Wicked Business

“Hey, I’m doing my best,” Diesel said, “but she has issues.”


“I do not have issues,” I said. “You’re the one with the issues. You’re the one who has to save the world. Am I all that hot on saving the world? No, but I’m being a good sport about it. You could at least recognize that. You could say, Wow, Lizzy, thanks for helping me out.”

“Maybe it’s that time of the month,” Morty said.

“Hold me back,” I said to Diesel. “I’m going to kill him.”

“What else?” Diesel asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“What else is bothering you?”

“I don’t want to go up in the dome.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Diesel said.

“So I don’t have to go up?”

“Yeah, you still have to go up, but you can whimper like a little girl if you want.”

I left the gallery and walked the hall that ran around the outside of the room. There were windows looking out on Boston, and between the windows were murals. Some of the murals were of farm scenes. Some were military, showing battles of the Revolution. Some were of statesmen. They all had appropriate quotes written in fancy script worked into the art. I stopped to look at a mural depicting a farm scene, and the quote took my breath away. Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines.

Holy cow. It was the line from Reedy’s Shakespeare anthology.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


I peered out the window that was next to the Shakespeare quote, and I looked down on Joy Street. Diesel walked over and stood next to me.

“Boston looks nice from up here,” he said. “This is my favorite American city.”

“I’m surprised you don’t live here. Why did you choose to live in Marblehead?”

“I had to be near you.”

It was the second time in the last two minutes I went breathless. When I get up in the morning, I try not to focus on the possibility that I’m one of two people on this earth with the ability to recognize an object that might make everyone’s life a misery. Truth is, a lot of the time when I’m tagging along with Diesel I’m feeling like Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole—that I’m in an insanely weird dream, and I’ll wake up at any moment and everything will be normal again.

And then there are times like this, when I’m reminded that I’ve been assigned a protector, and the magnitude of my responsibility sinks in.

“I found the clue,” I said to Diesel. “It’s painted into this mural.”

He draped an arm around me and read the quote attributed to Shakespeare. “Good job. There’s a sun in it, too. The hot eye of heaven. And it’s shining down on the farmer’s fields.”

“This mural is a mosaic,” Marty said, leaning close to the mural, examining the surface. “Inside the sun is a piece of tile shaped like a key.”

Diesel took the Lovey key out of his pocket and placed it over the mosaic key. It was a perfect fit, and a number appeared in the farmhouse. The number was followed by a capital J.

“This could all be a colossal nineteenth-century joke,” I said. “An endless scavenger hunt that goes nowhere.”

I heard the elevator doors open, and a security guard walked our way.

“No one is supposed to be in this part of the building,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t realize. We had a free moment and I guess we got carried away. We’ve never been in the State House before, and it’s really interesting.”

“If you come back during the week, you can take a tour,” the guard said. “I’m going to have to ask you to go back to the Great Hall now.”

“We should be getting back anyway,” I said. “Our break time is over.”

Diesel pocketed the key. We took the elevator to the second floor and went back to the reception. The guests were still seated. Chamber music could faintly be heard over the crush of conversation.

“Watch this,” Morty said. “I could do it with my eyes closed.”

A cheer went up from across the room.

“I got one!” someone yelled.

“Am I good or what?” Morty said.

We went down to the employee locker room, changed back into our own clothes, and left through a door that led to Hancock Street. We walked Hancock to Mt. Vernon, and Mt. Vernon to Joy. The house number that appeared on the mosaic was on the first block between Beacon and Mt. Vernon. We stood on the sidewalk and stared at the redbrick town house. Four floors, plus a garden level. Not in terrible condition, but not newly renovated, either.

There weren’t any lights on in the house. Either no one was home, or else someone went to bed early. It was too dark to read the bronze plaque by the door.

“It must be a historic house,” Morty said. “They always have plaques on them like that.”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I crept up the steps to the small front stoop to better see the writing on the plaque.