Dead Man's Puzzle (19 page)

Chapter 57

Cora stared at the puzzle and called Sherry names. Of all the nerve. She asks her for help, and what does she get? Nothing but cryptic nonsense, no better than the puzzle. “Why doesn’t it rhyme?” indeed! It
did
rhyme: “At noon I can not be done. So I should try to at one.” In what language didn’t that rhyme? Maybe if you translated it into Swahili. Was that Sherry’s problem? Too besotted by the safari, not to mention the honeymoon, to be able to think straight?

Even so, didn’t Sherry realize she wouldn’t be asking for help if she didn’t need it? Here she was, half a world away, all alone, sorting out the last wishes of an insufferable little man who couldn’t just say what he wanted—though not eating poison was probably fairly high on his list—a guy who bombards her with idiotic puzzles with meaningless rhymes, and—

Cora blinked.

A silly grin spread over her face.

How about that!

It
didn’t
rhyme!

Sherry was right. Cora would have to make it up to her for all the horrible things she’d been thinking about her.

So, the puzzle didn’t rhyme, and Overmeyer was a diabolical genius. Still a moron and a major pain in the fanny, but a diabolical genius nonetheless.

It occurred to Cora, damn, she should have asked Sherry if the puzzle had anything to do with computers. But that wouldn’t work. If you ask someone to find computer clues, they’ll
find
computer clues. The only true test is not to ask. Of course, then they don’t know to look.

Cora knew to look. She was going over that puzzle from top to bottom. She picked it up, started in the upper-left-hand corner.

Okay, anything about computers there?

No, and—

Cora’s mouth fell open.

Staring up at her from the puzzle were the words
poker
and
dogs
. And the second puzzle had been behind a picture of poker-playing dogs. The first puzzle was meant to send her to the second puzzle. The fact that the clue was so obscure that it hadn’t worked didn’t matter. It was clearly Overmeyer’s intention. Luckily, Cora had uncovered the second puzzle on her own.

So. The first and second puzzles were linked. The first puzzle meant something. So the second puzzle should mean something, too. Sherry had figured out the secret of the first puzzle. But she’d solved the second puzzle without noticing anything special. She had no suggestions, no hint of any hidden meaning. Presumably, there was none.

And yet.

Cora picked up the second puzzle.

“Flip me over. Onto my back. Upside head. Take a whack.”

Okay, Cora thought. That rhymed. And there was no way it meant anything else by not rhyming. So what about the verse itself?

It should be “upside
my
head.” But she’d learned that Overmeyer wasn’t too precise when it came to puzzles.

Or was he?

Was the lack of the word
my
a necessity of construction?

Or intentional?

“Flip me over. Onto my back.”

Cora picked up the sheet of paper, turned it over.

There were numbers scrawled on the back. Random numbers that could mean anything. She’d originally thought Overmeyer had done his puzzle on the back of a sheet of scratch paper. “Onto my back.” But suppose the puzzle was on the front? “Flip me over onto my back.” It would mean that the numbers were important. But they weren’t. Just scattered random numbers.

Or were they?

Cora studied the back of the sheet.

Oh, my God!

She reached into the top drawer, took out a ruler and a pencil.

Using the ruler as a straight edge, she began drawing lines.

A sudoku!

One good thing. If it was a sudoku, she knew how to solve it.

There was one way to find out.

If it was a sudoku, it would have a unique solution.

Cora snatched up the pencil.

Solved the puzzle.

Okay. She’d solved the sudoku. So what? What could it possibly mean?

Nothing.

Unless you combined it with the verse from the crossword puzzle.

Okay, she’d flipped it over on its back. Now what?

“Upside head.”

Head would be the first row.

But not the first row across.

The first row up and down.

The first column.

Down the first column?

No. Upside.

Up the first column the numbers read: 973 486 152.

What could that be?

Cora had no idea.

Well, great.

Instead of a meaningless puzzle, she now had a meaningless nine-digit number.

She turned the paper over onto its back or front or whatever, where the crossword puzzle was.

Cora scanned the puzzle, looking for another clue. But nothing jumped out at her the way
poker dogs
did. In the bottom left was
Mata Hari
and
I Spy,
certainly a theme, connected by the word
trap
. Had Overmeyer been involved in espionage and trapped by a cunning seductress? Somehow it seemed unlikely.

As Cora finished the second puzzle, something she told Becky Baldwin occurred to her.
When do you stop looking for something? When you find it.

Cora had found
poker dogs
in the first puzzle and gone straight to the second. She hadn’t finished going over the first puzzle.

She did so now. She picked it up, scanned the words.

She found nothing until she got to the bottom of the page. The computer terms still looked like computer terms. But Cora knew they didn’t have to be. The
screen
could be a window screen. A
mouse
could be the type that squeaks and eats cheese. A
net
could be a net to catch a
mouse
in. No, you didn’t catch a
mouse
in a
net
. You caught a butterfly in a
net
. You caught—

Cora’s eyes widened.

She snatched up the second puzzle.

There, at the bottom, connecting
Mata Hari
to
I Spy
.

Trap
.

That infuriating little man.

You had to put the puzzles together.

Mousetrap
.

Chapter 58

Cora killed the headlights down by the road. The last thing she needed was Brooks spotting her. If Brooks was even there. Had he returned home yet, or was he still at the B&B? With his lights out, it was impossible to tell. Was his car there? The top of the driveway was on the other side of the house. It didn’t matter. She had to be quiet anyway for fear the neighbor to the north would hear her. Not that he was apt to, on the other side of the wood.

Cora’s mind was racing, and she knew why. Because nothing made sense yet. Because all the facts she was amassing were a jumble of information that added up to nothing. Clues within clues within clues. Did this irritating man whom she had never met really mean for her to follow them? Or were they a figment of her imagination? Was she, like the computer nerd, duped into reading something into the puzzles that was not in fact there?

