At last, with nothing else to do, Joe left, still entirely frustrated.
But as he left Lori’s apartment, he thought of the first time Genevieve had come to him about Thorne Bigelow’s murder.
Quoth the raven: die.
New York City hadn’t been especially good to Poe. The man had been self-destructive, true, but he had come to New York to make his fortune. In the end, the city hadn’t afforded him the fame he had craved, much less any riches. Down and out, he had left the city to take a job in Philadelphia.
After he had left the city, a murder had occurred, that of Mary Rogers, known in the papers of the day as the beautiful cigar girl. She had disappeared on a Sunday.
Just like Lori Star.
Mary had left her home of her own free will.
Just like Lori Star.
Suddenly a sense of panic seized him, and he was desperate to see Genevieve, to make sure she was all right. He raced to her building, gave his name to the security guard and was cleared to go up. She met him at her door, an anxious look on her face.
“Joe, what is it?” she asked.
“Lori Star never came home,” he told her.
He barely noticed that she returned to the phone on the counter and told someone, “I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“Did you call the police about her?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.” He met her eyes. “I’d like to go to my apartment,” he told her.
“All right.”
“And I want you to come with me.”
“Sure,” she agreed.
He felt some of the tension easing out of him.
Genevieve was fine. There was no reason for him to keep feeling this awful sense of panic.
“Joe, what’s going on with you? What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“Nothing. It’s just…an uneasy time,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m not going to be happy until we find Thorne Bigelow’s killer.”
She looked at him and nodded, but she knew there was more to what was bothering him than that. But arguing with him wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
He tried to keep things light as they drove out to Brooklyn. He asked her about Eileen, making sure she was keeping in regular touch with her mother.
“Of course,” she told him.
“What are we doing here?” Genevieve asked him when they got to his place.
“I live here,” he said as lightly as he could.
“No, I meant what are we going to do while we’re here? What are we looking for?”
He hesitated. “This may be really farfetched and stupid,” he told her.
“I’m listening.”
“All right, let’s suppose that someone really is reenacting Poe’s work with real victims. Thorne was the first victim. And Sam…maybe that was intentional, too, or maybe the killer just saw a convenient chance and took it. But if the two are connected, the murderer must have been scared shi—alarmed when Lori Star started getting attention from the media.”
“Even if they’re not connected, Lori Star’s certainty that she knew what happened on the highway might have disturbed someone,” Genevieve pointed out.
“True.”
“You think she’s dead, don’t you?” Genevieve asked him.
He started to deny it, but then he met her eyes and tried not to turn away. Tried not to imagine her being strangled, even though the vision haunted him night after night.
“Yes,” he said.
“And…you think all three deaths are connected, don’t you? Even though you’re the one who told me that Poe’s characters never committed vehicular homicide?”
He stared back at her. “Yes,” he admitted flatly.
“Okay, so what are we doing here?”
“Research.”
“On…?”
“‘The Mystery of Marie Roget.’ You take the story itself. I’ll look up what really happened.”
She looked skeptical, but she accepted his collection of Poe stories, while he turned to his computer. They worked in companionable silence for a while.
The Internet was full of leads, but also sent him from page to page following them up. He made notes as he went.
“There’s a forword to the story in your book, you know,” Genevieve said. She had curled into the extra chair in his office.
“Yes?”