Puzzling Ink

by Becky Clark

  “Oh dear.” He shook his head. “Didn’t you poke holes in them before you started baking them?”

  “No. Why?”

  “So they don’t explode. Everyone knows that.”

  Quinn glared at him. “Does everyone know how I’m supposed to clean this?”

  * * * *

  After she removed the unexploded ordnance from the oven and scrubbed the kitchen—again—she served the Friday lunch special to the Retireds. Once again, they came for breakfast and stayed through lunch. They were the only customers who hadn’t cleared out due to the stench.

  As she had scrubbed the oven, she also solved her problem of being too tired to construct puzzles.

  She grabbed her purse and hurried out to the Retireds’ table. “Guys, will you keep an eye on things here while I run home for a sec? I’ll be back before you miss me.” She was halfway to the door. She knew they’d say yes. At least some of them.

  “Sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “What else do I have to do today?”

  “Do we have kitchen privileges?” Wilbur asked.

  “No!” Quinn called over her shoulder. She yanked open the door and looked back at them, comfortable around their table. “You can make coffee, but nothing else.” Wilbur started to speak. “I’m serious. Only coffee.” As she sidestepped Jethro lying on the sidewalk in front of the door, she turned back. “And thanks, guys! I really appreciate it. Be right back.”

  Summer midday heat took its toll on Quinn and her sprint home quickly morphed into a stroll, then a slog. She wished she’d driven to work. As she walked, she mulled over potential clues for the crossword.

  By the time she’d burst into the kitchen at home and startled her mom enough to raise a spatula in defense, grabbed her laptop, and hopped in her car, she had a plan in mind.

  At the diner, she hurried in, hoping the Retireds had done as she asked and stayed out of the kitchen. They looked as if they hadn’t moved at all. They still sat in their regular seats around the large rectangular table.

  They glanced up as the door chimed.

  “Did you miss me?” She hurried past them, noticing by the tall glasses in front of them that they’d graduated from coffee to cold drinks.

  “You were gone?” Silas joked.

  “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” She hoped Chief Chestnut hadn’t come looking to arrest her or anything.

  “Just some guy making a delivery. Told him to come back tomorrow since you weren’t here,” Silas said.

  “Oh no! Was it the produce guy? I needed that stuff—” Quinn stopped when she saw the men trying to stifle laughs. She went into the kitchen and came out holding a plump heirloom tomato. “Very funny, guys.”

  “Had you going, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you got me. Good one.” She flashed a grin, then returned to the kitchen, where she raced to put away all the produce so she could commence working on her puzzle.

  It wasn’t her first choice to sit in the big corner booth where Emmett had died, but many others had every day since. Plus, it really was the best seat in the restaurant for keeping an eye on everything. People could only see the open lid of her laptop while she worked on the puzzle and if anyone came close, all she had to do was shut it to keep it safe from prying eyes.

  She fired up her crossword program and created a new 15x15-square puzzle grid.

  The mini–spiral notebook was still in her back pocket, so she pulled it out and dug a pen from her apron pocket. Down the left side she started a list for her very specific theme: Who Else Should Chief Chestnut Investigate? Unknown cater-waiter, Loma, Margosha. She squinched her eyes as she tried to access her memory to pull the name of the ex-employee who kept hanging up on her—Michael Breckenridge. Everyone else she had called had been happy to talk to her. Why wasn’t he? After tapping her pen on the pad for a bit, thinking about the things Kelli the waitress had told her, she also added, life insurance and silent partner.

  Those were the directions she wanted Chief Chestnut to take in his investigation, rather than just dwelling on her and Jake.

  Crossword puzzles are symmetrical, up and down, and from side to side. You can turn them any which way and the grid remains in perfect balance. Because of the symmetry, however, the black squares need to be in certain places. They serve to break up long words and to make a puzzle attractive to the eye. A 15x15-square puzzle like this one can only have 38 black squares and 78 entries, the words that go in the squares. Puzzles almost always have a theme, even if it’s not obvious to the person solving the puzzle, like this one would be. Quinn’s puzzles were never titled with a hint to the theme, like in the New York Times crosswords, and they certainly never carried her name as the creator.

