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“And Annie,” Varen interjected.
Poe paused, smiling. He lifted a finger to loosen his cravat. “And . . . Annie,” he conceded.
“Who was married.”
“See, that’s an interesting story indeed. I—”
“And then Elmira.”
“And then Elmira, yes, fine.” Poe crossed his arms, slumped, and looked away. There came a mix of laughter and several teasing “ooh’s” from the back of the class.
“What can I say?” Poe muttered. “Chicks dig the mustache.”
Laughter again. Isobel shut her eyes and held them closed, trying to halt the crawl of color over her face. Take it down a notch, Dad, she thought toward him, opening her eyes again.
Then she grinned in spite of herself, because the plan was working better than she had hoped. As she asked more questions, Varen continued to interject between her father’s misty replies, supplying the real facts, eliciting laughter with his dry coolness. Soon they had only one subject left to cover: death.
“Mr. Poe, the details of your end are, at best, cloudy.” Her mom had told her to phrase it that way, though Isobel thought it made her sound like a cheesy soothsayer. “No one knows exactly what happened to you on that fateful night. There are theories ranging from rabies to murder.”
“Mmm. Murder,” Poe mused, “that most hideous yet somehow fascinating of human pastimes.”
“You admit that you were somehow involved in foul play?”
“I admit nothing,” Poe said. “I enjoy mysteries too much. I invented them, remember? And so I am obliged not to reveal the answer to the riddle of my death.” He stood slowly and began pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “Besides, I fear I cannot fully recall what happened to me that night so long ago, so many eons ago. . . .” He reached a quivering hand out toward his audience, his fingers curling into a rueful fist. Isobel rolled her eyes. She never would have thought he had it in him!
“I was on my way from New York to Richmond.”
“Richmond to New York,” Varen corrected.
“That’s right,” Poe whispered, bringing his hand toward his brow, bracing his head. “The musty air of the grave! The lull of death’s sleep. These things can congest the brain, clog the memory—but you’re right. I was leaving Richmond, yes, where I had finally become engaged. I was to be married. Yes, married. But first! First I was to return to my home in New York to collect my dear aunt Moody.”
“Muddy.”
“That’s what I said.” Poe stopped then, tilting his head as though listening to something far off. “I remember traveling by train with my trunk full of manuscripts and lectures. The train stopped and then I . . . I . . .”
Isobel let her eyes stray from her father to scan the faces of her classmates. Everyone stared. Even Bobby Bailey, who usually laid his head on his desk, had sat up to listen.
“Perhaps, Professor Nethers,” Isobel ventured, “you can enlighten us about some of the details surrounding this mystery?”
Varen, maybe remembering Isobel’s whispered plea, took his cue. “For five days Poe went missing,” he said, his voice slicing into the stillness of the room. “He was found near a tavern in Baltimore in a state of delirium, wearing someone else’s clothing. He was then taken by his cousin and a doctor friend to the hospital.”
“Yes, I remember now . . . ,” Poe whispered.
“The doctor’s reports say that Poe raved for days, talking to imaginary people and invisible objects on the wall.”
“Demon!” Isobel’s dad shouted suddenly, shooting a finger out to point at the ceiling. With a collective shriek, the entire room jumped in their seats. “Thing of evil!”
A strange feeling stole its way over Isobel. Her brow knotted, and she felt her jaw tighten and set. As she watched her father improvise, her hands pressed down on the desktop while her thoughts and her memory slowly wound around reawakening fears. She remembered now that Varen had mentioned this in the library, that first time they’d met for the project—how Poe had screamed out to invisible beings while on his deathbed.
“On the night before he died,” Varen continued in a solemn tone, “he began screaming out a name, shouting it for more than a day, calling for someone no one knew. Someone Poe never reportedly knew, either. Someone named Reynolds—”
Isobel gasped audibly. Prickling white spikes of fear and panic shot through her, freezing her mind and stalling her body. She sat stunned, her eyes on Varen while her memory projected onto her mind the image of a black-shrouded figure.
Isobel had no way of telling how much time trickled by before she registered Mr. Swanson’s voice. Apparently, however, it had been long enough for him to guess that this wasn’t just another part of the presentation. “Isobel,” he said, “are you all right?”
Dazedly she looked for her father, who had all but dropped out of character to stare at her with a “What’s going on?” look on his face.
“Uh,” Isobel croaked, fumbling for the radio. Flustered, she pressed play, then pause, then stop. “That’s the—all—all the time we have today,” she stuttered, pressing play again in an attempt to cover her mangled lines. The tail end of another round of clapping trickled lamely through the boom box before dying out.
