Page 188 of Cross & Crown

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.”

188

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

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