Disquiet Heart

by Randall Silvis

She was standing at the woodstove, alternately tending the ham and, in another skillet, frying slices of buttered bread. On the cooler edge of the stove top sat a pot of mush, and on the sideboard a quart of milk with two inches of golden cream on top.

  “Buck and me,” she corrected.

  I misunderstood. “Isn’t there anything for me?”

  She gave me a censorious look. “I had been told that you are a writer.”

  “That’s true, I am.”

  “Then if you expect to eat in this house, you had better remember the proper grammar. The correct phrase is not me and Buck, but Buck and me.”

  “Ah, of course, I knew that. I mean I know I should have said Buck and me. It’s just that it’s so easy to slip up, to … .”

  “To revert to your primitive ways?” she asked.

  I smiled sheepishly.

  “At least you didn’t say Buck and I.”

  “Or I and Buck, which is even worse. I’ll bet it sets your teeth on edge, doesn’t it? Whenever somebody speaks improperly.”

  “I arrived in this city twenty-seven months ago,” she told me. “My teeth have not been off edge since.”

  I grinned and nodded, thinking it a joke. But she did not smile. “You may return to the basement now,” she told me. “I will serve your breakfast there.”

  “It would save you some trouble if we were to eat here in the kitchen, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would not,” she said.

  Back down the stairway then and into the dungeonlike cellar. Despite the wood-burning boiler down there, the place seemed very much like a cell, and a dread seeped into me with every step descended.

  Until I saw what Buck had spread across the small table for me to view. He was standing there beside the table now, the oil lamp burning with a high flame. Along the nearest half of the table, between the lamp and me, were a dozen tiny pieces of broken nautilus shells, ribbed and curved, all of a similar size and the same delicate pink hue.

  I stood close to the table. “From around Brunrichter’s mausoleum?” I asked.

  “They are,” Buck said.

  “They look just like the one you found in your house.”

  “Which is there among them now. See if you can pick it out.”

  I studied them a moment, but soon gave up. “It’s impossible to tell.”

  “I guess that’s the point here, isn’t it?” he said.

  I pulled out a chair and sat. “Question is, what does it tell us?”

  “It tells us that whoever was in my house was also at that mausoleum one time or another.”

  “It could well have been me,” I said.

  But he did not wish to consider this possibility. “Let’s just say it wasn’t. For the sake of argument. Who else could it’ve been?”

  “Are you sure those shells can’t be found anywhere else around here?”

  “I’ve lived along these rivers all my life. I’d know.”

  “Could Susan have brought the shell into the house herself?” I asked. “Stuck in the tread of her own boot, for example?”

  “When was she ever up to the mausoleum?”

  “But maybe she picked it up in another place. From outside the mansion, for example. Where it had been carried and dropped by somebody else.”

  “She was only there that one night, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s all, yes.”

  “According to what the doctor told the police, she never even lighted from the carriage.”

  “But she did. I walked her onto the porch myself, and then into the foyer.”

  “Why would he lie about that?”

  I explained the doctor’s motivations in obscuring the events of that evening, the harm it might do his reputation were the true nature of the literary reception to become widely known.

  “So maybe he killed her just to keep her quiet about it,” Buck said. “So she wouldn’t tell nobody what she saw.”

  I shook my head. “I’m the bigger threat to him. Anyway I doubt that those parties are much of a secret. Not among the rich anyway. So it’s not gossip he would fear but a more public kind of criticism. As I might provoke in a newspaper piece.”

  Buck stood there rubbing a bristled cheek. The hollows of his eyes looked black, even in the yellow light of the lamp. “Couldn’t of been him anyway,” he muttered.

  “Why do you say that?”

  He nodded toward the staircase, down which Miss Jones was descending one slow, deliberate step at a time, a wicker tray held before her, heavily laden with two plates of food and two steaming mugs of tea. She said, “Dr. Brunrichter was not absent from the reception.”

  “You spoke with the guests?” I asked.

