by C. S. Poe
“I’m sure you’re reaching a point.”
I frowned at the interruption. “He kills her with an axe to the head. It’s considered one of his most gruesome tales.”
“With good reason.”
“What color was the cat? Yesterday, at the shop?”
“Right, because you have achromatopsia.”
“You remember that?”
He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled briefly before reading out loud. “Complete achromatopsia is a nonprogressive visual disorder, which is characterized by decreased vision, light sensitivity, and the absence of color vision. Affects 1 in 33,000 Americans. Individuals with complete achromatopsia have greatly decreased visual acuity in daylight, hemeralopia, nystagmus, and severe photophobia.”
“I wouldn’t say severe,” I muttered.
“I don’t notice nystagmus with you,” he stated, pocketing his phone and staring at me.
Nystagmus was the involuntary movement of the eyes, sometimes called dancing eyes.
“My, I’m flattered,” I replied while mockingly holding a hand to my chest. “I had it as a child. It got better as I got older. Only happens once in a while.”
“No color, huh?”
“Nope.”
He nodded thoughtfully and drank his coffee again. “Interesting.”
“Is it?” Not really. “I’d say it’s more of a pain.”
“Has this been officially diagnosed?” Calvin asked.
“Of course it has. You think I play blind for attention?”
“People do a lot of crazy things for attention.”
I snorted and crossed my arms. “I’ll give you the number of my ophthalmologist. Can we talk about the cat, please?”
“The cat was black,” Calvin answered. “Is this your theory? Some crazed madman is reenacting stories of Edgar Allan Poe?”
“I, uh, not exactly,” I said. Was that my theory? All I knew was the resemblance to Poe’s writing was uncanny and disturbing. “‘The Black Cat’ is often compared to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ because of the similar guilt the narrator experiences over his murder.”
“Is that so?” Calvin didn’t sound interested.
“‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is about—”
“I know what it’s about,” he said over me. “I had English 101 too.”
“Then you’ll find it hard to deny that what happened in my shop on Tuesday morning is exactly like that story.”
“Not exactly, unless you found the rest of a body today,” Calvin said.
“Er, no, but the focus of the story is the heart.”
“It was a pig’s heart.”
I threw my hands up. “Look, all I’m saying is, it’s weird. Really weird. Have there been any other deaths lately that—”
“You’re not privy to that information,” Calvin quickly answered.
“I’m not asking for case details.”
“You’re a civilian. I appreciate your theory, but let this go. Don’t start thinking you can play amateur sleuth just because you know a thing or two about crime scenes.”
“I’m not!” I protested.
Max dropped a box in the back, and the crash echoed through the shop. Calvin startled abruptly, almost comically, and dropped his coffee. The lid popped off, and the hot liquid shot all over my counter. He was frozen in place for just a second, long enough for me to see the noise had actually, truly, frightened him.
He blinked and looked down. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay.” I left to fetch a roll of paper towels from the office and brought them back to soak up the sugary, sticky mess. “Max?”
“Sorry, sorry! It was only books!” he said back.
“Only books? Are they okay?” I left the mess and hurried off the steps and down the tight aisles. “Let me see.”
Max opened the box on the floor, motioning to the antiques. “All present and accounted for.”
“What happened?”
“Spider.” He grinned sheepishly.
I crouched down, eyeing the contents. “Go through these next. Make sure the spines and corners are okay. Some of these look like original bindings by the publisher.”
“All right. Sorry, Sebastian.”
I left Max’s side and returned to the register to see Calvin tossing the soiled paper towels in the wastebasket. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll clean it.”
He looked at me. “I’d better go, if there was nothing else you needed to tell me?”
I shook my head. “No, that was it.”
Calvin stepped down and nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”
I was surprised. “Will you?”
He looked to be contemplating his own choice of words. “I’m sure you’ll worm your way into my case again.”
“Gee, thanks.”
That made him laugh, and without another word, Calvin turned to walk out of the shop.
THE REST of the day at the Emporium was comfortably busy. I didn’t have time to dwell on Neil, which was a relief. What spare time I did have was dedicated to eating my sushi lunch, brought to me by a very well-tipped delivery boy, and fixating on Calvin’s cases.
Or I should say, case.
Because my little fiasco was a closed book. Nothing more than a prank. Right?
And yet, two antique shops in the same week had experienced an event very reminiscent of Poe, and one had ended with a fatality. What if I had caught the individual in my shop planting the heart? Would I have been cut up and put under the floor, just like in “Tell-Tale”?
Yeah. I wasn’t obsessing over this.
I popped a tuna roll into my mouth while endorsing a few checks that had been delivered by mail. I needed to stop at the bank on the way home. I should buy some food too.
I could ask Neil—
No. I wasn’t going to think about him, about our relationship that he had essentially crumpled into a ball and thrown in the trash last night. He hadn’t called, texted, hadn’t done anything to indicate he was sorry. And I certainly wasn’t apologizing. I had nothing to apologize for.
“The Black Cat” isn’t one of Poe’s terribly common stories, I thought instead, while refusing to acknowledge I was directing my thoughts of Neil to an equally unhealthy topic.
