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given him the slip. No doubt Gessler was down in the
corpse-scented cellar blustering that he had lost his Dupin, never
realizing that while his men looked off in one direction, Dupin was
walking away— in plain sight! —in the other. This idea lifted
my spirits. I soon found myself whistling a little tune as I dug a
coin from my pocket for the flower-seller in front of the station:
a single red rose for Virginia's tomb.
    As the train began huffing and chugging
towards my cottage in Fordham, the idea that I had seen the
detestable Billy Burton walled up dead wearing a fool's cap seemed
a comic, if not altogether desirable, notion. I saw his fat red
face and his eyes bulging beneath the idiotic hat, all the
criticisms that dripped from his vile tongue reduced to a harmless
jingling of bells. Ha-ha! It almost seemed funny now that I thought
about it on the train.
    Still, the idea that I had seen Burton where
there was none troubled me. Briggs was right, of course. My
anxiety, already piqued by the burdens of my work, had been
heightened by Gessler's crime scene. Who could blame me? What man,
roused from a troubled sleep and thrust into the company of a
moldering corpse, would not be prone to disturbing visions?
    But the only vision I had now was of Burton
in motley. As I listened to the wheels clicking and clacking along
the tracks, I began to recount my adventure in my mind, cast in the
humorous light I now believed it deserved.
    I must have laughed aloud at some point, for
I caught one of the other passengers, a young girl, eying me
curiously. Suppressing my grin, I gave her a nod and she buried her
face bashfully in her mother's blouse. I then spent the remainder
of the thirteen-mile journey lost in pleasant reverie as I composed
the story in my mind as I would surely tell it in cheerful company
when the occasion next arose.
    My good humor was tempered only by the fact
that where I was going, there would be no one to tell.
    Virginia had been interred in the Valentine
family vault in a church graveyard not half a mile from our
cottage. The Valentines owned the house I had rented and the
poverty in which we lived there had become well-known. I had been
publishing little and the Journal had just started and
seemed destined to forever teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. We
had become the objects of pity. Worse still, news of Virginia's
death after her long illness of consumption had made us the
recipients of charity as well: linen grave clothes for Virginia,
suitable mourning attire for me, a coffin, even a borrowed grave.
To such a state had our pitiable existence fallen!
    Dusk was approaching by the time I arrived at
the burial ground. The air had grown chill and the sky was
beginning to darken. It was autumn. Even though the weather had
been dry, the ground in the churchyard, under the perpetual shadow
of massive twisted oaks, was constantly damp. Wet leaves clung to
the toes of my shoes.
    I knew the path to Virginia's vault well. I
could have walked it with my eyes closed, for I had made the trip
often enough, even in the dead of night. Once, I had visited her in
my sleep. I had awakened at her graveside with my stocking feet in
the snow and no knowledge of how I had come to be standing there.
Oh, my Virginia! No man had ever experienced a grief as deep as I
had for the loss of his beautiful little wife. As I turned a corner
and saw the structure of Virginia's vault at the end of the path
before me, I regretted that I had but a single red rose to lay upon
it.
    And I saw something else, too: a figure that
seemed to glide soundlessly across the graveled path and vanish
behind the very structure to which I was bound. I had caught only
the briefest glimpse of the form, but it was enough to cause my
heart to quicken. Had I seen a ghost? Or merely some overdue
mourner to Virginia's grave?
    Neither seemed likely. As I pondered the
issue, noting that the phantom failed to re-appear from either end
of the vault, I became convinced