The Gravedigger's Ball (16 page)

“If you knew anything at all about Poe, you’d know that he was much more than a drunk,” the professor said indignantly. “He was a seer, and he drank because the things he saw were beyond human comprehension. They were horrible, frightening things, and whenever he saw them, he drank himself into a stupor so he wouldn’t have to see them anymore.”

“How do you know what he saw?” Coletti asked skeptically. “He died a hundred years before you were born.”

The professor looked at Coletti with a smug expression. “I’ve spent my life poring over every word Poe ever wrote. I’ve written a thousand-page dissertation on his life and career, and what I’m telling you is that Poe lived with visions that horrified him. That’s why he loved poetry so much. In poems he could forget the pictures in his mind and paint a world where everyone could see the frost on a wave as it came in from the sea, or the dew on a flower in the morning. Unfortunately, Poe realized that the world didn’t want beauty. The world wanted horror, so Poe unlocked the unspeakable things he’d seen in his mind, and he shared them with a world that was all too happy to receive them.”

“So you’re saying Poe was crazy?”

“I’m saying he was troubled,” Workman said. “And it’s no wonder. His father left when he was too young to remember. His mother died when he was two. He was taken in by family friends, but when he grew up to be a gambler and a drunk, he fell out of favor with his stepfather, dropped out of college, and got himself kicked out of West Point. He drank and wrote and failed repeatedly, and when he was twenty-seven, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and moved in with the girl and her mother. So you’re right, Detective. He was a drunk who spent most of his adult life broke, but Edgar Allan Poe was nothing less than a genius.”

“What does any of that have to do with Mrs. Bailey being killed?”

The professor regarded the detective with a knowing smile. “Poe wrote about murder quite a bit. It was the subject he knew best. And when his detractors said he’d copied the German authors of his time by writing gothic tales of beauty and murder, Poe said, ‘Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul, and I have reduced it to its likely source.’” Workman stopped smiling and looked Coletti in the eye. “The source of Poe’s terror was his mind. It was there that he saw things that frightened him. He wrote about those things in graphic detail. And that has everything to do with what happened to Mrs. Bailey.”

“What are you saying, Professor?”

“I’m saying that Clarissa was chasing one of Poe’s visions—visions he shared in every horror story he ever wrote. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ was a vision. ‘The Black Cat’ was a vision. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ was a vision. But the vision that made him most famous was the one he saw at Fairgrounds Cemetery, where some believe he worked as a part-time gravedigger when things got lean with his writing. The vision he saw at Fairgrounds was immortalized in ‘The Raven,’ and that’s the vision Clarissa was trying to find.”

The professor got up and grabbed a leather-bound volume off a bookshelf near the couch, sat down next to Coletti, and opened the book to a well-worn page.

“Look here,” the professor said, pointing to the book. “When he speaks of a chamber door, it’s a metaphor for the death chamber. And here, where he talks of peering into darkness, he’s speaking of looking into the future. And here, where the raven continually repeats the word ‘nevermore,’ Poe’s saying he’ll never see that vision again.”

“And what exactly was this vision?” Coletti asked.

“It was a vision about unlocking the power of the human mind,” Workman said excitedly. “That’s why the raven sat on a bust of the goddess of wisdom. You see, Poe understood, even before science proved him right, that we only use a fraction of our brains. He knew that the human mind, when fully unleashed, could heal sickness, move mountains, even defeat death. Fortunately, Poe knew one more thing. He knew that he couldn’t allow that knowledge to fall into the wrong hands, so he hid it somewhere in Fairgrounds Cemetery for another seer to find. Poe told us that seer’s name right here in ‘The Raven,’ when he spoke of his lost love, Lenore.”

“Okay, let’s say your theory is true,” Coletti said, his tone skeptical. “What, besides that poem, makes you think a woman named Lenore is the key to all this?”

Workman went back to the book, flipping through it as he spoke. “Lenore appears in several of Poe’s works, including a poem called ‘Lenore.’ There, Poe wrote that Lenore was young, beautiful, and rich, and that the friends who claimed to love her really didn’t. In ‘The Raven,’ he wrote about Lenore again, only this time, there was a hidden message.”

