looked so distinguished? On me, it looked like I was nearing my expiration date—though I wasn’t even up to my fortieth birthday, while he was two years past his.
He looked at me, the exasperation clear on his face. “Seriously? You can’t put that down for one minute to help me? It won’t take that long, Savannah, I promise.”
“Zach, I’ve almost got it. That shelf is going to have to wait until I’m finished. You’re supposed to be retired anyway, remember? So why don’t you be a dear and go retire somewhere else until I wrap this up?”
My husband had been the police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a bullet had hit him in the chest and ended his career. The irony had been that he’d been stopping a robbery when he was off duty and heading home to me. My husband was a hero, no matter how much he downplayed what had happened. Zach had managed to save three people with his intervention. Just thinking about that night sent me into shivers. It still felt like yesterday when I’d gotten the call, the one every police officer’s wife dreads. As I’d raced to the hospital, I frantically worried if I’d be a widow by the time I got there. Fortunately the gunshot wound hadn’t been nearly as bad as it might have been, but I didn’t think I could ever go through that again. At least no one would be shooting at him anymore. Or so I hoped.
Unfortunately, the wound had left him technically disabled with an injury too close to his heart, though you’d never know it by the way he acted. Zach had taken early retirement—though not willingly—but he’d soon been bored with his idle lifestyle. Instead of puttering around the garden on our mini-farm on the outskirts of Parson’s Valley in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains or tinkering in his woodworking shop, Zach began working as a consultant to various police forces in North Carolina, and occasionally even the rest of the country. He was good at what he did, and the freedom of my job allowed me to travel with him whenever he was on a case.
“You know how hard it is for me to slow down and take it easy,” he said as he mopped his brow with a colorful bandana he always kept in his back pocket, even when he was wearing his nicest navy blue suit. “I get bored if I sit still too long. Why isn’t anything happening? Surely there’s some case somewhere that needs me.” Almost as an afterthought, he glanced down and pointed at my formula.
My eraser struck and removed one of the offending digits. “That’s why I said I wasn’t finished yet. Honestly, you need something else to keep you busy. Isn’t there anything besides police work that interests you? I thought you loved it here near the mountains as much as I do.”
“This place is nice.” He gestured around our cottage, tucked away in the western North Carolina Mountains. We had four acres, half of it wooded, and enough open land left to have a magnificent lawn and garden. It had always been our dream to own something like it some day, and I enjoyed it even more than I ever could have imagined. It would have been fine with me if we never left our serene enclave again, but my husband was a different story altogether.
“But . . .” I said, waiting for him to fill in the rest.
“It’s not the big city. Savannah, I can’t help it. I’m used to being in the middle of the action.”
I had a tough time understanding the pull that tugged at him constantly. “Zach, that’s why we came here, remember? I know your police consultant business isn’t getting you as much work as you’d hoped, and goodness knows our life here isn’t as stimulating as your old job used to be, but we’ve had our fill of that kind of excitement in our lives, haven’t we?”
He frowned at me, and it was all I could do not to laugh. My husband could be an imposing man—six foot three and two hundred ten pounds of lean muscle—but to me, there were times he looked like a little lost puppy. Sometimes it was all I could do not to rub him behind the ears.
“Don’t be so glum,” I said. “I’ll be finished with this puzzle in a jiff, and then I’ll help you with your shelf.”
He shrugged as he stared at my layout grid. “I don’t get it, Savannah. They’re just numbers. Why do they take so long to make?”
“I’m not solving the puzzle, Zach, I’m creating it. You know that takes a great deal more time and concentration.”
“You should give it up,” he said. “We don’t really need the money. We’re both supposed to be taking it easy now, not just me.”
I laughed. “Now why on earth would I do that? I’m in my puzzle-making prime.” I was good at what I did, just as good as he had been at his job, and I wasn’t about to stop.
Zach clearly didn’t know how to respond to that. After a look I’d seen a thousand times in our marriage that said he’d clearly lost interest in our topic of conversation, he said with a sigh, “Come up when you’re finished, then.” Zach tromped back to our cozy bedroom suite upstairs, which happened to be the hottest part of our cottage at the worst time of day. While I loved the warm sun that nurtured the rows of beans, corn, and tomatoes in our vegetable garden, I avoided the attic space devoutly in the summer afternoons; my husband’s internal thermostat was much more tolerant than mine. The mountain breezes we counted on to keep us cool had stalled somewhere else at the moment, and we were enduring a particularly miserable summer.
Before he left, I suggested, “Why don’t we get cleaned up and go into Asheville after I finish this? We can eat out, and maybe even catch a movie. What do you say?”
He grumbled something and continued up the stairs, and I knew enough not to pursue it. It was clear that the man was bored, but I wouldn’t have traded our new life for the old one in Charlotte for all of the money in the world. I’d help my husband with his shelf project just as I’d promised, but there was no way I was going to rush what I was doing. Stewing upstairs would give him time to cool off a little, as odd as that sounded in the heat of the day. I glanced at the puzzle with a sense of pride. I reveled in creating them too much to rush the process. I stared at the proposed puzzle formula, enjoying the elegant beauty of it. I knew that some of my peers created their puzzles by computer, but I liked to do them with a pencil in one hand and an eraser in the other. Building the logical progression into my creations was just part of the experience for me. I liked the test of balancing the results of the puzzles to challenge my readers. As I worked, I created my puzzles for one particular challenger, though she existed only in my imagination. As I finished each one, I could see her worry her way through the numbers, and I could almost hear her shout of joy as she finished.
I transferred the completed puzzle to a pristine sheet of paper, then studied the finished puzzle one last time before I faxed it to Derrick—my syndicate editor—a man I was not particularly fond of, despite the checks he sent me for every completed puzzle.
After glancing at my computer email and stalling a half dozen other ways, I realized I couldn’t delay my trek upstairs any longer.
I was going to have to help with that blasted shelf after all. I knew it was going to be miserably hot up there, but there was no way to avoid it. I’d promised for better or for worse on our wedding day, and enduring scalding
