Free The Enigmatologist by Ben Adams

of a tattoo peeked from under her right sleeve at her elbow. John wondered
if other ink decorated her body. Or if she had any hidden piercings.
    “You seem awfully young to be running a restaurant,” John
said.
    Her bangs ended above her trimmed eyebrows and two strands
of hair hung on either side of her face. Rosa tucked a strand behind her ear.
The rest of her hair had been pulled into a raven ponytail. A dyed blue streak.
John smiled, hoping it meant Rosa was artistically inclined. He learned in
college he had a greater chance with artsy girls.
    She smiled back playfully. “I’m older than I look.”
    “What are we talking here? thirty-five, forty?”
    “I’m not that old,” she said, laughing and slapping his
shoulder.
    “Hey now,” the sheriff said. “A person’s age don’t mean
nothing.”
    “I graduated from college a couple of years ago.”
    “Yeah? Me too,” John said. “What school?”
    “University of New Mexico. You?”
    “The Boulder School of Esoteric Art and Impractical Design.”
    “Wow, that’s a mouthful.”
    John’s cheeks turned slightly pink.
    “What did you study?” he asked.
    “A little bit of everything. Psych, Business
Administration, Sociology, Biochem , Medieval Studies,
but nothing really resonated with me. So I went the easy route. New Mexico
History.”
    “That’s the easy route?” All John had ever wanted to do
was study puzzles. It never occurred to him that some people didn’t have a
concentrated vision, that they tested everything until they discovered
something they loved. “So, the restaurant, how did that happen?”
    “I was going to go to grad school,” Rosa said, “get a PhD,
do the academia thing, but I found that what I really wanted to do was help
people. And the best way for me to do that was with food.”
    “So you went to a culinary academy?”
    “You don’t need a degree to make your grandma’s recipes.”
    John tore the edge of his paper placemat, shearing away a
fragment of green paper that protected the table from lunch falling from a
fork.
    “What about you? What do you do?” she asked.
    “John’s a private investigator,” the sheriff said.
    “You seem awfully young to be private investigator.”
    “I get that,” John said, feeling slightly inadequate. Rosa
was a small business owner, had studied multiple disciplines. He wanted her to
know that he was more than a guy who photographed cheating husbands sitting
naked on chocolate cake in front of a room full of Civil War re-enactors. “It’s
just my day job, though. I’m really an enigmatologist .”
    Sheriff Masters squinted, like the word ‘ enigmatologist ’ was sandstorm in a desert of spelling bee
vocabulary, but Rosa smiled and nodded like enigmatology was something she talked about all the time with her guests.
    “You design puzzles,” she said.
    “How did you…” He looked up at her, surprised, eyebrows
furrowing behind the frames of his glasses.
    “Like jigsaw puzzles?” the sheriff
asked.
    “Like crosswords,” John said, “logic puzzles. What I want
to do is create puzzles that change the way people view their world.”
    “Like those pictures folks look at till they go all
cross-eyed?” the sheriff asked.
    “Crosswords are like form of meditation, something you do
when you’re alone. You’re trying to recall everything you’ve learned, being
flexible enough to fit your accumulated knowledge into the right amount of
squares. That’s what I love about puzzles. They can alter us, stretch our
thinking, expand our awareness, push us to become something more.” John
prepared this quote years ago for when someone asked him about puzzles. He
thought it was an impressive line and had been waiting for the right time to
use it. Looking up at Rosa, he thought it worked.
    “I think people just like to fill in boxes,” Rosa said,
giving John a slight shove.
    “Well, there’s that, too,” John said, blushing but
grinning.
    “I have a riddle you can answer for