“Ah! what to us where foolish talk or wise?
Were persons, places, books, desires or aims,
Without the deeper sense that underlies,
The sweet encircling thought that neither names?”
—SOPHIE JEWETT
WITHIN FIVE MINUTES, THE ELECTRICITY was back on, and Elliot Corbin’s house for the second time in a month was crawling with police. Upon pulling away from the dilapidated mansion on his errand, Lieutenant Piotrowski had become curious about an old Toyota with a UMass parking decal pulled over half a mile down on the otherwise deserted road. He’d called in the plate number, learned that the car belonged to Amber Nichols, and, with my speculations vivid in his mind, summoned help and sped back to the scene. A quick glimpse through the library window had shown him my plight, and he’d immediately organized a silent entry, the dousing of the lights, and the apprehension of Amber Nichols.
I recalled the chill touch of steel against my throat. As soon as I recovered my breath and stopped trembling, I asked the lieutenant, “Weren’t you worried that when you tackled Amber like that, she might actually cut my throat? Accidentally or otherwise?”
Piotrowski bent, casually, and retrieved a heavy, gem-encrusted Victorian letter opener from the corner by the door, where it had halted in its skittering voyage across the floor. “With this?”
My eyes widened.
“The only way you’d been in any real danger from this particular deadly instrument, Doctor, was if you’d been a nine-by-twelve heavy-duty manila envelope.”
“Oh.” I swallowed hard. So I hadn’t been on the verge of death after all. “But how’d you know it wasn’t a real knife?” I protested. “You were way the hell outside the window.”
“An ostentatious thing like this? Any serious knife is sleek and deadly. And, besides, this useless doodad’s been sitting on Corbin’s desk since the murder. How could I forget it? Nichols must have grabbed it at the last minute, when she realized you were about to discover her presence in the house.”
“Ostentatious?” Sometimes Piotrowski surprised me.
“Too big a word for you, Doctor? It means—”
“God damn it, Piotrowski, I know what it means!”
Amber Nichols was under guard in the kitchen, waiting for transport to State Police headquarters. A preliminary body search for weapons had found none, but it had located a curious, bedraggled sheet of paper in the inside pocket of Amber’s caramel-colored blazer. Piotrowski took one look at the scrap, then slid it across the table toward me. “This what she told you about, Doctor?”
I glanced at it, puzzled: heavy, unlined paper, ripped ragged along one side, with a thumbtack hole in its center and a phone number and name scrawled across it in pencil: 555-9792——Guido’s Pizza. I looked up at Amber. Her gaze was fixed on the paper in my hand, and she was crying, silently. Pensively, I considered her words: Poe himself told him where to hide it. Somewhere in my cranial case, a chemical transformation occurred and neurons connected. Poe. Told. Him. Where. To. Hide. It. Oh. My. God. “The Purloined Letter!” As the Minister D. had done in Poe’s story, Elliot had disguised the poem as something ordinary, then had hidden it in plain sight—on his black-cat bulletin board! I flipped the tattered scrap of paper over and stared. There, in Emmeline Foster’s handwriting, was inscribed a brooding sonnet. A verse about a mysterious black bird that haunts a grieving, lovelorn poet and drives him irrevocably to madness. A sonnet whose every quatrain and the final couplet ended with the word nevermore! Was it possible?… Could it be?… Had Edgar Allan Poe done some “purloining” of his own, as Foster had charged in her diary? Had he shamelessly adapted the poem that made him famous from the sonnet Emmeline had submitted to him for publication in Graham’s magazine?
I was just about to put this question to Amber, when a red-headed trooper announced the arrival of the transport car. Piotrowski explained to Amber where she was being taken, but she paid no attention to him. She was staring at me. “I suppose …,” she murmured pathetically, “I suppose this means that now I’ll never find a job in the profession.…”
In the wee hours, after having interrogated Amber and taken, in excruciating detail, my statement about her confession to me, Lieutenant Piotrowski drove me back to Enfield through a rain-washed night and treated me to breakfast at the Blue Dolphin, the only place open at that hour of the morning. Above the counter, the luminous hands of a large round clock encircled in a slim tube of blue neon read 4:23, and I could swear the counterman groaned when he saw us walk in. He must have expected at least another hour of dead time in which to read his copy of The Political Unconscious before he had to fire up the grill.
“I don’t get it,” the lieutenant said, having inhaled half a carafe of coffee. “Who actually did write ‘The Raven’?”
