“I wish I had a plate of crumpets and a pot of tea to offer you,” Mr. Poe continued. “But I’m a little out of sorts just now.”
She waved away his apology. “I didn’t come here to drink tea, but to see you.”
Mr. Poe’s heart beat a little faster. “How are your lovely great-great-great-great grandnieces?”
“Em and Milly are well,” she answered. “Their travels in Mexico and Central America have been rich with new experiences.” She hesitated. “I’m told that travel does that.”
“Yes,” Mr. Poe said. He knew that in Miss Dickinson’s entire lifetime she had barely left her house, let alone her hometown of Amherst. Her travel had been limited to the universe in a human heart.
“The girls will be returning soon to Baltimore,” she said. “And how are your nephews?”
“Ah, Edgar and Allan,” Mr. Poe said. “Actually, they’re in grave danger.”
“I’m so sorry to hear it.”
“Oh, I’ve not taken it lying down. There’s no ‘give up’ in Edgar Allan Poe. I believe I’ve come up with a way to help them. As a matter of fact, the timing of your visit couldn’t be more auspicious, as I’ve arranged for a test of my new idea, which is ready to commence just about now.”
She looked interested.
“Come with me,” he said, striding past her. As they crossed the vast room, which more closely resembled a menagerie than an office, Mr. Poe explained the dire situation facing his great-great-great-great grandnephews. Next, he explained the challenge of communicating to the twins a warning about Professor Perry’s deceitful Poe impersonation, upon which all the subsequent lies rested.
“And you’ve managed to compose such a warning using only animal sounds?” Miss Dickinson asked, impressed.
Mr. Poe nodded as he led the way into a large conference room occupied by a dodo bird, an ox, two snakes, a great egret, a peacock, and a crow. “Thank you all for coming,” he said to the animals.
Miss Dickinson’s eyes widened.
“I had quite a bit of trouble with English,” Mr. Poe said to his fellow poet. “Fortunately, my great-great-great-great grandnephews are fluent in Latin.” He turned to the animals. “Now, get into your proper order, please.”
The animals shuffled and slithered into different places, coming into a straight line.
“Naturally, a whole sentence is impossible,” Mr. Poe explained to Miss Dickinson. “But the Latin phrase ‘dolosa esca,’ which, as you know, means ‘deceitful bait,’ ought to be sufficient to warn the twins of the professor’s disguise.”
“Dolosa esca?” Miss Dickinson looked confused. “You can get these creatures to speak Latin?”
“Just watch,” Mr. Poe said, turning to the animals.
Like a symphony conductor, he raised one hand to quiet them.
Then he pointed to the dodo bird, which made its natural sound: “Doe.”
Next, he pointed to the ox, which lowed.
The snake hissed.
The great egret came next. “Ah.”
The peacock squawked “Eh.”
The second snake hissed.
And the crow screamed: “Kaa!”
Taken together, it sounded like this: Doe-low-sss-ah / eh-sss-kaa.
“See, Miss Dickinson?” Mr. Poe said enthusiastically. “Dolosa esca! Latin for ‘deceitful bait’!”
Miss Dickinson’s eyes were even wider than before. “‘Great is language . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences.’”
Mr. Poe didn’t even mind that she was quoting Mr. Whitman’s poetry rather than his own.
“It’s genius, Mr. Poe.”
“Yes, genius is the right word,” he said. “But I can’t take all the credit.” He turned to his animal chorus. “Good work, ladies and gentlemen . . . er, I mean, colleagues.”
The peacock preened.
“But doesn’t dolosa esca also mean ‘deceitful food’?” asked Miss Dickinson, whose education had been informal but comprehensive.
“Exactly,” Mr. Poe answered, grinning. “Which also works, since Professor Perry has been experimenting with various forms of tasteless and odorless anesthetics, suggesting he’s planning at some point to drug the twins’ food. Dolosa esca . . . deceitful bait, deceitful food, two warnings in one!”
Miss Dickinson looked impressed. But after a moment, a shadow crossed her face. “But the dodo bird,” she said, pointing to the squat, large-billed avian.
“What about it?” asked Mr. Poe.
“It’s extinct on Earth.”
Mr. Poe slapped his forehead with his palm. “How could I forget?”
Miss Dickinson patted his shoulder. “Being up here makes one forget such things,” she said soothingly. “Up here, where nothing and no one is ever extinct.”
“That’s no excuse,” groaned Mr. Poe, deflating with discouragement. “Ah, this ruins everything,” he whispered to himself dejectedly. “There’s no substitute here for that first syllable.”
His animal chorus looked at him sympathetically, especially the dodo. Even the hyenas in the next room ceased their laughing.
“Why not just deliver the message with a parrot or myna or parakeet or . . . a raven, as in that famous poem of yours?” Miss Dickinson asked reasonably. “Couldn’t a talking bird be trained to say ‘dolosa esca’ or some other, even more specific warning, in English?”
Mr. Poe shook his head, dejected. “I tried that. But it doesn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“For some reason, I can only train the talking birds here to speak one word.”
“What word?”
