A Deadly Row

“I’m not planning to, but you never know. If you don’t mind taking a chance that I won’t make it, we can pencil tomorrow in.”

“That’s all I can ask.” She laughed gently, and then added, “Trust me, my date book isn’t exactly full these days.”

“Aren’t you seeing anyone special?”

“That depends on your definition. They’re all special, aren’t they?” she said with a smile.

“I don’t know how you do it. I can’t keep up with the one man I’ve got, let alone deal with a string of them.”

“Practice, practice, practice,” she said.

After we were finished eating, I said, “I hate to eat and run, but my dance card’s pretty full today.”

“I’m just glad we had a chance to get together,” Lorna said as we started to walk out of the restaurant.

“Me, too.”

“Until tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“That’s good enough for me.” Lorna could be demanding in her friendship; I knew that from past experience.

Back in the lobby, I looked around for Julia Tristan, just in case she’d lingered, but the woman was gone. I needed to talk to Zach about her, and it couldn’t wait until lunch.

The second I was back upstairs in our suite, I dialed his number.

To my surprise, his assistant Steve answered.

“May I speak with Zach?”

In a lowered voice, he said, “Sorry, but he can’t be disturbed.”

“Is he sitting in a corner, staring at the junction where the walls meet? Are his feet up on something? His hands are locked behind his head, aren’t they?”

Steve sounded agitated when he answered. “How could you possibly know that? Were you just here?”

“No, but I’ve seen it often enough. He’s got a thread he’s following in his head, and you could set off an M-80 under his chair and I doubt he’d notice it.”

“You two are something, have I told you that?”

“You did. When he comes out of his trance, have him call me, okay?”

“Will do.”

After we hung up, I paced around the room. I had a lot to talk to Zach about, but it would be less than productive doing it while he was on a track of his own. I knew better than to try to break through to him when he was that deep in thought. It would just have to wait, and I was going to have to deal with it.

In the meantime, I had a puzzle to create, and not an easy one, either.

I STARTED PLAYING WITH IDEAS FOR MY NEXT PUZZLE, REmembering that I’d promised Derrick something more complicated than I’d been doing lately. I hadn’t promised him anything much more difficult though, so I decided to do a sequencing puzzle this time.

After an hour and a half of erasing pairings and changing the numbers, I finally had a puzzle I was happy with.

Now I just had to write the snippet, and I’d have Derrick off my back for another day.

Puzzles are like people. Some are easy to figure out the second you see them, while others are more complicated from the start. But over time, I’ve found the most interesting people, as well as puzzles, appear to be simple initially, but are in fact much more complex once you get below the surface.

I read it again, and still wasn’t exactly sure what I’d meant by it. Some snippets were like that, coming to my conscious mind unbidden, as if I were channeling them as I typed, if I believed in that kind of thing. Though the horoscopes appeared close to my puzzles in many of the newspapers that carried them, the two were worlds apart. My puzzles were based on logic, and used the ability to take a limited amount of information to solve a conundrum. However horoscopes were inspired by the authors and how they perceived the stars and planets, I was pretty sure that even they would agree they weren’t based on my particular brand of mathematical reasoning.

I checked the puzzle again, solving it myself, and thought it was okay. Not great, but good enough. And until things settled back down in my life, that was going to have to suffice.

I WAS IN THE CAR ON MY WAY TO MEET ZACH FOR LUNCH when my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it in my purse, and said, “Hello?”

“Is this a bad time?” Sherry asked.

“Are you kidding? It’s never a bad time to talk to you.” I was just starting to realize that what I’d missed most about Charlotte were not the beautiful architecture or the advantages to the big city like restaurants and culture, but the people I’d known there.

And my former neighbor was at the top of the list.

“I don’t want to interrupt any deep puzzle thoughts,” she said.

“I just finished it and faxed it to my editor.”

“Good. You made quite an impression on your visit back.”

“Don’t I always? You make it sound as if it’s hit or miss.”