  She looked at her list. Technically, these entries would be the theme of this puzzle, and she really hoped they would wiggle into Chief Chestnut’s brain and lodge there long enough for him to get the subliminal message she was sending.

  Because of the symmetry of the grid, the theme words had to have symmetry also. She needed the entries to be certain lengths, to fit a certain number of boxes in the grid.

  She counted the number of letters in her entries and jotted them to the side.

  cater (5)-waiter (6)

  Loma (4)

  Margosha (8)

  Michael (7) Breckenridge (12)

  insurance (9)

  silent (6) partner (7)

  The only thing that jumped out at her was that Breckenridge was easy to clue in Colorado, since it was also the name of a popular ski town. Obviously, she couldn’t combine it with Michael, mainly because it was only a 15-square grid and that was a total of 19 letters. She crossed off Michael, but then cocked her head and wrote Michelangelo at the bottom of her list. She counted the letters: Twelve. Perfect. She had two of her theme words: Michelangelo and Breckenridge. Because they’d be the longest entries in the puzzle, maybe—if Chief Chestnut was looking for a theme—this would stick in his brain.

  She thought long and hard about cater and waiter, but ultimately crossed them off as being too generic. She knew that Rico had been trying to locate the waiter who had asked Donnie to deliver the plate with mushrooms to Emmett at the governor’s fundraiser. But even Donnie couldn’t—or wouldn’t—identify him, so without any other information than that, no crossword clue was going to help anyway.

  There was always room in a crossword for a 4-letter word, so she kept Loma. She knew of a city in California called Loma Linda, because it was where she had to order her fitness gear, boots, and flashlight for police academy training. That was a potential way to clue the word. Theoretically, the Chestnut Station PD ordered items from the Police Clearing House in Loma Linda at some point too. Although, the beauty of a crossword puzzle was that you didn’t need to know every single clue. If you knew all the down entries that crossed an across word, you’d automatically filled in the across word. But it would be way better for Chief Chestnut to know all the entries so the subliminal message could stick.

  Quinn tapped her pen on Margosha’s unique name. She typed it into her crossword database. No other constructor had ever used it in a puzzle. She typed it into an internet search and was stunned to see it pop up as the title of a TV show. She followed the link to the Internet Movie Database and saw it was a Russian TV show. She doubted it was entertainment that Chief Chestnut binged on.

  She scrolled and found nothing she could use as a clue. Nobody famous was named Margosha, there was no town named Margosha, no song lyrics singing her praises, no snack foods, no beauty products.

  She threw in the towel. There was no possible way to clue Margosha. Plus, she realized, it would be way too obvious it was a planted word. The last thing Quinn wanted was for Chief Chestnut to use this puzzle to find out she was the one who created them, especially now that she’d had the brainstorm to fill his gray matter with
subliminal messages. Maybe she really could help Rico in his job. Chief Chestnut shut down a lot of Rico’s investigations, especially the more serious ones. Quinn had once asked Rico why. He told her that the chief aspired to be mayor, though not necessarily in Chestnut Station. His ego was bigger than that. He believed if he could point to a very low crime rate where he was chief of police, it would go a long way in getting him elected mayor someplace else. As crazy and underhanded as that was, he was probably right. His plan would work as long as some nosy reporter or whistleblower never asked Rico a direct question about it. It seemed distasteful to Quinn, who would love nothing better than to see Chief Chestnut go down in flames, but with him gone, Rico would be the new chief.

  She crossed Margosha from her list of entries. She could, however, use the entry wife as the counterpart to the 4-letter word Loma. Ex-wife would be better, of course, but those pesky two extra letters just wouldn’t fit.

