The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  “You’re just full of surprises,” Lenore said absently.

  When they reached the lobby and walked out the door, Lenore saw yet another surprise. Sandy was sitting in her patrol car, watching as she came out the entrance. At first, the look on Sandy’s face was friendly. But when Sandy looked at Lenore, her friendliness turned to something else.

  Sandy got out of her car and walked across the sidewalk as Mann opened his car door for Lenore, about whose looks Sandy had heard much. When she was close enough to get a good look at the woman in Charlie’s passenger seat, Sandy’s posture changed even more, and though Sandy tried to hide it, everyone within thirty yards of them could see.

  “Lieutenant Sandy Jackson, this is Lenore Wilkinson,” Mann said as Sandy stuck her head in his car window.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Sandy muttered. Then she turned to Mann and kissed him on the cheek.

  Mann was surprised by the gesture. There were no public displays of affection while in uniform. But Sandy was more than a cop now. She was a woman—Charlie’s woman—and she wanted Lenore to know it.

  “I’m going over to the Poe house,” Sandy said before glancing at Lenore once again. “I’ll meet the two of you there.”

  * * *

  Poe’s stoic face stared out from a colorful mural on the side of the housing project on Seventh Street. The painting was the Housing Authority’s feeble attempt at making the development blend in with the nearby red brick house where Poe had once lived. The effort was a failure.

  The writer’s sullen image looked on with disapproval at the way the land around his former house had gone from country meadows to a mix of mean streets and hastily constructed new development. To add insult to injury, the man who’d invented the modern detective story was now at the center of one, and from the look on the mural’s painted face, he was none too pleased.

  Sandy pulled up within sight of Poe’s staring image. She parked her cruiser and looked at the corner where the National Park Service, which ran Poe’s former house, vied with the neighborhood for control. Judging by the broken glass and tiny red plastic baggies that littered the ground near the national historic site, the neighborhood had fought the government to a draw.

  She looked at the mural and the housing project that had thus far survived the neighborhood’s gentrification, and she realized that she was now part of the fight to hold that corner. Having transferred from the ninth district to become a lieutenant in the sixth, she was still learning her new environment. From what she saw, it was a world apart from the other side of Center City.

  In her five years in the ninth, Sandy had gotten to know the beggars and security guards, shopkeepers and salespeople in the high-end shopping district on Rittenhouse Square. She’d learned the rhythms of the skyscrapers that loomed within walking distance of City Hall. She’d come to recognize those faces that belonged downtown and those that didn’t. Moreover, she’d recognized her place in it all.

  She was the mediator—the one who knew the district better than it knew itself. As such, she was required to adjust her persona to fit the needs of the moment, and she did so to great effect. She was reassuring to the rich and a counselor to the downtrodden, a disciplinarian to the recalcitrant, and a supporter of her subordinates. More than any of those things, she was a lover to the one who made her rough edges smooth—Charlie Mann.

  But she wasn’t in the ninth district now. She was in the sixth, and things had changed. Her job was different, her location was different, and as she watched Mann pull up at the corner with another unmarked car following closely behind, she realized that her relationship was different, too. That grieved her, but Sandy had watched too many women stifle themselves and the men they purported to love simply because they refused to let go. Sandy didn’t plan to be one of those women.

  She got out of her car just as Mann walked over to meet her.

  “You all right?” Mann asked. “You left the hotel pretty fast.”

  “Let’s just get to work,” Sandy said, her face fixed in the serious expression she wore when she was in cop mode.

  Mann glanced at her once more. Then he signaled to the uniformed officers who’d followed them there from the hotel. One of them helped Lenore out of the car, walked her to the door of the Poe house, and stood guard outside. The cop wasn’t the only one on post. A black, wrought-iron raven hovered against the south wall of the sturdy brick house. It stared into the distance as the four of them walked in and were greeted by a thin woman with inquisitive eyes and short, auburn hair. She was wearing the green uniform of the National Park Service.

