Deadly Row, A - By Casey Mayes Page 0,1

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,