“Max?” I called from my office. I looked out the open door at the register, where he was wrapping a small trinket in tissue paper for a customer. “What do you think of when I say Edgar Allan Poe?”
“‘The Raven,’” Max offered. He handed over the sale to the older woman, flashing one of his killer smiles and thanking her for her business before warning her to be safe on the slippery sidewalk.
Kind of obvious, but I guess Max had a point. If there was one work that Poe was known for above all else, it was probably “The Raven.” It gave me an idea, and I turned to power the desktop computer on.
The welcome screen’s brightness levels had been readjusted. I swore, typing the password in and immediately lowering the settings. “Set the levels on the computer back to normal when you’re done,” I called to Max.
“Sorry! You know, they technically are set at normal,” he teased. Max poked his head in. “Sorry,” he added again.
I waved him away and resumed eating sushi while scanning recent newspaper headlines. Nothing jumped out as unordinary, but then again, it took quite a bit to rattle the nerves of a native New Yorker. I took a different approach and checked out the NYPD’s crime statistics for the end of the year.
Overall crime was down 20 percent from the same time the year before. Well, that was good news, I supposed. Ah, but there’s always an asterisk to these comments. Murder was up. An interactive map told me just where in particular too.
The outer boroughs mostly, but my neighborhood, the East Village, had a surprising number of red flags. I enlarged the map and clicked for crime details. One murder and over a dozen burglaries. I considered the murder in particular for a moment. It wasn’t Mike’s death, as the web counter appeared to be a week behind.
<
br /> Despite the number of people who lived in New York, the neighborhoods were pretty tight. News travels. A murder would have been talked about, however briefly. A few minutes of surfing the Internet brought up nothing of substantial interest, though.
Open case, still?
A lost life the media claimed to be unimportant?
I could ask Neil—no.
I could ask Calvin—he told me to stay out of it. That sounded familiar.
I took off my glasses and rubbed my face in aggravation. I don’t know what I had been expecting to find, maybe www.reallifepoemurders.com? I put my glasses back on and tried that.
It wasn’t a real domain. I was almost relieved.
I went back to the crime map and realized, with a sort of grim curiosity, that I could enlarge the map and see the exact cross streets of each recorded crime in my neighborhood. The murder was just a little north of my apartment and shop. I opened another page and scoured the neighborhood, but the East Village was a rich and trendy area, and I had no way to know for certain if the crime had occurred in one of the first-floor storefronts or in one of the many apartments above.
I couldn’t even say for certain why I was fixated on this one murder, out of all others that had occurred in the city. I guess I was desperate for some logical—and I use the word loosely—reason Mike was killed. Calvin would have already been going over the details, to see if there was a relation to any other unsolved—
And there it was. My clue.
The look Calvin had given me when I first started talking about Poe. I knew it.
“I fucking knew it!” I shouted triumphantly.
“Knew what?” Max called from somewhere in the shop.
“Uh….” I stared at one of the advertisements on the side of the webpage. The Garden was selling hockey tickets. “The Rangers are looking good for the play-offs this season!”
I could hear Max speaking to a customer on his way to the office. I shut the Internet tabs and turned the computer off just as he poked his head in the doorway.
“You don’t follow hockey,” he pointed out, as if I were losing my mind.
“I don’t?”
Max snorted and laughed. “You’re really starting anew. God, Neil must be in the doghouse.”
I grunted while getting to my feet. “Is it busy?”
“A few people.” Max turned and hurried to the counter as a posh-looking woman stepped up, holding a framed photo.
I paused in the doorway, holding my phone close to type a message.
Wwhat haopen on 13 btwn 2bd and 3rd ave?
I’m really bad at texting. I’m a seventy-year-old man inside the body of one in his thirties. I don’t know much slang past LOL and ASL—which I think is defunct anyway—and while apparently my phone has a massive library of emoji, I still have no idea how to access them.
I sent the message and tucked my phone into my back pocket before smoothing down my wrinkled shirt and making my way through the aisles of the Emporium. A familiar person stood along the back bookshelves, scouring the titles she’d seen a hundred times already. “Good afternoon, Beth.”
Beth Harrison turned around. “Oh, hi, Sebby.”
“Sebastian,” I corrected. She never listened.
Beth ran the used bookshop next door. It had been in her family nearly as long as the Strand had been around, and while it had never been an official part of what was once Book Row, Beth was determined to keep her little shop going. She ran all sorts of weekly events and had an impressive amount of authors, both known and yet to be discovered, walking in and out of her doors. There were readers’ circles, signings, release parties—she ate, slept, and breathed the book business.
She also had a habit of spending at least two or three lunch breaks a week in my shop, looking over my antique books. I honestly hoped there was nothing she wanted today. I wasn’t ready to haggle prices.
“Nothing new?” she asked, looping gray hair behind one ear. Beth was a pretty, older woman in her late fifties who cared about fashion just as much as I did. She wore big, thick glasses that hung off a rhinestone chain. Her hair was twisted back with a pen sticking out of the bun, and she wore a cat-print skirt with a flannel button-up.