  “You must be Detective Mann,” she said. “I’m Ranger Franklin. I’m the one who took your call.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Mann said. “This is Lenore Wilkinson and Lieutenant Jackson. We appreciate you setting this up on such short notice.”

  “No problem. I got the last tour out as quickly as I could so you’d have the house to yourselves. What exactly is it you’re looking for?”

  “We were hoping to learn something about the woman who was killed at Fairgrounds Cemetery this morning,” Mann said. “I understand she’d visited here before.”

  “Yes, we knew Mrs. Bailey well,” the ranger said, her voice tinged with sadness. “She was here a lot over the past few months, trying to find some clue about Poe that she hadn’t already learned.”

  “What kind of clue?” Lenore asked as she walked past the ranger and toward the interactive exhibits.

  “We never knew,” the ranger said with a sad smile.

  Lenore looked at the pulley-driven balloon for children and the television screens for adults. Then she peered around a wall and into a room whose tables and red-cushioned chairs were arranged into what Poe described as a manifestation of good taste. Mann and the others looked at the room, too, and saw that its bookcase and mantelpiece were painted onto the walls.

  Lenore wandered out of that room and stopped at the wall whose cracked plaster and exposed wooden slats led to the actual area where Poe lived.

  “What did Clarissa learn here?” Lenore asked, speaking as she ran her hand along the walls.

  “Nothing she didn’t already know, I’m afraid,” the ranger said as they all followed Lenore into the back room. “We tell specific stories about Poe that we know are factual. Mrs. Bailey wanted more than that. Unfortunately, we couldn’t help.”

  The ranger looked at Lenore. “Would you like to see the rest of the house?” she asked.

  Lenore smiled. “Yes. I’d like that very much.”

  The ranger walked them all into the living room area. It was small by modern standards, perhaps twelve feet across. The walls were blotched and speckled. The wooden floors were painted brown. Lenore looked at every detail while the rest of them watched her curiously.

  “Did Poe own this house?” Lenore asked.

  “No, he rented it with a hundred dollars he won in a writing contest,” the ranger said. “He lived here for about a year with his wife and mother-in-law. His wife was very sick at the time.”

  Lenore walked into the small kitchen and stared at the space where the stove had been. There were holes in the walls for gas lines, and a walkway leading to a back porch. The ceilings were low, and there was a narrow staircase leading to the upstairs.

  “They must’ve been small people,” Sandy said as she looked at the cramped kitchen and low ceilings.

  “Yes, they were,” the ranger said. “Poe was about five eight. Of course, a lot of people in the eighteen hundreds were short by today’s standards.”

  They walked up the rickety stairs to the second floor and saw private rooms with closets and shelves that once held the belongings of Poe; his sickly young wife, Virginia; and his domineering mother-in-law, Muddy.

  Lenore and the others looked through windows whose views once showed similar houses across the street but now showed two-story rows of public housing and the building that housed the German Society.

  A few minutes later, they climbe
d creaky steps to the third floor and listened as the ranger told stories of Poe’s tragic life, filled with abandonment and death, disappointment and poverty. In the midst of her stories about Poe’s exploits as a magazine and newspaper man, she said something that piqued Mann’s interest.

  “He was writing for a newspaper—one of several he worked for—and he challenged readers to send in cryptograms so he could solve them,” she said.

  “Did anyone keep any?” Mann asked anxiously. “Are they in a museum somewhere?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But you can find one of Poe’s cryptograms in a story called ‘The Gold Bug.’ It’s about three men who find buried treasure on an island off South Carolina.”

  “Do you have a copy?”

  “I’m sure I can dig one up.”

  Lenore looked at Mann curiously. “Is there something important about cryptograms?”

  Mann looked to Sandy, who took out her copy of Clarissa’s tattoo and showed it to Lenore. “Do you recognize this?” she asked gently.

  Lenore stared at the picture, touching it with her fingertips and squinting. “No,” she said, her voice filled with uncertainty. “Well, other than the fact that it’s a tattoo.”

