Poe shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

detail spilled from my tongue. Peter sat at the edge of his chair, listening with interest. At first, he even shared in the thrill of the incident, but soon enough remembered himself. He declared the Phantom nothing but a cracked lunatic.
    I somehow felt the need to defend, even
commend
the threatening party. “No, Peter, he was no lunatic in the least! In his eyes was a rational purpose of some kind—a rare intelligence.”
    “What cloak-and-dagger business! Why—? Why should he bother to—? What, one of our mortgage cases?”
    I responded with a hoarse laughter that seemed to offend Peter—as though denying a would-be lunatic’s potential interest in our mortgage disputes devalued the whole legal profession. But I was sorry for the tone, and I more calmly explained that this affair was something to do with Edgar Poe; I explained that I had been studying clippings about Poe and had noticed important inconsistencies.
    “For instance, there is the common innuendo, the suggestion, that Poe died of his ‘fatal weakness,’ they say, meaning drinking. Yet who was a witness? Hadn’t some of the same newspapers reported, only a few weeks earlier, Poe joining the Sons of Temperance in Richmond and successfully keeping their oath?”
    “A thorough scamp and a poet, that Edgar Poe! To read him is like being in a charnel-house and breathing the air.”
    “You say you never read him, Peter!”
    “Yes, and that’s precisely why! I would not be half surprised if more people never read him each day. Even the titles of his tales are nightmares. Just because you cared about him, Quentin Clark, should that mean anyone else did? None of this is about Poe, it is about you wanting it to be about Poe! Why, this warning you think you heard surely had nothing to do with him at all, except in some disordered current of your mind!” He threw his hands in the air.
    Perhaps Peter was right; the Phantom hadn’t
specifically
said anything pertaining to Poe. Could I be so certain? Yet I was. Someone wanted me to stop inquiring into Poe’s death. I knew someone had to hold the truth of what had happened to Poe here in Baltimore, and that is what others must have feared. I had to find that truth to know why.
     
    One day, I was checking over some of the scrivener’s copies of an important contract. A clerk thrust his head into my office.
    “Mr. Clark. Mr. Poe. Here.”
    Startled, I demanded to know what he meant.
    “From Mr. Poe,” he repeated, waving a piece of paper in front of his face.
    “Oh!” I gestured to him for the letter. It was from one Neilson Poe.
    The name had been familiar to me from the newspapers as a local attorney representing many defaulters and petty thieves and criminals in court and, for a time, as a director on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad committee. Addressing a note to Neilson a few days earlier, I had asked whether the man was a relative of the poet Edgar Poe’s, and had requested an interview.
    In this reply, Neilson thanked me for my interest in his relation but averred that professional duties made any appointment impossible for some weeks. Weeks! Frustrated, I recalled an item about Neilson Poe I had read in the latest court columns of the newspapers and quickly gathered up my coat.
    Neilson, according to the paper’s advance report of the day’s activities at court, was at that very moment defending a man, Cavender, who had been indicted for assault with attempt to commit an outrage against a young woman. The Cavender case had already adjourned for the day when I reached the courthouse, so I looked in the prisoners’ cells that were housed in its cellar. Addressing a police officer with my credentials as an attorney, I was directed to the cell of Mr. Cavender. Inside the chamber, which was dark and small, a man garbed as a prisoner sat in deep communion with one wearing a fine suit and a lawyer’s fixed expression of calm. There was a stone jug of coffee and a plate of white bread.
    “Rough day at