I just wasn’t seeing it yet.
“I GIVE UP,” I SAID AS I STARED AT THE COPIES FOR THE HUNdredth time after we’d had our dinner. Zach didn’t even hear me he was so intent studying the timeline he’d created. It was a work of art, the size of a regular sheet of paper, but with every suspect’s whereabouts drawn in a different colored pen, looping in and out, making contact, and then splitting off again.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” I said. I had a puzzle to do for tomorrow, but I was tempted to have Derrick run one of my backups again, no matter how much grief he gave me about it. This was too important.
Then again, maybe the distraction of creating a more complex puzzle was exactly what I needed.
I started reviewing the types of puzzles I liked to create on my notepad, but before I could make up my mind, my telephone started ringing.
Zach didn’t even look up as I answered.
It was Lorna.
“We’re still on for tomorrow, aren’t we?” she asked.
“Yes, unless you want to cancel.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said, and then she hung up.
“Who was that?” Zach asked. So, it had caught his attention.
“It was Lorna. She wanted to be sure I was still meeting her in the morning.”
“She could have been calling for another reason,” Zach said.
“What’s that?”
“To see where we were.”
“Why should she want to know that?”
“She wouldn’t, unless she’s the killer.”
“Come on, Zach. You can’t read too much into everything that happens to us.”
He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
“Fine; whatever you say. Frankly, I’m too tired to argue.”
I walked back to retrieve my pad when I glanced down at the copies on the floor. I glanced from my grid to the copies and back again, and then I looked at the last clue we’d gotten.
Could it honestly be that easy, or was I letting my imagination get the better of me?
There was only one way to find out.
I studied the letters in the sequence they’d been received, and wrote the combinations below the square on the horizontal axis. And then I remembered the 4O I’d so casually dismissed. What if it wasn’t a zero, but a letter O instead? That would make it 4-O.
I added it to the others, and wrote A3, E5, E2, A4, E1, and 4O.
So far, we’d received As, Es, and an O on the last one before the oblong circles.
The first part of every sequence was a vowel.
Five columns wide had to mean A, E, I, O, and U. I knew Y was sometimes a vowel, but there wasn’t room on my grid, and if I needed it later, it wouldn’t be too hard to add.
What about the y-axis going up the rows? We had a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Each row had its own number.
I wrote it in quickly, and then called Zach.
“Come here. You need to see this.”
“What is it, Savannah? I’m onto something here.”
“If it weren’t important, I wouldn’t ask you to look,” I said.
He came over to me, and I handed him my pad.
He stared at the grid. “There are a lot of spaces we still don’t know about though. There’s no way we could be expected to solve this with the clues we’ve gotten so far.”
“That’s why the killer sent us this last one,” I said. “He ran out of time, so this has to be the key.”
Zach took it from me, studied it, and then said, “But the question is, what lock does this key fit into?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” I admitted. “Do you think I’ve lost my mind?”
“Yes, but for completely different reasons. This could actually be it. Good work.”
“I’m not there yet.”
“You’ll get it,” he said.
I laid the original clues out again, this time being careful to put them in the proper order. As I did, I stared at each note.
3A, 5E, 2E, 4A, 1E, O4.
After that, I decided to add the order they arrived in, and got something like this: 3A (1), 5E (2), 2E (3), 4A (4), 1E (5), 4O (6 or 1).