  “Yes, but is it anything else?” Sandy prodded. “Is it more than a tattoo to you?”

  Lenore gazed at the picture for a few minutes more, trying to see something, anything other than dead white skin that had been pricked with ink-tipped needles. Try as she might, she could see nothing more than letters and numbers that made no sense together.

  “It’s okay,” Sandy said, nodding to the ranger. “Let’s finish the tour.”

  The ranger led them down a newly built set of back stairs, and they walked into the dark basement whose tiny windows shed shafts of light on dark alcoves, brick floors, and stone walls. The ranger told them that Poe had set the horrors of his short story “The Black Cat” in that basement. From the dangerous wooden steps and the openings to secret passages, the ladders set against bricks and the beams in the low ceiling, it was easy to see how fear could live in such a place.

  Mann watched Lenore carefully as she ran her fingers against the lime and plaster on the basement walls. Sandy watched, too, waiting to see when Lenore’s supposed gift would reveal itself. But there, in the darkest room in the house, where spirits seemed to lurk in shadows, Lenore didn’t feel anything more than what she’d felt while looking at the cryptogram.

  Standing on her toes, she looked out one of the narrow basement windows at the backyard. “I bet it was beautiful back there when Poe was alive,” she said.

  “Yes, it was,” said the ranger. “Poe’s mother-in-law planted flowers and did her gardening back there in the spring and summer.”

  “Can we go out?” Lenore asked.

  “Sure.”

  The ranger led them to the back door, and they followed her outside. The grass had already shriveled and faded with the change of seasons. The area that had been home to brightly colored flowers in the summertime was now filled with dirt and mulch.

  None of this interested Lenore. She was taken with the wrought-iron raven that stood on stilts with its wings spread out and its beak open wide as it permanently soared over the yard.

  “There was a bird like this one in the graveyard this morning,” Lenore said in a faraway voice. “It flew away right after Detective Coletti found Clarissa’s body.”

  The ranger looked at Lenore with those inquisitive eyes. “Are you sure it was a bird like this?” she asked. “Ravens are pretty rare around here. Maybe you saw a crow.”

  “No, the bird was bigger than a crow,” Lenore said as she stared at the sculpture. “Smarter, too.”

  “Why do you say that?” Mann asked.

  “After we heard the gunshot this morning, Detective Coletti chased the killer and lost him. That’s when he found Clarissa’s body. The strange thing about the bird is that he stayed there in that tree, watching the whole thing. And even with all that commotion—a gun going off, a chase through the graveyard—the bird never moved until the killer got away. It was almost like the bird was standing guard.”

  Mann and Sandy both recalled what the commissioner had said about the raven. Lenore hadn’t been there for that conversation, and yet she’d come to the same conclusion that Lynch had. The raven was somehow connected to the case, and to the killer.

  “Maybe that’s what the raven was doing when the killer chased Kirsten through the woods this morning,” Sandy said as she thought through Lenore’s scenario. “Maybe it was standing guard.”

  Lenore looked at Sandy with gratitude. Then she looked at the ranger with questions. “Was Poe’s raven like the one we saw at the graveyard today?” she asked. “Was it a guardian?”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” the ranger said. “Ravens have always symbolized death, and the raven in Poe’s poem is no exception.”

  “What exactly is the poem about?” Lenore asked.

  “It’s about a man grieving his dead lover,” the ranger said, looking her in the eye. “A woman whose name is Lenore.”

  They all looked at Lenore, and she looked inside herself. There, she saw a kindred spirit to the man whose life was filled with one tragedy after another. In a strange sense, she felt as if she understood Poe. She could relate to his pain.

  “In the poem, this grieving man is sitting in his study,” the ranger continued. “His grief is slowly driving him mad, and as he wrestles with the fact that he may never see Lenore again, the raven tortures him with a single word: ‘nevermore.’ So, to answer your question, the raven in Poe’s poem isn’t a guardian. If anything, it’s a symbol of hopelessness—a symbol that Poe later describes as a tool to reveal the human tendency for self-torture.”

