Diesel picked a picture book about trucks off her cart and paged through it. “That’s a complicated question.”
Sharon pushed her cart forward and placed a book on a shelf. “I met Gilbert through a dating service. He said he was looking for true love.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “We went out a couple times, and I thought he liked me, and then this woman named Ann came along, and he got weird and dumped me.”
“Do you have a last name for her?”
“No. I don’t know anything about her.” She shelved another book. “I’ll tell you one thing, though—Gilbert Reedy was a very strange man. His area of expertise was Elizabethan England, but he was obsessed with an obscure poet from the nineteenth century. He had a little book of sonnets he could quote by heart. He was convinced it held the key to true love. Like it had mystical powers. And then one day last week, he called me up and said he didn’t need me anymore. That was the way he put it. He didn’t need me. Can you imagine? How am I supposed to interpret that? And he was babbling about Ann, Ann, Ann. And good triumphing over evil. And he should have seen it sooner.”
“What should he have seen sooner?” I asked her.
“He didn’t say. He was on a rant, making no sense. If it was anyone else, I’d think they were on drugs, but Gilbert Reedy wouldn’t have any idea where to get drugs. He was a total academic. It was almost like dating me was a science experiment.”
“Did he carry the book of sonnets with him?” Diesel asked. “Did you see it?”
“Yes. It was actually very wonderful. The sonnets were written by a man named Lovey, and the book cover was leather with hand-tooled almond blossoms scrawled across it. It reminded me of the Van Gogh painting. I did a little of my own research and found that Van Gogh and Lovey were contemporaries, so it’s possible Lovey copied the painting to decorate his book. Or it could just have been coincidence. The almond blossom has long been a symbol of hope. The book locked like a diary, and there was a little key that went with the book, but Gilbert never let me see the key. He said it was the last piece to the puzzle, and he kept it someplace safe.”
“What did he mean by the last piece to the puzzle?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” Gordon said. “He was always making statements like that and then jumping off to something else. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I kept going out with him. He was sort of a crackpot.”
“He read poetry to you, and he was searching for true love,” I said.
Gordon smiled and nodded. “Yes. He was a romantic crackpot.”
“Do you have any idea who might know something about the key and the puzzle?” I asked her. “Did he have any close relatives or friends that he might have spoken to?”
“I don’t think he had friends, and he didn’t talk about his relatives. He mentioned his grad student a lot. Julie. He was her thesis advisor. He thought she was smart. He might have confided in her. And of course there’s Ann.”
We left the library and returned to the SUV.
“You said Reedy had chosen four women from the dating service,” I said to Diesel. “Is Ann the fourth?”
“No. Deirdre Early is the fourth. She has a Boston address.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s almost four o’clock. Do you want to keep going with this?”
“Yeah. I’d like to poke around Harvard and see if I can find Reedy’s grad student. And then we can try to catch Early on our way home.”
Diesel tapped a number into his cell phone and asked for assistance in contacting Reedy’s grad student. “I’ll be in Cambridge in an hour,” he said. “See if you can get her to meet me. And I’d like to see Reedy’s office.”
“Was that your assistant?” I asked him when he disconnected.
“More or less.”
Diesel’s been through six assistants in the short time I’ve known him. I’ve stopped trying to remember names. They never have faces. They’re always just voices floating out of the hands-free car phone, brought to Diesel through the miracle of Bluetooth.
We took 1A to Boston. The landscape was interesting at first and then turned ugly with potholed highways and crazy angry drivers careening around insane traffic circles that shot roads off in all directions.
We left the North Shore and connected to Storrow Drive, rolling through Boston, following the Charles River. The back sides of four-story redbrick town houses hugged the left side of the road, with Boston’s high-rise office and condo buildings rising beyond them. I knew that tree-lined streets of prime real estate row houses ran for a couple blocks in from Storrow, ending with the two high-end boutique shopping streets, Newbury and Boylston. The Public Garden was at one end of Newbury, and the large indoor shopping mall was at the other end. And if you walked far enough south, you came to Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox.
A narrow patch of grass and a bike path stretched along the river side of Storrow. A few people pedaled along the bike path, and a few hardy souls were out on the river in small sailboats. We passed an empty bandshell and some Porta-Potties left from a weekend event.
Diesel drove the length of Storrow and took the bridge over the Charles River to Cambridge. I was in foreign territory now. I’d made lots of trips to downtown Boston since moving to Marblehead, but I’ve never ventured across the river to Cambridge.
“You look like you know where you’re going,” I said to Diesel.