Riddles Wrapped in Enigmas

Nancy did puzzles because that was what she’d always done, and because that was what they paid her to do. So when the puzzles were numbers, she ordered them, and when they were hypothetical, she used philosophy, and when they were tactile, she spent hours at the table, fitting glittering mica chips together so well that you couldn’t even find the seams.

Someone always left the puzzles at her door. Nancy hadn’t ventured past the end of her street n years, but she’d never caught anyone leaving them. The puzzle was usually tucked into a manila folder on nondescript paper. Payment came the same way, receipts of whatever amount had been deposited into her bank account. She preferred it that way—most of what she needed came from the Internet.

Not that she hadn’t ever tried to discover the source of the puzzles; their origin was the only one she could never solve. But with one exception, the puzzles were as anonymous as the containers they came in. She’d even, in desperation, once had a cardboard box full of broken eggshells examined by a forensic scientist who owed her a favor. He’d handed them back, unnerved, having found nothing—no fingerprints, no DNA, no trace evidence at all. He couldn’t tell that she had handled them, he’d said—they seemed immune to any examination. Even the eggs had been scoured clean, with no indication even of the cleaning.

So Nancy gave up, and solved her paid puzzles, and tried not to let her situation gnaw too much on her mind. She used the money to decorate her apartment in lavish patterns and developed a horror of broken things, and bought two beers at the bar downstairs every week to prove that she still had some sort of social connection.

When she wasn’t fitting puzzles together, Nancy played with her cat—Escher, payment for one of her non-mysterious jobs—and read, and watched TV, and searched online, looking for the boy she loved.

His name was Billy Nguyen. He’d been 19 and she’d been 20 when they’d met five years ago. He was beautiful. Nancy had opened her door one morning to find five precarious stacks of plywood crates, and sitting on the shortest, bobbing his head to the music blasting from his CD player, was a tall Korean boy with blue streaks in his hair. Pulling out his earphones, he’d explained that he was there to help her lift the ruined statue pieces inside the boxes. He’d smiled and a long dimple creased her left cheek, revealing the cheekbone line beneath it.

They had lifted and fitted the statues’ components for two weeks—the statues were made of onyx and turned out to depict minotaurs. Billy had taught her how to cook chicken really well, and she’d made him lemonade and burnt peanut butter cookies, and somewhere in the middle of all that Nancy fell in love. And when they put the last horn in place, Billy had kissed her, and she’d let herself believe that he might love her back. He’d been sleeping on her couch the whole time, so that when he’d dozed off as they watched some movie, Nancy had let him sleep. She’d gone to bed in a happy blur, drunk on the memory of his hand in hers.

But when she woke up, he was gone. The blanket was folded with another deposit slip on top, all of his things, and the statues, gone as well. Nancy had asked everyone nearby if they’d seen him, but it was useless. The doorman saw someone leave, but didn’t know who; the coffee shop girl remembered Billy, but had no idea what had happened. She’d known better, even in her desperate mood, than to involve the police—without any proof that he’d even existed, she would have been laughed out as a loony.

So now she just searched and searched, looking at different times for his name of his picture, but nothing ever came up. In her darkest moments, she wondered if she was crazy, if the whole thing had been some mental breakdown.

Nancy refused to believe it, though. She let her fingers do the work as she arranged a charred document, moving nimbly to keep it from flaking, and wracked her brain for any sort of clue, any sort of pattern that would lead her to him. Nancy was sure there had to be one, because everything had a pattern if you looked hard enough—although a tiny, nasty part of her whispered that there certainly was one, and it meant that she would never find him. Her life didn’t run the sort of path that allowed for beautiful dimpled boys.

She continued to live her life, marking each moment with a new envelope. Nancy ordered, and fixed, and placed, and rearranged—and hoped.