Wandering Star

Charleston, 1828. A nineteen-year-old private at Fort Moultrie is writing verses nobody wants, drinking rum nobody can account for, and keeping company with a pirate.

His name on the muster roll is Edgar A. Perry. It is not his name.

Charlotte Law commands the Wandering Star and forty men who would die for her. She has a scrap of vellum marked with a death's head, a beetle cast in solid gold, and a location somewhere in the black marsh across the water. What she needs is a third pair of hands, and Finnegan - Irish, homesick, and hopelessly in love with her - is only too glad to volunteer.

They will find what they are looking for. Four or five men are already in the ground above it.

A short, sharp piece of Southern Gothic about the year Edgar Allan Poe spent on Sullivan's Island: the sand and salt and Spanish moss he would spend the rest of his life writing his way out of. Poe really did enlist under a false name. He really was at Fort Moultrie. He really did walk that haunted stretch of lowcountry, and fifteen years later he set "The Gold-Bug" there.

This is the story he never published.

Approximately 5,200 words - one sitting. Includes a historical afterword on Poe's Carolina year.