Puzzle Me This

by Eli Easton

  Published by Pinkerton Road

  Pennsylvania, USA

  Second edition, Sept, 2019

  eli@elieaston.com

  www.elieaston.com

  Puzzle Me This

  © 2013 Eli Easton

  Cover Art by Reese Dante

  First edition published Oct 2013 with Dreamspinner Press.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution.

  Please do not loan or give this ebook to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means.

  The author earns her living from sales of her work. Please support the arts! DO NOT PIRATE THIS BOOK.

  Contents

  Blurb

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1 One Down, Ten Across

  Chapter 2 Won't You Be My Neighbor?

  Chapter 3 Looking for Mr. Goodbar

  Chapter 4 Luke Answers

  Chapter 5 Man with a Grid

  Chapter 6 Logistics

  Chapter 7 Who's the Bigger Nerd?

  Chapter 8 Cranking up the Heat-O-Meter

  Chapter 9 Luke Meets Godzilla

  Chapter 10 Veil of Tiers

  Chapter 11 The Philadelphia Horror (Con)

  Chapter 12 Alex Goes to Eleven

  Chapter 13 Trick and Treat

  Chapter 14 The Best Thing

  Chapter 15 Too Much and Not Enough

  Chapter 16 Turkey Trimmed with Family Drama

  Chapter 17 Childhood Fears

  Chapter 18 Alex Pushes Back

  Chapter 19 What Happens in the Throne Room

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  The Mating of Michael

  Also By Eli Easton

  About Eli Easton

  PUZZLE ME THIS

  Luke Schumaker designs computer games, working from his home. Every day he walks his dog in the woods nearby, never suspecting that someone who is completely smitten is watching.

  The watcher is Alex Shaw, and he too works from home, designing logic and crossword puzzles. Alex’s options are limited: he’s too shy to approach Luke and his wheelchair won’t let him follow into the woods. His solution? Secret messages for Luke in the crosswords he writes for the local paper.

  When Luke decodes them, romance begins, but then they face greater puzzles, like Alex’s interfering sister and what commitment to a man in a wheelchair really takes. And, most puzzling of all, how do you know if love is real?

  Acknowledgments

  This is the second edition of Puzzle Me This. The first edition was published in Oct 2013 by Dreamspinner Press.

  This second edition adds 12,000 new words to the story and includes a significant edit of the original portions of the book.

  The original story was written to submit to Dreamspinner’s “Daily Dose” series with a theme of sports. It was not selected for that series (because the “games” in this story were not sufficiently sporty), but it was accepted for general publication as a stand-alone novella. So thank you to Dreamspinner for taking a chance on a new author in 2013.

  Because of the word limit on the “Daily Dose” series, I worked hard to get the original story under 20,000 words. When I got the rights to the story back from Dreamspinner, I was able to rework and expand the story–to “let the belt out”, as it were. The results is, I hope, a story with more breathing room, more fun banter, and more time to spend with Luke and Alex.

  I’d like to thank the Dreamspinner editors for help in shaping the first edition of this book. And thanks to the editor for the second edition, Jason Bradley, cover artist Reese Dante, and promo queen Rachel Maybury.

  Chapter 1

  One Down, Ten Across

  “Come on, Trevor! Get the ball!”

  Luke Schumaker threw a rubber baseball into the woods. The large, shaggy-haired retriever dove after it with unbounded glee. It must be nice to have one thing in life you were born to do and do it so whole-heartedly.

  Luke loved his early morning hikes in the Pennsylvania woods. The trail up Henneman Hill started at the edge of his apartment complex and was its chief attraction as far as Luke was concerned. August was not his favorite month in the Northeast, with its damp, close heat. But he’d put up with the summers in exchange for fall and winter. He’d spent ten years after college working in California for computer game companies, and he’d been thrilled when his company had announced a work-from-home policy. It meant he could continue to do the job he loved and move back to Pennsylvania, where weather was weather, and men wore flannel shirts—even the gay ones.

