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“‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ That’s ‘Masque’ with a q,” he said, and Isobel had to hurry up and write the word “Usher,” only she ended up dropping the e and adding an extra r so that it slurred into “Ushrr.”
“‘The Murders’—”
“Hold on!” she said, her pen flying.
He waited.
“All right,” she said, finishing up the th at the end of “Death.” She crinkled her nose at the word. Why did it feel like she was inscribing someone’s epitaph?
“‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” he continued.
“This guy had some major issues,” Isobel murmured toward the paper, and shook her head as she wrote.
“That’s how most people choose to see it,” he said. “Next is ‘The Raven.’”
Isobel stopped writing. Lifting her pen from the paper, she looked up. “Well, how do you choose to see it?”
His eyes flashed up from the open book to stare at her again, a toned-down version of his death-ray glare.
“It’s a legitimate question,” she said. “And it totally has to do with the project.” She gave a small, sly smile, but he didn’t smile back. Isobel knew he wasn’t exactly the Ronald McDonald type, but she wished he would lighten up. Sheesh.
“Maybe he just knew something the rest of us don’t,” he said. He opened the purple folder, and his eyes shifted to the syllabus tucked inside.
“Like what?” she asked, genuinely curious.
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, and Isobel picked her pen up again, figuring he was ignoring her so she’d get back to work. Her hand poised and at the ready, she waited for the next gruesome title.
“I don’t know,” he said instead, surprising her.
She watched him thoughtfully as he stared down into the open book, like he hoped to fall in, the ends of his feathery black hair nearly brushing the words. There was something odd about the way he’d just spoken. Sort of like, maybe he did know, or at least had an idea.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“Nobody knows.”
It was her turn to give the slow, patient blink.
Seeming to note her skepticism, he drew in a long breath before continuing. “He was found semiconscious, lying in a gutter in Baltimore. Somebody brought him into a nearby tavern—or some people say that they actually found him in the tavern.”
Isobel listened, loosely twisting her pen between her fingertips.
“He was on his way home from Richmond, heading to New York, when he went missing for five days. Completely gone,” he said. “He never made it, and some people say that for whatever reason, he tried to turn back. Then, when they found him in Baltimore, he couldn’t say what had happened because he kept going in and out of consciousness. But he wasn’t making any sense anyway.”
“Why?” Isobel asked, her voice going quiet. “What did he say?”
Varen lifted his brows and cast his gaze toward one of the nearby windows, his eyes narrowing in the light. “Nothing that made sense. When they took him to the hospital, he talked to things that weren’t there. Then, the day before he died, he started calling out for somebody. But nobody knew who it was.”
“And then he just died?”
“After a few days in the hospital, yeah, he died.”
“And nobody knows where he’d been or what happened to him? Like, at all?”
“There are a lot of theories,” he said. “That’s why we’re covering it in the project.”
“Like, what are some of the theories?” she asked.
“Well.” Varen’s chair creaked as he leaned back. His eyes went distant again, and for the first time, that iron gate guard of his seemed to lower an inch. “A lot of people stick to the theory that he drank himself to death.”
