the seen and unseen. And if he promised he would come back to me—well, I just don’t think he would be satisfied with ambiguity.”
“But then why hasn’t he just appeared to you, say, as a ghost?” Gladys persisted. “Or through a medium? Why all these clues?”
“Because Harry loved tricks. His whole life was an illusion. He lived his magic. Nothing was ever what it seemed.” Even their marriage, she couldn’t help thinking, was an illusion. He had kept secrets even from her.
Charles sat down beside her. “What’s next?”
“We have to look at your other photographs.”
He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “It’s a big task,” he said, standing up. “Come into the study.”
Even though he said he hadn’t, Charles, it seemed, had saved a copy of every photograph he’d ever taken, from the time he was seven years old. There were thousands of pictures, haphazardly tossed in boxes stacked end to end across the study floor. The room was overwhelming. Gladys could not contribute; she sat, agitated, on the desk chair and asked one question after another about the progress they were making. Two hours later, they had come up with nothing. The daylight was dimming, and Charles stood to turn on the electric lights. Bess remained on the floor in the pool of photographs, forlorn.
In the fading sunlight she felt suddenly sentimental. She looked at the disorder around her, Charles eagerly sorting through every picture he had ever taken, because, as she did, he believed in the reality, or the myth, of Harry Houdini’s spirit.
“I treated you poorly, Charles,” she said, looking up at him. He stood above her and pushed his shirtsleeves up his forearms, as Harry used to do. It occurred to her for the first time that she could love this boy—not just in theory, but really, truly, love him. “I’m sorry I lost my temper with you before.”
Charles said, “If I ask you something, will you answer me honestly?”
“Of course.”
“If your husband had told you about me, would you have taken me in? Another woman’s child?”
“You would have been—” Bess stopped. Her voice broke. “You would have been my son. I would have loved you all along.”
Charles’s hands were white. “I needed a mother and you needed a son. But we didn’t find each other until it was too late.”
“It’s not too late.”
“Isn’t it? I’m not a little boy anymore.”
“Harry loved his mother till the day he died. I used to wonder why we never did adopt any children. We kept saying, later, later. And later never came. And of course, now I realize why he kept putting off the decision; he was hoping he would find you. But I think now, looking back, that Harry was also very much like a boy himself, a kind of Peter Pan, if you will, who never grew up.” She paused. “You would have loved him.” She cleared her throat and swept her hands through the piles of photographs covering the floor. “We can’t possibly have looked at everything, can we? I feel like we are missing something.”
Charles ran his hands through his hair again. “I don’t know, but I’m exhausted.”
Bess tried not to panic. She did not want him to dismiss them to their hotel without finding anything, because she might never get another chance.
Gladys crept over to her side and knelt down beside her. “Perhaps there is another way.”
“No, no. There can’t be.” Bess looked about the room, but there were only those three newspaper photographs on the wall. She’d looked at them a hundred times in desperation, and none of them had any words on them she could decipher from the code.
Then something occurred to her. “What’s the biggest bank around here?”
Charles thought about it. “The Boardwalk National Bank, I suppose. Why?”
Gladys’s eyes widened. “Of course. It would have to be one he knew would still be around, years later.”
“What do you mean?” Charles asked.
“Years before he died,” Bess explained, “Harry told me he had arranged some kind of financial security, in case anything ever happened to him. He didn’t mean an insurance policy—he never trusted those. I always believed he had hidden money somewhere else. We were never exactly rich; I was always hounding him about spending more than we took in. And he knew there was a debt on the house. So he knew I would have difficulty if he died.”
“And you think this money is in a bank here?” Charles asked.
“It makes sense,” Gladys said. “Bess inquired at banks in New York. But Harry knew you had lived here at one point. It would have been a safer place to hide it.” And Atlantic City had held special meaning for Bess and Harry, too; it had been the place where she had almost lost him once, but had not, in more ways than one.