  Gay men, that is, not gay flannel shirts, though Luke had a few of those in his closet.

  Luke was pretty sure he had a serious flannel kink.

  Back at his apartment, Luke had his key out before he noticed the newspaper propped against his door. It was a Philadelphia paper, the Examiner. He gave the interloper a side-eye, as if it were a spider or a dangerous reptile. But when it was still there after his shower, he decided a little neighborly consideration was in order.

  The apartment complex was called the Woodsman, and it had thirty separate units, all emphatically rustic. Each unit housed four apartments. Luke knocked on the door of all three of his neighbors. It was still early, and he found someone at home at each unit. All of them disavowed any claim on the Examiner.

  He supposed it was his lucky day then. Luke returned to his apartment and sat down in his kitchenette to enjoy his breakfast of eggs and toast, today with a side of a real newspaper, printed on an actual physical medium, with pages that turned and everything.

  He flipped through the news without much interest. But when he reached the Entertainment section, a crossword puzzle caught his eye. He was reminded of his teenage years, when his dad would get the Sunday paper and hand Luke the crossword puzzle page. He hadn’t done one in ages. He glanced at the clock guiltily. He usually started work by nine, and it was eight forty-five. But he never could resist a puzzle. He picked up a pencil and looked down the clue list, tracing his lips with his tongue in concentration. He finished it in twenty minutes.

  At lunchtime, Luke made a sandwich. Something had been tugging at his brain all morning, something about the crossword puzzle. He dragged the completed puzzle across the table and looked at the grid as he chewed his sandwich.

  19 across – Gospel writer _ _ _ _

  It was a four-letter spot, and the crossing “k” in space three made it Luke, not Mark or John. Luke was not uncommon in crossword puzzles. But there was more….

  20 across – If it fits _ _ _ _

  21 across – Dying to meet your _ _ _ _ _

  2 down – Source for kindling _ _ _ _ _

  12 across – Don’t run _ _ _ _

  18 down – What silence is _ _ _ _ _ _

  22 across – Fetcher _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  [Luke shoe maker woods walk golden retriever]

  Luke stared at the puzzle in disbelief. What were the odds that Luke and “shoe maker,” the Anglicized version of his last name, would appear in the same crossword puzzle and all in the same horizontal line? Add in “walk,” “woods,” “golden,” and “retriever”—a thing he did daily—and the odds had to be off the charts. And then there was the fact that the newspaper had been mysteriously left on his doorstep.

  He checked at the crossword puzzle byline: A. Ecrivain. The name meant nothing to him.

  The rest of the day passed in a daze. Luke was, by his own admission, a puzzle geek. Once his brain latched onto a problem, it was hard to tear it away. It made him
a strong computer game designer, but work suffered when his brain latched onto something outside the bounds of his daily bits and bytes.

  Did A. Ecrivain really send him a hidden message in a crossword puzzle? And if so, why?

  He googled the Philly paper but couldn’t find anything about their crossword puzzles on their website. He googled “A. Ecrivain” and the results were all in French. The word “écrivain” was French for “writer,” he discovered. The crossword puzzle designer’s byline was therefore “A. Writer”—obviously a pseudonym. Great. He spent an hour with an old stats textbook trying to figure out the odds of seven key words appearing among seventy random ones. He wasn’t the best at stats, but he came up with something like less than three percent.

  At six o’clock he had a Skype chat with his development team, and they discussed the next episode of Saints and Sinners. That finally shifted the track in his train to the mainline. By bedtime, Luke was trying to think up a unique idea for a troll/bridge puzzle, and the crossword had been filed away in a mental TBD bin with things like picking up bread and buying Stephen King’s latest e-book for his iPad.

  Until the next morning.

  Chapter 2

  Won't You Be My Neighbor?

  The next morning was an especially fine one, with big fluffy white clouds and a gentle breeze. Luke and Trevor took their time on their hike up Henneman Hill. They even sat for a few minutes at the overlook while Luke thought about his troll puzzle and Trevor chewed on a stick with complete contentment.