  She crossed off insurance because she couldn’t think of any other logical word to pair with it. Again, Rico had to be on this line of questioning already and if he found something, he’d of course bring it to Chief Chestnut’s attention. Even he couldn’t ignore that. The names of beneficiaries were always of interest to law enforcement investigators. Who would benefit from someone’s death was one of the first questions they asked.

  She studied silent and partner. Because they had differing numbers of letters, they couldn’t be used in a symmetrical pattern on the grid. But Quinn was convinced she could make it work, so she left them on her list of entries.

  She flipped the page and wrote a clean list of her theme words:

  Loma/wife

  Michelangelo/Breckenridge

  silent/partner

  The fact that the last pair had different numbers of letters triggered her OCD, but she had to shake that off. It also went against all the rules of crossword construction. She shook that off, too. Will Shortz would understand, given the circumstances.

  Over the course of the afternoon, between the very few customers that came in, she worked on the puzzle. She decided where her longest entries needed to go, then filled in thirty-eight black squares.

  She appreciated using a computer program for her grid, because the computer automatically made the puzzle symmetrical. When she clicked on a square five spaces from the left on the top row, the computer also automatically blackened a square five spaces from the right on the bottom row. Back when she used to do it all by hand on graph paper, she’d forget or miscount and it would throw her entire grid off. Since she couldn’t stand erasures, she’d always have to start over.

  When she was happy with the design of her grid and the black spaces had a pleasing look to them, she filled in her theme words. Michelangelo and Breckenridge were easy because there was only one place for them to go, filling row four from the top on the left and row four from the bottom on the right. The rest of those rows were taken up with black spaces. She gave wife the top right corner and Loma the bottom left. She wanted silent partner to trigger something in Chief, so she found a place for silent at the beginning of the seventh row from the top and partner at the end of the row, sixth from the bottom.

  Then the hard work began: All the rest of the entries. This was a lot of trial and error. Every so often she’d stop and ask the computer to fill in the grid for her, but until she fixed some entries on her own, it was an impossibility. Quinn knew that professional cruciverbalists would never deign to use the computer to fill their grid. It was a point of pride to fill with as little help from the computer as possible, but Quinn was: one, in a hurry; and two, barely professional. Besides, nobody was going to tattle to the crossword police on her.

  She tapped the command to automatically fill the grid and let out a whoop when letters magically appeared in all the spaces. She couldn’t believe her eyes when one of the entries smack-dab in the middle of the grid was ins. To her, because of her dad, it was an obvious abbreviation of insurance, but maybe not conventional, so she wouldn’t clue it that way.

  Now, all she needed was to write the clues, which she thought was the most fun.

  She was pleased by her results and this puzzle might have been completed in record time. She never kept track of how long a puzzle took to create, because she rarely did it all in one sitting, but maybe she should start. She texted herself a reminder.

  Quinn checked over her puzzle one last time. She verified some of the clues, like making sure she got the Steven Wright quote verbatim, and that a RONDEL poem actually had 14 lines. She clucked her tongue over some of the more obscure words like EBLIS and ARUI, but she didn’t have time for better entries. Besides, she reasoned, crossword enthusiasts knew a lot of obscure words.

  She also didn’t have time to run it by Vera to edit. Generally, Vera didn’t have much to say about the puzzles. Editing was merely a formality to her. As she said many times when Quinn sought her opinion about the puzzle, “Our readers will let me know if there’s a problem with it.” Which was exactly what Quinn tried to avoid whenever possible. If Vera happened to ask why Quinn had uploaded a bonus puzzle to the website, she’d simply say she got excited about it, which was absolutely true.

  The fact that Vera probably still wanted to interview her for an article about Emmett’s death also weighed heavily in her decision not to contact her. So far Quinn had seen only a short blurb online about the basic facts: Emmett Dubois died under suspicious circumstances, Jake Szabo had been arrested and sits in the local jail, Quinn Carr found the body. When the next print edition came out, there might be more, but no quotes from Quinn, if she could help it.

