Sinister Sudoku (23 page)

Ava Barnes and Michelle Markson, usually adversaries rather than allies, had both been gratified by the amount of coverage. Liza had found her face plastered across newspapers and the airwaves for her role in finding the clue in the sudoku, and her column had gotten plenty of free publicity.

And then Ritz Tarleton, less than a week out of the pokey, had gotten arrested on a DUI charge again. The nation’s newsmeisters had weighed the stories in the balance— drunken celebutante versus abstract art. And even though the Mondrian was worth $3 million, the drunken celebrity story was of course the one that the media had led with. The news cycle went on.

I guess that means there’ll be a small turnout without the gawkers and idiots,
Liza thought as she opened the door.

Inside, the church was packed. No talking heads from television, no true-crime buffs, but all of Elise Halvorsen’s friends and neighbors had shown up to support her, even though they didn’t know her brother from a hole in the wall.

Liza looked around for a seat. Oh, great. Michael and Kevin were sitting together with a space between them. Michael had brought a suit up with him. He should have brought an overcoat—he looked cold. Liza also recognized the suit Kevin was wearing. The last time she’d seen it had been on their big date before she discovered Dalen’s body.

Sheriff Clements was in the last row of pews, a brown wool overcoat over his best khaki uniform. Beside him stood Ted Everard in that loden suit she’d first seen him in. It looked a lot better with a light gray shirt and a black patterned tie, not to mention being cleaned and pressed.

Jaysol’s Dry Cleaners must have been doing banner business for this hoedown,
Liza thought.

Up in the front row, Mrs. Halvorsen sat in the purple wool suit she always wore to funerals. She hadn’t worn black since she buried her husband. Liza’s neighbor was surrounded by a coterie of bemused-looking relatives—her nieces and nephews. Mrs. H. was the last Dalen of her generation.

About halfway down the aisle, Liza spotted a waving hand. Thank heavens, Ava had saved a seat for her. Joining her friend, Liza sat down and listened to some whispered grousing about the lack of national coverage until Pastor Todd came out to lead them in prayer.

Liza knew the pastor to be a good man, but today he showed himself a master preacher as he gave a eulogy that had to be an oratorical nightmare. He’d glossed over Chris Dalen’s rotten relationship with his family, how he made his living, where he’d been for the last fifteen years, and how he’d died.

Somehow, Pastor Todd got the job done, remembering Chris as a loving brother who had made some mistakes in life, but who, at the end, had tried to make up for the biggest transgression of his past and managed to assure his sister’s future.

Liza glanced over at Ava.
I guess that means the news has gotten out about the reward money.

The Western Assurance Group had balked at first when Liza applied for the reward—and demanded that it be paid to Elise Halvorsen. When you came right down to it, if it hadn’t been for Mrs. H., Liza wouldn’t have undertaken to find the painting at all. It had taken some pointed comments from Michelle to one of the senior vice presidents about the value of good publicity versus bad, but the company had finally agreed to pony up for the finder’s fee. Taxes would take a healthy bite out of the sum, but Mrs. H. should end up with enough to live out the rest of her life comfortably.

Liza rose with the rest of the congregation as the pall-bearers took the plain wooden coffin from the church. Mrs. Halvorsen and her relations followed. She was sobbing quietly, trying to hide it, no doubt unsettled a bit by finding herself the center of attention.

“Are you going to the cemetery?” Ava asked when they finally got outside. “You could ride with me.”

Recognizing a covert plea for moral support, Liza agreed. The sermon had exercised a remarkable influence on Ava, it turned out. Liza’s managing editor didn’t mention news or publicity for the entire drive.

The turnout at the graveside was smaller, just the Halvorsen/Dalen contingent and a few of Mrs. H.’s closer friends. Liza noticed that the sheriff and Ted Everard also attended. Pastor Todd kept the ceremonies dignified and brief, and at last it was over.

When Liza stepped up to offer her condolences, Elise Halvorsen flung both arms around her in a tight hug. Liza found her own eyes blurred with tears.

She’d had another nightmare last night—at least it had started as one. Chris Dalen had erupted spectacularly from the mattress, pursuing her across the treacherously giving terrain of the endless bed. But when he’d finally caught up with her, his eyes had been alive, not staring, and all he’d done was say, “Thanks.”

“Where to now?” Ava asked as they walked away.

“Mrs. H. is having what she calls ‘a small collation’ at her house, and I agreed to help with the food,” Liza said.