“‘Nevermore,’” he answered. It was the word spoken by the raven in Mr. Poe’s most famous poem. “I’m beaten.”
Miss Dickinson put her hand on his shoulder and this time quoted herself:
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And'never stops—at all—”
Mr. Poe said nothing.
“I have an idea that might be helpful,” she said. “In my division. Greeting cards.”
“You would take that risk?” he asked, surprised.
“The key,” she continued, drawing nearer so that she could lower her voice even more, “is to deliver a greeting card that contains a warning subtle enough to escape the attention of Mr. Shakespeare, while still communicating the necessary warning to your rather brilliant nephews.”
“Indeed,” Mr. Poe agreed. “But there’s so little time.”
“I’d be honored to use a quote from one of your fine poems or stories. May I?” she asked.
“Of course. Do you have one in mind?”
“Not yet, but I’ll find something.” She turned and started swiftly toward the elevator.
What a woman! thought Mr. Poe.
O’ER HILL AND DALE
A soft snow was falling as the long black limousine pulled up to the Poe family’s house.
Edgar and Allan had been watching for the car.
Now they turned from the living room window and called, “It’s here!”
Wiping cookie crumbs from his hands, Uncle Jack came out of the kitchen in his blue suit and best silk tie; meantime, Aunt Judith preened with last-minute intensity in front of the hall mirror. She was dressed in her Sunday best, including the pearls that had come to her through many generations of Poes.
“Let’s get a move on,” Uncle Jack called to her.
“Just a minute, dear,” she answered, making minute adjustments to her already perfect hairstyle. “One doesn’t get invited just any old evening to dinner at a hundred-acre private estate in Green Spring Valley. Getting one’s appearance right is important.”
Roderick stretched, as if to show off his new Italian leath
er collar.
The twins wore suits but no ties. They wanted to maintain the rough-and-ready appearance of private detectives rather than the appearance of junior business executives.
After all, they were detectives.
Edgar carried a digital recorder to get Miss Reynolds’s words down for posterity—the solution to a 165-year-old murder mystery that would set free the ghost of their great-great-great-great granduncle.
Naturally, this was reason enough to solve the crime.
But naming the killer of such a famous author would also make global headlines, creating a welcome distraction from the current lead news: the imminent reentry of the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite.
Newspapers, websites, twenty-four-hour TV news channels . . . There had been predictions of crash landings anywhere from California to Siberia to South Africa. The satellite had been the last place Mal and Irma Poe had been alive. Truth be told, Edgar and Allan felt somehow guilty for the damage the crash might do. All the reassurances of their aunt and uncle failed to make the boys feel otherwise.
This made publicly solving Edgar Allan Poe’s murder that much more important.
The doorbell rang.
“Poe family?” the formally clad chauffeur asked as Uncle Jack opened the front door.
Moments later, the four Poes and Roderick settled into the comfortable leather seats in the back of the stretch limousine, which pulled away from their house with a smooth swoosh. This wasn’t the first time the boys had ridden in high style. Just a few weeks before, they’d been picked up by limos for their respective TV show appearances in New Orleans. But they’d never been in one this luxurious before. The interior had tiny glittering lights, like a nightclub.
“Look, imported water,” Aunt Judith said, taking a small glass bottle from one of the cup holders.
Allan took a bottle too, pouring its bubbling contents into a glass for Roderick, who’d settled comfortably on the thickly carpeted floor.
“And over here, free booze,” said Uncle Jack. He didn’t drink hard liquor, but he took the top off the crystal decanter and smelled the alcohol anyway. “I think it’s the real stuff, from Scotland. We’re traveling in style, boys.”
“And reading lights, like in an airplane,” Aunt Judith added, switching on the light above her head. “And free reading material.”
Tucked into a leather pouch were a half dozen current magazines along with the day’s newspaper, neatly folded.
“They got any news magazines in there?” Uncle Jack asked.
Allan rummaged through. “Here you go, Uncle Jack,” he said, handing him a magazine with the president of the United States on the cover.
“Thanks,” Uncle Jack said, switching on his overhead light.
“Anything for me?” Aunt Judith inquired.
Edgar handed her a glossy magazine about historic homes.
“Perfect,” she said.
“And you, Roderick?” Allan asked.
The cat merely purred in response.
“He’s all caught up with his reading,” Edgar said.
During the forty-five-minute drive to the estate, Allan rummaged through the leather pouch, avoiding the day’s newspaper with its satellite speculation, and chose instead a science magazine, which featured articles on turtle eggs and cold fusion energy. Meantime, Edgar leafed through National Geographic, taking particular interest in photographs of recently discovered cave paintings in France believed to date back over forty thousand years. With all the reading lights switched on, the family saw only their own reflections in the tinted windows and nothing of the moonlit, snowy night passing at sixty-five miles per hour outside.
The chauffeur turned on the intercom and announced that they were nearing their destination. The Poe family switched off their reading lights to look outside. Moonlight reflected off the newly fallen snow, illuminating skeletal poplar, oak, and maple trees that stretched into a distance of gently rolling hills.
“Beautiful country,” Uncle Jack commented.
