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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 washer 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 atfirst 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