"The stink in here…" he said to himself, sniffing.

A woman sang drunkenly from the ladies' cells corridor. The visitor merely stood silently. Not finding any particular look of sympathy about him, I did the same.

I was surprised when the stranger was joined by a frightened young lady, wrapped tightly in her cloak.

"Oh, dear Quentin, look at where they've put you!" Hattie stared pityingly at me. She was near tears.

"Hattie!" I reached out and grabbed her by the hand. It hardly seemed possible that she was real, even with the warm leather of her gloves. Taking renewed notice of the stranger, I released her hands. "Is Peter not with you?"

"No, he would not hear of me coming. He will not speak of the situation at all. When he went to the lecture, he was quite angered, Quentin. He felt he had to do something to try to stop you. I do believe he is still your friend."

"He must know I am innocent! How could I have something to do with the shooting of the Baron? The Baron had kidnapped my friend to prevent him from speaking-"

"Your friend? Would that be the friend who has placed you into this débâcle, Mr. Clark?" said the man standing at Hattie's side, turning toward me with a frown not unlike Peter's.

Hattie motioned him for patience. She turned back to me. "This is my cousin's husband, Quentin. One of the finest attorneys in Washington in this sort of matter. He can help us, I'm certain."

Despite the despair of what was now my lot, I felt comfort at the word "us."

"And the Baron himself?" I asked.

"He lies without hope of recovery," my new lawyer blurted out.

"I have written to your great-aunt for her to come at once; she shall help rectify all this," Hattie continued, as though not having heard the terrible words. If what her cousin said was true, if the Baron was shortly to die, in the eyes of the world I would be condemned as a murderer.

A few days later I was moved from the district station house to the Jail of Baltimore City and County, on the banks of Jones Falls. The atmosphere duplicated my hopelessness; the surrounding cells were filled to capacity with some who'd been convicted of grave crimes along with those waiting, with small hopes, for their trial dates, or with perverse eagerness for their own hangings.

The morning before, I had been officially arraigned for the attempt to murder Baron Dupin. My declarations that the Baron must be stopped, combined with my appearance on the lyceum stage, were cited widely. Hattie's cousin shook his beard disapprovingly at the fact that a highly respected police officer was a witness against me. The police had also found a gun when searching Glen Eliza-the weapon I had brought as a safeguard when I'd visited John Benson, which, absentmindedly, I had left in plain view.

The tempests outside grew worse every day. The rain would not stop. Each time it slowed itself it followed on even harder, as though it had only been taking a breath. It was said that a bridge was swept away at Broadway near Gay Street and struck another bridge, so that the two bridges drove themselves downriver through half of Baltimore, knocking entire houses off the banks along their way. In the prison, meanwhile, the air itself seemed to change-full of pressure and discomfort. I saw one prisoner scream frightfully and squeeze his head with his hands as though something was burrowing through to get out. "It's come!" he cried apocalyptically. "It's come!" Confrontations between some of the more desperate prisoners and the guards also grew worse, whether from the air or from other causes of which I had not made myself aware. Through the bars of my window, I could see the shore of Jones Falls gradually surrender to the boiling layer of rainwater. I felt myself do the same.

My lawyer returned, each time with more bad tidings from outside. The newspapers, which I could read only listlessly, were quite giddy about my guilt. It was now written that the Frenchman dangerously wounded and lying in the hospital was the model for Poe's tales of analysis, and that I had done away with him because of jealousy, due to a diseased preoccupation with Poe. The Whig newspapers thought my action as assassin somehow heroic. The Democratic newspapers, perhaps in response against the Whigs, were convinced I was villainous and cowardly. Both, though, had decided I was certainly the killer. The newspapers known to be neutral, namely the Sun and Transcript, worried that the episode would do no insignificant damage to our country's relationship with the still young French Republic and its president, Louis-Napoleon.

I protested vociferously that the Baron Dupin was by no means the real Dupin, though I believe Hattie's cousin thought my choice of objection in the matter most strange. Edwin came to see me several times, but soon the police peppered him with questions, suspicious of any Negro having business with me, and I begged him to refrain from his visits to protect himself from their scrutiny. John Benson, my benevolent Phantom, came to call on me in this wretched place, too. I shook his hand warmly, desperate for an ally.

The cross-bar shadows fell over his haggard face. He explained that he was working nearly all hours on his uncle's account books. "I'm dragged out, no mistake. The devil himself was never so pressed with business," he said. He looked at me sidelong through the bars, as though at any moment we could exchange places if he were not careful with the words he chose.

"Perhaps you should confess, Mr. Clark," he advised.

"Confess what?"

"That you had been overtaken with Poe. Overcome, so to speak."

I hoped I could elicit more valuable assistance from him. "Benson, you must tell me if there was anything else you discovered about how Poe died."

He sat on a stool kicking his legs out, despondent and sleepy, and repeated his suggestion that I consider making a complete confession. "Don't think of the Poe predicament any longer, Mr. Clark. The truth behind his death is beyond discovery now. You see that."

Hattie visited me on the days she managed to avoid both her aunt and Peter. She brought me food and small gifts. In my anxious and confused state, I could hardly find words to express my gratitude to her.

She recalled many stories from our childhood to calm my nerves. We had frank discussions touching all subjects. She told me how she felt when I was in Paris.

"I could see yours were great dreams, Quentin." She sighed. "I know we do not have a life of mutual happiness ahead of us, Quentin. But I wish only to say that you mustn't think I was angered, or melancholy, for your having gone away, or because you have not told me more. If I have shown melancholy it is because you did not feel, you did not know decidedly, that you could say every detail and would receive in return my unblushing friendship."

"Peter was right. There was selfishness that began all this. Maybe I did all this not for what Poe's writings would mean to the world, but for what they meant to me alone. Perhaps that exists only in my mind!"

"That is why it is important," Hattie replied, taking my hand.

"Why couldn't I see?" I fretted nervously. "It has become all about his death to me, at the expense of his life. Precisely what I worried others would do. At the expense of my life, too."

The rains and flooding soon made it too difficult to travel to the prison from other quarters of the city. Separated from Hattie, there was no company outside the desolate prisoners. I had never felt quite so unaided, trapped, finished.

Once, during a night in which sleep had mercifully overtaken me, I heard light footsteps coming toward my cell. Hattie. She had come again, through the worst floods and rains yet. She came swiftly and elegantly through the corridor, closed off from the filth of the cells in her bright red cloak. Yet, strangely, there was no guard beside her and-I realized when coming to my senses-these were not hours in which visitors were admitted. As she emerged from the shadows of other cells, she reached in and grabbed my wrists so tightly I could not move. It was not Hattie at all.