I retrieved the photocopy of Emmeline Foster’s sonnet that Piotrowski had allowed me to make. My mind was still reeling: Mere hours ago I’d thought for certain I was nose to nose with the Grim Reaper; in the interests of her own professional advancement, one of my colleagues had callously murdered another; the classic poem I’d been teaching for years as Edgar Allan Poe’s actually had a far more complicated authorship.
With its address to a raven, and its repeated refrain of “Nevermore,” Emmeline Foster’s modest little sonnet was obviously the direct source of Poe’s “Raven,” but it was nothing at all like the troubled poet’s extravagant, hysterical poem.
“They both did, Lieutenant,” I replied, and words I’d read the day I’d gone through Elliot Corbin’s letters came back to mind. There can be no such phenomenon as “plagiarism,” Elliot had written to a well-known colleague. All texts circulate within a prior textual matrix … who can “own” ideas or hold “property” in language?
I glanced down at the verses in my hand.
THE BIRD OF THE DREAM
One midnight dreary at my windowpane,
I sobbed, “Ah, love,” and did the night implore,
“Bring back lost heart whose life I pled in vain.”
But darkness fluttered, croaking,
“Nevermore”.…
“Maybe she didn’t own the concept, Lieutenant, but I do think Emmeline Foster ought to have gotten credit for her contribution to Poe’s poem.”
“Well,” Piotrowski ladled sugar generously into his coffee. “I got a feeling you’ll be making sure that happens.”
“Yeah, I guess.…” I was too weary even to think about it.
“Ms. Nichols admitted to everything, ya know. You were right that she’d sold him her essay, and I was right that she tried to blackmail him with it. They had a … disagreement, right there in his office—”
“So that’s what I heard.”
“But she didn’t kill him because of that. Like she told you, it was over that poem you got there.” He tapped the photocopy with his forefinger. “She called it a ‘source poem,’ figured it was gonna make her real rich. She went to see Corbin, and they got into another altercation. She’d swiped Ms. Cassale’s knife from your office, and she threatened him with it, trying to make him give the poem back. He laughed and taunted her. Told her finding the poem was going to be the ‘capstone of his illustrious career.’ So she stabbed him. She was so out of control with rage she hardly knew what she was doing. It’s my feeling it was manslaughter more than homicide. Thank God I don’t have to make that decision! But she was fully cognizant what she was doing when she planted that knife at Ms. Birdwort’s house. No question that was premeditated. Professor Person had told her about the Corbin-Birdwort marriage—seemed to think it was a big joke—so Nichols figured that Ms. Birdwort was the perfect person to throw suspicion on. And she knew what she was up to when she kept coming back to Corbin’s and prowling around during the night looking for that poem.”
“Mike told me he heard things in the night. He thought the house was haunted.”
“Well, it was,” the lieutenant said. “By the worst kind of ghost—a real murderer.”
“But did Amber say anything about those journals of Emmeline Foster’s? I assume she’s the one who took them.”
“I asked her about that. She said they were useless; they didn’t say a thing about ‘The Raven.’ So …” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “So, she burned them.”
“Arrggh,” I shrieked.
The counterman looked at me askance as he delivered eggs over and hash browns.
“I knew you’d feel that way,” Piotrowski said, shaking Tabasco sauce over his eggs. “But at least you got one of them.…”
We ate in silence. Amber’s confession had brought me no sense of relief or closure—and, now, the loss of the journals. I was enveloped in a fog of depression and exhaustion, but Piotrowski had the contented air of a man who knows he’s done a good, professional, job, and he wanted to mull it all over.
“Ya know, it was the oddest thing, Doctor. I knew she’d break in Corbin’s kitchen when she looked over at you and asked if you thought she’d ever find a job in the profession. You just stood there like you do, with that look of yours, and it was all over for her. This is one a the weirdest stories I ever heard. She offed that man because she wanted to be an English professor. Tell me, Doctor, what’s so great about your profession that makes people go through such ordeals? I mean—you did it.”
“I didn’t kill anybody, Piotrowski!”
“No, a’course not, but all those years in grad school, and all those, what d’ya call ’em, adjunct jobs, and I know you get paid a hell of a lot less than you’re worth, with all your education—a lot less than I do, ferrinstance. I just don’t understand the appeal.”
“Oh, it’s kind of a vocation,” I said vaguely. But I was still feeling Amber’s blade prick my skin. “What did she intend to do with me? She’d convinced me she had a knife, but she couldn’t have fooled me forever. Eventually I would have figured it out and gotten away from her.”