Did the first puzzle really refer her to the second? Poker-playing dogs indeed. So the words were in the puzzle. Big deal. There weren’t even as many of them as there were computer clues. Why latch on to one and not the other?

Unfortunately, Cora had the answer. Because the computer did not exist.

And there
were
poker-playing dogs.

If the first puzzle sent her to the second puzzle, could the two puzzles, taken together, be sending her back here? In the dead of night? With a flashlight? Well, the flashlight and the dead of night had nothing to do with it. That was just when she figured it out. But could the puzzles want her to return to the cabin?

What else could they want?

Cora crept up the driveway in the dark, not wanting to risk the flashlight. She wondered if the front door was locked. Had the cabin been searched since she’d broken in? Sure it had. By every heir within a hundred miles. It should be locked up tight.

It was. The doorknob did not turn. Too bad. She wasn’t really up for climbing in the dark. But there was no help for it.

Cora went around to the back of the house, pushed up the kitchen window. It wouldn’t move. Someone had locked it, too.

Cora ascribed to the window private practices still illegal in some states. She fumbled in her purse, pulled out her gun, rammed the barrel through the windowpane just above the lock. She unlocked the window, pushed up the bottom. Brushed the glass off the sill and climbed through.

It wasn’t easy. There was glass on the counter. Cora had to be careful where she put her hand. She wriggled through, squirmed across the counter, dropped to the floor.

She risked the light, shading the beam with her hand. Her fingers glowed red.

Cora crossed the kitchen, opened the basement door. She slipped in onto the top step, closed the door behind her. Took her hand off the beam and shone the light.

The basement was, as Chief Harper had described it, merely a crawl space. Cora, recalling what the chief had looked like when he emerged, wasn’t keen on going down there, but there was no help for it. She crept down the three steps. She could feel the cobwebs clinging to her skin, smell the stench from the broken plumbing. She shuddered, pressed on. Reached the bottom.

The floor was loose dirt that gave beneath her weight, creating the uneasy feeling that at any moment it might give way and plunge her into a bottomless pit. Cora gritted her teeth, shone the light.

There were the mousetraps she and Becky had found, arranged in a loose semicircle, curving away from the bottom of the stair. Leading to what?

There was nothing on the ground. Even the broken bike was outside the arc.

Cora raised the light.

The beam picked up the electrical wires Chief Harper had mentioned. Edison himself might have installed them.

Farther on was the shiny metal conduit of a heating duct. Installed in response to a building ordinance.

Stamped with a serial number, Chief Harper said.

Where would that be? Probably right at the joint. The pipe was joined by a two-inch metal strip wrapped around and fastened by a bolt and wing nut. There was printing on the pipe near the joint: “US Patent.”

And the serial number.

973486152

Cora pulled the paper out of her pocket, compared the number.

Son of a bitch!

Her pulse raced.

Cora examined the joint. The bolt and wing nut were scratched, as if by a pliers and screwdriver. Someone had taken the pipe joint apart.

She didn’t have a pliers and screwdriver. She took out her gun and began banging on the wing nut. The nut wouldn’t budge. She began pounding the pipe itself, bending it in, away from the joint. It was rough going, because the crawl space wasn’t high enough for her to stand. Cora sat on the floor, swinging the gun like a hammer. When she had the pipe bent enough, she raised her leg and kicked.

The pipe flew apart.

Something dropped out, fluttered to the dirt floor.

It was a piece of paper.

Cora picked it up, unfolded it.

It was a crossword puzzle.

 ACROSS

1 Megastars

6 French friend

10 “Gee!”

14 Bushes can be found here

15 Tailless cat

16 Utah ski center

17 Kayak user for thousands of years

18 Start of a message

20 Dryer fluff

21 Ziegfeld’s nickname

22 Fleet of Spain, once

23 Pink, in a steak house

25 Et ___ (and others)

26 Rip off

29 “Seems I was wrong”

33 Part 2 of message

35 Classic Welles role

36 B&O stop

37 4:00 P.M., perhaps

40 “A mind ___ terrible thing to waste”

41 Highly diluted

43 Part 3 of message

45 Bookstore section

48 Idiot boxes

49 Concert hall section

50 C minor and others

51 “Likewise”

54 Smelly black stuff

55 Puts two and two together

59 Part 4 of message

61 Bashar Assad’s land

62 Annapolis inst.

63 Bygone Mideast leader

64 Bad-guy role

65 Mason’s wedge

66 Winston Churchill, e.g.

67 Beats by a hair

 DOWN

1 Biased type, briefly

2 Cold cut store

3 Conestoga haulers

4 Toulouse-___

5 Grounded flier

6 Go easy?

7 Lubricant for subs?

8 S&L earnings

9 Get rid of hot air

10 It could be a lifesaver

11 “The Three Sisters” sister

12 Ear piercer

13 1985 U.S. Open winner Mandlikova

19 Camera diaphragm

21 Member of la famille immédiate

24 ___ above the rest

25 Tax filer’s dread

26 Punchers

27 Shop tool

28 Spam, for example

29 Advice to a sleepyhead

30 Easily fooled

31 Beginning

32 Glum drops

34 Jet black

38 Cut at a 45-degree angle

39 It’s a sin

42 Bills, e.g.

44 Made an effort

46 Filly’s foot

47 Diva, traditionally

50 “Misery” Oscar winner Bates

51 Hosp. areas

52 Child’s portion?

53 All, as a prefix

54 The first one ruled 1547–84

56 Schlep

57 Jackknife, e.g.

58 Behaves like Simon

60 P, in Greece

61 That boat