Her friend immediately reverted to managing editor mode. “And then I hope you’ll be getting some work done. Your cushion frankly needs some padding. You’ve got a national column now. This is not the time to be goofing off.”

“Then let’s hope nobody else I know gets murdered anytime soon,” Liza said.

That shut Ava up.

As the crowd began to disperse, Liza spotted two more familiar figures—Michael and Kevin.

Then she realized they were both bearing down on her.

She hadn’t exactly been avoiding them. In fact, it had been more the other way around. Kevin and Michael had been a long time getting over their humiliating defeat in the drinking contest at the Famished Farmer and their less than stellar performance the morning after.

Judging from the way they were almost elbowing one another to get to her first, Liza figured their egos were definitely on the mend.

Michael arrived, fractionally in the lead. “Hey, Liza.”

Now that he was here, he seemed to lose confidence. Kevin spoke up. “Valentine’s Day is coming up, and we want to know—well, I want to know if you and I—”

“Or you and I,” Michael put in.

“Oh, Valentine’s Day,” Liza said. “You know, guys, that’s turned into a pretty adult holiday lately.”

They nodded, their tongues all but hanging out.

“So I decided to go with the one adult involved in this last adventure.”

By luck, Ted Everard passed by at just that moment. Liza hooked his arm.

“That’s why Ted and I are going to Portland for that weekend.”

They walked off, arm in arm, with what felt like half of Maiden’s Bay staring after them, openmouthed in shock.

Even by Michelle’s high standards, it was a perfect exit.

Liza smiled.

Written by Oregon’s own leading sudoku columnist, Liza K

How often do you find yourself working through the middle of a sudoku and saying nasty things about the person who created the puzzle? I’m guilty of that, and I make a living out of devising the darned things.

However, while recently conducting a class for beginning solvers, I gave them a chance to find out how the other side lives for their final project. I thought I’d kept it simple, giving each participant a solution and the job of removing matching pairs of clues to create a symmetrical, thirty-clue sudoku.

A friend who also took the challenge gave this report. “I did what you asked, checked the final product, and found that I had a puzzle with two possible solutions. When I switched around a couple of other pairs of clues, I wound up with twelve possible solutions. My next fix brought the possible solutions up past a hundred.”

The class didn’t do so well, either.

Which leads, indirectly, to this article, where I’ll attempt to show the method I use to create a very simple puzzle. Don’t look for X-Wings or similar esoterica. This will be a puzzle solvable by the simplest techniques.

The first step is to create a gridwork with a symmetrical design. Here, gray spaces represent the final sudoku— they’ll become clues. The white spaces we’ll call blanks— they’ll be blank in the finished puzzle.

You can choose any of the magic digits 1 through 9 to start. I’ll start at the end of the line, setting up a classic Hidden Single situation. This technique works on the basic sudoku rule that a number can appear only once in a box, one of the nine-space subgrids in a puzzle. So, if a particular number is present in the boxes on either side of a given box (or above and below it), that means there are only three spaces in the third box where that number can be found. With clues or filled-in spaces, the number of available spaces can be even smaller. In fact, there may be only one space.

STEP 2

In Step 2, 9
₁
shows the only space available in the center box. The placement of 9
₂
, 9
₃
, and 9
₄
in clue spaces prohibits the placement of 9s in the other rows and columns for the box. We don’t need to worry about the empty gray space. In the final puzzle, that will be occupied by other clues.

So, we’ve placed the first four of the nine 9s for this puzzle. Can we place others? We’ll aim to fix digits in blank spaces.

STEP 3

Looking at the lower right box in Step 3, we see that the already placed clues 9
₂
and 9
₄
prohibit the placement of 9s in most of the box. With three additional spaces taken up by clues, there’s only one space available, which we’ve filled with 9
₅
.

Next, we move to the box in the upper right. The newly placed 9
₅
prohibits placements of 9s in the open spaces in one column. Placed clue 9
₂
prohibits 9s in another column. Since we’re trying to avoid placing digits in clue spaces, this leaves one blank, which we’ll fill with 9
₆
.

Another technique for fixing numbers in place is to use a clue space to set up placements. Setting up clue 9
₇
in the lower left-hand box prohibits any other 9s there. It also affects the upper left-hand box, helping to reduce the number of legal squares to two. Placing 9
₈
in one of those inevitably fixes the position of 9
₉
in the top center box, and vice versa.