“I’m the one to deal with him,” said Buck.
Miss Jones said, “You will not. Neither of you. I simply will not permit it.”
“Miss Jones,” I started, having no idea what I would blurt out next but intent on refuting her somehow. Before I could do so, Poe raised a hand to silence me. I knew by this gesture that he was about to speak. But first we were forced to endure another of his damn pauses.
“While at the good doctor’s home this morning,” he finally said, “I observed a certain oddness to the building. Have you noticed it, Augie?”
I had not, and shook my head.
“On the right side of the house, the last window on the first floor opens off the library. Directly above it, the last window on the upper floor opens off the doctor’s bedroom. And yet … ,” he stroked his chin. “And yet the building continues beyond those windows for another ten feet or so.”
I tried my best to envision it. “But the library wall on that side of the building has no doorway.”
“Nor, if I recall correctly from my brief visit there, does the bedroom above it.”
“All of which means what?” Buck asked.
Poe drew himself up until he was sitting erect. He placed both hands on his knees. “It means,” he said, “that although I hold the utmost respect for the wishes of Miss Jones, I find that I must agree with Augie. The house, you see, is not as it appears. Or rather, it is more than it appears. We must get inside that house.”
Buck and I nodded. Miss Jones said nothing but sat there shaking her head.
NOTHING MORE could be accomplished by Poe or me for the rest of the day or the whole of the next, so we busied ourselves with letters, mine to Mrs. Clemm (with no reference to our current complications), Poe’s to former colleagues in New York and Philadelphia, in an effort to revive his sagging literary possibilities. Both of us assumed, at least in our public faces, that this mess would soon be over and we would continue with our lives on more or less the same course as before our collision with Pittsburgh.
The next day Miss Jones and Buck put in a long morning of walking so as to determine the hours for Sunday’s Easter services. We knew that Brunrichter, like many confirmed atheists, assumed the mask of a believer for professional reasons. That is, though he placed the whole of his faith in the revelations of science, he attended church weekly as an aid to his reputation and standing in the community.
Poe thought he recalled being told by Mrs. Dalrymple that she was Episcopalian—a foggy memory at best. Tevis was the unknown. We suspected, however, that believer or not he would be a churchgoer too, if only at his employer’s insistence.
“The biggest scoundrels,” said Poe, “will invariably make the biggest show of piety.”
Playing the possibilities, then, Miss Jones composed a chart on which she listed the Sunday hours of worship service for any and all of the churches the Brunrichter household might attend. In the end she pronounced the hour between ten and eleven next morning our hour of opportunity.
“One hour only?” said Poe. “It is a very large house, Miss Jones.”
“But there will be four of us to search it,” she said.
“Three,” he corrected.
“Now, Mr. Poe—”
“No, Miss Jones. You will not risk all you have labored to create.”
“But if I choose—”
“You will not choose. And that, my dear lady, to whom each of us is forever indebted, is the end of it.”
He capped the statement with something like a bow, which culminated with him touching his lips to the back of her brittle hand. I could not help but smile at the way she blushed and very nearly tittered. Had I attempted to placate her with such a gesture, she would have raked her knuckles across my skull.
In any case, the matter was settled. And so followed a restless afternoon. Upon sunset, the restlessness increased. Poe and Miss Jones pretended to read, Buck and I played euchre, then poker, then cribbage. After dinner Poe recited for us, at Miss Jones’s request, her favorite poem—a generous gesture on his part but one that did little to ease our restiveness.
Imagine, if you will, the author seated not far from the parlor’s fireplace, so that the orange glow from the low flames falls on the side of his face, the other side in shadow, while he declaims, in a tone of melancholy both well-practiced and real, “when each pale and dying ember / wrought its ghost upon the floor,” and then later when he reads to his breathless audience of three, sotto voce, “It is the beating of the hideous heart!”
Not long after, Miss Jones fetched blankets for Buck and Poe, and I brought mine up from the basement, and we each claimed a narrow piece of the parlor floor. Miss Jones bade us good night and good rest and left us alone for the remainder of the evening.
