Eli just shook his head. It was obvious there was a lot more going on here than he was saying. But I’d already discovered that demanding answers wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I could be patient. I didn’t have a choice.
We spread out the food—loaded burgers and onion rings. My appetite roared to life at the first taste of juicy hamburger. Too absorbed in the process of enjoying my dinner, I didn’t even try to speak until my plate was cleaned. Sucking a strand of cheese off my thumb, I looked up to see Eli’s eyes on my face. Chocolate brown, melty warm. I felt heat fill my cheeks and pulled my thumb out of my mouth. I’d been so hungry I hadn’t thought about table manners—I was sucking on my fingers like a kid.
I stood, taking my dish to the sink and washing my hands. “Thanks,” I said over my shoulder. “That was exactly what I needed.”
Eli only grunted in response.
“What’s all this?” he said, looking at the other end of the table where I’d laid out the contents of my backpack.
“Everything I have to my name,” I said, half as a joke, trying to push away the stab in my chest at the truth of that statement. It was what it was. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by being upset about it. “I lost my best mic. My second-best was in the backpack, but it got a little banged up. I need to see if I can fix it.”
“You’ve got your tablet too, and some notebooks. Not too bad, all things considered,” he said, moving to study my meager pile of belongings.
“No,” I agreed. “Could have been worse. Not too much worse, but still.”
He picked up the mic. “You want me to take a look at it?”
“Sure,” I said slowly. “You do small appliance repairs on top of all the rest of this?”
He grinned. “Not exactly. If your toaster breaks, don’t send it my way. But this, I might be able to help you with. Now, if you had a broken bomb, I would definitely be your guy.”
“None of those,” I said. “The only bombs I’ve been around lately seem to have worked as planned.”
“Unfortunately,” he agreed.
Eli brought his plate to the sink and cleared away the trash from dinner. “Hold on a sec.” He went down the hall, came back with a small black case not much bigger than my cell phone, grabbing my microphone off the table. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I think it’s where the cord plugs in.” I pointed to the base of the mic. “I usually unplug everything before I put it away, but I guess I forgot. I left the cable plugged in, andthen when I fell, when the bomb went off, I must have landed on it.”
“Oh yeah, I see.” He tugged on the bottom of the mic where the housing was bent around the area where the cable connected. “Let me get in here and take a look. You might just have a few loose wires.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. I like a puzzle,” he said, nudging out a chair in front of my pile of gear.
“Me too.” I flipped on the light over the table and sat beside him, pulling my phone from my back pocket.
“Not a surprise,” he said, “given what you do for a living.”
“True,” I agreed.
As he started tinkering, I opened one of my favorite websites—it was a wild card of puzzles. Every day, a different one, sometimes word-based, like a locked-room mystery puzzle. Sometimes it was numbers or shapes. Those weren’t my thing quite as much, but I liked figuring stuff out.
“This is the one I’m working on right now.” I showed Eli the latest puzzle that had me stumped.
He stopped his work on the mic and studied it. It was a jumble of letters, kind of like a crossword. No hints. There was a pattern there—I knew that much. But despite the puzzle being made of letters, this wasn’t a language- or text-based puzzle. This was math, hiding behind words, and that type of puzzle wasn’t my forte.
It was, however, Eli’s. He slid a letter into a blank space and then another. He reached for the third and stopped. “What’s next?” he asked.
I bit my lip, staring at the screen. I tried anOand then aU, sliding them into an empty spot only to have thembounce back into the pool of letters at the bottom of the screen.
“You’re not going to give me a hint?” I tried fluttering my eyelashes, and his eyes crinkled at the edges, but he didn’t tell me the answer.
“You’ll get it,” he said, his mouth curling up at one corner.
A few minutes later, I did—dragging something that looked like aT, but I thought might actually be a mathematical symbol or just a made-up whatever, beside theUthat Eli had moved. From there, the rest of the puzzle just seemed to make sense.
That was the thing I loved about my work and about puzzles in general: the way the beginning felt so random, you didn’t know where to start. There weren’t any answers, nothing connected, and then, piece by piece, you found what you needed, until that moment—the click—when everything came clear. And even if you didn’t see everything at that point, you knew where you were going. The picture started to make sense.