  “I spoke with four guests, to be precise.” She same to the table, stood there holding the tray bosom high, unmoving, until Buck lifted the lamp out of the way and then swept the broken seashells into his hand. Miss Jones set the tray in the center of the table.

  “All four guests confirmed that, following your hasty departure, Dr. Brunrichter and Mr. Poe alike returned to the library. Mr. Poe was made comfortable on the divan, where he remained for the evening, sometimes sleeping and sometimes not. Dr. Brunrichter entertained his guests with several selections played upon the Chickering. One of the young ladies sometimes accompanied him vocally.”

  “What about Tevis?” I asked. “He’s the one who slugged me. Did you ask about him?”

  “I did not, but he was mentioned. By Mrs. Verhoven, to be specific. She informed me that the doctor asked his Mr. Tevis to station himself at the library door in the event that you might return to cause further disruption. Mrs. Verhoven expressed her regrets that you had conducted yourself like a ruffian. She remembered you from a picnic several days earlier, at which time, she said, you conducted yourself as a fine young gentleman should.”

  Buck gave me a fierce look. “Could they all be lying?” he asked.

  Miss Jones continued. “Scarcely an hour passed between Mr. Dubbins’s departure from the estate and your return to your own home, Mr. Kemmer. Within another thirty minutes, the police, alerted by you, had arrived at the estate in search of Mr. Dubbins. At which time they found Dr. Brunrichter still at the piano, and all guests still in attendance.”

  Now nobody spoke. The smell of the food there in front of me, so appetizing only minutes earlier, was turning my stomach. As did the notion that Susan’s death could be ascribed no rationale. The fact that life is meaningless is one I had already come to suspect, but that even the best of us might die needlessly, with nothing gained from our demise, nothing learned—this was too bitter a truth to be made to swallow.

  Eventually I looked across the table and raised my eyes to Buck, whose gaze had gone vacant, utterly blank of hope. “We should have some of this fine breakfast,” I told him. “We won’t have another chance to eat until after the students leave.”

  “There will be no students,” Miss Jones informed me. “I have canceled all classes for the week ahead.”

  I nodded. Neither Buck nor I reached for our plates. I have no doubt that he was as hungry as I, but it was a two-sided hunger, and the deeper one would not permit the lesser to be satisfied.

  “I need to talk with Poe,” I said then.

  “Impossible,” said Miss Jones. “You could never go to him now.”

  “But he could come here.”

  “Could,” said Buck. “But why would he?”

  “He is still my friend. I know he is.”

  “And Brunrichter’s friend as well.”

  “The two things aren’t necessarily incompatible. Look, I don’t care for the doctor’s manner, I never have. But apparently he had nothing to do with Susan’s death. I don’t like him because of the way he’s trying to take control of Poe. Plus, Mr. Poe is sick. And I don’t trust the medicines he’s being given. He’s been no more than a shadow of himself ever since we came to Pittsburgh. That’s another reason why you need to bring him here.”

  But Buck was shaking his head. “The police c
atch you a second time, they’re going to chain you to a wall.”

  “Prudence,” said Miss Jones. “We must be prudent in everything we do.”

  “We need his mind,” I said.

  “Have you not already stated that his mind is clouded?”

  “But if we can get him away from his medicines for a day or two … get him away from the wine and brandy …”

  “You jeopardize your freedom,” said Miss Jones. “Ours as well.”

  I turned in my chair, looked up at her, lifted a hand and laid it lightly atop her wrist. She stiffened at the contact, as if to pull away. But I drew her brittle arm away from her body, enclosed her hand in both of mine. Her fingers were as cold and hard as sticks, her knuckles like stones. But from the palm of her hand came a warmth, a low-banked heat, ageless and aching. I pressed the heat of my own hand into it.

  “Miss Jones,” I told her. “Because of what you have done for me, your love for Susan, there is nothing you could ask of me that I would not do my utmost to provide. I am in your debt forever. But I must make this one last request of you. Please. We need Mr. Poe.”

  “We have the three of us. That should be sufficient.”

