JD was grinning, looking pleased with himself. “It’s a legit map. I mean, we have to take into account that I freehand drew it from memory, so it might be iffy on exact locations.
But stil .”
“What are we looking for, then?” Kelly asked. He still sounded miserable, but he was up and peeking over JD’s shoulder.
“Is there an X on it?” Julian asked, his voice laced with sarcasm. “An X would make this easy.”
“No. But there is a cross,” JD told him.
“It’s a cemetery,” Julian grunted. “There are crosses everywhere.”
“The treasure he buried was a cross,” Nick pointed out.
“What better to mark it with?”
“Are you thinking the treasure itself is buried here?”
Kelly asked again. “’Cause I don’t have my grave-desecrating boots on.”
“No, this is just another hint. The treasure would have to be northwest, somewhere along Battle Road,” Nick guessed.
Julian pulled up short. “How do you know that? And why the f**k are we here rather than there?”
“The wagon was intercepted on the road to Concord and Lexington,” Nick told him. “It had to be hidden before it reached the checkpoint at Boston. See, at the time, Boston was a peninsula; there was only one way in by land. The British troops occupied the city, but the Colonial troops controlled the countryside. They had a gentleman’s agreement to allow passage to and from the city as long the traveler was unarmed.
A stolen wagon full of gold being driven like hell by British soldiers wasn’t going to be making the cut. They would have had to have hidden it between Lexington and here.”
Julian frowned. “Fair enough.”
JD was watching Nick, his blue eyes unreadable.
“What?” Nick asked.
“You know a hell of a lot more about this than you let on.”
Nick’s only response was an unapologetic shrug.
“Where’s the cross on the goddamned napkin? Let’s get this shit over with,” Kelly mumbled.
JD held it up, positioning the two main landmarks appropriately. Nick pointed to the cross on the napkin, and they all turned toward the spot in the graveyard it indicated.
Julian glanced toward the sidewalk as Nick and the others moved forward. “I’ll hold down the fort,” he offered. “I’m not very good at this stuff anyway.”
Nick stopped and looked back at him. Julian cocked his head almost imperceptibly, and Nick’s eyes strayed toward the perimeter. A city cab sat idling on the other side of the street, just out of sight unless you stood near the cemetery gate to see beyond the buildings on either side.
Nick nodded. Julian had picked up on their tail before Nick had. That was a little spooky, but Nick tried to shrug it off and trust the man to have his six as he headed for the indicated section of the graveyard.
JD and Kelly were wandering around the graves, bending occasionally to examine a headstone or wipe at the words to better read them.
“I think I got something,” Kelly said quietly. Nick came up behind where he was kneeling. The carvings on the marker had been nearly obscured by hundreds of years of weathering, which was odd since most of them had held up reasonably well. But the date was still clearly visible. There was no date of birth, merely the date of death: April 19, 1775.
“That’s weird,” JD whispered.
“That’s the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord,” Nick told them.
“Could it be a soldier who was killed there?” Kelly asked.
“It’s not a body,” JD said. “The marker was placed here as a clue to the location of the stolen loot.”
“Would explain why there’s no date of birth, and why the carving isn’t as deep: it was done in a hurry or on the sly,” Nick added. “This must have been the only way the soldiers could tell what they’d done, leaving a monument to the theft, a map pointing the way.”
Kelly fished his phone out of his pocket, then took a picture of the gravestone.
“What are you doing?” Nick asked.
“Being awesome, how about you?” Kelly drawled. He pulled up the shot he’d just taken in his photo app and began to play with the contrast, adding to the shadows, brightening the lighter bits. Soon he had a representation of what the marker probably read. He stood and showed it to Nick.
Nick grinned and nodded. “Being awesome indeed.”
“What’s it say?” JD asked, and they crowded around the phone.
“Russell B. North,” Kelly read. “Is that significant?”
“Not to me,” Nick admitted.
“North,” JD said with a wave of his hand. “And the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Old North Bridge. It was where the first shot of the war was fired.”
“How would he have gotten back there to leave something?” Nick argued.
“He obviously stuck around Boston long enough to commission a f**king headstone be carved. That would have been what, at least a week? A few days? Time for him to range out of Boston while it was being done. A single man traveling out of the city with no weapons would have had free passage, you said so yourself. Maybe the treasure itself was hidden there.”
Kelly and Nick shared a look, and Kelly nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
“Okay. Let’s rol .”
They rejoined Julian as he loitered near the entrance.
“Find it?”
“We think so. How are our friends?” Nick asked. He carefully positioned himself between the cab and JD, just in case.Julian grunted. “Nosy.”
“Should we deter them?” Kelly asked.
Nick stared at the cab for a few moments. He wanted their tail to know they’d been spotted. “No,” he finally growled.
“We’ll lose them on Battle Road. If they can keep up, they’re welcome to come and get us.”
Kelly had commandeered Nick’s spare set of sunglasses in the car and was nursing a cup of the strongest coffee he’d been able to buy on the walk back to the hotel. He was slumped in the front seat, trying not to watch the scenery pass by.
He felt a million times better than he had when he’d woken, but he’d much rather be in bed on Nick’s boat being cuddled than here right now.
“Doing okay?” Nick asked him. He’d stopped sounding amused, and his voice was laced with more concern every time he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Kelly grunted. “Don’t look at me. Stop looking at me.”