Page 53 of Piece By Piece

She had seen this before.

She set the book down and went up to the front of the store.

On the counter next to the register, she saw a stack of Grant’s scavenger hunt clue cards.

She’d been looking for errors in them, trying to find one so she could point it out to Grant and feel satisfied.

She picked one up, the miniature crossword card, the one with five across and five down, and took it back to the storage room.

She held the clue card next to the anthology.

She started looking at the grid layouts, the clue phrasing, the way that both puzzles used the same distinctive technique.

Her hands started to shake.

She pulled out her phone and opened the fan forum she’d bookmarked and scrolled to a thread where somebody had analyzed Elliott’s clue-writing style.

They had identified signature patterns.

A preference for misdirection through double definitions.

A habit of using six-letter fills with uncommon letter combinations.

One commenter even called it the “Elliott turn.”

She looked at Grant’s clue card.

The Elliott turn was right there, staring her in the face, sticking out its tongue.

She sat on the floor in the storage room with the anthology in one hand and the clue card in the other.

The room seemed to tilt under her.

She said his name out loud, just once, just to hear how it would sound in this new context.

Grant.

That quiet man who liked silence.

That puzzle genius who hid behind the counter and crossed his arms.

The man who’d taught that shy boy to listen to the tangram pieces and who had filled the cookie jar in secret.

Who played his sad classical music at midnight.

The man her father had spent ten years writing margin notes to.

She walked upstairs.

She wasn’t running exactly, but she was moving with the focused urgency of someone chasing an answer she already had, racing it before her emotions could catch up.

The crossword books were on her nightstand, as they always were.

She grabbed the one on the top, the one that had all of her father’s margin notes, the one she’d been sleeping next to since she arrived in Seagrove, and she carried it back downstairs.

She sat at the table near the reading nook and opened up the anthology, set out the clue card, and then laid her father’s book side by side with the other two.

Three puzzles.