“So.” She cleared her throat. “What are we doing?”
He did the prolonged silence thing again, like he needed the time to contemplate whether or not to banish her from his sight.
“We,” he said at last, “are doing our project on Poe.”
He shifted the huge book around and scooted it toward her, one finger indicating a black-and-white thumbnail photograph. The image portrayed was of a gaunt, deep-browed man with unruly hair and a small black-comb mustache. His eyes looked sad, desperate, and wild all at the same time. Sunken and pooled by enormous dark circles, they seemed to ache with sorrow.
To Isobel, he looked like a nicely dressed mental patient in need of a nap.
She sank farther into her chair, picking at the pages. “Didn’t he marry his cousin or something?”
“The man is a literary god and that’s all you have to say?”
She shrugged and grabbed a book from the stack on the table. She opened it, then flipped through the pages, glancing up at him. He leaned forward over the table and scribbled something onto a yellow steno notepad, which sat atop his black hardbound book. Her eyes fell to the book. She couldn’t help wondering if it was some sort of journal or something and why he seemed to carry it with him wherever he went.
“Who’s Lenore?” she asked, turning another page.
He stopped writing, looked up. Stared.
What? Had she said something wrong?
“His dead love,” he replied finally.
“Poe’s?”
“The narrator’s.”
“Oh,” she said, wondering if there was a difference but knowing better than to ask.
She crossed her legs and adjusted herself in her seat. “So, how are we going to do the presentation part? Do I get stuck playing the dead chick?”
It was supposed to be a joke, something to help smooth down his prickly defense.
“You could never be Lenore,” he said, returning to his scrawling.
At this, Isobel scoffed outright, trying to decide if she’d been insulted. “Yeah? Why not?”
“For one,” he said, jotting along, “you’re not dead.”
“Oh,” she replied, “so you’re going to be Lenore, then?”
He looked up. Isobel smiled, swaying back and forth in her swivel seat.
His pen made a point of disconnecting with the paper, and there was another pause, followed by a slow blink before he said, “You do the talking for the presentation, I’ll write the paper.” He pulled off the top sheet from the steno pad and slid it in front of her.
Isobel picked up the paper. Leaning back in her chair, she watched him over the frayed top edge as he bent to extract a dark purple folder from his bag.
“Write these down,” he said, setting the folder aside and returning his attention to the book with the thumbnail.
Isobel pulled her purse onto her lap, rustling around in the front flap until she found a pen.
“‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” he said, and Isobel started writing on the sheet of steno paper, right under where he’d already written “Major Works.”
“‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ That’s ‘Masque’ with a q,” he said, and Isobel had to hurry up and write the word “Usher,” only she ended up dropping the e and adding an extra r so that it slurred into “Ushrr.”
“‘The Murders’—”
“Hold on!” she said, her pen flying.
He waited.
“All right,” she said, finishing up the th at the end of “Death.” She crinkled her nose at the word. Why did it feel like she was inscribing someone’s epitaph?
“‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” he continued.
“This guy had some major issues,” Isobel murmured toward the paper, and shook her head as she wrote.
“That’s how most people choose to see it,” he said. “Next is ‘The Raven.’”
Isobel stopped writing. Lifting her pen from the paper, she looked up. “Well, how do you choose to see it?”
His eyes flashed up from the open book to stare at her again, a toned-down version of his death-ray glare.
“It’s a legitimate question,” she said. “And it totally has to do with the project.” She gave a small, sly smile, but he didn’t smile back. Isobel knew he wasn’t exactly the Ronald McDonald type, but she wished he would lighten up. Sheesh.
“Maybe he just knew something the rest of us don’t,” he said. He opened the purple folder, and his eyes shifted to the syllabus tucked inside.
“Like what?” she asked, genuinely curious.
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, and Isobel picked her pen up again, figuring he was ignoring her so she’d get back to work. Her hand poised and at the ready, she waited for the next gruesome title.
“I don’t know,” he said instead, surprising her.
She watched him thoughtfully as he stared down into the open book, like he hoped to fall in, the ends of his feathery black hair nearly brushing the words. There was something odd about the way he’d just spoken. Sort of like, maybe he did know, or at least had an idea.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“Nobody knows.”
It was her turn to give the slow, patient blink.
Seeming to note her skepticism, he drew in a long breath before continuing. “He was found semiconscious, lying in a gutter in Baltimore. Somebody brought him into a nearby tavern—or some people say that they actually found him in the tavern.”
Isobel listened, loosely twisting her pen between her fingertips.
“He was on his way home from Richmond, heading to New York, when he went missing for five days. Completely gone,” he said. “He never made it, and some people say that for whatever reason, he tried to turn back. Then, when they found him in Baltimore, he couldn’t say what had happened because he kept going in and out of consciousness. But he wasn’t making any sense anyway.”
“Why?” Isobel asked, her voice going quiet. “What did he say?”
Varen lifted his brows and cast his gaze toward one of the nearby windows, his eyes narrowing in the light. “Nothing that made sense. When they took him to the hospital, he talked to things that weren’t there. Then, the day before he died, he started calling out for somebody. But nobody knew who it was.”
“And then he just died?”
“After a few days in the hospital, yeah, he died.”
“And nobody knows where he’d been or what happened to him? Like, at all?”
“There are a lot of theories,” he said. “That’s why we’re covering it in the project.”
“Like, what are some of the theories?” she asked.
“Well.” Varen’s chair creaked as he leaned back. His eyes went distant again, and for the first time, that iron gate guard of his seemed to lower an inch. “A lot of people stick to the theory that he drank himself to death.”
Isobel’s gaze trailed down to his hands. She’d never seen a boy with hands like that, with long, delicate fingers, beautiful but still masculine. His fingernails were long too, almost crystalline, tapered to points. They were the kind of hands you’d expect to see under lace cuffs, like Mozart or something.
“And it was election day,” he said, “so a lot of people think he was drugged and used as a repeat voter. That’s one of the most popular theories.” He shrugged. “Some people even say it was rabies, just because he liked cats.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t they have been able to tell if he’d been drinking?”
“The accounts got mixed up,” he said. “And he had enemies. A lot of gossip got spread around.”
“So what do you think happened to him?”
To Isobel’s surprise, he made a face like that question bothered him. His eyebrows furrowed, his gaze darkened, and he frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think a lot of those theories are too convenient. But at the same time, I don’t have any of my own.”