Read Online Once Upon a Midnight Eerie: Book #2 (Misadventures of Edgar/Allan) by Gordon McAlpine - Free Book Online Page B

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    HAVE A NICE DAY!

7

    BACK TO THE BONEYARD
    THE boys were well rested when they returned to the Saint Louis Cemetery late that night. Once again, Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith had lingered over evening tea in the lobby of the Pepper Tree Inn, so Edgar, Allan, and Roderick had climbed out of their room window, crawled across the ledge, and shinned down the balcony to the alley.
    This time, however, they were not met by the Dickinson sisters.
    Instead, Em and Milly were engaged now in their own part of the mission, which was to find a way to break into the New Orleans Pirate Museum, where the wax figures of the Lafitte brothers highlighted the collection of buccaneer memorabilia.
    And that wasn’t the only difference between this late-night trip to the cemetery and the first.

    Tonight, Allan and Edgar did not run but strolled casually, hoping to make the pickax, shovel, and pair of flashlights they’d bought that afternoon at a hardware store seem less suspicious to passersby.
    And the weather was different. Thick fog had rolled up the river and now blanketed the French Quarter, limiting visibility to about twenty feet. The bright lights of the crowded streets looked like colorful galaxies viewed through an out-of-focus telescope. And as the twins left the tourist district and neared the cemetery, the dimmer, less frequently spaced streetlamps cast strange halos over the otherwise encompassing dark.
    Finally, this trip to the cemetery was different because Allan and Edgar had a worrisome sense of being followed, though each time they turned back no one was there. Even Roderick looked over his shoulder from time to time.
    The cemetery awaited in stillness.
    The boys and cat edged through the break in the wall.
    A cemetery that is spooky on a clear night is spookier on a foggy one. But Edgar and Allan were not particularly spooked.
    Their first stop was the tomb of their friends.
    The memorial stone was different from how it had been just the day before.
    No worn-away letters . . . a night off for Genevieve and Clarence.

    But the Poe twins’ work had just begun.
    Edgar and Allan split up to scour the cemetery, looking for a mausoleum marked SHAKESPEARE . Just twenty-four hours earlier, they might have been startled by the occasional wisps of fog that crept in ghostly shapes around the corners and cornices of the stone crypts. But since meeting the Du Valiers, Edgar and Allan had learned that real ghosts looked more like ordinary human beings than ectoplasm.
    Continuing up and down the long rows, the twins took note of all the tombs they passed, resting places for families with names like Petit, Moreau, Martinez, Laurent, Bertrand, Fournier, Morel, Girard, Mercier, Garcia, Bonnet, Lopez, Blanc, Mathieu, Gautier, Dumont, Fontaine, Sanchez, Marchand, Dufour, Dumas, Leroux, Renard, Dupuis, Laveau, de Tremblement, Gomez, Leblanc . . .
    Then Edgar and Allan met one another coming around a fog-enshrouded corner.
    “I think we’ve covered the whole cemetery,” Edgar said.
    “Lots of French surnames with a little Spanish tossed in,” added Allan.
    “That pretty well describes the population of New Orleans in the early 1800s.”
    But they hadn’t come here to take a census.
    The bottom line was that there was no Shakespeare crypt.
    Not even any names of his major characters. No Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth or Capulet or Montague or Othello . . .
    Had Edgar and Allan figured it wrong?
    The boys looked at each other, their two minds working as one.
    After a moment, each broke out laughing.
    Five minutes later, Edgar and Allan arrived with their pickax and shovel at the weathered but otherwise ordinary-looking tomb of a man named Lance de Tremblement, who died in 1813. As they struck at the old brass doors, they couldn’t help but wonder how they’d walked past it the first time.
    It was so simple!
    After all, the Lafitte brothers’ native language was French.
    And in French the word lance means