Yup, she gave no fucks.
“Not since yesterday.” I paused. “Isn’t that a line from Beauty and the Beast?”
“Princess,” Beth mumbled as she turned back to the collection. “What about all those from the estate?”
“We’re still cataloging,” I answered.
Beth scoffed. “I can’t pay you if you won’t put the books on the shelf, Seb.”
“You don’t pay me anyway.”
“I paid my account last week.”
“And immediately bought my first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles,” I answered.
“You’d have gotten so much more for it if you’d had it in the shop when the second season of Sherlock aired,” Beth added.
“You still owe me three grand.”
“Next week,” she said with a wave of her hand. “And I thought we agreed on twenty-eight?”
“Three,” I said firmly. “It was in fine condition, and I know you charged more than enough to your customer.”
Beth sighed and smiled. “Fine, fine, Sebby, but only because I like you.”
“Thank God.”
“You know that poor guy who passed away,” she quickly started. “The estate sale gentleman—all those cheap books I won—”
“I know you won them,” I managed to get in.
A few weeks back, several antique shops had been given the first chance to bid on an impressive library of antique books that a bank was trying to liquidate after the elderly owner passed. I had won and then told Beth the remaining books—paperbacks and the sort—were going to be on sale to the general public if no one bid on the lot. So she did, and Beth had been happy with the haul she won and took me out to lunch as a thank-you.
“Shh, listen,” she chastised. “He had so many gay romance novels.”
“Really?”
“Oh, tons, Sebastian,” Beth laughed. “And you know, they’ve been flying off my shelves. Lots of mysteries too. He had very diverse tastes.”
“Huh.” I briefly considered switching it up and spending tomorrow’s lunch next door. Maybe I could live my happily ever after vicariously through some cheap gay paperbacks. “Any with cops?”
Beth snorted. “Plenty with firemen.”
“I prefer guns over hoses.”
“Excuse me?” a quiet voice behind me asked, interrupting a conversation bound to lead down a rabbit hole full of bad puns.
Turning around, I was met by a man perhaps a few years younger than myself. He was very tall and lanky, with a large smile and big eyes. “Oh, hello. Can I help you find anything?”
The stranger beamed happily. “I was wondering if you had any American classics.” He turned to wave at the bookshelves. “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Poe?”
Beth patted my shoulder and leaned up to whisper, “Send him next door when you’re done.” She excused herself and hurried back to her shop, Good Books.
When Beth had departed, my new customer immediately reached a hand out. “My name is Duncan Andrews.”
“Sebastian Snow,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Are you the owner?”
“The bills are made out to me.”
He chuckled. “I love your store. It’s really nice. I came a few days ago. You have a lot of nice books.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said humbly. “Are you looking for a Christmas present?”
“Hmm… well, for myself,” Duncan said with a sort of guilty smile.
“I think I have something from Emily Dickinson,” I said, moving by Duncan to a bookcase farther down the wall.
He followed close behind. “I find Dickinson’s work quite sad. Do you like her poetry?”
I paused beside the shelf nearest the front door and turned to look up at him. “Honestly, I’ve never been a huge
fan, but I studied her work in college.”
Duncan’s face seemed to light up. “I majored in American Literature in college!”
“My dad taught it for a long time,” I said. I looked at the books and leaned close to start scanning the spines. “I’ve come to appreciate the big names as I’ve gotten older,” I continued. “But if I had to pick a poet who wrote about death—”
“Poe?” Duncan asked.
I looked sideways. “Er, yes. I’m a much bigger fan of Poe than Dickinson.”
Duncan flashed another smile and ran a hand through his hair. “His work is really incredible. I think he’s fascinating.”
“Very mysterious,” I agreed as images of pig hearts and dead cats entered my mind. I grabbed a small book and showed Duncan. “Here it is.”
He took the offering. “I don’t suppose you have any Poe too?”
“I don’t,” I answered. “But Good Books next door is sure to have something, albeit nothing antique.”
Duncan nodded. “Okay. Thank you, Sebastian.”
“Can I ring you up?” I motioned for him to follow me through the tangle of displays.
Dean Martin was serenading me over the speakers as we went to the brass register. If I held him tight, he’d be warm all the way home.
I don’t know, Dean. I’ve sort of got a thing for Frank Sinatra. You won’t tell him if I do hold you, will you?
“You don’t have any Christmas decorations up,” Duncan pointed out as he handed me back the book to wrap in tissue paper.
“Oh. Yeah, I guess I never got around to it. But I’ve got the tunes at least.” I glanced up and smiled.
Duncan looked about to speak before the shop door banged open.
“Mr. Snow! Mr. Snow, I forgot one letter!” My energetic, lovely little mail lady spoke. If there ever was one USPS employee who took that “through rain and snow” shit seriously, it was my girl, Daphne.
“Thank you, Daphne,” I said, reaching down to accept the envelope. “You could have dropped it off tomorrow.”
She shushed me and waved. “Have a good afternoon, sweetheart!”