  She uploaded the puzzle to the newspaper website and sent a quick email to the “Puzzle Corner” subscribers alerting them to the surprise bonus puzzle this week.

  Then she waited.

  Chapter 11

  Before Quinn prepped salad for her new dinner special—God bless produce deliveries—she took water out for Jethro, who was sprawling in front of the diner. She opened the door and the blast furnace that was Chestnut Station in summer hit her again. The petunias growing in the sidewalk planters had been broiled, generating a heavy curtain of cloying sweetness that hung over the entire town. She literally staggered toward the water dish. She filled it, then ushered Jethro into the diner.

  “Much too hot out here.” She picked up the water dish and placed it just inside the door. Health department, shmealth department.

  Jethro ignored the water and plodded over to the big corner booth.

  “Rain nor shine nor beastly heat can keep you from your rounds, eh, boy?” Quinn felt twitchy as she watched him duck under the table and snuffle under the seat. He was taking his duties much more seriously this afternoon, maybe because she’d flipped the script on him by letting him in late in the day too. Paying her back with extra diligence?

  He backed out from under the table and turned his sad, droopy eyes on Quinn. When she didn’t respond, he turned his head back to the booth. When she still didn’t respond, he sighed and crawled back under the table.

  Quinn bent to see what he was doing. He turned his head as languidly as before from her to the seat, then back again, until finally she crawled under the table with him, fearing the worst.

  “Please don’t tell me there’s a dead mouse back here.” Quinn glanced around the diner, but the couple eating pie à la mode were only focused on it and each other. She placed her cheek on the linoleum and peered into the darkness under the booth. No dead mouse lump, thank goodness. Just a bite of hot dog one of those twins must have dropped. It was wedged in with an assortment of trash that had fallen under there over the years. Another duty she’d need to add to her list. She wriggled out and got the broom.

  Jethro moved out of her way as she swept the detritus into a small pile. She gestured to the hot dog as an invitation to him and he plucked it from the heap, swallowing without chewing.

  Paper straw wrappers, foil f
rom pieces of gum, ancient wadded-up napkins, a cootie catcher some kid had made, and a folded sheet of paper. She scooped it all into the dustpan, but plucked the paper out at the last minute, her curiosity winning over neatness. She unfolded it and saw glossy colored letters cut from a magazine glued on it. I know what you did, Jake.

  Quinn stared at the message, then stared at Jethro, who stared right back, a stringy slip of saliva dangling from his jowls. Quinn turned toward the couple eating pie, who continued to ignore her. She read the note again. And then what seemed like seven hundred more times.

  She stumbled toward the storage room, broom and dustpan clattering. At this, the couple startled and scowled at her. Quinn dealt with the dustpan before heading into Jake’s office. She read the note again. It was clearly meant to intimidate Jake, but what did it mean? How long had it been under the booth? Quinn sucked in a breath. Did the murder mystery guy drop it the night Emmett Dubois died? It was on the side of the booth where he sat. He must have. What was the note writer trying to accomplish? What had Jake done?

  Who was this murder mystery guy?

  She called her mom. “Hey, did you ever find out anything more about any murder mystery parties around here?”

  “Nope. Nobody knows anything. I think I’ve checked with everyone who might host or attend something like that. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help.”

  “No worries, Mom. Thanks for trying.”

  “Maybe I should have one. I could make a menu like they’d have on the Orient Express.”

  “Maybe stick a pin in that idea for a while.”

  Quinn knew she needed to get back into the kitchen. People were going to start trickling in for dinner soon and she had nothing prepped. But hungry bellies seemed less important than the note she held in her hand. She traced her finger over the letters spelling out Jake. Black lowercase J. Red capital A. Blue lowercase K and E.

  J-A-K-E. She didn’t even know this man, not really. She’d worked for him for less than a month. She had been in such a daze when she landed back at her parents’ house. She’d never asked anyone about him, just shrugged and took the waitress gig her mom got her, hoping her meds would kick in soon.