Poe Read online

  I took the picture at the end of summer; the mornings were just starting to be cool in that crisp, near-autumn kind of way. I’d been entertaining the delusion that I could make a few extra bucks from the paper if I shot photos too, so I’d taken to keeping a cheap camera in the car. At the crosswalk on the corner of Main and Ocean, an old woman was crossing the street slowly, holding up traffic. Not news exactly, but something about it interested me. She wore a plastic scarf over her head because it had been lightly raining earlier; her pink coat translated into a light gray on the black-and-white print.

  The photo is now torn straight through the middle, neatly halving the woman in two.

  But what’s interesting, compelling, is that the tear is underneath the remaining glass in the frame.

  Which is not physically possible.

  I pick up the other photo, this one taken a few weeks later at the same crosswalk. A heavyset woman wearing a reflective jacket and blowing a whistle supervises elementary school children crossing the street. I thought it made for a nice contrast, New Goshen’s past and New Goshen’s future, but when I showed them to Mac and proposed I get paid, he burst into hysterical laughter before promptly throwing me out of his office.

  This picture too is ripped neatly in half in exactly the same way.

  I sit down on the couch, holding the photo at arm’s length. There’s something familiar about the heavyset woman… What? I close my eyes, picturing her face in my head. And then it hits me—her permed and frizzy hair, her eyes, which I last saw staring lifelessly in the morgue, and her gray, bloody corpse splayed out like a medieval victim of torture. What was it the doctor with the iPod said?

  I can’t quite remember—something strange and disturbing.

  My guilt prescriptions are still on the bamboo coffee table where I left them, so I pop a couple of Ambien, washing them down with a half-empty bottle of water that I find lying on the floor.

  And then I remember the envelope. If it’s not an eviction notice from my slumlord, then what is it?

  I pull it out from my jeans pocket and rip off the end. Inside is a small white sheet of notepaper with just two small words written in tight, angry print.

  race you

  Well that makes no fucking sense.

  The Ambien begins to creep through my veins; it’s a welcome, sagging fuzziness that tugs at reality. And just as my eyelids start to droop I remember what she said, the doctor in scrubs, as she peered into the abdomen of the corpse: “Check out the spleen. It looks like something was eating it.”

  But then everything, blissfully, fades to black.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: RACE YOU

  I’m standing in a snowy wood. It’s morning, the sun is coming up in the east, and I’m not cold, even though I’m only wearing a pair of plaid flannel pajama bottoms that my mother gave me years ago.

  A feeling buzzes through me, powerful and strong. I reach up for a tree limb and break it off easily. Interesting. Then I crush it in my fist, turning it into fine powder that gives off the clean scent of freshly cut pine.

  In the distance a sleigh bell jingles, and there’s laughter, bright and tinkling, familiar. My mother. I race up the small hill—I’m amazingly fast; the trees pass by in a blur—but when I reach the top of the rise, I’m faced with another, steeper hill. Sharp rocks protrude from the even, untouched layer of snow, but no problem, my feet sink deep, reaching frozen ground, and I use the earth to launch myself up the hill faster, with long, powerful strides. But at the top I find a small mountain is now in front of me.

  Again the familiar laughter, and another voice now, deeper. My father’s. They’re close, so close; I want to call out but strangely have lost my voice—what I’ve gained in physical strength I’ve lost in my ability to speak.

  Then I see the thin punk-rock musician from Lisa’s photos standing with preternatural stillness by a thin, barren tree. He stares at me with wild, roaming eyes. His face is ashy pale, and in his bony right hand he grips a long knife that glints in the hazy morning light. His thin white T-shirt is covered with bright blood, and after his eyes register mine, he grins.

  “Race you,” he says.

  He plunges into the dark wood, and as my heart thuds frantically against my chest, a feeling of complete and utter panic rising through me, I run after him. But he’s faster, stronger—he’s over the hill and halfway up the next just as I get to the top, my chest heaving. If only I could call out a warning; if I wasn’t a mute, my parents might have a chance. When I reach a flat clearing, I can’t tell which way to turn—the trees are spinning, and my lungs burn with cold. Then I see marks left in the snow, an inhuman distance between each footprint. I want to collapse, sleep, let the drifting snow cover me, but maybe there’s time, so I stumble through the clearing and back into the woods, where the trail leads.