  It wasn’t until they approached his unit again, and Luke nodded a greeting at his downstairs neighbor, a grandmother who was heading off to the gym, that he remembered the newspaper. He jogged up the steps to his apartment, curious as to whether yesterday’s mystery would be repeated.

  Sure enough, there was a new copy of the Examiner on the doorstep. This time it had an ominous and vaguely teasing presence, like a clue in a cheesy horror movie.

  Luke’s heart rate sped up. But he forced himself to shower and pour a bowl of cereal and coffee before he opened the newspaper. He sat at the kitchen table and did the entire crossword puzzle, tongue poking out in concentration. It wasn’t until the grid was filled in that he allowed himself to look for keywords.

  Holy shit.

  1 across – Two can play _ _ _ _

  10 down – Made it up _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  11 across – Axe to grind _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  20 down – Blue-eyed _____ _ _ _ _ _

  31 across – ___ as a button _ _ _ _

  32 down – Greeting _ _ _ _ _

  [game designer woodsman blond cute hello]

  Okay, “cute” might or might not be part of the hidden message, but Luke was blond, and he was cute, dammit.

  He shivered as if a cold finger had stroked the back of his neck. There was absolutely no doubt the message was for him. He was a game designer. He lived in the Woodsman apartment complex and walked his golden retriever. The fact that his name had been in the first puzzle certainly cinched the deal.

  Someone was leaving him, personally, messages in the daily crossword. But who would do that? And why?

  On the third morning, Luke went for his walk early and was back home by seven. He watched through his peephole, spying on the open-air corridor outside his door in a vigil that was, frankly, damned boring. But at 7:20 a.m., a teenager appeared and lobbed a newspaper at Luke’s door from the parking lot like he was pitching for the World Series.

  Luke opened the door in a flash. “Hey! You!”

  The boy turned and eyed Luke warily, as if he might dance a naked Macarena at any moment.

  “I didn’t order this paper. Why are you leaving it?”

  The kid pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Luke Schumaker, 1750 Wilson Drive, apartment 31C?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You have a subscription that started a few days ago.”

  “But I didn’t sign up for that. Did someone else sign me up?”

  The kid held up his hands and made an it’s-not-my-fault face. “Dunno, dude. Call the paper, I guess.”

  Luke called the newspaper. He was patched through to the subscription hotline. His daily delivery was a gift subscription, they said, paid in advance for three months. No, they couldn’t tell him who ordered it, because the gifter had checked the “anonymous” box. Company policy.

  “You’re telling me that a person can just randomly torment you with daily newspapers?” Luke demanded. “And I can’t even find out who it is?”

  The woman on the phone greeted this with utter silence.

  “Can you give me a hint at least? First letter of the last name?” Luke cajoled.

  “Sir, do you wish to stop delivery? I can’t refund the subscription fee, but I can stop delivery if you don’t want it.”

  “No!” Luke said quickly. “No. It’s fine. Thanks.”

  Luke hung up the phone. A slow grin spread over his face, and his gamer mind rubbed its hands together with villainous glee. Oh, this? This was excellent. Someone was being a sneaky sneak-a-lot. He ripped off a piece of notepaper and started making a plan.

  There were two possibilities as Luke saw it. “A. Ecrivain” was either someone who lived in the complex or someone he’d met in town who was watching him. He couldn’t rule out women—he didn’t exactly wear a gay tattoo on his forehead.

  Of course, the crossword puzzle writer wasn’t necessarily hitting on him. But then, someone had to be very motivated, and sex was a top-notch motivator in Luke’s humble opinion. They’d hardly go to this much effort to borrow his laundry detergent. Also: one clue had been “cute.” So Luke thought he could safely assume the writer was into him. That way.

  Which made it especially delicious.

  He drew a line down the paper. The left side he titled “The Woodsman” and the right one “Town.”