  “But what does it mean?” Sandy asked impatiently. “When you strip away all the academic analysis, what did Poe see when he wrote ‘The Raven’?”

  The ranger sighed and looked around at all of them. They stared at her eagerly, waiting for some tidbit that would take them beyond the normal narrative.

  “This isn’t the story I would usually tell, but since you’re here about Clarissa, I feel like I should share it,” she said, looking up at the wrought-iron bird that hovered over them. “Some people look at ‘The Raven’ as evidence of Poe’s ability to see into places that others couldn’t. The people who interpret it that way focus on the stanzas about opening doors, looking into darkness, and dreaming dreams. They also focus on the name Lenore, and they believe that this Lenore, like Poe, can see things. As you probably know by now, Clarissa was among those who believed that. But what you might not know is that there are others who believe it, too. Sometimes they come here, just like Clarissa did, looking for proof that Poe’s visions are actually true.”

  “Can you identify any of them?” Mann asked.

  “Now that you mention it, there was one man who was coming pretty often up until about six months ago. Then all of a sudden he just stopped.”

  “Do you think we can access your surveillance video from that far back?” Mann asked. “Maybe we can identify him.”

  “We might be able to do that,” the ranger said. “I’d have to check with headquarters, but I don’t know how quickly we could get it to you.”

  “Do you remember what the guy looked like?” Sandy asked.

  “I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. He was white, fairly young, and tall, with dark eyes and hair. I used to tease him sometimes about all that dark hair. I told him he looked just like the raven.”

  A chill went through the room as they realized that the description fit that of the man who’d killed twice that day.

  They only hoped they could stop the Gravedigger from killing again.

  * * *

  Sandy had to get away. Standing there in that house, walking through those rooms, and hearing those stories hadn’t awakened her intuition. It had awakened her independence, because being that close to Charlie at a time when she wasn’t sure he wanted to be close to her
had reminded her of who she was.

  She was whole. She had always been whole, and she would be whole whether Charlie ever came around or not. Sometimes, as a cop, she needed to remind herself of that. She was so accustomed to working within a structure and being part of a team that she sometimes forgot that teamwork could only get you so far.

  Born in West Philly at a time when the Junior Black Mafia rolled in custom ragtop Volvos, slinging drugs and killing competitors, Sandy understood survival better than most. She’d seen people rise as teams, but when a team stopped working together, she’d seen those same people drag each other down.

  Sandy wasn’t willing to gamble on the team anymore. She’d much rather hold on to the sure thing, and since Sandy was the only sure thing she knew, that meant holding on to herself.

  If she was going to help solve this case, she couldn’t do it while keeping one eye on the evidence and the other on her man. She couldn’t worry about Lenore either, because in truth, Lenore was no threat to her, and Sandy felt silly for even thinking that way. Lenore was in the midst of a firestorm that, by all indications, someone else had created. If Sandy and Lenore were anything to each other, they were kindred spirits, not enemies.

  As Sandy walked into the sixth police district, which was nestled on a small block halfway between the Poe house and police headquarters, she received mumbled greetings from the desk sergeant and a few of the others who were there. They’d heard about her temporary reassignment to homicide and most of them weren’t happy about it. They felt abandoned, as if she’d been waiting for a better deal someplace else. That couldn’t have been further from the truth, but Sandy didn’t have time to explain that now. She had too many thoughts swirling through her mind, not the least of which was the thought that the case wasn’t as impossible to solve as it seemed.

  She went into the locker room and gathered her things in a Louis Vuitton Speedy. Then she changed into the uniform most popular in the streets of West Philly.

  As she stepped out of the locker room in snug jeans, a T-shirt, and a paper-thin, form-fitting leather jacket, the desk sergeant nearly fell out of his chair. He’d never seen a lieutenant who looked like her. Sandy knew that, and it gave her great pleasure to know that the curves beneath her jacket and jeans were leaving a lasting impression.