Chapter Two

As always, my first instinct upon waking was to listen – eyes closed, mind clearing of its sleep befuddlement, and senses tuned to the sounds around me. The room where I usually slept was insulated from the street traffic below by thick walls and double-paned glass behind heavy drapes. The old wood in my Colonial Era building still creaked and cracked when someone walked up the stairs or across the floor on the second and third stories, but it had long since settled into silent watchfulness as time marched on outside its brick walls.

I heard nothing, but I was two floors above the secret room where Edgar Allan Poe was, or maybe was not, still sleeping. I jumped up and threw on my uniform of jeans and a man’s linen shirt untucked like a tunic. It was still warm enough for flip-flops, and my greenish-gold pedicure was all the embellishment I wore.

I pulled my hair down from the silk scrunchie I wore it in to sleep, pieced the curls apart, and ten minutes later I was on my way down the stairs.

I skipped the sitting room and library on the second floor and went straight down to the hallway that led to the storeroom and bar. The storeroom hadn’t been disturbed, and only the dim light from the fading sun illuminated the empty bar beyond.

I turned on the storeroom light and pulled the rack away from the wall, then unlocked the door.

“Mr. Poe?” I spoke just above a whisper. I didn’t want to startle him into violence if he was awake, especially since he seemed to have experienced some before he arrived in my bar.

I pushed the door open slowly, giving him time to see me as unthreatening. “Mr. Poe, are you awake?”

The light in the nest was still on, and I could see that the sandwich and water had been moved off the small table. “My name is Ren – Alexandra Reynolds. You’ve been hurt, but you’re safe here,” I said quietly. “The door was closed to protect you, but you’re free to come out if you’d like.”

There was still no movement from the nest. I knew what it felt like to be cornered, and realized that even weak from a hangover, Poe was likely strong enough to do damage to me if he was afraid. So I backed up, turned a chair around, and straddled it so I faced the door to the secret room from about six feet away.

I leaned forward, resting my arms on the chair back, and considered Poe’s condition. If he had, indeed, escaped a cooping situation, then he’d most likely been drugged, starved, and beaten. “I have more food if you’d like,” I said softly. Everything in the storeroom was alcoholic, but I kept basic food supplies in the refrigerator behind the bar so I could feed George and anyone who wandered in The Door hungry.

I thought I heard him shuffle his position slightly, but he still didn’t emerge from the nest, so I remained where I was. I debated singing something he would recognize but decided against it, as I didn’t particularly love the songs from that time. Then I considered what I knew of Poe’s work, and the tune to an Appalachian folk version of Annabel Lee came into my head. I must have begun to hum, because I was aware that the music died away when Poe finally stepped into the open doorway.

He looked pale and shaky, as one does with the mother of all hangovers, and it was obvious he’d finally vomited at some point during the day because it was matted in his mustache and stained his shirt and coat. He winced as his gaze swept over the cases and bottles of liquor stacked in the storeroom, and when he studied me, I looked back steadily.

“Where is your master?” he finally said.

I held my casual pose as I continued to meet his eyes. “I am my own master.” My blood pulsed with an anger I’d thought long buried, but I kept my tone neutral.

“The owner of this establishment then,” he said with a hint of impatience.

“You’re looking at her,” I answered as I stood and pushed the chair away. “I’ll show you to the bathroom, and you can wash while I find you something else to wear.”

He gave me a critical once-over. “’Tis not I who requires a change of clothing.”

I gave him the same up-and-down gaze, landing on the vomit stains with a raised eyebrow. He looked down at himself and scowled.

“Where is my satchel?” He sounded accusing.

“You arrived empty-handed,” I said. Poe remained still, as though he’d taken root, and I saw anger and fear at war in his expression.

“You are a stranger here, sir,” I said carefully. “You stumbled in my door, bruised and drunk, carrying nothing but ballots in your pockets that I assume were given to you by roughskins. I offer you a place to clean yourself, something to wear, a meal, and a quiet place to determine what happened to you and what to do next.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You say I am a stranger here, yet you know my name.”

“As does anyone who has read your work.”

“I find it unlikely you know how to read,” he scoffed.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest and glared.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door –

Only this, and nothing more.’”

The look of startled amazement on his face gave me a small bit of satisfaction, but I was still irritated. “As likely as you are to be a thorn in my side, no one deserves the treatment you apparently received at the hands of an election gang. You are in some trouble, and I will do what I can to help.”

I turned and left the storeroom before he could say anything else, and I was out at the bar, closed on Monday nights, fixing a plate of cheese, crackers, and grapes when he found me. He looked around the room, which I’d designed in warm tones of orange and burnished gold. I redecorated every time I came back to Baltimore, but The Door had worn these colors for almost ten years. It was nearly time for me to find a place to go for new inspiration.

“I assume,” Poe began cautiously, “that you have no husband and are perhaps a madam or procuress. If so, might I inquire as to the nature of your custom so that I might find a man who can help me?”

It took me exactly one second to translate the question. “You see a black woman of independent means and assume that the only way I could earn such luxuries is on my back?”

“It is not an unreasonable assumption.” He scowled back at me.

I stared at him as I forcibly reminded myself of the world as he knew it, and I decided I wasn’t going to meet his expectations just to make him more comfortable. “It’s not only unreasonable, it’s insulting.”

There was a moment of shock before he scowled again and looked me up and down with an expression that was dangerously close to contempt. “Your race and your sex are clear for any to see. If you own this establishment, what else should I assume? What other business can someone like you engage in?”

Someone like me. It had been years since anyone had been overtly degrading toward me in my own place, and I found myself warming to the fight with a long-suppressed anger and years of higher education in my back pocket. “As I said, you are a stranger here, and here, no human being is born less than any other. None. My sex, as you call it, comprises more than half of the world’s population, and white and black people account for approximately equal slices in a pie chart of world ethnicities. Together, our races make up barely one-fourth of the total, so demographically speaking, our numbers and relative influence are the same.”

He stared at me. “A pie chart of world ethnicities?”

The dried vomit in his mustache was making me twitchy, and the conversation needed a change of subject before I said something I’d regret.

“You stink, and there’s vomit on your suit. You can use the shower upstairs to clean up, if you can tolerate using the same bathroom I do.”

I stepped out from behind the bar and went down the hall and up the staircase to the second floor. I had locked both front and back doors, so even if he wanted to leave the building, he couldn’t, which meant he’d either drink everything in my bar or he would follow me upstairs.

The sound of feet striding down the hall toward the back door made me tired. I was going to have to keep him locked in when I slept so he didn’t escape into twenty-first century Baltimore. I hated locking people in. Locking them out was so much simpler.