The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library

withdrawal. Kept screaming for someone named Reynolds. ‘Reynolds, Reynolds,’ over and over again until he fell into a final coma.”

“Who’s Reynolds?”

Brainert shrugged. “It’s a mystery still.”

Brainert’s attention shifted back to the cell phone images. He flipped to the digital picture of the final portrait. He squinted as he stared at it. Then he blinked. “What in the—”

To get a better look, Brainert lifted the bandage that covered his other eye. I winced at the sight of the ragged black cut held together by stitches.

Brainert made sputtering sounds of excitement, then he looked at me, breathless.

“What is it? Tell me!”

“You’ve found it, Pen. The treasure. This is it—or part of it.”

“This picture?”

“This picture,” Brainert affirmed. “In the past few days, I’ve immersed myself in Poe’s life, his works, in the images of him taken while he was alive.” He tapped the phone screen again. “This is a previously unknown picture of Poe.”

“How do you know for sure?”

Toggling the button, Brainert jumped back to the previous image. “If you look closely you can see that Poe is wearing the same suit of clothing in both daguerreotypes. But in the known image, his hair is uncombed, the lower buttons of his jacket are undone, his shirt ruffled and unkempt—”

Brainert called up the image of the second daguerreo type. “Same suit, same overcoat—but the jacket is no longer undone, his hair is combed. My guess is that Poe was unsatisfied with the first image, so he commissioned a second.”

“I didn’t know old Edgar was so image conscious.”

“Oh, but he was Pen. Like many orphans, Poe suffered from an inferiority complex, a constant craving for love, attention, and self-esteem. He once wrote a short biographical sketch of himself that was, shall we say, wildly exaggerated.”

“You mean he made it up?”

“Indeed he did.” Brainert raised an eyebrow. “What? You thought only certain modern writers did that?”

To that, I had no comment and Brainert went back to ogling the cell phone image. “You see how thick the frame is? This is not a paper copy. It’s likely the original daguerreotype. A veritable treasure!”

Suddenly Brainert’s mouth widened into a toothy grin. “And there’s more…Much more.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I know what you’re going to tell me!”

“You do?”

I thought of Jack’s dream—and knew at once why he’d shown me that case from his past. “There’s something else, something of equal or even greater value behind that photo! Hidden in the frame!”

Brainert stared at me speechless. “How? How did you figure it out?”

It’s a cinch, Jack whispered through my mind with a laugh. She had out-of-this-world advice.

I stammered. “I really can’t tell you,” I said. “It just came to me.”

Jack laughed again.

Not to be outdone, Brainert sniffed, “Well, I’ll be happy to explain why you’re right.” He pulled out a sheet of paper from the pages scattered across his meal table. I reached for it, but Brainert held it out of my reach. “Not so fast,” he said. “We must start at the beginning.”

I sat back down and crossed my arms like an obedient student. Like it or not, I was in for the long haul.

“Poe was fond of riddles, and he was a romantic man who thirsted after love. He married Virginia Clemm when she was only in her early teens. Knowing his fondness for riddles, and his literary talent, in her girlish way she wanted to impress him. So one day Virginia wrote a poem to her husband. The poem was also a riddle, but a simple one. The feat delighted Poe as she hoped it would, and he always cherished that moment, even long after her death.”

Brainert sighed. “Now, I don’t have that poem in front of me, but the riddle is easily explained. Virginia wrote the poem so the first letter in each of the thirteen stanzas spelled out Poe’s name. Thirteen stanzas, EDGAR ALLAN POE.”

“Seems simple enough,” I replied.

“So simple that both Miles Chesley and Dr. Conte tried that solution with the Phelps volumes—that is, taking the first letter of each of the thirteen volume titles to see if a cryptogram existed.”

“And?”

Brainert displayed the paper in his hand. “It spells this,” he said. “FRMEWIHDOAPTE, which is—”

“Gibberish.”

“Right.”

“Exactly the conclusion both Miles Chesley and Dr. Conte came to,” said Brainert. “But you recall that much has been made of the unscholarly nature of the Phelps books. How he chose the names from sometimes- insignificant works as titles to his volumes. I mean, who ever heard of Poe’s essay ‘Music’? Hardly anyone beyond scholars, yet he chose to give that title to Volume Three.”

“Okay, but where are you going with this?”

Brainert slipped me another page. “Here are the titles and volume numbers of the Phelps editions. The first letter of each title is highlighted.”

For Annie, Volume 1

Romance, Volume 2

Music, Volume 3

Eleonora, Volume 4

William Wilson, Volume 5

Israfel, Volume 6

Hop-Frog, Volume 7

Dream Within a Dream, Volume 8

On Imagination, Volume 9

A Descent into the Maelstrom, Volume 10

Pit and the Pendulum, Volume 11

The Poetic Principal, Volume 12

Eureka, Volume 13

“I still don’t get it.”

Brainert sighed as if he were dealing with a particularly thickheaded pupil.

“It’s simple, Pen. The Virginia Clemm riddle solution doesn’t work because the Phelps books weren’t published from volume one to thirteen, in that order. They were actually published out of order.”

“Huh?”

“His contemporaries thought Phelps was again being slipshod. Those who purchased his volumes assumed as the operator of an amateur press, he didn’t do things in the proper order because of production delays and whatnot. But they were wrong.”

Brainert waved another piece of paper under my nose. “Eugene Phelps was very careful and deliberate in the order he published the books, and in the controversial titles he chose. When taken together, these elements combine to break the code and solve the mystery!”

Brainert shoved another page into my hand. “It was your aunt Sadie who researched the actual order of publication.

She called me with the results of her labors. She’d been on the Internet all evening, checking collector sites. And it paid off. The Poe Code is broken.”

I scanned the paper in my hand and found the order of publication was off drastically. Volume One published first, Volume Thirteen last, but everything in between was a mess: