Chapter 5 #2
“Yes, I made a list. I told you, I’m nothing if not thorough.
And this is because you’re a beautiful, smart, young woman on an island full of eligible men who would be lucky to buy you dinner, and I just refuse to watch you sitting around on another Friday night rearranging the picture book selection. That’s how women become old maids.”
Liza laughed. She hadn’t heard the term old maid in a very long time.
She looked at Dixie.
Then she looked at the ceiling as if some kind of divine intervention might save her from this insane conversation.
“Fine,” she said. “You can introduce me to the firefighter, but that’s only because I need you to stop looking at me like that.”
Dixie folded the list, tucked it back into her apron with a smile.
“That’s all I ask, sugar. One dinner. And if he’s awful, I’ll buy you a bottle of wine, and we’ll never speak of this again.”
“Deal.”
As Liza walked back to the front of the store, she passed the shared wall of The Puzzle Post and paused.
She could hear Grant on the other side moving something across the floor.
That man was constantly moving things around. He was probably in there rearranging some display with his own form of military precision.
She thought about how he’d gone quiet when she talked about her father, the way his coffee cup had just frozen in the air, the way he’d said, Sounds like he was a good man in a voice that sounded like it came from somewhere deep.
She shook her head and kept walking.
Dixie was right about one thing.
She did need to stop spending her Friday nights sitting in a children’s book section.
But she wasn’t sure the firefighter was the answer.
Francine arrived at the Inn at Seagrove on a Tuesday morning. She carried a leather tote bag and wore linen pants and looked like someone who had never once in her life been flustered.
Julie watched her from the front desk with the careful assessment of a woman sizing up her own replacement, and her stomach knotted. Dawson had said at least four times that Francine wasn’t a replacement, that she was support for Julie, but Julie wasn’t sure she felt that way.
Francine looked to be somewhere in her early sixties with a silver hairstyle that was cut into a sharp bob, and she had the kind of posture that suggested she’d spent a lifetime in elegant situations.
She shook Julie’s hand with a firm, warm grip and said, “Thank you for having me. I know this wasn’t your idea.”
Julie stared at her. “Um, what makes you say that?”
“Well, because I’ve been doing hospitality for thirty-five years, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who runs her own inn and is excited about somebody else coming in and touching it.” She smiled. “It’s a compliment. It means you care.”
Julie didn’t know exactly how to respond, so she just showed Francine the check-in system, the guest binder, and the supply closet. She explained things in far more detail than was necessary.
Francine listened without interrupting and asked two questions, but took no notes.
“You know, it’s kind of odd that you’re not writing anything down,” Julie said.
“I have a good memory.”
Julie forced a smile. “Well, if you need anything, I’ll be over in the kitchen working on my manuscript.”
It was crazy that Julie still wrote her books sitting at the kitchen table, even though she had a nice office upstairs. It just felt more comfortable.
“Perfect,” Francine said. “I’ll handle the two o’clock check-in and the linen delivery. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Julie went to the kitchen and sat down at her laptop. She opened Chapter 12 and stared at it, and then she started listening for sounds of disaster from the front desk.
There were none.
After about twenty minutes, she stood up and walked past the front desk. Not checking, just passing through, in the way that a woman who was definitely not checking would pass through.
Francine was sitting at the computer, clicking through the reservation system, and probably wondering why she was here when she’d surely managed much larger establishments than this.
“Everything okay?” Julie asked.
“Wonderful. The Hendersons in Room 4 called about extra towels, and I took care of it. The linen delivery is early. They’ll be here in forty minutes instead of two hours, and I’ve already cleared a spot.”
Julie opened her mouth, closed it, and then went back into the kitchen.
She sat at her laptop again. The cursor blinked, and she wasn’t sure if the tightness in her chest was relief or the unsettling feeling of being unnecessary in her own home.
She’d spent so long holding everything together that she didn’t know what to do with her hands now that somebody else was picking up the pieces.
She typed one sentence, deleted it, then typed it again.
She wasn’t sure if the new help was making her feel better or worse.
It was almost midnight when Grant closed his laptop and rubbed his eyes.
He had been trying to design the clue cards for the scavenger hunt, but his mind just kept going round and round about the conversation on the porch. Liza’s voice saying that he always said W. Elliott understood how his brain worked.
His mind jumped to the image of a man he’d never met sitting at a kitchen table with his blue pen, working through puzzles Grant had built in his apartment at two in the morning because he couldn’t sleep.
David Forrester. That was Liza’s father’s name.
She’d mentioned it once earlier that week in passing, and then Grant had filed it away like he filed everything, carefully and precisely in a place where he could access it later.
He had never thought much about who solved his crosswords. That was the beauty of having a pseudonym.
The puzzles just flew out into the world and then disappeared, and he never had to think about who had solved them, or whose hands were on them, or the minds that had to work through them.
Clean. Anonymous. Safe.
But now he had a face attached to one of those pairs of hands. A man who had written notes in the margins like he was writing back. A man who had told his daughter that a stranger understood how his brain worked.
Grant opened his email and scrolled past all the spam and newsletters and automated alerts until he found the folder he was looking for.
It was one he had labeled simply: Owen.
He opened it.
The emails were all there.
He scrolled to the last one, sent at 11:47 p.m. three days before Owen died, probably from bed after a beer or two, based on the typos.
Nothing was capitalized. Barely any punctuation.
hey little brother
i just want to say im proud of you
i know you hate hearing that but tough nuggies
the app is gonna be huge and youre gonna wanna freak out about it
and thats ok
just dont disappear into one of those puzzle rooms you like to go into and forget to live
stop hiding behind the puzzles man
one day youre going to meet somebody who solves you
and then when that happens you better not run
love you,
o
Grant read it twice, then a third time.
He’d memorized it years ago, of course, but reading the actual words with Owen’s sloppy punctuation and stubborn lowercase, the love you, o at the end, it still felt like he was pressing on a bruise that would never go away.
One day you’re going to meet somebody who solves you.
He thought about Liza on the porch, laughing about the kitten her father had smuggled home.
He thought about the cookie jar sitting on his counter.
The owl with the big eyes.
He thought about the way she’d asked, “Why does everything have to be silent?”
And the way the question had stayed with him for days, not because she was accusing him of anything, but because she was genuinely curious about it.
She actually wanted to know.
He closed the laptop.
He never deleted the email.
He would never, ever do that.