- Spring arrives. Grandfather cracks his pelvis, from which he never recovers. Harry K. Thaw escapes to Canada, comes back to the U.S. and is captured.
- Meanwhile Harry Houdini mourns his mother, who has died while he was in Europe. He's in bad shape. She called out for him moments before her death, but he wasn't there. He's sure she needed to tell him something.
- Houdini becomes obsessed with mediums and clairvoyants, wondering if he can speak with his mother one last time. He hires a detective agency to find the frauds pretending to contact the dead.
- He decides to start working again, and pushes every show to the limit. People think he has a death wish. When an explosion occurs nearby at the end of a show, the audience flees in terror.