The Mystery of Nevermore by C.S. Poe

when you’re done,” I called to Max.
    “Sorry! You know, they technically are set at normal,” he teased. Max poked his head in. “Sorry,” he added again.
    I waved him away and resumed eating sushi while scanning recent newspaper headlines. Nothing jumped out as unordinary, but then again, it took quite a bit to rattle the nerves of a native New Yorker. I took a different approach and checked out the NYPD’s crime statistics for the end of the year.
    Overall crime was down 20 percent from the same time the year before. Well, that was good news, I supposed. Ah, but there’s always an asterisk to these comments. Murder was up. An interactive map told me just where in particular too.
    The outer boroughs mostly, but my neighborhood, the East Village, had a surprising number of red flags. I enlarged the map and clicked for crime details. One murder and over a dozen burglaries. I considered the murder in particular for a moment. It wasn’t Mike’s death, as the web counter appeared to be a week behind.
    Despite the number of people who lived in New York, the neighborhoods were pretty tight. News travels. A murder would have been talked about, however briefly. A few minutes of surfing the Internet brought up nothing of substantial interest, though.
    Open case, still?
    A lost life the media claimed to be unimportant?
    I could ask Neil— no .
    I could ask Calvin—he told me to stay out of it. That sounded familiar.
    I took off my glasses and rubbed my face in aggravation. I don’t know what I had been expecting to find, maybe www.reallifepoemurders.com? I put my glasses back on and tried that.
    It wasn’t a real domain. I was almost relieved.
    I went back to the crime map and realized, with a sort of grim curiosity, that I could enlarge the map and see the exact cross streets of each recorded crime in my neighborhood. The murder was just a little north of my apartment and shop. I opened another page and scoured the neighborhood, but the East Village was a rich and trendy area, and I had no way to know for certain if the crime had occurred in one of the first-floor storefronts or in one of the many apartments above.
    I couldn’t even say for certain why I was fixated on this one murder, out of all others that had occurred in the city. I guess I was desperate for some logical—and I use the word loosely—reason Mike was killed. Calvin would have already been going over the details, to see if there was a relation to any other unsolved—
    And there it was. My clue.
    The look Calvin had given me when I first started talking about Poe. I knew it.
    “I fucking knew it!” I shouted triumphantly.
    “Knew what?” Max called from somewhere in the shop.
    “Uh….” I stared at one of the advertisements on the side of the webpage. The Garden was selling hockey tickets. “The Rangers are looking good for the play-offs this season!”
    I could hear Max speaking to a customer on his way to the office. I shut the Internet tabs and turned the computer off just as he poked his head in the doorway.
    “You don’t follow hockey,” he pointed out, as if I were losing my mind.
    “I don’t?”
    Max snorted and laughed. “You’re really starting anew. God, Neil must be in the doghouse.”
    I grunted while getting to my feet. “Is it busy?”
    “A few people.” Max turned and hurried to the counter as a posh-looking woman stepped up, holding a framed photo.
    I paused in the doorway, holding my phone close to type a message.
    Wwhat haopen on 13 btwn 2bd and 3rd ave?
    I’m really bad at texting. I’m a seventy-year-old man inside the body of one in his thirties. I don’t know much slang past LOL and ASL—which I think is defunct anyway—and while apparently my phone has a massive library of emoji, I still have no idea how to access them.
    I sent the message and tucked my phone into my back pocket before smoothing down my wrinkled shirt and making my way through the aisles of the Emporium. A familiar person stood along the