  I reach the summit of the next hill, spent. And there, in the distance, I see him in silhouette standing on a jutting crag near the peak of the next mountain. He’s watching someone below, with a visibly coiled energy, like a lion about to pounce. He turns to me with a jeering grimace, opens his mouth, and lets out an indescribable sound, like the roar of a massive waterfall. The ground begins to shake as he leaps off the edge.

  A bloodcurdling scream echoes through the canyon walls. My mother.

  Too late, too late, but still I try to force my aching legs to move—they’re sluggish, frozen, and I’m overcome with an empty feeling of powerlessness and desperation. Not enough—I’m not enough—and then I see the snow on the mountain peak start to shiver. A crack forms, and then a thundering chunk drops off. An avalanche. I don’t even bother to move—there’s no point—and the torrent of snow hits me with the force of a Mack truck, knocking me into a current of rushing powder. Once again I’m rolled around; once again I can’t tell which way is up or down; once again I’m drowning. Dying is becoming a familiar experience.

  Finally all is still and dark, like a cocoon, like a womb. My heart still beats, but I’m choking on snow, buried alive.

  A sound. Digging. The snow in front of my face gets lighter, brighter, and I can see movement of some kind, accompanied by a deep, guttural growl. A hand reaches down to me, grips me tightly by the wrist, and lifts me with supernatural strength to the surface, where I gasp for breath and shake with wet cold.

  It’s the woman from the water.

  Her skin is so pale it has a bluish hue, and her hair is wet. It clings to her high forehead in damp clumps. She wears a thin cotton shift that’s drenched too, as if she just crawled out of the well. She cradles me in her icy arms, staring at me with glittering, ice-blue eyes, then brushes snow from my face, leans down as if to kiss me but stops short.

  “Dimitri, he is coming,” she whispers. Her accent is foreign but familiar, and I don’t just hear her speak—I see blue words drip from her lips, like vapor.

  And then she smiles at me, but it’s a cold smile, calculating. She reaches into the snow and conjures an icicle, holding it in front of my face. But I don’t see my reflection, or hers. Instead I see a warped symbol. It is oddly familiar but also strange.

  “You must be ready.”

  The symbol—it’s the symbol on my father’s ring. I want to ask her what it means, but just then she places the tip of the icicle on my forehead, and it burns, spreading to a searing, sharp pain that crushes me from within—white hot, blinding.

  I wake up. Turn on the light. There is a small dusting of snow on the floor, already starting to melt. And at the edge, a woman’s delicate footprint, leading from my apartment, out the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: MYSTERY #5

  I have watched enough cheesy detective television shows in my young life to know that when one is presented with an inexplicable mystery, the first order of business (after procuring good donuts and coffee—check) is to create a wall of clues with photos of suspects and article clippings, preferably in an artistic yet seemingly random fashion. This collage is essential to the solution, because it is the ground from which
the aha! moment comes—a moment which usually occurs fifteen minutes before the hour is up. The lead detective suddenly gasps and goes to grab his coat and keys without explaining the details to his black or female partner.

  So, three donuts under the belt and halfway through my second cup of coffee, I grab my obituary journalist notebook and start to make notes.

  #1–Who is Daniel? Do I need to be jealous?

  #2–Dead fat woman in morgue. Identify.

  #3–What’s up with the symbol on my father’s ring?

  #4–How is Aspinwall connected with any or all of the above?

  #5–POE

  I don’t have a name for the ghostly woman in my dream, and I feel vaguely superstitious that committing too much of my thoughts about her to paper will somehow conjure her, make her real. So I decide to use a code word, Poe, for mystery #5, in honor of the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Seems appropriate.

