She peered at the image, looking for a smudge of a young woman holding on to a white hat in the wind, before she remembered that she hadn’t come outside until after the jump. Then she sighed, holding out the photograph. “But I don’t see what this has to do with my coming here. Look around. Harry’s not here.”
Charles pressed the paper back into her palm. “You didn’t look closely enough.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a small magnifying glass. He knelt down beside her and held the glass over the picture. “Look here.” He pointed to the crowd. “What do you see?”
Bess followed his finger. The crowd was pressed together, everyone staring intently at Harry hanging over the water, about to jump. It was a moment in time captured by a boy’s cheap camera, unaware of what the magician’s wife had just done, or what would happen to the magician, or what would happen to the boy himself, only months later, when he would be orphaned. Only the backs of the people’s heads were visible to the camera. Except, there was something strange. One man was not looking at the ocean; he was facing the other direction, his face turned upward, staring straight past the heads of the crowd into the camera.
Bess bent over and rubbed her eyes.
“Do you see it?” Charles pressed. “Bess, do you see?”
Through the glass, clear as day, she could make him out. The man looking at the camera—staring right at her, now, as she sat there beside Charles—was, unmistakably, Harry.
Bess let out a small cry. Her eyes went back and forth between the two men in the picture. They were different, but they were the same man. There was a young, dark-haired Harry, dangling perilously from the pier. And there was an older, gray-haired Harry, standing in the crowd.
“Charles,” she said softly, “how is it possible?”
Charles pointed to the image. “This is my theory: I think he’s living still—in another place, another plane—and he’s coming back from the other side, through my photographs.”
Gladys sat on the bench beside Bess and took her hands. “Don’t you see, Bess? Don’t you see what he’s done? He’s found a way to come back to you!”
Bess started to cry. “I don’t understand. How does this keep his promise? What is he playing at here?”
Charles, pacing in front of them, was almost electric with excitement. “You were right about the message!” he pressed. “I think Harry is waiting for you—just not in the way you thought.” He swept his hand in front of him and gestured toward the crowded pier. “You came out here thinking you would find him here, in the present. But he can’t get to you that way. He can only come back through the past. And he’s using my photographs to do it.”
“So you think . . . he is going back in time?”
Charles nodded. “To when these pictures were taken. We didn’t think about this, but all of those photographs were taken before he died. He’s been able to alter the landscape, just slightly, enough for the coded words to come through. You were right about the message—you just didn’t interpret it correctly.”
Suddenly, it became clear to her what Harry had meant, what Charles had discovered. I am waiting for you at Young’s Pier. Harry had used the song they’d chosen to relay this message. But the problem was, he couldn’t reach her in her own, current, time. Perhaps, in the limbo one entered after death, one could only cross back to the years one had lived, and could go no further. And so Harry was prevented from coming back in all the ways she had been anticipating—through a medium, say, or as a ghost, because he couldn’t move beyond 1926. And he wasn’t trying to tell her where he would be waiting for her, now, on this side; he was trying to tell her where he would be waiting on the other side. He was telling her that, when she died, he would be waiting for her here, on Young’s Pier, in 1905. And they would go on, together, to what was beckoning.
Bess recalled the agony of that afternoon, the interminable minutes as she’d watched the seething, throbbing blue ocean that had swallowed Harry whole. Afterward she could not get the sound of the crowd out of her head, the small cries of the women as he failed to appear in the water, the shrill voice of the newsboy as he called out the news: “Extree! Houdini dead!”
“I thought I’d lost you,” she’d murmured, over and over that night.
“Oh, no,” Harry had assured her. “You didn’t lose me. I was right there all along.”
I was right there all along . . .
It made even more sense now, why Harry had chosen this place to come back to her.
Gladys felt Bess’s face. “You’re crying,” she said softly. “Are you sad because you wish he was here with you now?”
“No.” Bess wiped her face. “I’m crying because I don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because now I know he’s there, and I’ll be there with him, too.”
Somewhere far away, in a time she’d already lived, the rest of the song was playing:
I’ll take you home again, Kathleen
Across the ocean wild and wide
To where your heart has ever been
Since first you were my bonnie bride.
The roses all have left your cheek.
I’ve watched them fade away and die
Your voice is sad when e’er you speak