We were on East Wheelock Street, and there were dorms to the left and right of me. I was thinking this was incredibly appealing, and maybe I would want to live here some day. Open a bakery of my own and make healthy treats and homemade granola for the college faculty. And then I saw the Sphinx, and I had second thoughts about Hanover.
The building was a temple, a tomb, a forbidding gray stone bunker. It could have been a bomb shelter. It was nicely proportioned but cold and unwelcoming. And it looked forgotten, sitting forlorn in a scraggly copse of undernourished trees, perched on hardscrabble grass without a single azalea bush to soften its appearance. A hundred years ago, it had no doubt been the pride of a secret society when secret societies flourished. But that time had come and gone, and the Sphinx now looked like a beautifully designed but lone monument in an unattended boneyard.
Diesel found parking a block away, and we walked back to take a closer look. No sign of Wulf or Hatchet. No sign of Deirdre Early. No sign that anyone ever used the building. The heavy wood door looked completely unused. Diesel ran his hand over it and wasn’t able to find a lock he could open. There was no give when he pushed against it.
We circled the building and found a simple, unassuming door on the east side. It had a five-button security lock that had been pretty well bashed in and what appeared to be the tip of a sword wedged between door and jamb.
“Looks like Hatchet’s been here,” Diesel said.
“Can you open it?”
He put his hand to it. “It’s jammed.”
We circled the building several times but couldn’t find a way to get in. I had the scrap of paper with the hieroglyphics and scrambled letters on it. We compared the hieroglyphics on my paper to the markings on the tomb’s cornerstone and they were exactly the same.
“Do you get any vibes when you touch the building?” Diesel asked me.
I put my hand to the stone. “Nope. Nothing.”
I heard sirens and I turned to see a police car race down Wheelock, moving toward Main Street. It was followed by a fire truck and another police car. We left the Sphinx and went to the sidewalk. It was impossible to see exactly what was going on, but smoke billowed into the sky from somewhere on campus.
Diesel and I walked toward the smoke and saw that it was coming from a building on the far side of the Green. We crossed the Green and joined the crowd of students watching the building burn.
I was standing next to a guy with a two-day beard and hair that was in worse shape than Diesel’s.
“What building is this?” I asked him. “How did the fire start?”
“This is Parkhurst,” he said. “It’s an admin building. The Office of Student Life is in here. Don’t know how the fire started.”
An older woman who looked like she might work in the building leaned toward us. “I was told some crazy woman came in demanding a list of Sphinx members. And when she didn’t get it, she torched the office and ran away.”
“The gang’s all here,” Diesel said to me.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“Lunch,” Diesel said. “I’m starving.”
We crossed Wheelock, bypassed The Hanover Inn, thinking it looked too classy for us, and settled on Lou’s. My rule of thumb is always go with the diner that has a pastry counter right up front. Especially if the pastries are homemade and look like the ones in Lou’s case.
There was counter seating and booth seating and we were able to take our pick, since everyone else in town was gawking at the fire. I ordered a burger, and Diesel ordered something called The Big Green, which it turned out meant they emptied the kitchen onto as many plates as it took and tried to cram them onto the small booth table. It was the equivalent of ordering half a cow at Fat Bubba’s Steak House. Eggs, pancakes with real maple syrup, bacon, hash browns, sausage, English muffin, and whatever else was buried under the eggs and potatoes.
Diesel shoveled it all in and got a maple-glazed cruller on the way out.
“Impressive,” I said to him.
“The food?”
“That, too.”
We walked back to the Sphinx and stared at it.
“I’ve got nothing,” I said to Diesel.
“It bothers me that Hatchet and Fire Woman are here, and we’re not seeing them.”
“Are we talking about Deirdre Early or Anarchy?”
“I’m counting on them being the same person.”
“Works for me. We haven’t seen Wulf, either.”
“I’m sure he’s here, somewhere. He’s probably napping in his Batmobile, waiting for the moon to come out.”
“You don’t like him.”
“There was a time when I admired and envied him. His skills came earlier than mine. But we made different life choices, and it’s placed us in an adversarial position.”
There were some guys and dogs playing with Frisbees on the lawn of a neighboring fraternity.
“Is that Alpha Delta?” I asked Diesel.
“Yeah. It’s the fraternity that inspired Animal House.”
“It’s also mentioned in a lot of references as having a secret tunnel to the Sphinx.”