The Poe Shadow

3

I WAS STIRRED awake the next morning only by the muffled sounds from the servants below. I washed and dressed rapidly. But at this hour, no carriages were found for hire near my house. Luckily, I found a public omnibus that happened to be boarding.

Having not traveled by public conveyance as of late, I was struck by how many strangers to Baltimore were aboard. This I thought from their dress and speech, and their watchfulness of the people around them. It led me to wonder… I happened to be carrying among my papers a portrait of Poe from a biographical article published a few years before. At the next stopping-place I turned to the rear of the bus. When the conductor finished collecting tickets from the newcomers, I asked him whether the man pictured in the magazine had been his passenger in the last weeks of September. That was the time-I had estimated from the more reliable newspaper accounts-that Poe would have arrived to Baltimore. The conductor murmured "Don't recall 'm," or something in the same fashion.

A slight comment, I know! Hardly worth any excitement? Yet I felt the flash of accomplishment. In a single moment, though rebuffed, I had acquired knowledge that Poe had not been in this particular omnibus during this conductor's watch! I had solicited a small share of the truth behind Poe's final passage through Baltimore, and that contented me.

Since I had to move about the city anyway, it could not hurt to ride the omnibus more frequently and, when I did, ask such questions.

You have no doubt noted that Poe's time in Baltimore had not seemed to be premeditated. After becoming engaged to Elmira Shelton in Richmond, he had a

After my visit to the burial ground, I'd been bent on directing to these questions my own faculties of intelligence, which I would humbly measure against those of any man-at least any man I had yet known (for this was about to change).

There was that one momentous afternoon when the answers seemed to come improbably into view. Peter had been delayed at court, and our desks were empty of new work. I was walking away from the Hanover Market and was stepping to the Camden Street curb with an armful of packages.

"Poe the poet?"

At first I ignored this. Then I stopped and turned around slowly, wondering if my ears had been fooled by the wind. Truly, though, if this voice had not pronounced on its own power "Poe the poet" it had said something just like that.

It was the fish dealer, Mr. Wilson, with whom I had just done business at the market. Our law office had recently arranged some mortgages for him. Though a few times he had come to our offices, I preferred finding him here, as I could then also select the finest fish to be prepared for supper at Glen Eliza. And Wilson's crab-and-oyster gumbo was the best this side of New Orleans.

The fishmonger motioned me to follow him back to the large market. I had left my memorandum book at his table. He wiped his hands on his streaked apron and handed it to me. It was now wrapped in the distinct odors of his store, as though it had been lost at sea and then pulled out.

"You don't want to forget your work. I opened it to see who it belonged to. I see you've written the name Edgar Poe." The fishmonger pointed to the open page.

I returned the book to my bag. "Thank you, Mr. Wilson."

"Ah, Squire Clark, here's something." He excitedly unwrapped a package of fish from its paper. Inside was a hideously ugly fish, piled upon its identical brothers. "This was ordered especially from out west for a di

"Perhaps that is the problem, my friend."

"Yes." He hesitated and cleared his throat. He was now hacking at fish without looking down at his hands or at the heads shooting off them. "Any event-poor soul, must have been, that Poe. Died over at that creaky ol' Washington College Hospital some weeks back, I heard. My sister's husband knows a nurse there, who says, according to another nurse who spoke to a doctor-demonish busybodies, these women-who said Poe wasn't right in his upper story, that as he lay there he called out a name over and over before he…well, that is," he shifted to a whisper of great sensitivity, "before he croaked. God have mercy on the weak."

"You said he called a name, Mr. Wilson?"

The fishmonger sloshed around his words to remember. He sat at his stool and began picking out unsold oysters from a barrel, carefully prying each one open and checking them for pearls before discarding them with philosophical regret. The oyster was the consummate Baltimore native, not only because it was enterprising and could be traded but because it possessed the always-present possibility of an even more valuable treasure inside. Suddenly the fish dealer clucked exultantly.

"‘Reynolds,' it was! Right, that's it, ‘Reynolds'! I know because she kept saying it when she told me over supper, and on our plates were the last good soft-shell crabs of the season."

I asked him to think hard and be certain.

"‘Reynolds, Reynolds, Reynolds!'" he said with some offense at my doubt. "That's how he was calling it out, all through the night. She said she couldn't pluck it out of her brain after she heard of it. Creaky ol' hospital-should be burnt down, I say. I knew a Reynolds in my youth who threw stones at infantrymen-he was a demonish character, no mistake, Squire Clark."

"But did Poe ever mention a Reynolds before?" I asked myself out loud. "A family member, or…"

The fish dealer's enjoyment of the scene lessened, and he stared at me. "This Mr. Poe was a friend of yours?"

"A friend," I said, "and a friend of all who read him."

I bid my client a hasty good evening with much gratitude for the remarkable service he had provided me. I had been permitted to hear Poe's very last utterance to this earth (or nearly the last, anyhow), and in it some retort, some revelation, some remedy to the slashing and the cutting of the press might be recovered. That single word meant there was something to be found, some life left of Poe's for me to discover.

Reynolds!

I spent countless hours searching through Poe's letters to me and through all of his tales and verse to detect any sign of Reynolds. Tickets to exhibitions and concerts went unused; if Je