  On the Woodsman list went:

  Judy Miller—The complex manager was a fortysomething smoker with a voice like Harvey Fierstein. She said “ain’t” and “yous” a lot. Unlikely to be a wordsmith, but appearances could be deceiving.

  Mr. Morissey—The groundskeeper was in his fifties, weathered, married, and lumberjack straight. Yeah. Probably not.

  Phil—The maintenance man weighed three hundred pounds. He’d fixed Luke’s showerhead once, but when Luke cornered him for a chat outside 30A, Phil didn’t seem to recognize him. It was a big “no” to Phil, then.

  His co-unit dwellers—The other three apartments in his unit were occupied by a single mother who was always distracted, a young couple attending the university, and a grandmother who played tennis in hot-pink sweats. He couldn’t rule out any of them absolutely, but he’d give them low odds.

  Luke’s bedroom window overlooked the parking lot. He set up his laptop in there so he could keep an eye on the comers and goers as he worked that day.

  A young woman with red hair and expensive suits lived in unit 28. She looked like Pippi Longstocking, if Pippi had grown up and gotten a law degree. And was often hungover. She never glanced at his building.

  In 22B were Jock A and Jock B, who never emerged without sweats and a ball. Jock A had a girlfriend, and Jock B scratched his balls in a manner distinctively het.

  There was a guy in a wheelchair in the end unit. He was picked up by a van at 10:00 a.m. He was dark-haired and cute, if you found librarian-types cute—which Luke did. But he never looked in Luke’s direction.

  A hot, intellectual-looking yuppie in unit 27 topped Luke’s suspect list for a few hours, possibly wishful thinking. But when a young woman with a twin baby stroller emerged from the same apartment that afternoon, Luke reluctantly crossed him out.

  Chapter 3

  Looking for Mr. Goodbar

  In town, the only places Luke went to regularly were the grocery store, a coffee shop called Diggits, and Chumley’s, a gay bar. He usually took his laptop to Diggits on Wednesday afternoons and worked there just for a change of scenery. He loved working from home, but his soc
ial skills could get a bit crusty without regular exercise.

  The next day there were no messages in the crossword puzzle. But the byline was also not A. Ecrivain but someone else. So apparently, they used various crossword puzzle resources. That didn’t discourage Luke. Oh no, not he, the man who had once stood in line for twelve hours, overnight, and in the rain, for the opening of a new high-tech arcade in San Francisco.

  He went to the coffee shop at his usual time on Wednesday and surreptitiously cased the joint. The girl behind the counter had blue hair, a bored attitude, and a nametag that said “Jazzy.” She’d never even remotely flirted with him. There was an all-American busboy, but his eyes were so dull with disinterest that Luke figured he’d have to wear a little black dress and heels to get a reaction. Luke recognized a few regulars, but none of them seemed likely to be his secret penman, nor interested in him at all.

  Neither Thursday nor Friday’s papers had a crossword by A Ecrivain. So on Friday night, Luke hit Chumley’s.

  He’d decided when he moved here that he and Chumley’s should have a distant relationship. He’d sown his wild oats in San Francisco—or what passed for wild oats for a workaholic nerd. Here in the medium-sized university town of State College, Pennsylvania, Chumley’s was the first, and the last, of the gay scene. Luke was thirty and ready to meet someone meaningful. He didn’t want to get a rep in town as a man-ho. So he’d gone to Chumley’s just a few times, when he’d been batshit stir-crazy and horny as a goat. He’d hooked up twice, but neither had been anything more than a one-night stand.

  Chumley’s was a mix of leather, business types, and college students. It was a friendly place that lacked the feelings of judgment that dogged the San Fran clubs, where wearing the wrong shoes could get you treated like pork rinds at a vegan potluck. Luke drank a beer and played detective for a while, but no one was ringing any bells on the suspect hotline.

  He got distracted by the heated glances of a man wearing a black leather jacket and a tight white T-shirt. His face was rough but attractive. Luke tried to come up with a good reason for him to be a suspect. But no, it was impossible to see Biker Boy with a dictionary, except possibly as a doorstop.