Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan) (8 page)

WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW  .  .  .

BACK TO THE BONEYARD

THE
boys were well rested when they returned to the Saint Louis Cemetery late that night. Once again, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith had lingered over evening tea in the lobby of the Pepper Tree Inn, so Edgar, Allan, and Roderick had climbed out of their room window, crawled across the ledge, and shinned down the balcony to the alley.

This time, however, they were not met by the Dickinson sisters.

Instead, Em and Milly were engaged now in their own part of the mission, which was to find a way to break into the New Orleans Pirate Museum, where the wax figures of the Lafitte brothers highlighted the collection of buccaneer memorabilia.

And that wasn’t the only difference between this late-night trip to the cemetery and the first.

Tonight, Allan and Edgar did not run but strolled casually, hoping to make the pickax, shovel, and pair of flashlights they’d bought that afternoon at a hardware store seem less suspicious to passersby.

And the weather was different. Thick fog had rolled up the river and now blanketed the French Quarter, limiting visibility to about twenty feet. The bright lights of the crowded streets looked like colorful galaxies viewed through an out-of-focus telescope. And as the twins left the tourist district and neared the cemetery, the dimmer, less frequently spaced streetlamps cast strange halos over the otherwise encompassing dark.

Finally, this trip to the cemetery was different because Allan and Edgar had a worrisome sense of being followed, though each time they turned back no one was there. Even Roderick looked over his shoulder from time to time.

The cemetery awaited in stillness.

The boys and cat edged through the break in the wall.

A cemetery that is spooky on a clear night is spookier on a foggy one. But Edgar and Allan were not particularly spooked.

Their first stop was the tomb of their friends.

The memorial stone was different from how it had been just the day before.

No worn-away letters . . . a night off for Genevieve and Clarence.

But the Poe twins’ work had just begun.

Edgar and Allan split up to scour the cemetery, looking for a mausoleum marked
SHAKESPEARE
. Just twenty-four hours earlier, they might have been startled by the occasional wisps of fog that crept in ghostly shapes around the corners and cornices of the stone crypts. But since meeting the Du Valiers, Edgar and Allan had learned that real ghosts looked more like ordinary human beings than ectoplasm.

Continuing up and down the long rows, the twins took note of all the tombs they passed, resting places for families with names like Petit, Moreau, Martinez, Laurent, Bertrand, Fournier, Morel, Girard, Mercier, Garcia, Bonnet, Lopez, Blanc, Mathieu, Gautier, Dumont, Fontaine, Sanchez, Marchand, Dufour, Dumas, Leroux, Renard, Dupuis, Laveau, de Tremblement, Gomez, Leblanc . . .

Then Edgar and Allan met one another coming around a fog-enshrouded corner.

“I think we’ve covered the whole cemetery,” Edgar said.

“Lots of French surnames with a little Spanish tossed in,” added Allan.

“That pretty well describes the population of New Orleans in the early 1800s.”

But they hadn’t come here to take a census.

The bottom line was that there was no Shakespeare crypt.

Not even any names of his major characters. No Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth or Capulet or Montague or Othello . . .

Had Edgar and Allan figured it wrong?

The boys looked at each other, their two minds working as one.

After a moment, each broke out laughing.

Five minutes later, Edgar and Allan arrived with their pickax and shovel at the weathered but otherwise ordinary-looking tomb of a man named Lance de Tremblement, who died in 1813. As they struck at the old brass doors, they couldn’t help but wonder how they’d walked past it the first time.

It was so simple!

After all, the Lafitte brothers’ native language was French.

And in French the word lance means “spear,” while
tremblement
means “tremor” or “shaking.” Thus “Lance de Tremblement,” in English, was “a spear of shaking” or a “Shake-spear”!

Crack!

The boys broke the lock on the metal doors.

Allan tossed the pickax aside.

They looked at one another. Neither had ever entered a tomb at midnight before.

What awaited them in the darkness?

With Roderick serving as lookout, the twins entered the ominous crypt. They flicked on their flashlights, running the beams over the small cobwebbed chamber.

No skeletons, no coffins, no cremation urns.

There was nothing there at all.

The boys looked at each other in dismay. Had they guessed wrong?

“Any self-respecting pirate would make this a little more difficult,” Allan murmured.

They did a second flashlit examination of the crypt . . . and still, nothing.

Then, from a darkened corner, Roderick meowed.

“What is it?” Edgar asked.

Roderick meowed again, this time more urgently, his eyes reflecting the flashlights’ beams.

The boys rushed over.

Roderick sat atop a stone slab, which looked like a blank grave marker. After a moment, he inclined his head graciously, rose to his feet, stretched, and padded off.

The boys examined the slab. Then they reached for their pickax and shovel.

Any pirate worth his reputation
always
buried his treasure.

Edgar levered up the slab with the pickax. Allan began to dig.

And after several frantic minutes, they broke through to a subterranean storage space.

Within it was pirate treasure—far more than two boys could carry.

They opened the first of a half dozen chests, all of which had been waterproofed with tar.

Inside, glittering gold doubloons, booty of the Spanish Main!

In the second chest were more doubloons; in the third and fourth were jewels, sparkling in colors that hadn’t faded in two centuries; in the fifth were heavy serving dishes and chalices, all layered in gold and studded with rubies; in the sixth were personal items, such as clothing, boots of Spanish leather, hats, swords, and, most important:

A leather-bound diary stored inside of a sealskin pouch.

Edgar opened it, with Allan’s flashlight trained upon the first page.

A few minutes later, when the Poe twins emerged from the tomb, they still bore the wide grins that had spread across their faces when they first spied the treasure. But grins aside, they looked quite different from before. Now, they wore feathered pirate hats, vests that smelled of gunpowder even two centuries after their last use, and, slung across their hips, scabbards with slightly rusted swords—all authentic pirate loot. Roderick sported a two-hundred-year-old silk scarf around his neck.

Aside from the pirate garb and accessories, the twins had taken from the crypt only the murderous pirate’s incriminating diary. They closed the brass doors behind them, picked up their tools, and covered their tracks so no one would stumble across their discovery before the proper authorities were notified.

The boys might be dressed like pirates. But they weren’t really interested in loot.

This was about justice.

They ran out of the cemetery and back into the crowded part of the French Quarter. Here, every night was like a masquerade party, so their unusual attire (including swords) drew hardly any attention.

At the museum, they found the Dickinson sisters crouched in shadows near the entrance.

“Did you get the diary?” Em whispered.

Edgar and Allan’s faces answered the question.

“And in it he confesses his crime?” Milly asked.

“In gory detail,” said Allan.

“Good. But we’re not going to be able to break in tonight. So Milly and I have come up with a plan B.”

“Why can’t we go tonight?” the Poe twins asked impatiently.

Milly pointed to the museum. Inside, the lights were on. “There’s a whole crew in there, getting ready for a show that opens tomorrow.”

“Look at the banner they just hung to advertise it,” Em added.

“I have a feeling that show’s not going to run for long,” Edgar said.