  Sadly, the best place to start my research is in the dusty basement archive at the Devonshire Eagle, where they still use microfiche to catalog articles. This means I probably can’t escape a visit with Mac to see what new assignments are on the horizon, which means my hospital vacation is over, which gives me a sad ache somewhere in the lower quadrant of my stomach. But there are things to do, people to see, dead people to write about—they wait for no one, the dead and dying.

  I pass the bored security guard on the first floor (I can’t see the need for security, really, except to keep Mac’s legendary creditors from dropping by inconveniently) and give him a wave, which he studiously ignores as I press the B button on the elevator. I’m somewhat in luck, because it’s half past twelve, which means most newspaper employees are still on their smoke/lunch break. When the doors open, the elevator is empty.

  I’ve never understood why the lighting is so poor on the basement floor, or why the walls are painted a prison-cell olive green. There is a steel gray desk, behind which sits Ernest, who really should have died about ten years ago. He officially retired from Exeter Academy after forty years teaching pubescent boys Greek and Latin but got bored and lonely at home, so he took a job at the paper, where he is paid to be bored and lonely at work. It’s rumored that he’s eighty-five, but he jokes that he doesn’t feel a day over ninety.

  “I thought you kicked the bucket,” he says, not looking up from his crossword puzzle.

  “Why, you after my job?”

  “I’d consider that a demotion,” he says dryly.

  “You’re probably right. Mind if I do a little research?”

  Ernest pulls a well-chewed pencil from behind his ear, tapping it on the desk. “Suit yourself,” he says absently. “What’s a four-letter word for a flat-topped plateau?”

  “Mesa.”

  “Oh, for cripe’s sake, I should have known that.”

  I head toward the back, where the microfiche machines are gathering dust, passing through the narrow corridors created by the steel shelving. Each shelf contains a white cardboard box of archived newspapers and forgotten office files—a genuine tinderbox of paper, which apparently doesn’t concern the employees of the Devonshire Eagle, because I note more than a few cigarette stubs ground onto the floor. The Stacks, as we call the basement, is a great place to hide from work or engage in an office tryst—I once caught Myrna passionately kissing Barney from accounting, a fact I use every once in a while to get her to vouch for one of my mythical illnesses.

  The lone fluorescent light flickers overhead, making a low, ambient buzzing sound. I reach the far end of the room, where an antiquated computer stores the article catalog, and I sit down in a creaky wooden chair, turn on the computer—it takes a good five minutes for it to boot up—type in “Aspinwall,” and press RETURN.

  A long digital list appears. The archive goes back to the mid-1850s and might have gone back further if not for a fire in 1839 that razed the newspaper office—and most of the surrounding town—to the ground. Fire seems to be a recurring issue for New Goshen.

  January, 1930. ICE TRUCK HITS CYCLIST NEAR ASPINWALL

  July, 1935. BASTILLE DAY CELEBRATED AT ASPINWALL BALL

  August, 1940. BABY CRIMINAL CAUGHT STEALING, RUNS OFF

  October, 1940. TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS FIVE, SOCIALITE MISSING

  May, 1970. ASPINWALL FOR SALE

  September, 1972. HOW TO TELL IF YOUR CHILD IS A HIPPIE

  October, 1972. WILD ANIMAL SUSPECTED IN ASPINWALL DEATH

  December, 1980. ASPINWALL DEMOLITION SET

  January, 1982. ONE YEAR LATER, AND ASPINWALL STILL STANDS

  I decide to skip the first article and focus on the others, jotting down the dates in pencil. “Baby criminal” in particular seems to stand out—how much trouble could an infant get into, anyway? It doesn’t take long to find the box with the microfilm reels, and then I settle onto the fabulous fifties plastic chair in front of the reader.

  Spinning the articles on the monitor always makes me motion sick, and I wonder why no one has thought to digitize the film and put it online, like a real newspaper. But then I remember that, gee, no one really gives a shit about New Goshen in the early part of the twentieth century. The Bastille Day article yields nothing, unless one is captivated by the ballroom finery and high society of New Goshen circa 1935, although there is a photo snapped in the Great Hall that looks like a film still straight from Citizen Kane. Two men with slicked-back hair, one sporting a thin pencil mustache, are decked out in tuxedos, and they stand next to a beautiful woman wearing a satin evening gown and mink coat. The headline reads BASTILLE DAY A GAY AFFAIR.