“So you’re saying Lenore Wilkinson knows where this message is?”

“I’m saying that if such a message exists, Clarissa apparently believed that Mrs. Wilkinson was the only one who could find it.”

“Suppose, just for argument’s sake, Clarissa had already come across a clue that could help Lenore find this message. Would you be able to interpret it?”

“What do you mean?”

Coletti pulled out the picture of the cryptogram. “Clarissa had this tattooed on her neck a few days before meeting Lenore. Call me crazy, but she didn’t seem like the tattoo type, which makes me think it’s connected to finding Poe’s message.”

Workman looked at the picture, and the color drained from his face. He seemed to want to say something, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

Coletti saw him struggling to find an acceptable version of the truth, so he decided to help him along. “You’ve seen this cryptogram before, haven’t you?”

Workman got up and ran his hands through his sparse hair. Looking through the window at the students on the brick walkway outside, he spoke quietly. “Yes, I’ve seen it before. Supposedly it’s an old cryptogram that Poe himself couldn’t solve. I showed it to Clarissa and the others on a lark.”

“Why do you think she had it tattooed on herself?” Coletti asked.

Workman left the window, sat back down on the couch, and smiled sadly. “Sometimes people get lost in things so they don’t have to deal with their reality. With her marriage falling apart the way it was, maybe this thing with Poe became Clarissa’s way to escape.”

“It was more than an escape. She was so excited about Lenore’s visit that she sent you an e-mail about it.”

“Actually, she sent it to the manager of the cemetery,” Workman said. “I was just copied on it. But clearly Clarissa was excited about Lenore’s visit. I was excited, too.”

“But not excited enough to be there to see if Lenore was the key to your theory,” Coletti said, his eyes boring into him.

“I had departmental meetings this morning. I was planning to catch up with them later.”

“Were you really?” Coletti asked cynically. “Professor, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Clarissa believed in this stuff more than you do. I mean, for an academic of your stature to have a chance to see his theory proved is the opportunity of a lifetime. But you’re telling me you missed it for a staff meeting.”

“What I’m telling you is I was going to meet Clarissa and Lenore later,” Workman said, sounding irritated.

“Or maybe you were there at the graveyard this morning,” Coletti said accusingly, “in which case you’ll either need to get a lawyer or get a few people to vouch for your alibi.”

The professor chuckled. “I assure you the entire English department can vouch for the fact that I was in a meeting this morning.”

“Then maybe you can help me with something else,” Coletti said. “I can account for four of the five people on that e-mail Clarissa sent, but I don’t know who the fifth person is. Do you?”

“I can’t say that I do.”

“But I suppose the people on that e-mail aren’t the only ones who believe in your theories about Poe,” Coletti said.

“You’re probably right. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you how many believers there are. Could be ten, could be twenty, there might be hundreds.”

“Have you ever taught your theories on Poe in a classroom environment?” Coletti asked.

“For the past year my History of English Literature course included a snippet on Poe, but other than that, I haven’t done it.”

“Is there a way to access a list of the students who took that course?”

“Sure, class registration is computerized, so the registrar has a list of every student who’s taken my class over the past four years, along with their ID pictures. You should be able to request that list and get it fairly easily.”

“How about people outside your class who might have learned of your theories?”

“My writings on the subject are public knowledge, so I have no way of knowing who else might have read them other than the people I know personally.”

“Can you provide me with a list of those you know personally?”

“It’s a short list—Violet Grant and Lily Thompkins.”

“And do you think either of them would kill to get to the secret first?”

“I doubt it,” Workman said. “They’re history buffs, not killers.”

“How about you?” Coletti asked. “Would you kill to get it?”

“No,” Workman said firmly. “But I suppose someone who believed in my theories could’ve killed Clarissa, then killed Officer Smith to avoid being caught.”

“Yes, I suppose they could have,” Coletti said thoughtfully. “I guess the only question is why.”

