Entombed (28 page)

"Poe's first
publication?"

"Indeed, Miss Cooper.
He never signed any of the copies, nor did he even keep one for
himself. Only a handful exist at this point in time. It's no secret
that one of our members bought one at auction last year for six hundred
thousand dollars. But that's today. As you know, poetry has never been
the means to support many young men or women. So Poe took another
route-he lied about his age and enlisted in the army. Claimed to be
twenty-two years old and said his name was Edgar Perry."

Mike hadn't known
about the military piece. "Didn't that commit him to five years? Wasn't
that pretty standard back then?"

"You're right,
Detective. But life as a private wasn't all he had imagined, and he
wanted out after two. He actually created an entirely false
pedigree-you people would call it perjury-just so he could gain
admission to West Point and become an officer."

"Poe actually entered
the Academy?" Mike asked.

"He was a cadet for a
year and a half. Until he was court-martialed for gross neglect of
duties and failure to obey orders. He left in disgrace, and again in
debt."

"What then?" I asked.

"He was like a lost
soul. He wandered a bit writing poetry, and finally wound up in
Baltimore, where his father's family lived."

"Was his older brother
still in residence there?"

"That was a brief
reunion. Shortly after Edgar reached Baltimore, his brother died-of
intemperance, it was called at the time."

"Intemperance?" I
asked.

"Alcohol, Miss Cooper.
William Henry Poe drank himself to death by the age of twenty-four."

"What a ghastly series
of events. Did Edgar reconnect with any other family members?" Mercer
asked.

"Some might call the
word 'reconnection' an understatement, Mr. Wallace," Zeldin said.
"Edgar's father, David, had a widowed sister named Maria Poe Clemm
living there in Baltimore with her two children-her son, Henry, and a
nine-year-old daughter named Virginia. So Edgar moved in with his poor
widowed aunt Maria and his little first cousins-the only real family he
had known in a lifetime."

"Seems like finally it
might have provided some stability," I said. "Was it a productive
period for him?"

"In a literary sense,
it was quite so. He was writing stories and getting them published in
the
Southern
Literary Messenger.
Gothic tales of premature burial,
physical decay and putrescence, addiction to alcohol, questions about
the finality of death. You can only imagine how the tragic events of
his youth had fueled his imagination," Zeldin said, pausing for a
moment. "On the personal side, he had fallen in love."

"Against that cheerful
background? Who's the lucky woman?" Mike asked.

"Girl, actually. Hard
to call her anything else. His first cousin, Detective. Little Virginia
Clemm."

Mike slapped his knee.
"The friggin' nine-year-old?"

"He waited, Mr.
Chapman," Zeldin said, wagging a finger and smiling wryly. "He didn't
marry her until she was older-until she turned thirteen."

"And Poe himself?"

"Twenty-seven years of
age."

"Goodness gracious,
great balls of fire!" Mike said, blushing. "People used to think Jerry
Lee Lewis was a pervert. Roman Polanski had to become a fugitive for
the rest of his adult life 'cause he'd had sex with a teenager. Listen
to this shit, will you? Poe was a pedophile. An incestuous pedophile.
Coop would have probably thrown his ass in jail for statutory rape as
well as incest."

"You're speaking of
the poet's muse, Mr. Chapman. My cohorts in the Raven Society believe
in giving great latitude to someone of such unusual creativity. We
don't dwell on his peccadillos," Zeldin said, amused by Mike's reaction
to Virginia's age.

"I'm speaking of
something that would shock just about anybody I can think of. And was
he a drunken pedophile, too?"

"Yes, Detective, there
are letters from his publisher at the very time despairing of the fact
that he was already an alcoholic. And suggestions of a worse addiction."

"What's that?" I
asked, reminded of the involvement of substance abuse in the lives of
Aurora Tait, Emily Upshaw, Gino Guidi, and some of the other names that
had surfaced in our case. I wondered if there was any relevance to the
connection.

"Our members divide on
this issue," Zeldin said. "Some don't like to attribute more faults to
the master than are well documented. But most of us are convinced that
Poe was addicted to opium as well as alcohol. There are even letters
from the period that suggest he used laudanum."