  The second article proves to be more mundane than its title suggests. The baby criminal in question turns out to be a twelve-year-old stable hand who was accused of stealing five silver spoons, a silver creamer, and a good laying hen. Positively tame by today’s standards of juvenile depravity.

  Finally, I find the most interesting article of the bunch.

  TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS FIVE, SOCIALITE MISSING

  One wonders if the town of New Goshen will ever recover following last night’s tragic events, marring the traditional Halloween festivities. Downtown businesses put the flag at half-staff, and a funeral procession with all five bodies made its way down Main Street today, with dirges played by the American Legion Military Band.

  All Hallow’s Eve began in traditional fashion with little tykes playing trick or treat on neighbors’ porches. Who would have thought that hours later the town would be mourning five lost souls, the most luminous of Devonshire County’s socialites, Mr. Blaine Lomond, Mr. Edgar Sweeney, Mr. Sidney Crane, Miss Eliza Fitzgerald, and her twin sister, Miss Sarah Fitzgerald?

  Chester Hurlbut of Hurlbut’s Ice Delivery on East Street was on his way home from a late-night church service when he spotted the flames.

  “I thought maybe they were having a bonfire,” said Hurlbut. “They had some fancy parties there. When Miss Delia turned five, they brought in circus ponies and peacocks!”

  Indeed, Aspinwall mansion has seen happier times. Just last September this reporter was invited to the Annual Harvest Gala to help support the Cooke School for the Blind, a sparkling affair that brought high-society folks from as far away as Albany, NY.

  In today’s burial service, Rev. Dr. William Jersey of Grace Protestant Episcopal Church read the prayer as the five coffins were laid to rest at Folsom Cemetery.

  And as if this tragedy alone wasn’t enough to bear, police say they’re searching for Mrs. Aspinwall, who was last seen being carried from the inferno by the gardener but has subsequently disappeared. Captain Aspinwall attested that when he saw her last, she had suffered horrible burns and seemed close to death. Readers may recall that the Aspinwalls were recently robbed by their young stable hand, who made off with several pieces of silver and some say was seen at the house shortly after the fire began. Any persons with knowledge of the whereabouts of either the groom or the gardener should contact authorities immediately.

  Several photos accompany the article. One is an easily recognizabl
e Main Street, filled with throngs of people clad in somber black, watching as the funeral procession passes by the Devonshire Eagle flatiron building. There’s a hand-drawn pencil sketch of Miss Sarah Brewster, almost cameo-like in its perfection, and then a photo of the Aspinwall mansion with family and staff neatly arranged on the clipped front lawn. The maids wear uniforms and starched white aprons, while the valets or butlers wear stiff black suits and the same sober expression. At the far right is an awkward, freckled twelve-year-old who looks like he’s overdue for a growth spurt. He wears dirty overalls and a jaunty sideways cap. The caption identifies him as A. Bennet, the baby criminal. I wonder if he’s related to Lisa.

  Centered in the photo and seated on white Adirondack chairs are Captain Aspinwall and his wife. Captain Aspinwall sports long sideburns and a fierce, burning expression; an eight-year-old Delia kneels at his feet, her hair looped in perfectly formed curls, a shy smile on her mild face.

  And here I find something strange.

  The face of Mrs. Aspinwall has been purposely rubbed out, like someone took an eraser to the print. And then to the far left is a man, a blurry figure who at the last moment must have stepped out of the frame so that only his arm and shoulder appear. His shirt is dirty and coarse, and his pale hand holds a trowel.

  It can only be one man. The gardener.

  Bob looks crushed as soon as I enter the third-floor newsroom, like I just stole his favorite Monday morning gag (as if I’d wear Old Fart Slippers to the office). In fact, the whole room stops. Myrna’s hands freeze above her keyboard, Nate drops a pencil, and everyone stares, including a few people I don’t recognize who are probably from the accounting department—they never leave their floor, never. I feel like another head has just sprouted from my shoulders.