“A hypnotist? Oh, Tess, please. You’re getting weird on me.”

“Maybe I am.” But she was only growing more convinced of her own theory. Perhaps she could draw Cecilia’s memories out of her, under the guise of concern and friendship. “You want to stay for pizza? Daniel here brought enough for ten people.”

“I have a big appetite,” he said, blushing. “I guess I overestimate how much others need.”

Charlotte and Cecilia shook their heads at the offer, almost in unison.

“I’ve done what I came to do, Tess,” Cecilia said, her voice shaking with some unidentified emotion. “I said I couldn’t say I was sorry, but I am sorry for one thing. I wish I had realized I didn’t have to fight you so hard.”

She broke down and began to cry. Tess would have embraced Cecilia then, but Charlotte had already taken her into her arms, so she settled for patting her arm awkwardly.

“Cecilia, it’s not that bad. You didn’t kill anyone.”

“I thought… I thought I did,” she said, in the broken voice that comes on the heels of a hard cry. “That’s why I’ve been avoiding you. All this time, I believed Yeager’s death was my fault, because I must have stirred someone up somehow. Maybe that is what happened. Maybe someone summoned me to that corner to see the consequences of my rhetoric. Good Lord, maybe someone thought it was what I wanted. If it turns out Yeager was killed by one of us…” She broke down again.

“You didn’t stir anyone up, Cecilia,” Tess told her, in her most soothing voice. “Yeager did. That datebook he wagged on the air? It was a prop. If anything got him killed, it was his own stupidity. Jerold Ensor probably thought his name was in that book. Or Arnold Pitts. If they set you up to witness the killing, it was only to implicate the Visitor. Who’s a better murder suspect than the man no one knows by name? Maybe they thought turning the Visitor into a homicide suspect would force police to do everything they could to identify him, which would lead them to whatever it was Bobby Hilliard gave him that night.”

Cecilia’s shoulders continued to shake as she suppressed another wave of sobs. Daniel, embarrassed by all this emotion, escaped to the kitchen with a beer, in search of Crow.

And Tess realized that her words, intended to do no more than comfort, may have stumbled into the vicinity of the truth.

Yeager’s killer wanted the Visitor, any way he could get him. Enough to pretend to be him, in order to get the police to flush out the real one. Yeager’s killer believed Bobby had passed to the Visitor that still-mysterious “they,” the things worth killing for. The plan had failed, which could mean the Poe Toaster’s life was in danger. But how can you protect someone, or even warn him, if you don’t know who he is?

Chapter 31

Are you sure?“ the mystified classified clerk at the City Paper had asked. She had already read the ad back three times and hadn’t gotten it right once. ”I mean, it’s a lot of words, and it’s not like most of the things we run in our “Misconnected‘ section. Usually, they’re a little more direct, you know?”

Tess had felt perversely flattered that the clerk even cared. This youngish-sounding woman had been a bored automaton when their conversation had started. Now the mask of boredom had slipped, and she was no longer in such a rush to take Tess’s ad and money and get her off the phone.

“More direct? You mean something like: ”You: Black cloak, roses, cognac. Me: Braid, vintage tweed coat, Smith amp; Wesson. Glimpsed at Westminster Hall on Jan. 19 and then-nevermore.“”

“That’s a little better,” the clerk had conceded. “But you could get the word count down. You don’t really need the ”nevermore‘ part because, like, he knows, right? After all, if you’d seen the guy since then, you wouldn’t be placing an ad. Also, my advice? Lose the poetry.“

Tess had looked at the lines she had penned on a legal pad at her kitchen table. It read:

From the same source I have not taken My sorrow I could not awaken, My heart to joy at the same tone, And all I loved, I loved alone.

These were the four lines dropped from the poem “Alone,” the last written missive from her Visitor, whoever he was.

After much pencil-chewing, literal and figurative, Tess had added her own quatrain:

Just because a man’s a stranger Doesn’t mean he can avoid all danger Meet me tomorrow at 6, the usual place, I know your secret-you know my face.

“I’ll stick to my version,” she told the clerk firmly.

“It’s way too vague, I’m telling you. You need to be specific to get results.”

“Well, there’s always next week, isn’t there, and another chance to get it right.”

She hung up, but Tess wasn’t done. She had index cards printed with the same doggerel and she set out with Esskay and Miata, posting them in her usual haunts. If someone had been following her all those weeks, he had been to these places, too. She walked down to the Daily Grind, where Travis agreed to tape the card to the cash register, sharing a conspiratorial wink with her. She crossed the street to Video Americain, where another card joined the jumble of ads for music lessons and apartment shares and yard sales. By the end of the day, her exercise in verse had gone up in the two supermarkets she frequented, Kitty’s bookstore, the boxing gym where she lifted weights, and the “Andy Hardy” liquor store, a neighborhood joint that had earned that nickname because the owners were peppy enthusiastic kids who didn’t look old enough to be drinking wine, much less selling it.

The index cards specified the date they were to meet. The City Paper came out on Wednesday, so “tomorrow” should be clearly understood. Not that Tess was optimistic about getting a response. It seemed just as probable that he would use the time to go to her office or her home. So Crow would be in the house on East Lane, listening for approaching footsteps while he worked in the kitchen. And Daniel had volunteered to park across the street from her office in Butchers Hill, watching for the man to show up there.

Finally, Whitney was to shadow her to Westminster, her only backup now that Gretchen had blown her off. Not that Tess feared this man, whoever he was. Clearly, he was the frightened one.

It was out of consideration for him that she had chosen 6 p.m., when the early nightfall provided cover yet the downtown streets were not yet deserted. The traffic, street and foot, would still be heavy-civil servants rushing home to the suburbs, university types heading to their apartments. She hoped he understood this. She cared only for his safety. His safety and his anonymity. But if he held the secret to a murder, he had to come forward.

Now it was Thursday night, and she was alone in the graveyard. The sign said the grounds closed at dusk, but the unlocked gates invited one to ignore this rule. Tess watched the minute hand of the Bromo-Seltzer clock slowly reaching toward 12. She had debated whether she should wait by the memorial, which had so vexed Gretchen with its wrong date, or the original burial place, which is where the Visitor had laid his gifts. She chose the latter, but there was no bench in its immediate vicinity. Feeling it would be sacrilegious to perch on one of the old family crypts nearby, she began to pace. Then she decided she would look threatening if she kept moving back and forth in this way, so she willed herself to stand still, which made it harder to keep warm. The night was unexpectedly bitter, February strutting its stuff, reminding Baltimoreans that it was short but strong.

Six o’clock came and went, then six-fifteen and six-thirty. Thirty minutes made a profound difference in the neighborhood, and Tess was beginning to lose that comforting end-of-workday bustle she had so counted on. At six-forty-five, she was ready to get out her cell phone and tell Whitney to abort when she saw a tall figure coming toward her, up the steps that led from the law school construction site. The man’s head was down, but he held his hands to his mouth in a gesture she remembered. He glanced at her, slowed his stride for a few steps, and then his gait quickened again. He was rushing, trying to get by her without breaking into an out-and-out run.