Morris noted. “I’ve met Liza and Malcolm, just not Brent Whaley.”
“Well, they must be friends. They’re society friends, at least,” Benedict said.
Other diners came and went. Benedict sped up the recording, and people on the screen began to look like little ants.
Liza left the restaurant at about three thirty in the afternoon.
Malcolm left a few minutes later.
Brent Whaley didn’t seem to leave.
“Take it all the way to the next morning,” Griffin asked.
They watched as the evening diners—including Vickie and Griffin themselves—came and went. They watched as the staff left, including their waiter, Jon Skye, gift-store maven Lacey Shaw and finally Alice Frampton with her father, Gary. Then nothing. Just a few late-night stragglers walking past, but the front door didn’t open again, and the time stamp on the video rolled into the next day.
“Did you see Brent Whaley leave?” Griffin asked, looking at the others.
“Let me run the footage back,” Benedict said.
Morris pointed at the screen when a large group was leaving together. “Is that Whaley there? I think it’s the same man—the top of his head appears to be the same. But maybe not.”
“You have to be right,” Benedict said. “Yeah, that has to be him. He’s just surrounded by that big crowd—looks like it was a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. Guess Brent got into the middle of it.”
“Maybe—or maybe not,” Griffin murmured.
“We’ll find out. Because if he was still in the restaurant... I guess we’ll pick up Brent Whaley. If he tells us he walked out in a crowd...we’ll know for sure. But even with the cameras, there are things that can be missed. And there is the delivery door... Oh, we’ll be really nice. We’ll ask for help from him,” Morris said wearily. He shook his head. “Would one writer kill another? Out of jealousy, anger or a perceived insult?”
Griffin looked at Vickie. “I don’t think it involved writers, but... ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’” he said.
“Oh, yeah, man! I read that one,” Office Benedict said, enthused. “So cold! So precise... But our victim wasn’t walled in.”
“Poe liked to wall people in, huh?” Morris asked, shaking his head. “‘The Black Cat.’ He liked burying people alive, too. ‘The Premature Burial’—and others, I’m sure.”
“Everyone is a Poe expert,” Griffin murmured, looking at Vickie a little bit baffled. She had to smile. “Detective, Mrs. Verne said that you took her husband’s desktop computer. Have you been able to find anything on it, any references to him planning to meet up with anyone—anything at all?”
“Our tech people are on it—and they’re good,” Morris assured him.
“I’m sure they are,” Griffin said. “We’ll be in touch then,” he said. “Will you let me know if you’re able to find Brent Whaley?”
When they left a few minutes later, Vickie whispered to Griffin, “That really was a great rendition of ‘The Raven’ you gave earlier.”
He laughed, squeezing her hand and smiling at her. “Yeah? Well...”
He looked away. Something was bothering him, she thought. “My turn,” she said. “What? What’s going on?”
“I saw him.”
“Him—who?”
“Him—Poe. Edgar Allan. He was at the burial ground.”
“The ghost of?” Vickie asked, frowning.
“Looked just like Poe—and disappeared in the wink of an eye. In my experience that means, A, I’ve worked at this job too long, B, there’s a really amazing magician at work in Baltimore, or, C, the ghost of the master of horror and mystery himself, Edgar Allan Poe, is walking among us!”
Vickie stood on North Amity Street, looking at the building that Edgar Allan Poe had once called home.
She was on her own; Griffin had headed to the morgue with Carl Morris. The medical examiner—Dr. Myron Hatfield—was going to start right in on Franklin Verne.
With the uproar in the city over the very unusual passing of such a man, it was imperative that he give a cause of death as quickly as possible. He had already been approached by various media outlets, of course.
He’d said he could not give out cause until he had received results on every test that must be considered when such a death had occurred.
Bravo, Myron! Vickie had thought. She was sure that certain things might quickly be obvious. She was glad that the man intended to be thorough—and that he wouldn’t be pressured into speaking before he was ready.
Morris had, she realized, kept a number of pieces of information from the press. There was no mention of the dead blackbirds found by him, nor the little souvenir-style raven Verne had been holding so tightly in his hand.
Vickie looked up at the house. She had downloaded and printed some information about the residence while at the police station.
While the home wasn’t furnished, it was on the National Registry of Historic Places, and, according to her reading, very much the same as it had been during the years Poe had lived there between 1833 and 1835. A Poe society had struggled long and hard to preserve the building and had managed to do so. Through time—and due to the expense of keeping up the old property—city organizations took over. Now Poe Baltimore, an organization dedicated to keeping alive the brilliance of the man who had lived and written some of his most amazing work in the city, took care of the house.
The house was a small brick row house in a line of other similar houses.
A friendly docent welcomed her and explained some of the rooms and the exhibits. The museum was proud to have Poe’s writing desk and a number of other important artifacts, some china, glasses and more that had belonged to the family. Vickie admired the objects—those that had belonged to Poe’s father, and those that were simply from the correct period.
Walking the rooms, halls and stairways of the house and studying the exhibits, Vickie wondered about the fact that Griffin had been the one to see Poe—while she had dreamed about him. She wondered if she was a little bit worried that the ghost had shown himself to Griffin rather than to her—or if she was just disturbed because her dream had been so real. She had nearly felt the dirt of the road; she had heard the noise of the tavern as if it had been real. She’d much rather simply see the man—or the specter of him—than face dreams that made her feel she was right there with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the dust that stirred in the air.
The staircases in the house were wicked—with twists and turns and very narrow. Vickie smiled and stepped out of the way for a mother with a young son to make their way up.
Vickie followed; the