  “We have your wisdom, it’s true. Your cleverness. Your educated mind. And we have Buck’s strength. His loyalty. A father’s determination.”

  “We have your fearlessness,” he told me.

  “Maybe fearlessness, maybe foolishness,” I said with a smile. “In any case, what we have together is a great deal. But we need more. We need an eye that can see into the very heart of darkness. We need an ear attuned to evil in all its seductive voices. We need a man who knows how to straddle the worlds of light and darkness, and a mind that can peer into both worlds at once.”

  “Can we trust him?” Buck asked. “That’s the only thing I need to know.”

  I looked again at Miss Jones, my hands still wrapped around hers as I waited her answer.

  Half a minute passed. Finally, as if struggling against the pull of gravity, she raised her free hand and brought it to rest atop my own. Her thin lips smiled. Of Buck she asked, “Our Susan trusted Mr. Dubbins, did she not?”

  “She did,” Buck said.

  She patted my hand. “Then we shall as well.”

  VANITY, THY name is Poe.

  On a sheet of her finest stationery, Miss Jones wrote this:

  My dear Edgar,

  Imagine my surprise to learn that you, too, are stranded in Pittsburgh! My steamboat departs, however, at noon. Can you meet with me here? Please, you must, for I have great news for you—a position to secure your place in history!

  Yours most affectionately,

  Rufus

  by the hand of M. Lignelli,

  Secretary to Rufus Griswold

  If anything could cut through Poe’s narcotic fog, it was an appeal to his ambition, made by the one man most frequently his champion (and just as frequently his nemesis or rival). Though I had never met Griswold I had heard of him through Muddy’s letters, of the many times he had come to Poe’s aid with an assignment, a loan, a letter of introduction. He was therefore the only individual I could think of who might be called into action as the proverbial carrot on a stick.

  It being a weekday, I surmised that Brunrichter would be busy at the hospital. But just in case he was not, and felt inclined, as he surely would in that case, to accompany Poe on his visit to another literary figure, I asked Miss Jones to append this postscript: Whatever you do, Edgar, come alone, lest this windfall be jeopardized. But come—and quickly!

  Would Poe, if he had his senses about him, be suspicious of this note, seeing it as vague and possibly spurious? Probably so. But I was counting on Poe’s hunger for security and advancement to allay any doubts he might entertain.

  Buck then carried this note, thrice-folded, sealed with wax, and wrapped once with a strand of red ribbon, down to Penn Avenue, where the aqueduct ended, and where a line of hacks were queued for the morning’s first passengers soon to disembark the Main Line. Then, handing over yet more of his hard-earned savings, he hired a driver and sent him off in his cab to the mansion on Ridge Avenue, with instructions that if Mr. Poe were still asleep he was to be awakened immediately and delivered personally of the note from his old friend and colleague Rufus Griswold.

  Upon completion of this mission, Buck returned first to his own house, and then to Miss Jones’s basement to wait with me. He tossed a pair of boots at my feet.

  “They won’t be a perfect fit,” he said.

  “You can stuff them with newspaper,” said Miss Jones.

  I told her, “Better bring me a week’s worth.”

  She returned soon enough and gave us also a deck of cards with which to distract ourselves. Unfortunately we could concentrate on no mere game and spent most of the next hour seated across from one another at the small oak table, each of us building his own shaky house of cards, story upon story, only to watch them tremble and fall.

  HORSES’ HOOVES in the schoolyard. Miss Jones’s footsteps hurrying above us like muffled gunfire as she crossed to the front door. There she paused, waiting for the knock.

  Tap tap tap. Buck and I sat motionless, breathless, as we stared at one another. Would that be Poe at the door, or the hack driver come back empty-handed?

  Miss Jones’s voice through the floorboards. I could not hear the words but there was something in her tone, something subdued, almost reverential. I remembered how her hand had quivered when she’d penned the note to Poe—she, a humble (figuratively speaking) school teacher, in correspondence (though fraudulently) with the renowned author himself!

