"We're fortunate that Phelps lives here."

"Here, in the snuff mill?" Mike asked.

"No, no," the groundskeeper said. "Did you see the carriage houses we passed before we reached this building? I live in one of those."

I had noticed three buildings, smaller than the mill but in the same old style with wooden gables over the door and windows.

"Obviously, people can only come here to the mill on the days the gardens are open," Zeldin said, "because the entire perimeter of the park is gated, of course. But that's most of the year, except for major holidays. And yes, members are free to come and go from these rooms as they please."

He rolled into the first alcove and beckoned us to follow. Once inside the office, Zeldin steadied himself on the edge of the desk and hoisted his body out of the wheelchair. For the several minutes it took him to open a file cabinet and remove the papers we had asked for, he balanced against the desktop.

I watched Mercer and Mike staring at him, knowing they were trying to determine the strength of his legs and the extent of his movement to figure whether he was capable of playing a role in any of the recent crimes. But Zeldin lowered himself back into the chair before any of us could gauge his mobility.

"Here's what you've asked for, Detective. The list of our members," he said. "You may have that copy, and I trust you'll treat them kindly."

Mike put the papers on the desk and I leaned in next to him to read with him. The pages were divided by cities, and I quickly scanned the out-of-towners for familiar surnames, finding none. Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond-most of them lived in places where Poe had also spent time. The rest of the members lived in New York City. Other than Zeldin, I was disappointed to see that there was not a name I recognized.

Mike turned to the last paper, which was headed with the initials PNG. We both stared at one of the names that jumped out at us. "Help me here," Mike said to Zeldin. "Who are these guys?"

" PNG? Personae non grata, Mr. Chapman. Not everyone in the group knows the institutional history as well as I do, Detective. There are some people who might try to reapply to the society after old-timers like myself are no longer alive. This is to make sure certain people never enter our fold."

Mike pulled out the desk chair and sat down. "I'd like to start right here, if you don't mind. Why is Noah Tormey on this list?"

"I suppose I first met Noah Tormey about twenty-five years ago," Zeldin said. "Maybe longer. Quite an intelligent young man, fancied himself a scholar although I'm not sure I'd be that generous. He had just graduated from New York University and was an instructor in the English department. He came to me to borrow some books-they were out-of-print volumes-to do some research for a dissertation."

"Came to you here, at the Botanical Gardens?"

"Heavens, no. I was just a lowly librarian then. Well-known in literary circles for my collection of Poe-his works, as well as biography and criticism. He came to my home, where you were yesterday."

Not bad digs for a "lowly librarian," as Zeldin described himself, is what I was thinking. Perhaps he sensed that and decided to explain.

"My mother had owned that apartment, Ms. Cooper. I inherited it upon her death. She had been collecting rare books most of her life, including Poe. It's thanks to her family fortune-sewing thread, simple cotton sewing thread that my great-grandfather manufactured-that I've been able to indulge myself in my two passions, horticulture and literature."

"So you and Tormey struck up a friendship?" Mike asked.

"He was an interesting fellow. I wouldn't say we became close, but he'd call when he needed something and if it was a volume I owned, I was happy to loan it to him."

"Did the two of you talk? Socially, I mean."

"Our conversation was always about the nineteenth century, Detective. Not women, not current events, not our personal lives, if that's what you mean."

"And the Raven Society?"

"I suppose that came up. In fact I'm sure it did. Tormey eventually got around to asking me about joining, I'm quite sure of it."

"Were you already a member?" Mike asked.

"Yes, I was admitted rather early. I had come along at the moment the group was trying to expand a bit, and my scholarship in the field was well documented. I think I was in my mid-twenties when I was accepted."

"Secret handshake? Flap your elbows like a bird? Swear you'll never watch The Maltese Falcon or read Rex Stout again?"

Zeldin wasn't amused. "I submitted some of the papers I had written and demonstrated, at meetings with some of the members, that I was intimate with the body of work. I'm sure my collection of first editions made me an attractive candidate."

"So what happened to Noah Tormey? Why'd he get black-balled?"

"There was no question that he knew Poe's writings as well as most of us. But then he published a paper in one of the literary reviews. It was brilliantly researched and quite well written," Zeldin said.

I thought immediately of Emily Upshaw, who had done some of Tormey's writing for him.

"The problem was," he went on, "the piece dredged up all the petty old claims, with impressive documentation."

"The personal foibles you just described to us?" I asked, wondering why they would matter to scholars.

"No, no, Miss Cooper. Poe's plagiarism."

"His what?" Mike asked. "What did he plagiarize?"

Zeldin sighed. Then he called out the groundskeeper's name. "Phelps?"

Sinclair Phelps came back into the little office from the other room. "Yes?"

"Against that wall, third drawer down, would you mind fetching me a folder labeled 'Tormey'?"

Phelps retrieved the document and left the room. "We're talking about a young man hoping to establish himself in academia," Zeldin said, opening the file and passing an issue of the review to Mike. "Naturally, the immature Poe he wrote about was struggling to find his voice. You'll see some examples in this study."

We took a few minutes and read the first several pages. There were lines that appeared to be lightly lifted from obscure poets I'd never read. Here was Poe's "Song":

I saw thee on the bridal day-

When a burning blush came o'er thee…

And below it a poem by John Lofland, published a year earlier:

I saw her on the bridal day

In blushing beauty blest…

I had just heard Tormey yesterday, teaching his class Biographia Literaria. Now here in the paper Zeldin gave me to look at, he was quoting Coleridge and his classic description of poetry as a kind of composition "which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth."

Next to Coleridge he interposed the words of Poe, who wrote that "a poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth."

Least welcome to Zeldin and his cohorts must have been the lines referred to in the masterwork, "The Raven." Here was Elizabeth Barrett Browning first, hardly an obscure poet if one was to be borrowing phrases: "With a murmurous stir uncertain in the air the purple curtain…" And then Poe's famous line: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain…"

I handed Tormey's essay back to Zeldin.

"Mr. Tormey took Poe apart, as the two of you can see. Most of my colleagues didn't treat that lightly. He was even anxious to show off his own skill at researching, noting how Edgar had taken commentary for many of his treatises practically verbatim from secondary sources, sometimes right out of the encyclopedia-like a schoolchild might do."

"Had Poe ever been exposed to this kind of claim in his lifetime?" I asked.