The limousine slowed to a stop. The chauffeur rolled down the divider that separated the front seat from the passenger section. “This is the gate to the estate,” he said. “It’s another half mile from here, through the grounds, to the main house.”
With the divider down, the Poes could see through the windshield as tall gates slowly parted before them. Then the chauffeur rolled up the divider, obscuring the road ahead as he accelerated through the entrance and onto a gravel road.
Aunt Judith checked her makeup in a compact mirror.
Uncle Jack gathered up the magazines, folded the newspaper, and put them all back into their leather pouch. “Hey,” he said, surprised.
“What?” the twins inquired.
Uncle Jack turned to them, switching his reading light back on. “You guys missed these in here.” He held two greeting card–size envelopes.
The boys flipped on their reading lights.
Each envelope had been addressed in a beautiful hand:
Edgar and Allan were impressed both by the penmanship and by the formal address: young masters . . . It had a nice ring to it, even if Master This-or-That seemed to belong more to the nineteenth century or early twentieth than to today.
“We missed these?” Allan asked his uncle doubtfully.
“Well, they didn’t come from nowhere,” Uncle Jack replied.
“Are they from you and Aunt Judith?”
The two shook their heads.
“Must be from Miss Reynolds,” Aunt Judith suggested. “To welcome you boys to her estate.”
It was a reasonable proposition.
Except that the twins were sure the envelopes hadn’t been there forty minutes before, when they’d sorted through the magazines.
So where had they come from? And how did they get here?
The boys didn’t know.
But they had strong suspicions as to what they were: more cryptic messages from that mysterious entity who for years had been sending them warnings.
“Well, open them,” Aunt Judith said, switching on her light.
The twins opened the envelopes and removed identical greeting cards. On the front of each was a picture of a river winding through a northern Italian city that looked familiar, though they couldn’t quite place it. And stranger yet was what was written inside:
Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist . . . not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!
The cards were not signed.
“What the heck?” exclaimed Uncle Jack.
“It’s nonsense,” said Aunt Judith. “Some kind of prank?”
“Actually, it’s excerpted from a short story,” Edgar told her. “‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Is that the one about the man who’s shadowed everywhere by his double?” Uncle Jack asked, being more acquainted with his ancestor’s work than that of any other writer.
“Right, a doppelgänger,” Edgar said.
“A what?” Uncle Jack asked.
“It’s a literary term from German,” Allan answered. “From doppel, meaning ‘double,’ and gänger, meaning ‘goer.’”
“Yes, but what about the quote?” Aunt Judith asked.
The twins’ singular mind set to work on the problem. And they’d likely have figured it out in a flash . . .
But the limousine made a gentle stop and the back door was opened, not by the chauffeur or even a butler, but by Miss Birdy Reynolds herself, who leaned into the car and said with a smile, “Welcome to my home, dear Poes.”
The family piled out into the crisp January night.
“It’s too cold to linger here,” Miss Reynolds continued. “Come inside.”
But the Poes needed a moment to take in the
mansion, which was like something out of a strange dream, being a massive amalgam of architectural styles from different historical eras.
The broad marble staircase that led up from the driveway was decorated with golden, Second Empire–style lamps—countless ornate curlicues—like those on some of the bridges in Paris; the fifteen-foot-high wooden front doors at the top of the stairs were made of crosshatched planks of pine, like the gates of a frontier fort. The flat roof, as large as a football field, was lined with battlements, like a medieval castle, while one corner of the mansion was anchored by a rectangular Italian Renaissance–style tower and the other by a round, turreted tower that looked like it might be home to Sleeping Beauty.
The limousine pulled away.
“Come, come,” Miss Reynolds insisted, hurrying up the stairs and opening one of the enormous wooden front doors, indicating with a sweep of her hand that they were to enter before her. “I’m afraid it’s the servants’ night off, and so I’m unable to greet you as formally as I’d like. No butler. A mere rented limousine, rather than my personal chauffeur. Please, I mean no offense.”
“No offense taken,” Aunt Judith said as she entered the mansion.
“Your hospitality is exemplary,” Uncle Jack assured his hostess as he reached the doorway and politely indicated that she was to go inside before him.
She nodded and went in.
With tail held high, Roderick followed her.
Uncle Jack turned to his nephews. “Best behavior, boys,” he whispered as he ushered them inside.
“Why not?” they answered.
They had nothing against Miss Reynolds. It was her ancestor who’d been the murderer.
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
A LETTER DELIVERED THREE DAYS BEFORE TO THE GREEN SPRING VALLEY MANSION
IGER COFFIN MAKERS
Serving discreet customers since 1845
Dear Professor,
First, allow me to express my sympathies for the law enforcement interference that befell you last year. What a shame that the luxurious child-size coffin we delivered to your Kansas location is now in the hands of the authorities, empty. On a brighter note, it is my pleasure to inform you that we can offer you free overnight shipping of a replacement child-size coffin to your Maryland address. Additionally, because you are a valued customer, we will include our deluxe cat-size coffin at no charge.
The Pet and the Pendulum Page 6