"A bit," I said. "In Charlottesville."

"Mr. Jefferson's great university had just been in existence for one year. Edgar was only seventeen when he entered, living in a room on the Lawn that you can still see today."

"Yes, I know. The unlucky number thirteen."

"Superstitious, Miss Cooper? Well, maybe his stay there would have been cursed anyway. Poe loved language. He studied French and Italian and Latin. He was a debater and a great swimmer. He wrote verse and sketched charcoals. That was the good side of student life at Virginia. But there was a dark side as well."

"In what sense?"

"Virginia was the most expensive college in the country at that time, but in addition to the usual costs he ran up, Edgar Poe developed a serious gambling habit, falling several thousand dollars in debt. And alcohol was already becoming a problem for him, as it had been for his father. He gambled and drank, drank and desperately gambled at cards."

"Did he finish college?" I asked.

"It was a two-year course at the time. He left after the first year, and that marked his major rift with John Allan, who refused to pay the boy's debts and wouldn't let him return to school. They quarreled more vociferously than ever before, and as Poe frequently wrote in his letters, he was keenly aware that this surrogate father who had raised him had absolutely no affection for him."

"How painful for a young man who had no family to speak of. It's so odd then, that Poe used his name."

"You're wrong, Miss Cooper. We use his name-Edgar rarely did."

"I don't understand."

"So far as we know, the first time Poe signed his name using Allan as part of the signature was years later, after John Allan's death. He often used the initial A when he published works, but he rarely used the name Allan, the way we do today. I truly think he hated that man."

I thought of the signature that was so familiar from reproductions of books and manuscripts. Zeldin was right, of course. It was Edgar A. Poe-the name Allan was never spelled out in the writer's own hand. "So Poe left Richmond?"

"At the age of eighteen he was alone in the world again, and restless. He struck out for Boston-probably because his mother had written of loving the city so much. That's where a forty-page volume of poetry called Tamerlane first appeared in 1827, wrapped in plain brown paper and distributed around town by an anonymous author."

"Poe's first publication?"

"Indeed, Miss Cooper. He never signed any of the copies, nor did he even keep one for himself. Only a handful exist at this point in time. It's no secret that one of our members bought one at auction last year for six hundred thousand dollars. But that's today. As you know, poetry has never been the means to support many young men or women. So Poe took another route-he lied about his age and enlisted in the army. Claimed to be twenty-two years old and said his name was Edgar Perry."

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."