One final bit of conversation for the night was this, after the lamp had been extinguished and we each lay on our backs, watching the dance of flame shadows on the white ceiling:
Buck said, “I never been read to by anyone before except for my Susan.”
“Whose voice, I am sure,” said Poe, “was far more mellifluous than my own.”
“I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy yours,” said Buck. “It’s just that I ain’t never heard anything like it before.”
“Strange how comfortable it was for me,” said Poe. “I have never been so at ease with an audience.”
“Maybe from now on you will be.”
“Thank you, sir. Your good wishes are appreciated.”
There was a long pause then. There seemed nothing more to say. But then Buck went ahead and said it, what I, for one, was thinking too.
“I hope Susan got to hear it. I hope it works that way.”
I clenched my fists beneath the blanket. I squeezed my eyes.
“Do you figure it does, Mr. Poe?”
Another pause. Then, “I think, sir, that if anything survives this misfortune we call Life, it is the goodness of a soul like your daughter’s.”
“And may the same hold true for your own. For your own precious wife, I mean.”
“Hand in hand,” said Poe, the life-long scorner, the cynic formed of misery. “Even now they stand and watch us, Buck. Hand in hand.”
33
EASTER MORNING, a clear sky, robin’s egg blue. We had been in concealment since before the wispy fog had lifted, the three of us watching the mansion from a stand of birches some sixty yards from the house, watching across a wide expanse of yard, none of us with much to say, more eager than worried, though I imagined I detected, despite the morning’s clarity and glimmer, some kind of sadness in the air, so that even as I watched a flock of grackles pecking at the soft ground, even as I smiled to see the white-and-yellow heads of Easter lilies peeking from the grass, I felt a vague, unsettling heaviness in my chest, and spent some time in reverie of those not so distant days made sweeter now in afterthought than they had ever been in fact.
A sound from the rear dooryard, the clap of a door. Marcus Keesling, a dark-haired boy, maybe twelve or so, came leading a roan mare from the stable. Brunrichter kept two horses, this one and its matched mate, identical but for the white blaze on the first mare’s chest.
One after another the horses were led to the carriage house. Poe looked to me and nodded; a signal to be ready. I did the same to Buck.
Tevis was the first to emerge from the house. Straight across the yard to the carriage house, whose double door had now been swung open. The snap of reins, Tevis’s gruff, “Haw!” and out came the horses trotting smartly, hitched to a brougham.
Tevis pulled the carriage close to the rear door, from which Mrs. Dalrymple emerged, still tying her bonnet. She climbed up beside Tevis, leaving the interior of the carriage empty. Then around to the front of the house to wait near the veranda. Tevis set the brake and climbed down and stood ready at the carriage door.
Several minutes passed before Brunrichter emerged. Black frockcoat and trousers, wine-colored waistcoat, and one of his fancy glass canes—perhaps the very one he had
given me, which I then chose to leave behind when I vacated the house. Before coming down off the porch he turned and locked the door. Locked it, I told myself, because there were secrets inside.
Soon the carriage went out the gate and turned toward town. Buck and I, ready to run, looked to Poe; he stood with his head cocked, listening, one hand slightly raised as a signal that we should wait. I waited until the clop of hooves could no longer be heard, and then, though Poe remained motionless, hand in the air, I ran anyway, zigzagging back through the trees so as to approach the mansion from its front face lest I be spotted by the stable boy in the rear.
Poe’s “Wait!” was just a whisper and it did nothing to slow me. Nor did it hold back Buck, who raced close on my heels. He reached the veranda only seconds behind me. I went from window to window along the porch, but none would budge.
Poe soon joined us. “No luck?” he asked.
“We might try the back. But I have my doubts we will find a door unlocked. Plus, the stable boy is back there somewhere. Probably his father as well.”
“Can you get onto the roof?” Poe asked. “Or have you lost the knack?”
