Page 52 of Piece By Piece

He worked until about two in the morning, filling in the connecting words, crafting the clues, testing it out.

He finally put his pencil down. The crossword was half-finished, and his coffee was ice cold.

He could hear Owen’s voice in his head. Stop hiding behind the puzzles, little brother.

Grant picked up his pencil again and kept going.

CHAPTER 9

On Tuesday afternoon, Liza was doing what she always did when her brain felt like it was too full and about to explode.

She was reorganizing.

The bookstore’s back storage room had become her big project this week.

Dixie hadn’t touched it in years, and the shelves were a mix of overstock, misdelivered titles, damaged returns, and three boxes that seemed to contain nothing but bookmarks from the 1990s.

She dared not mention it to Julie, who also had worked at the bookstore for a long time, because Julie would come over and try to fix everything, and she was covered up in her own demanding schedule.

Liza was on her knees looking through the bottom shelf when she found a crossword anthology.

It was a slim paperback, The W. Elliott Collection, Volume 3, and it had been tucked between water-damaged romance novels and a guide to birdwatching in the Lowcountry.

She almost put it aside without a second look, but the name on the cover stopped her.

W. Elliott.

She pulled it out and sat back on her heels. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about W. Elliott since her late-night Google search.

The anonymous puzzle creator her father had loved, the one who understood how his brain had worked, was overtaking her mind, too.

But she had found almost nothing online.

No name, no face.

Just the puzzles.

How could somebody stay so anonymous in a world where privacy was almost impossible?

She flipped through the anthology.

As usual, the crosswords were beautifully constructed.

Clean grids.

Elegant clue structure.

Themes that revealed themselves slowly.

She had seen enough of Grant’s work by now to recognize a good puzzle design, and this was exceptional.

Something was nagging at her.

There was a feeling in the back of her mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue.

She looked at the first puzzle and studied the clue structure and the way the theme answers were placed.

There was a certain rhythm to the difficulty curve, easy clues at the edges, harder ones in the center.