  I gave Buck a hopeful look, the hint of a smile. We each leaned back in our chairs, ready to rise, heads cocked toward the stairway.

  And then I heard it. The front door closed and two pairs of footsteps crossed the bare wood floor. Two! The hack driver would have been sent away, which meant that the second set of footsteps could only be Poe’s.

  I rose slowly from my chair, careful that the legs did not squeak. Tiptoed to the stairway. Mounted the first step. Felt my knees weaken, heart begin to race. How was he going to react to the sight of me? How would he react to this duplicity?

  I nodded to Buck. Now he rose too, made his way silently to the cellar exit and sneaked outside.

  The voices upstairs became louder and clearer with every step I ascended. Poe—yes, Poe!—was asking why Mr. Griswold had chosen to meet him here rather than in his cabin aboard the steamboat. Miss Jones feigned ignorance. She bid Poe sit, make himself comfortable. She would fetch the tea, she said. Mr. Griswold would be arriving any moment.

  At the top of the stairs I paused. Strange how I felt at that moment. There were tears in my eyes, butterflies in my stomach. The man still meant a great deal to me, no matter how indifferent to his approval and trust I strove to appear.

  I opened the door, peeked out into the kitchen. Miss Jones, setting cups and sugar bowl atop her wicker tray, glanced my way then jerked her chin toward an adjoining room.

  A couple of slow breaths, just to steady myself. How I detested my body when it weakened like that, going stiff and clumsy and hot with trepidation. In defiance of those reactions, I strode forward.

  Poe was seated in Miss Jones’s library, a small room lined on three sides with crowded bookshelves. Arranged in a circle in the center of the room were two padded armchairs, their seats and back cushions covered with hemlock green cloth, and eight straight-backed chairs. Poe was seated rigidly in an armchair, a hand on each knee as if to brace himself up, eyes turned away from me toward the bookcase on his right.

  I stepped over the threshold. Softly I said, “Good morning.”

  His head turned slowly, mouth already crooked in a lopsided smile. He studied me for a moment. The only alteration of expression was in his eyes, which narrowed just slightly as he squinted to see me better. Ten seconds passed before he spoke. “Augie?” he said.

  How dulled his senses were. How like a dream I must have seeme
d to him.

  I came into the room, crossed to him, stood before him for a moment, then lowered myself into the armchair next to his (thinking even as I did so, I wonder which of these was Susan’s chair?). He still regarded me with a quizzical look, but his eyes were void of the sparks of surprise.

  “I apologize for not being Rufus Griswold,” I told him. “I am very sorry for this deception.”

  He looked at me a moment longer. Blinked. And said, “Rufus should be arriving shortly.”

  It made me wonder how much of the past few days he was actually aware of. Did he remember visiting me in jail? Or understand that I was being hunted as a murderer?

  The front door eased open then, a long slow squeak of hinges. Buck, I knew, was coming inside. He had been charged with the responsibility of preventing Mr. Poe’s egress were he to make such an attempt. But there was small chance of that at the moment. Poe was subdued to the point of mesmerization. I marveled that he had been able to get this far.

  “Do you know where you are?” I asked.

  Again, a delay preceded his response. “I was told that Rufus is here.”

  “Yes. Does anyone else know that you have come here to meet Mr. Griswold?”

  He thought about this for a moment, then answered, “The housekeeper.”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple?”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple,” he repeated.

  “Does Dr. Brunrichter know?”

  “Mrs. Dalrymple will inform him.”

  “Of course. And will she tell him where?”

  He thought about this, closed his eyes, swayed softly in his chair, hands still clamped to his kneecaps. By now Miss Jones was standing in the doorway, holding her tea tray. Buck peered over her shoulder.

  A few moments later Poe’s body jerked and his eyes flew open, his right hand going to the armrest, gripping it tight. “Are we departing?” he asked.

  I laid a hand on his arm. “Not just yet.”

  And now, close up, I could see the glazing of his eyes, could smell the peculiar odor of his breath, almost almondine. There was a laxness to the muscles of his face. His hand began to slip from the armrest.