I knew a challenge when I heard one. Off the porch and around to the far side I went, surveying the possibilities, Poe at my side. I had brought along a small pry bar, both as weapon and tool, and I pulled it from my jacket now and gripped it tightly. I could only assume that Buck remained as we had left him, his huge paw on the glass doorknob, squeezing, eyes hard, as if he intended to tear the door off its hinges.
I asked Poe, “Can you boost me onto the porch roof?”
“You’ll never reach it.”
“If I stand on your shoulders I might.”
“It’s sixteen feet at its lowest.”
“I’ll get a chair off the porch for you to stand on.”
“They are wicker, Augie. Slow down and think.”
I turned away from the house then, let my gaze travel over the ground. Several yards beyond the rear of the mansion, overturned atop a woodpile, was a handcart. “There!” I said. “We can prop that cart against the house.”
Poe eyed it critically. “Precarious at best.”
I grinned at him. “Have you lost the knack?”
His eyes narrowed. “Get it,” he said.
I sprinted to the corner of the house, peeked toward the outbuildings, saw no one, heard nothing. Raced forward hunkered low. Seized the cart by its handles, hoisted it onto its front wheel and ran.
Safe behind the house again, I slowed and pushed the cart past Poe, who continued to watch the stables. Satisfied that I had not been seen, he finally joined me near the front corner of the house, where I attempted to make the overturned cart as stable as possible. He gave the cart a shake. “It appears solid enough,” he said. “All right, climb aboard.” And with that he knelt.
I was the larger man and by all rights should have hoisted Poe onto the roof. But I was more adept with a pry bar than he, more experienced as a sneak thief. I straddled his neck.
Poe struggled to stand erect. “Wait until I am in place and stabilized,” he said. “Then you can stand.”
With that he moved to the overturned cart. I placed both hands against the wall, dug in my fingernails, hoping to take some of the weight off Poe. Still it was no easy task for him to lift even one foot onto the edge of the cart. He struggled mightily, several times lunging upward, shifting his weight, but he could not elevate his other foot off the ground.
He stood there panting, hand to the wall, with me still astride his shoulders. “Let’s trade positions,” I whispered.
Poe put a foot to the cart again. “One more time.”
Again he struggled. But it was hopeless. “This is nonsense,” I whispered. “Where’s Buck. He can throw me onto the roof.”
As if in answer, a shattering of glass. I knew without needing to see—I could see it all too clearly in my mind’s eye—that we had exhausted Buck’s patience. Life had exhausted Buck’s patience. He had put a fist through the etched glass door, consequences be damned.
Poe was crabbing sideways, trying to see onto the porch. I heard footsteps racing through the rear yard. “Put me down!” I hissed. “Down!”
Poe sank to his knees. “Stay here,” I told him, then hopped off just in time to hear a startled yelp from the opposite side of the porch. By the time I reached the porch, Buck was holding the stable boy by the scruff of the neck.
The boy looked at Buck and then at me. “Are you robbing the place?” he asked, his eyes a bit too wide with eagerness.
Buck said, “You know where things are in there, do you?”
“I ain’t never been inside except for the kitchen. Wouldn’t mind going in with you, though.”
Buck turned his head just slightly and said, loud enough for Poe to hear, “I think a better place for you is back where you came from. Your father out there too?”
“Taking a nap,” the boy said.
“Time to rise and shine,” said Buck as he hauled the boy off the porch.
Ten seconds later I signaled to Poe. Then he and I stepped onto the porch. The foyer now stood open to us, littered with milky glass. I swept a hand toward the shattered entrance. “Welcome home,” I said.
POE WENT straight to the far wall of the library. He rapped his knuckles here and there, listening for a hollow sound, a secret panel. “There are only four possibilities,” he told me. “The entrance is here, or through the master bedroom, or from the attic or the cellar. You try upstairs.”