"How was he able to
write?" I asked. "How was he able to leave us this brilliant body of
work?"

"Poe suffered all the
demons, Miss Cooper. Every one of them. Start with his fractured,
loveless childhood. Then, for almost all of his adult life, he was
impoverished-even though his work was known and acclaimed both in
America and Europe. Add to poverty his constant despair over his wife's
chronic, debilitating illness, his lifelong battle with alcohol and
opiates, and what he himself described as his insanity after Virginia's
death."

The three of us were
quiet.

"He died alone?"
Mercer asked.

"His final weeks are
somewhat of a mystery, Mr. Wallace. He left the Bronx for Philadelphia,
then on to Richmond, then back to Baltimore. He was found at a rum
shop, greatly intoxicated and incoherent, the story goes. Friends took
him to a hospital where he spent the night, with terrible tremors and
sweats, addressing and having conversation with spectral images on the
walls of his room. Within days, young Edgar Poe-forty years of age-was
dead. 'Lord help my poor soul' were the last words he spoke."

"And in between all
these aspects of profound dysfunction," I said, "he wrote some of the
most remarkable poetry-and prose- in the English language. It's quite
extraordinary."

"Pure genius.
Tortured, tormented genius, Miss Cooper," Zeldin said. "If he hadn't
been a successful poet, Edgar Allan Poe had all the makings of a serial
killer."

28

"Our head
groundskeeper, Mr. Phelps, tells me you made his acquaintance at the
gorge the other evening, is that right?" Zeldin asked.

At the prearranged
time, Sinclair Phelps had knocked on the door of Zeldin's office to
take him down to a minivan that had been specially fitted with a ramp
for his wheelchair.

"Yes, we've met," I
said, greeting the groundskeeper and introducing him to Mercer.

"Tell them, Sinclair.
They don't seem to believe I hadn't heard of the doctor's unfortunate
drowning by the time I left my office on Tuesday."

"If there's any
question of that, Mr. Chapman, I'm the one who made the notifications,"
Phelps said. "The only call I made, other than to nine-one-one, was to
the director of the gardens. He cautioned me himself not to tell any of
the staff until the police investigators left the park."

Phelps was wheeling
Zeldin to a large elevator, which delivered us all to the ground floor.
"You're welcome to leave your car here and drive with us in the van."

"Where are we going?"
Mike asked.

"To the snuff mill,
Detective," Zeldin said, laughing. "It's the unofficial headquarters of
the Raven Society, for the time being."

The wheelchair locked
in place in the rear of the van. Mike sat in the front passenger seat
with Mercer and me behind him. "Snuff what?"

"If you go back to the
seventeen-forties, Detective, six hundred acres of this prime country
real estate was owned by the Lorillard family. Pierre Lorillard was a
French Huguenot who settled in this part of Westchester and began his
tobacco industry in Lower Manhattan. But he moved it here, to this very
site, to take advantage of the swift flow of the river just below the
gorge.

"Yes, this was all
Lorillard land when Poe came here on his peregrinations, isn't that
right, Phelps?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sinclair's been here
about as long as I have. It's thanks to his conspiratorial nature that
I've been able to give a home to the society's papers."

"You like Poe, too?"
Mike asked.

"No, sir. Not
particularly. I like Zeldin, though. And the mill is too handsome not
to put to some use." Phelps didn't smile. I figured that was a good
thing because the cracks in his weathered skin looked as though they
would split open like an eggshell if they moved at all.

"Tobacco was actually
milled here?" I asked.

"Yes," Phelps said.
"The waterfalls you saw the other night, they're what powered the
tobacco mill in the eighteenth century. That's the only reason the
Lorillards' business could thrive here. There are no other falls in New
York City. The first botanical plantings in this area were rose
gardens. That was purposely so the rose petals could be used to add
scent to the snuff."

"And to think the
Bronx always gets such a bum rap," Mike said. "What's over there?"

