Linda Fairstein - Entombed

Mike hadn't known about the military piece. "Didn't that commit him to five years? Wasn't that pretty standard back then?"

"You're right, Detective. But life as a private wasn't all he had imagined, and he wanted out after two. He actually created an entirely false pedigree-you people would call it perjury-just so he could gain admission to West Point and become an officer."

"Poe actually entered the Academy?" Mike asked.

"He was a cadet for a year and a half. Until he was court-martialed for gross neglect of duties and failure to obey orders. He left in disgrace, and again in debt."

"What then?" I asked.

"He was like a lost soul. He wandered a bit writing poetry, and finally wound up in Baltimore, where his father's family lived."

"Was his older brother still in residence there?"

"That was a brief reunion. Shortly after Edgar reached Baltimore, his brother died-of intemperance, it was called at the time."

"Intemperance?" I asked.

"Alcohol, Miss Cooper. William Henry Poe drank himself to death by the age of twenty-four."

"What a ghastly series of events. Did Edgar reconnect with any other family members?" Mercer asked.

"Some might call the word 'reconnection' an understatement, Mr. Wallace," Zeldin said. "Edgar's father, David, had a widowed sister named Maria Poe Clemm living there in Baltimore with her two children-her son, Henry, and a nine-year-old daughter named Virginia. So Edgar moved in with his poor widowed aunt Maria and his little first cousins-the only real family he had known in a lifetime."

"Seems like finally it might have provided some stability," I said. "Was it a productive period for him?"

"In a literary sense, it was quite so. He was writing stories and getting them published in the Southern Literary Messenger. Gothic tales of premature burial, physical decay and putrescence, addiction to alcohol, questions about the finality of death. You can only imagine how the tragic events of his youth had fueled his imagination," Zeldin said, pausing for a moment. "On the personal side, he had fallen in love."

"Against that cheerful background? Who's the lucky woman?" Mike asked.

"Girl, actually. Hard to call her anything else. His first cousin, Detective. Little Virginia Clemm."

Mike slapped his knee. "The friggin' nine-year-old?"

"He waited, Mr. Chapman," Zeldin said, wagging a finger and smiling wryly. "He didn't marry her until she was older-until she turned thirteen."

"And Poe himself?"

"Twenty-seven years of age."

"Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!" Mike said, blushing. "People used to think Jerry Lee Lewis was a pervert. Roman Polanski had to become a fugitive for the rest of his adult life 'cause he'd had sex with a teenager. Listen to this shit, will you? Poe was a pedophile. An incestuous pedophile. Coop would have probably thrown his ass in jail for statutory rape as well as incest."

"You're speaking of the poet's muse, Mr. Chapman. My cohorts in the Raven Society believe in giving great latitude to someone of such unusual creativity. We don't dwell on his peccadillos," Zeldin said, amused by Mike's reaction to Virginia's age.

"I'm speaking of something that would shock just about anybody I can think of. And was he a drunken pedophile, too?"

"Yes, Detective, there are letters from his publisher at the very time despairing of the fact that he was already an alcoholic. And suggestions of a worse addiction."

"What's that?" I asked, reminded of the involvement of substance abuse in the lives of Aurora Tait, Emily Upshaw, Gino Guidi, and some of the other names that had surfaced in our case. I wondered if there was any relevance to the connection.

"Our members divide on this issue," Zeldin said. "Some don't like to attribute more faults to the master than are well documented. But most of us are convinced that Poe was addicted to opium as well as alcohol. There are even letters from the period that suggest he used laudanum."

"How was he able to write?" I asked. "How was he able to leave us this brilliant body of work?"

"Poe suffered all the demons, Miss Cooper. Every one of them. Start with his fractured, loveless childhood. Then, for almost all of his adult life, he was impoverished-even though his work was known and acclaimed both in America and Europe. Add to poverty his constant despair over his wife's chronic, debilitating illness, his lifelong battle with alcohol and opiates, and what he himself described as his insanity after Virginia's death."

The three of us were quiet.

"He died alone?" Mercer asked.

"His final weeks are somewhat of a mystery, Mr. Wallace. He left the Bronx for Philadelphia, then on to Richmond, then back to Baltimore. He was found at a rum shop, greatly intoxicated and incoherent, the story goes. Friends took him to a hospital where he spent the night, with terrible tremors and sweats, addressing and having conversation with spectral images on the walls of his room. Within days, young Edgar Poe-forty years of age-was dead. 'Lord help my poor soul' were the last words he spoke."

"And in between all these aspects of profound dysfunction," I said, "he wrote some of the most remarkable poetry-and prose- in the English language. It's quite extraordinary."

"Pure genius. Tortured, tormented genius, Miss Cooper," Zeldin said. "If he hadn't been a successful poet, Edgar Allan Poe had all the makings of a serial killer."

"Our head groundskeeper, Mr. Phelps, tells me you made his acquaintance at the gorge the other evening, is that right?" Zeldin asked.

At the prearranged time, Sinclair Phelps had knocked on the door of Zeldin's office to take him down to a minivan that had been specially fitted with a ramp for his wheelchair.

"Yes, we've met," I said, greeting the groundskeeper and introducing him to Mercer.

"Tell them, Sinclair. They don't seem to believe I hadn't heard of the doctor's unfortunate drowning by the time I left my office on Tuesday."

"If there's any question of that, Mr. Chapman, I'm the one who made the notifications," Phelps said. "The only call I made, other than to nine-one-one, was to the director of the gardens. He cautioned me himself not to tell any of the staff until the police investigators left the park."

Phelps was wheeling Zeldin to a large elevator, which delivered us all to the ground floor. "You're welcome to leave your car here and drive with us in the van."

"Where are we going?" Mike asked.

"To the snuff mill, Detective," Zeldin said, laughing. "It's the unofficial headquarters of the Raven Society, for the time being."

The wheelchair locked in place in the rear of the van. Mike sat in the front passenger seat with Mercer and me behind him. "Snuff what?"

"If you go back to the seventeen-forties, Detective, six hundred acres of this prime country real estate was owned by the Lorillard family. Pierre Lorillard was a French Huguenot who settled in this part of Westchester and began his tobacco industry in Lower Manhattan. But he moved it here, to this very site, to take advantage of the swift flow of the river just below the gorge.

"Yes, this was all Lorillard land when Poe came here on his peregrinations, isn't that right, Phelps?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sinclair's been here about as long as I have. It's thanks to his conspiratorial nature that I've been able to give a home to the society's papers."

"You like Poe, too?" Mike asked.

"No, sir. Not particularly. I like Zeldin, though. And the mill is too handsome not to put to some use." Phelps didn't smile. I figured that was a good thing because the cracks in his weathered skin looked as though they would split open like an eggshell if they moved at all.

"Tobacco was actually milled here?" I asked.

"Yes," Phelps said. "The waterfalls you saw the other night, they're what powered the tobacco mill in the eighteenth century. That's the only reason the Lorillards' business could thrive here. There are no other falls in New York City. The first botanical plantings in this area were rose gardens. That was purposely so the rose petals could be used to add scent to the snuff."