The book was titled The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. It had been published the previous year and contained two stories. The second story Minerva did not care for, nor did she quite understand the author’s intent in writing it; but upon reaching the back cover, she immediately turned to the beginning to read the first again. This story, after a long and winding introduction, involved the solving of a seeming impossibility: a situation in which two women, a daughter and mother, were graphically murdered—one stuffed up a chimney! the other’s head left hanging by a strip of skin!—inside a room where all the doors and windows were locked, and yet where no trace of the killer could be identified. Nonetheless the narrator’s friend, Dupin, pinpointed the culprit, using only the powers of faculty and observation.
Her thoughts after this second reading, originally unsettled, tumbled like grapes or blueberries through sieves pocked with decreasingly smaller holes, sorting by circumference, collecting by kinship. Everything, Minerva realized now, was a mystery, an unanswered question.
Take Bonaventure itself. The commercial: the farming, the crop yields, and varying prices of the produce brought to market. The metaphysical: the community, with the disparate wants and intentions of its members. Each was a question that had yet to be asked. But this man Dupin, this character of Poe’s, could string together questions and make a reply to each. Every silent answer led to the next question like Theseus’s ball of twine through the labyrinth, until finally he could respond to the unspoken thought in his friend’s head, having followed alongside ever since the narrator was jostled by a grocer blocks ago. For Dupin, that ability—that gift—was nothing more than a source of amusement, a broom to sweep away the dust of boredom. What waste! To Minerva it was nothing less than the pinnacle of the mind, a synthesis of ratiocination and intuition. It was the very goal of Bonaventure’s experiment, wrapped in a gruesome tale of blood and horror.
When Minerva visited her father in his office to inform him it was now her life’s mission to assist humanity in answering these greater mysteries—how shall we live? how shall we worship?—by reconciling the unanswered riddles of the everyday, he barely acknowledged her. He sat at his desk, a set of scales before him. One pan held a number of small brass weights stamped with the numbers of their ounces. The other pan had been hastily covered by a handkerchief just before Minerva’s entry into the office.
David Grosvenor listened to his daughter’s epiphany, though Minerva couldn’t dismiss the almost tangible feeling that, having interrupted him, he was impatient for her to be gone. Eventually he nodded, and without looking up from the balance scales he suggested she offer her deductive assistance to Mr. Sutton, who had misplaced one of his hogs.
“And while you’re at it,” said Grosvenor, “see if you can’t locate your friend Mr. Lyman. No one’s seen him in nearly a week.”
•••
Mr. Sutton was adamant his hog had not run off. It was stolen.
“It so happened I looked out my window that morning and saw them rooting through the corn. I told Presley to pull on his drawers and yelled for Mr. Alby to come help. When we herded them back into the pen and counted, we realized we’d caught all of them save John Tyler.”
Minerva knew, from some of the debates at the supper table, that Mr. Sutton was no booster of their sitting president, whom Sutton likened to a piece of livestock too stupid to understand what lay in store for it.
“Why do you think it—I mean the pig—didn’t run off? From what you say, the gate had been open all night.”
“The gate had been opened at night, more correctly,” said Sutton. “Swine can’t work a gate and there’s no chance I or anyone else would have left the gate open after the evening slop for the simple reason that each of us knows how difficult it is to catch a loose pig. It’s a chore nobody wants. I ask you, why would John Tyler mosey off to some far horizon while every other pig headed straight to the cornfield? No. Somebody came and took that hog, and freed the others to cover the absence.”
A thief then, Minerva thought. Yet she couldn’t imagine anyone leading a full-grown pig far on a rope leash. It began to dawn on Minerva that determining a course of events was difficult without a trail of gore and a bloody shaving razor.
“Whom do you suspect then? I hate to accuse anyone without more definitive proof, though even I must admit Mr. Whitney over at his farm is a very taciturn man.” She could think of no other potential rustlers beyond the greybeard Whitney, who in the past had accused the Bonaventurists of misconduct after several of his prize milk cows went missing.
Sutton took a deep breath and appraised Minerva much as one does when he realizes his jacket is hooked on a briar and he stops to study how best to liberate it without tearing the fabric. “I have a man’s name in mind but I fear you’ll not care to hear it.”
“Please do not think to shield me from cruel truths because of my sex. I think better of you than that, Mr. Sutton.”
“That isn’t why I hesitate.” Sutton pursed his lips. “I am supposed to deliver the hogs to the butcher next week. John Tyler was the biggest of the bunch—three-hundred pounds market