“You should study English literature, Detective. Then you’d know there are only a few reasons people kill: love, hate, fear, money, and power. In Clarissa’s case, she was seeking the ultimate power, but obviously there was someone who wanted that power even more than she did.”

Coletti got up from the couch, fished a card from his pocket, and handed it to the professor. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

“I will,” Workman said, taking the card and handing Coletti one of his own.

“And, Professor?” Coletti said as he walked out the door. “Stick around. I’m sure I’ll have more questions for you later.”

*   *   *

Lenore sat silently in Mann’s car as they drove away from the Poe house. She was trying to understand how she’d suddenly become so important.

She’d spent more than half her life being viewed as an outcast—the bastard daughter of a man who’d disgraced his entire family. After that, she’d spent four years toiling in college, only to find that academic success didn’t fulfill her. Soon after, while in grad school, she met and married a man who had everything several times over, but even that didn’t change the way she viewed herself.

For twenty-nine years Lenore had felt like a nobody. Learning that there were those who saw her as the key to a 150-year-old secret was overwhelming. She’d never been anyone special before.

“You all right?” Mann asked, glancing over at her as they turned onto Broad Street.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Where are we going now?”

“To the safe house I told you about.”

“Is Lieutenant Jackson going to be there?” she asked with a schoolgirl grin.

He shot an annoyed look in her direction, then checked the rearview mirror to make sure the cop in the unmarked car was still following them. “She’s going to meet us later.”

Lenore was quiet for a few minutes. “She seems to have real feelings for you,” Lenore said as she gazed out the window. “I don’t understand why you’re so distant toward her.”

“It’s not for you to understand,” he said curtly.

“I’m not trying to pry, but—”

“Then don’t,” he snapped.

“Okay,” she said, sitting back in her seat. “I was just…”

She let the words trail off as she looked out the window and watched the city go by. She saw smiling college students walking among neighborhood residents whose faces looked worn out by poverty. She saw white-coated doctors in Crocs and scrubs near Temple University Hospital. She saw drug-addled people with hopelessness in their eyes.

Lenore saw a city where poverty and affluence, history and hope were locked in a strange sort of dance, repeatedly switching partners while the music played on. She’d heard once that the sound of Philadelphia was the happy and hopeful chorus of songs like “Love Train.” But on trash-strewn streets where the distance between rich and poor looked insurmountable, all Lenore could hear was a dirge.

Suddenly, the silence in the car was broken by the sound of a buzzing phone. Lenore looked at Mann to see if it was his, because it was rare for her to receive cell phone calls. When Charlie didn’t make a move, she fished her phone out of her purse.

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line spoke so loudly that Mann could hear it. He glanced at her curiously, but Lenore ignored him and bent forward as if that would somehow muffle the sound of her husband’s shouting.

“Honey, you need to calm down,” she said as the yelling continued. “John … John! John! Stop shouting at me!”

Charlie tried not to listen, but John Wilkinson was screaming so loudly that he couldn’t help hearing snippets of the conversation. Apparently John had returned from Europe to find that his wife had witnessed a murder, but rather than asking if Lenore was all right, he was demanding that she come home. Charlie didn’t understand all of it, but from what he could surmise, it had something to do with international investors who would frown upon Lenore’s involvement in a murder.

“Listen, John,” Lenore said when she was able to get a word in edgewise. “I can’t do this right now.”

There was more screaming, and when Charlie glanced at Lenore again, she had tears in her eyes.

“Why are you more concerned about your investors than you are about me?” she yelled while her husband continued to rant. “Why can’t you, just one time, put me first? Do you even care about what I’ve been through? Does it matter to you that I could’ve been killed in that cemetery?”

Lenore knew her husband didn’t hear a word she’d said. He was too busy trying to shout her down, just as he always did. But this conversation was different. He’d crossed an invisible line that Lenore had finally drawn for herself.

“Shut up and listen to me, John!” she yelled, and miraculously, her husband did as he was told.

Lenore was shaking with anger. Decorum was no longer the priority, and for the first time in a long time, neither were her husband’s desires.