The yellowed newspaper review still lay upon the table. By way of replying to the frontiersman’s query, I picked it up, rose from my seat, and—stepping to the opposite side of the table—handed it to Crockett.

“Read this,” I said, as he cast me a quizzical glance.

Holding the clipping towards the light, Crockett began to peruse it, squinting through the smoky haze issuing from the smoldering tip of his much-reduced panatela. A moment later, he plucked the cigar from his mouth and—gaping up at me—exclaimed: “Why this here writin is all about Eliza Poe! Ain’t that your deceased mother?”

I nodded in the affirmative.

“But what in tarnation does all this dad-blasted business have to do with her?”

“That, Colonel Crockett, is precisely what I intend to find out.”

Declaring that he was feeling “dog-tired,” Crocked: took his leave soon afterwards—though not before we had resolved upon a course of action. From my earlier perusal of the newspaper clipping, I had already determined that, among the eminent Baltimoreans identified in the review, only one now remained alive: Mrs. Henrietta Nicodemus, whose late husband, Josiah, had made a considerable fortune as the owner of a large fleet of merchant vessels, following a singularly adventurous career as the captain of the brig Grampus. The aged widow, who remained a prominent figure in Baltimore’s flourishing social scene, resided in baronial splendor in one of the city’s most fashionable districts. It was this magnificent residence—and the elderly (though still-vital) personage who inhabited it—that the frontiersman and I proposed to visit on the morrow.

After bidding me good-night—and enjoining me to tell Muddy and Sissy that the evening had been a “regular slam-whanger”—Crockett departed. No sooner had I locked the front door behind him than, returning to my study, I began to pace rapidly about the floor, my soul in a state of extreme and unbridled agitation.

Throughout the course of our dinner party, I, like Crockett, had managed to keep my anxieties at bay. Now that I was alone—the frontiersman having departed, Muddy and Sissy asleep in their chambers—these forcibly suppressed emotions returned with an overpowering intensity. Especially unnerving was the memory of the anomalous female being, whose uncanny countenance (a precise description of which I had deliberately withheld from Crockett) filled me with even greater feelings of foreboding and dread than the fearfully mutilated visage of the murder victim.

All at once, as I circumambulated the floor for the dozenth time, my gaze fell upon the volume that had so riveted my interest when I had discovered it among the books sent to me for review by my employer, Mr. Thomas White. It lay atop a stack of papers on a corner of my writing table, where I had left it the previous afternoon. I refer to the remarkable study by the German scholar Heinrich Maelzel, Curious Beliefs and Peculiar Customs among the Savage Peoples of Melanesia.