I was out of the room in an instant, across the foyer and under the massive chandelier, for which I felt an almost overwhelming contempt. Nothing would have pleased me more than to pull the entire glittering thing to the floor.
But it was, after all, just an object. And while the destruction of objects might be useful in the venting of excess animus, the truest satisfaction could come only from destroying the ultimate source of one’s hatred. I went straight to Brunrichter’s bedroom.
The place reeked to me. It reeked of his unctuous smoothness, it stank of his arrogance. Whatever oils he applied to his hair, whatever scents he employed, those fragrances in my nostrils smelled only of deceit, an odor of charred logs and wet ash.
His bed, the Turkish carpet, the landscapes and pastoral scenes that hung on the walls, even the bookcases and the volumes they contained—all were so neat, so undisturbed. It aggravated me to find no robe tossed carelessly over a chair, no well-worn slipper kicked into a corner. But on the window seat there was a squirrel cage, and I smiled to see it empty. A squirrel in the house is thought to bring good luck, and I was determined that Brunrichter should enjoy no such thing.
To the wall in question. From the center of the room I scrutinized it. I could detect nothing amiss. Then closer, to lift every picture away from the wall, to slide my hand up and down the textured wall covering, over the intaglio of slender vines and delicate flowers against a background of cream. Again, no sign of a secret entrance.
I even looked under the bed. Behind the heavy, carved headboard. Inside the mahogany chifforobe.
Frustrated, I stepped back to the center of the room. Then, beginning in an upper corner, I ran my gaze down to the floor, then slowly up to the ceiling again until I had scrutinized every inch of the wall. My gaze had come up and over the chifforobe when the import of what I had observed just a moment earlier suddenly dawned on me.
Casters. The chifforobe sat atop metal casters. Why would a piece of furniture so huge, nearly seven feet high and over four feet wide, and filled with a dozen suits of clothes and overcoats, be outfitted for movement?
I seized the wardrobe by its corner and swung it clear of the wall. Nothing behind it. I pushed it farther to the side, so that light from the window was not blocked from falling over the wall. Still, no seams were visible in the wall covering.
All that was visible, all that was out of the ordinary, was but a pale gray shadow, irregular and no larger than my palm, at chest level on the wall. I looked clo
ser. It was an adumbration left by routine touch, the oils and fingerprints accumulated over time from a hand pressed to just that spot. Precisely that spot, and no other on the entire wall.
I pressed my fingertips to the shadow. Pushed inward. The wall gave way just slightly beneath my touch, no more than a quarter of an inch no matter how hard I pushed, and I pushed, finally, with both hands and all my strength. But now, at last, I could see the seam, the cleverly hidden opening.
I still had the pry bar in my belt. I lifted my hands from the door momentarily, reaching for the pry bar. And as my weight came off the wall there was a subtle click, and now the wall sprang open toward me! The door was constructed not to open inward at one’s touch, but to spring outward by an inch or so, just wide enough that I could slip my fingers into the opening and pull the doorway fully open.
The interior was pitch-black and the light from the room did not enter very far. The air that rushed out at me was warm and stale and dry.
I started inside, gingerly feeling my way. And then thought of Poe. Out into the hallway I went, to the railing that overlooked the stairway and foyer. I could see or hear no one below. I hurried halfway down the stairs then, far enough to see into the library, where Poe, standing on a chair, had his eye pressed to a golden gasolier sconce mounted some five feet below the twelve-foot ceiling.
“Sssst—Poe!” I hissed at him.
He turned sharply, saw me hunkered on the stairs, and grinned. “There’s a room behind this wall,” he said.
“I know. I found the doorway upstairs. Where’s Buck?”
“Not back from the stables yet. But look here—you see this? From down below it looks like nothing more than a pearl button inlaid on the sconce—you see it?”
“What of it?” I asked.
“A lens! An eyepiece!”
“Can you see anything through it?”
He shook his head. “The lens is convex. Besides, the room on the other side is dark.”
“But there is definitely a room there?”
Disquiet Heart Page 32