The Ninth Step by Grant Jerkins

looked to Helen like a mole. An inquisitive mole.
    She found that she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t introduce herself to this man. Blood flushed the capillaries of her face as all of her resolve drained away.
    “May I help you?” he asked, when it became clear that Helen was not going to voluntarily explain her presence.
    Helen opened her mouth and was surprised to hear words come out of it.
    “I’ve come about your wife.”
    Helen couldn’t understand Edgar’s initial reaction to her presence. He smiled. The man had smiled and invited her in. He acted almost as though he expected her. As though he considered it normal for a stranger to show up on his doorstep late in the evening inquiring about his dead wife. He’d said, “I almost didn’t put my address on it. Most people do e-mail or a phone call. But I wanted to be thorough.” Then a beeping sound diverted his attention and he excused himself to the kitchen.
    She stared at the maps, charts, and graphs on Edgar’s walls. Much of it she didn’t understand, but the gist was quite obvious. The man was not at peace. He was carrying a burden. He wanted to find the person responsible for killing his wife. Helen clenched her fist, wishing she had brought the chip with her.
    “They help me to keep things straight in my mind,” Edgar said, back from the kitchen, a box of colored Sharpies in one hand and a steaming green Tupperware container in the other.
    “This is so… thorough.”
    “She was pregnant, did you know that?”
    “No. I’m so sorry.”
    Edgar placed his dinner on the corner of his work desk, using a hot pad to protect the wood surface. He pulled a ledger from one of the drawers and flipped through it. “Give me just a minute. I want to update a color code for this.”
    Helen’s attention was drawn to the glass-enclosed case on the far wall. She crossed over to it and took in the display. At first, she thought they were objects of art, but she quickly realized that they were puzzles of some kind. There was a plain-looking wooden box—no bigger than her fist—alongside which stood a neatly printed card informing the observer that this was a seventy-eight-step nineteenth-century Japanese puzzle box,
himitsu-bako
.
    Helen opened the case and carefully picked up the box. She was surprised at how light it was. She quickly replaced it, careful to position it exactly as she had found it. When she was finished, she found that Edgar was standing directly behind her. He reached into the case and repositioned the box. To Helen, it looked as though he had changed its position by, maybe, a millimeter. She thought,
Note to self: Do not touch the puzzle boxes.
    “Have you ever done a Rubik’s Cube?” she asked.
    “That’s not really where my interest lies.”
    “Oh. But have you ever done one? I had one in seventh grade. I never did solve it.”
    “Really?” His tone was deadpan.
    “Really. So, have you?”
    One eyebrow arched up over the top of his glasses, as he looked at her in question.
    “Done a Rubik’s Cube. Have you?”
    “Mass-produced games and puzzles hold little interest for me.”
    “So the answer is no.”
    “Correct. The answer is no,” Edgar replied, conceding the point.
    “You should buy one. If anyone could solve one of those, it’s you.”
    “I really don’t think it would hold much—” Edgar cut himself off. From the look on his face, it was clear to Helen he was irritated to have allowed himself to be drawn into this particular conversation. Edgar sat down and cracked open the ledger. “How did I first contact you? Was it the flyer? An e-mail? Do you work in the area? Or are you a resident? I’ll need to plot it.”
    Helen was lost. She looked from the maps to the charts, to the puzzle boxes, and finally to the open, hopeful look in Edgar’s eyes. She didn’t know what to say.
    “I don’t mean to be overly personal. It will help me to know how I intersected with you. So that I expand the area of probability. You