“I dunno, Doctor. I don’t think she thought it through that far.”
Suddenly, I wanted—needed—a piece of chocolate cake—dark, dense, moist, chocolate cake, with thick chocolate icing.
“You eat that stuff for breakfast?” Piotrowski asked.
“It’s therapy,” I responded, minutes later, picking the final crumbs off the plate with a damp forefinger. I hadn’t forgotten the lieutenant’s earlier remark. “What look of mine?” I frowned at him. “What are you talking about—that look of yours?”
He chuckled. “That look you get. A certain kinda look I don’t see on too many people. Like you’re thinking in a complicated kind of way … intelligence that hasn’t had all the human feeling drained out of it.”
“Give me a break, Lieutenant!”
“No, I mean it. It’s kind of … oh, I dunno … kinda poetic.”
“Jeez!” My face was hot.
“It’s not just like head knowledge. It’s got depth to it, and contradictions, and … and … compassion.”
I couldn’t take any more. “I saw your face when she made that pathetic statement, Piotrowski. You were no deadpan.”
“Yeah, but, then … I don’t have a Ph.D.”
“You make the Ph.D. sound like some sort of a developmental handicap, for Godsake!”
“Yeah? Well …,” he said, and shook his head as he poured another cup of coffee.
The sun was rising as we left the diner. As we turned onto Route 138, I asked Piotrowski if Sophia Warzek had ever actually approached him with an alibi for Jane, as she’d told me she intended to.
“Alibi?” He laughed. “Is that what that was? More like an ali-pie, if ya ask me!”
“What?”
“Yeah, Sophie called me. Sweet kid! She had this theory that Ms. Birdwort couldna done the murder that day because she was ‘in the middle of writing a poem and was … too abstracted,’ Ms. Warzek said, to stab anyone. She’d stopped by on her way home from baking Thanksgiving morning at Bread and Roses to surprise Ms. Birdwort with a holiday pumpkin pie, and Ms. Birdwort didn’t even say thank you, she was so out of it. Ya ask me, sounds more like the professor was under the influence of some illicit substance—”
“The Muse isn’t illicit, Lieutenant. At least not as far as I know. At least not yet.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But there’s stuff I know.…” He let it trail off. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jane Birdwort wasn’t in for some further visits from our boys in blue.
My car was still in the college lot. Lights flickered on in houses as we drove the few blocks toward town to pick it up. We turned past the Corbin house, a flight of crows started from a bare-branched oak tree, and a few tumblers turned in my memory.
“You know, Lieutenant, for about a month now, every time I’d drop in at my office before class, I’d have this feeling, like someone was watching me. Or in the library. Or the coffee shop. Sometimes even downtown. Just an odd sensation that someone’s eyes were on me. And it just hit me, do you think maybe it was Amber?”
The policeman started to laugh, rich, deep, very amused chuckles. I turned and stared at him. “Oh, that,” he said, between chortles. “Dr. Pelletier, I think you got yourself an admirer. Pudgy kid? Glasses? Follows you everywhere?”
“Tom Lundgren! Oh, no!” I hid my face in my hands.
Piotrowski signaled the turn onto the Enfield campus. “You know …” He cleared his throat. “You know, seriously … you should be more careful. Good-looking woman like you on her own …” He pulled his Jeep in next to the Jetta, and gazed at me consideringly. I was suddenly acutely aware of the depths of … what?… intelligence? feeling? knowledge?… layered in his brown eyes. Consciousness! That’s what it was. A consciousness so deep a woman could … could … A momentary chill caused the fine hair on my arms to shiver. What the hell? I tore my gaze away from Piotrowski’s speculative brown eyes. His intense expression most likely signified nothing more than a professional contemplation of public-safety policy.
“Don’t worry about me, Lieutenant. I know how to take care of myself.”
“I know ya do. It’s just that you shouldn’t always hafta.”
I had the door open and one foot out of the Jeep, when he reached over and squeezed my arm gently. “Take it easy, Dr. Pelletier … Karen.”
Karen! He called me Karen! This was the most personal the big cop had ever gotten with me. I was so shocked, I nearly fell out of the car.
“Be seeing ya,” he said. He had such a nice smile.
He waited until I had the Jetta warmed up and followed me as far as the campus gate. I turned right, and Piotrowski turned left, toward wherever it was he was headed next. As usual, I hadn’t bothered to ask, but all at once I was extremely curious.