The road curved and on
our right was an enormous Victorian structure, crisp white paint
outlining its form against the powder blue sky, countless glass
windowpanes reflecting the rare February sun.

"That's our
conservatory," Zeldin said. "It's the largest crystal palace in
America. You must come back and allow us to guide you through it. It's
full of the world's most exotic plants, set out like an ecotour in its
eleven galleries."

"Pretty spectacular
greenhouse," Mike said.

"The first one was
built in London-Palm House, at Kew, Detective-for Queen Victoria and
her royal gardens. The idea was to construct these enormous, shimmering
structures, allowing all sorts of tropical and rare gardens to be under
one roof, exposed to the sunlight. Remarkable sight, isn't it?"

"I remember coming
here as a child, but I thought it had been closed," I said.

"Just reopened a few
years back, with twenty-five million dollars worth of improvements.
This treasure was built in 1901. In fact, a few of them were erected-I
guess the most famous was at the Chicago World's Fair. But as large as
they seem, they're extremely fragile."

The gleaming cupola of
the rotunda was the centerpiece of the structure, with long transparent
arms stretching out on both sides.

"That's one entire
acre beneath that roof," Zeldin said. "Seventeen thousand panes of
glass hold it together, each one specially made to fit in the curves of
the old iron frame."

The van wound around
the vast grounds of the gardens, stripped now of all the colorful
flowers and plants that would blossom again in another couple of
months. Within minutes, we had left all the buildings behind and
appeared to be driving through a rambling countryside that more closely
resembled the foothills of the Berkshires than an urban park. Ahead for
as far as I could see were thick stands of trees, which looked as
chillingly foreboding as they had when we drove in a couple nights back
to visit the scene of Ichiko's death.

"Into the woods?" Mike
asked.

"This is the only
remaining native forest in New York City," Phelps said.

"I didn't even know
there was one."

"Fifty acres' worth.
It's a first-growth, mixed-hardwood forest. This is what most of the
Bronx looked like when the Europeans arrived," he said.

"What are the trees?"

"Hiawatha and his
hemlocks," Zeldin said. "Don't you remember your Longfellow poems, Miss
Cooper? The most common tree throughout these low hills of the Bronx is
hemlock, and we've got all that's left of them."

"Did Poe use…?" Mercer
began.

Zeldin interrupted
before he could finish. He delighted in showing off his unique mastery
of Poe and the local flora. "Hemlock appears in only one story. It's
called 'Morella.' But in his letters, as I told you, he wrote often
about walking in this very forest."

We crossed over a
bridge and stopped before a handsome stone building, two stories high
and covered with ivy, which appeared to be a meticulously restored
structure from the early nineteenth century.

I stepped out of the
car and the only thing I heard to break the silence in the
snow-carpeted forest was the running water of the river directly below
us.

Phelps opened the rear
of the van and lowered Zeldin's wheelchair down the ramp. We followed
them to a dark green wooden door of the old mill at the back of the
building, fronting the river. This was a third floor, below ground
level, which wasn't visible from the approach on the roadway. Phelps
unlocked the combination that hung on the hinge and turned on the
lights as we entered.

"The administration
hasn't really figured out how to use this building," Zeldin said.
"Frankly, after the Palace, I think it's the structural gem of the
whole institution. So for the meantime, the upstairs is almost like
storage space for the garden's library, but Phelps has helped me outfit
this area for the Raven Society."

One-half of the
basement was a large open space. It was furnished with several
oversized sofas and armchairs that looked as though they had come from
the Salvation Army. The other side was a series of small rooms set up
like a small office suite. The entire wall was ringed with bookshelves.
An assortment of ravens in all shapes and sizes-stuffed birds,
porcelain ones, and carved ebony figures-were mounted on every flat
surface.

"Is this where you
meet?" I asked.

"Rarely. But this is
the repository for all our documents and research. Some members just
enjoy coming here for the ambiance. Sitting in a comfortable chair,
gazing out at the forest, and reading a good book."

"And the members just
come and go as they like? They all have the combination to this lock?"
Mercer asked.