Free Poe shadow by Matthew Pearl

convey Brooks’s story to the newspapers, whose reporters would grudgingly correct the languid reporting made since his death….
    That was the encounter for which I had been prepared when I had first heard Brooks’s name.
    Instead, outside No. 270 Fayette, the only person in sight was a free black, solitary and determined, dismantling a piece of the charred, broken wooden frame of the house….
    I stood before the address of Dr. Brooks and wished again that it were the wrong number. I should have brought the city directory itself to be certain I was at the right place—although I had even written the address on two slips of paper now in separate pockets of my vest. I checked one slip—
    Dr. Nathan C. Brooks. 270 Fayette st.
    then reached into my pocket for the other—
    Dr. N. C. Brooks. 270 Fayette.
    This
had
been the house. Of course.
    The lingering stench of burnt, damp wood threw me into a fit of coughing. Broken china and charred scraps of ruined tapestries seemed to compose the floor inside. It was as though a chasm had opened up beneath and pulled out all the life that had been there.
    “What happened here?” I asked when I had regained my breath.
    “Pray God,” the joiner, a type of carpenter skilled in woodwork, repeated to himself under his breath. Thank the Lord, he said, the Liberty engine company had prevented more destruction. “If Dr. Brooks hadn’t hired himself an unskilled man first,” he told me, “and without the blasted rain, the repairs would long be done, and splendidly.” In the meantime, the owner of the house was living with relatives, but the joiner did not know where.
    The laborer was able to tell me further that the fire had occurred about two months earlier. I rapidly compared the dates in my mind and realized with numbness what it meant. The fire would have been just around the time…the very time Edgar Poe arrived in Baltimore looking for the house of Dr. Brooks.
     
    “What is it you wish to report?”
    “I have told you, if you could call for the officer, I shall give all the particulars.” I was standing in the Middle District police station house.
    After several exchanges similar to this, the police clerk brought out an intelligent-looking officer from the next room. All of my urges to see something done had returned forcefully, but with an entirely different bent. As I stood in front of the police officer and narrated the events of the last weeks, I felt a wave of relief. After what I’d seen at the Brooks house, after having breathed the last traces of destruction and looked upon the sleepy, now-vacant windows and the scarred tree trunks, I knew that this had surpassed me.
    The officer examined the newspaper cuttings I handed to him as I explained the questions the press had neglected or misunderstood.
    “Mr. Clark, I know not what can be done. If there were reason to believe there had been some wrongful act associated with this…”
    I grasped the officer’s shoulder as though I had found a lost friend. “You believe so?”
    He looked back faintly.
    “Whether there was a wrongful act,” I repeated his words. “It is precisely the sort of question for which you must find an answer, my good officer. Just that! Hear me. He was found wearing clothes that did not fit him. He was shouting out for a ‘Reynolds.’ I know not who that could be. The house he went to upon his arrival burnt down, perhaps near the very same hour he arrived at it. And I believe a man, one I had never seen before, tried to frighten me from inquiring into these matters. Officer, this mystery must not remain untreated a moment longer!”
    “This article,” he said, returning to the newspaper cutting, “says Poe was a writer.”
    Progress! “My favorite author. In fact, if you are a magazine reader, I would wager you have come upon his literary work.” I listed some of Poe’s best-known magazine contributions: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” “The