Page 45 of The Grandest Game
She hadn’t ever let herself even imagine him saying those words, not once in the year and a half since she’d heard the arctic chill in his voice.Stop calling.
“I was wrong,” Grayson said again. He finally looked away from the scoreboard. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “About the nature of this puzzle.”
The puzzle.He was talking about thepuzzle.
“I assumed that this challenge would unfold sequentially, one clue leading to the next, each object with its own use.However.” Grayson gave that one word the weight of a whole sentence. “Your logic is sound, Ms. Kane.”
Was that his version of a compliment?Your logic is sound?He’d read that poem, and it had inspired in him the sudden realization thather logic was sound? Forget the sun. Lyra could think of better ways to end Grayson Hawthorne.
“Two correct answers in quick succession,” he continued,unaware that she was plotting his demise, “indeed suggests the answers are themselves connected. Thereisa pattern—or a code.”
Odette looked from Lyra to Grayson then back again. “As I said earlier,” the old woman told Lyra. “Very much a Hawthorne.”
That sounded a lot less like a compliment than it had before. Lyra narrowed her eyes. “How did you say you knew Tobias Hawthorne again?”
“I didn’t. And my earlier terms still stand.” Odette lifted the jeweled object in her hands—a pair of opera glasses—to her face. “I won’t answer that question unless and until all three of us make it out and down to the dock by sunrise.” Odette peered through the opera glasses at their array of objects, then lowered the glasses. “Nothing. But it was worth a shot.” The old woman cheated her gaze toward Lyra. “I don’t suppose you found anything useful out on the island?”
If Odette had been the one to plant those notes, then she was still playing mind games. If she hadn’t, then she was fishing.
“I found an Abraham Lincoln quote with the wordescapein it.” Lyra took in every aspect of Odette’s expression, preparing to track even the most subtle shift. “And then there were the notes.Thomas, Thomas, Tommaso, Tomás.”
Odette had very few wrinkles for a woman her age. She also had an excellent poker face. “And the significance to those names…”
“Your father?” Grayson’s tone called to mind the hardening of a jaw and the ticking of a rather foreboding muscle near the mouth, but Lyra kept her eyes focused on Odette.
“My biological father was a man of many names.” Lyra kept her voice perfectly even, perfectly controlled. “My mother first knew him as Tomás.”
Odette took in Lyra’s features. “Puerto Rican? Cuban?”
“I don’t know,” Lyra said. “By the time my mom was pregnant with me, she’d heard him tell business associates a dozen different stories about his background. He’d claim to be Greek or Italian one day, Brazilian the next. He was always working a new hustle.Big ideas. That was how my mom described him.” Lyra expelled a breath. “Not so big on telling the truth or keeping promises. She left him when I was three days old.”
Lyra had no memories of the man, other thanthememory.
“Am I to understand that someone on this island left you notes with a variety of your father’s aliases written on them?” Grayson’s voice was edged, each word precise and as sharp as the tip of a knife.
“Rohan seemed to think it wasn’t your brothers or Avery.” Lyra finally looked away from Odette but spared herself from looking directly at Grayson.
“I assure you,” Grayson replied, “it was not.”
“And I assure you both,” Odette cut in, “that I am not a person who has to resort to parlor tricks or dramatics to win.” She smiled like a cookie-baking grandmother. “Now, rather than assuming facts not in evidence about my intentions and character, perhaps you two could join me in looking for that elusive pattern?”
Pushing her long, gray hair back over her shoulder, Odette lined their objects up one by one. Lyra welcomed the distraction—and then she had to remind herself that the gamewasn’tthe distraction.
The game was the point. It was why she was here.
Lyra picked up one of the quarters and studied it.1991.She thought back to her exchange with Grayson about the years. Numbers, at least, were safe. Numbers were predictable. And these numbers had a pattern.
1991. 2002. 2020.
Lyra looked to the Scrabble tiles, the poetry magnets, and allthe rest of it. Taking another large mental step back from the Great Room and its occupants, she thought about multiple-choice tests and trick questions, about working backward, deriving clues from the answers.
Or in this case, the answer, singular, that they’d been given.SWORD.
If therewasa pattern to all three answers, then maybe Grayson hadn’t beenentirelywrong about the puzzle. MaybeSWORDwas indeed a clue, just not the linear kind he was used to. Lyra turned that over in her mind.What if, having been given one of the answers, what we’ve really been given is a means of decoding the other two?
“Sword.” Lyra said it out loud as she pulled four letters from the Scrabble letter bank—W,O,R, andD. There was noS, so she drew it with her finger.
And then she realized…
