Wicked Business (Lizzy and Diesel 2)

“I will take my leave of thee here,” he said.

“Omigosh, is this your car?” Glo asked Hatchet. “This is so cool. This looks like a big Easter egg.”

Hatchet sighed and slumped a little. “My sword doth barely fit in this vehicle.”

“That’s because you have such a big manly sword,” Glo said.

Hatchet perked up at that. “’Tis true. My sword is big and manly.”

I left on that note, not really wanting to dwell on Hatchet’s sword.

Diesel was waiting for me in the bakery. “We need to go back to Cambridge,” he said. “I think I know what we were doing wrong.”

“I have to work. I have cupcakes to frost.”

“Not anymore,” Clara said. “He ate them.”

“All of them?”

“No. His monkey ate some.”

I glanced over at Carl, sitting in the corner with his eyes half closed. “Looks like he overdid it.”

“He has no control,” Diesel said.

“And you?” I asked him.

“I have control in spades.”

“Go,” Clara said. “Take the monkey. Save the world.”

We all went out to the SUV, buckled ourselves in, and Diesel headed for the 1A.

“What’s the big revelation?” I asked him.

“I think we were investigating the wrong Tichy. I went back to Reedy’s papers and found a letter to Lovey from someone named Monroe. Monroe was thanking Lovey for introducing him to his one true love, the woman he was about to marry. And there’s a brief mention of Monroe in the Goodfellow diary. Lovey felt that Monroe had a pure and innocent soul. Monroe’s last name is never given, but Peder Tichy’s headstone said he was survived by his wife, Mary, and his children, Catherine and Monroe.”

“Monroe would be more of a contemporary with Lovey. He’d fit the profile better.”

“When I started to research Tichy, it was Peder who kept coming up. Not a lot is out there about Monroe, other than his connection to the Boston Society of Natural History. At the time, the Society’s museum was located in Back Bay and was known as the New England Museum of Natural History. In 1951, it moved to its present location on the Charles River and became the Boston Museum of Science.”

“The history of Tichy.”

“Exactly. When we were at the cemetery, we only looked at Peder Tichy’s headstone. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to look at Monroe’s.”

Almost an hour later, we were on Mount Auburn Street and Carl was asleep in the backseat. We entered the cemetery and saw lights flashing on the road ahead near the area where Tichy was buried. We got closer and realized that the road was clogged with police cars, cemetery maintenance vehicles, and satellite news trucks. Diesel pulled onto a cross street and parked, and we went on foot to the grave site.

We moved through the crush of people and stopped a short distance from what used to be Peder Tichy’s last resting place. From my vantage point, it looked to me like Tichy was missing. His headstone was tipped over, and there was a big, messy hole in the ground where grass had grown yesterday.

“What’s going on?” Diesel asked one of the cops.

“A groundskeeper discovered this when he came to work this morning. Probably some fraternity had a scavenger hunt and it called for a body. You can’t imagine the stuff these kids do.”

I supposed it was possible, but I was going to look for dirt under Hatchet’s fingernails next time I ran into him.

“Look toward the top of the hill,” Diesel said.

It was Wulf, standing alone as usual, dressed in black slacks and a black leather jacket. He was unsmiling, watching the scene at the grave site. He didn’t look like he’d been digging. He seemed lost in thought, not looking our way, although I was sure he knew we were there.