The Puzzle Master (6 page)

But Michael caught up to him. “Who’s your girlfriend?”

“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a friend. Her name’s Iris.”

Iris didn’t look at them and walked on, staring at the floor.

“Whatever. Say, did you find anything good at that junk store this summer? You said you were looking.”

Marshall winced.
Sheesh
, he was talking about her uncle’s store right in front of her.

“Uh, not really,” he said in partial truth. He couldn’t tell Michael about the puzzle. They would laugh him out of school. Iris looked at him and smiled. And they both knew what was happening.
The puzzle was their little secret.

“Well, you’ve got a lot to live up to after that knife last year.
How about a gun or something like that?”

“Michael, we can’t have guns, we’d go to jail. And if I did, no way I’d bring that here.” Marshall looked around and hoped no one was looking or listening to them. He didn’t need anyone tattling on them that they heard them say something about a gun on school property. “I’ll let you know when I get it though. It’ll be cool.”

“I hope so.” Michael grinned, a lopsided one. “This years’ club is going to be about the kid with the coolest toy from summer. You’re sort of my inspiration.” Michael slapped him on the back. “But here’s the kicker—you have to get voted in.”

“By whom?” said Marshall, mouth in a
frown.
This was absurd and had to be the worst club ever.

“By me and Greg and Justin.
That’s who.” He stared at Marshall, trying to intimidate him down just a bit. People don’t go around asking Michael questions: they do as they
’re told
. “You got the rest of the year to join the club; until December to get something good. No cool toy, no club.”

He grinned once more and sort of shuffled away into his class, American History.

Iris was right next to him, silent.

“I haven’t seen you all week,” she finally said. Her eyes were round and soft today, kind of looking like she’d been crying. But, Marshall wasn’t going to ask that. Maybe she was still sad from leaving her old school.

“Yeah, got grounded.
Mason found me sneaking back in.” He tossed his head.
“Doesn’t matter though.
I’ll be there today. 
After school.”

Iris looked like she was going to hug him.
“Really?”
Her eyes were wide and happy now.

“Sure, I did it last year, a couple days a week.
Wouldn’t miss it.”

She looked around them. “Then we can start on the puzzle?”

“
Sheesh
, of course Iris.
My fingers have been itching to do it all week! You haven’t started on it yet or nothing, have you?”

Iris crossed her arms. “I told you, I don’t know puzzles. This is my first big one.” He still believed she could be a puzzle master. She had that look to her;
like
she was smart at a whole lot of things which no one knew about. She was a real-life regular mystery, that Iris.

They went through the day, just waiting for the three o’clock bell to ring.

***

Iris didn’t take the bus. She walked.

Luke’s home was a few blocks past Marshall’s neighborhood, the other way, past the railroad tracks. The bus went her route, but she didn’t go on it and Marshall wanted to ask her about that.

If Marshall wasn’t going to Luke’s, he would’ve taken the bus. But because he was meeting Iris there, he walked too. She’d gotten a head start. He took a quick sip of the inhaler on his way there. Something about the heat and hurry he was in got his chest heaving.

He found her waiting at the door of Luke’s Junk.

“You didn’t wait for me?” he asked. He wasn’t angry, just wondering. “You didn’t want to walk with me?”

“Didn’t know if you wanted me to walk with you.
After the way Michael spoke to you about …”

“That idiot is so stupid, he doesn’t even know he’s dumb,” said Marshall, thinking back to what he said about him and Iris being girlfriend and boyfriend. “He’s all talk, you know.”

Luke was at his usual spot, behind the counter, feet up, smoke billowing around him like a low cloud.

“Hey kids,” he said. “How was the first day?”

“Hi Mr. Luke, not so bad.”
Marshall slung his backpack on the counter, and Iris followed suit. Luke fired up another cigarette, watching the few customers in the room. Marshall hadn’t even noticed them.

“So, I heard from Mrs. Kelso that you got grounded on account of me,” Luke blew the smoke away from Marshall and instantly dragged again.

“Yeah, no big deal.”
Marshall looked at Iris who was watching her Uncle smoke.

“Well now, it is a big deal. Is it okay you being here now?” he motioned at the room.

“Yep.
Got the okay.”

Luke nodded and dragged from the cigarette again. “To make it up to you, I stocked the fridge back there with water, juice and soda and some snacks too, so you got something to eat after school.”

Marshall smiled. “That’s awful nice Mr. Luke.
Sheesh
, you didn’t have to do that.”

“I got the little missy here to take care of now too, so don’t want you getting all hungry on me.”

“Thanks Uncle,” said Iris.” We’ll be in the back then.”

He nodded. “I reckon it’s going to take you all year to finish that puzzle.”

“No way.
We’ll get it done before Christmas.”

Luke was looking down at him with a pair of reading glasses when his eyes shot up in thought.
“Oh really?”

“Yeah.
No sweat.”

“Is that a bet?” Luke asked almost too quietly.

Iris groaned, her lips pressed together. “Marshall, don’t do it. My Uncle never loses bets.”

“No it’s okay. I think we can do it.” He looked at Luke with squinted eyes. “What’s the bet for?”

Luke took another drag and tamped it out in his ashtray. There had to be about thirty odd cigarette butts in there and it was only 3:15. “You
win,
you get this fishing pole right here.” He pointed to the case below him. Marshall leaned in, his nose pressed against the glass.

“You mean this one?”

“Yep.
It beats that pocketknife you bought last year. This one is hand made from the 1940’s.” He grinned, his yellow teeth like slats of a picket fence.
“Goes for hundreds of dollars in an antique store.”

Mother of pearl decorated the handle. His dad would be jealous over it, even Mason would want it, and Marshall liked fishing even more than him. Marshall looked at Luke who had a sideways grin. Mr. Luke had reeled him in, hook, line and sinker. Even more reason Marshall had to win the bet. “And if I lose?”

“If you lose, you have to work here three days a week after school, and then on through the summer when we’re the busiest … for only three dollars an hour.”

Marshall squinted again. “How is that a loss for me?”

“Because you’re cheap labor.”

“You don’t have to do it Marshall,” Iris said, a smile floating through her words. “Luke’s nice and all, but if you work here, he’ll really make you work.”

“I would love to work here.”

 And that was no lie. It was like a dream come true. Heck, he’d work there for ten cents an hour. Marshall stuck out his hand, and Luke grasped it, thick and warm like a bear’s paw.

“It’s a deal then?”

“Deal.”

“You two,” Iris said and nodded to herself. “Come on; better get this bet over with.” They turned to go to the back room. Luke hacked a laugh and put his feet back on the counter. Marshall was positive he had the better end of the deal.

The two of them grabbed a root beer and Marshall dove into his granola bar.

Marshall looked at the corner of the room where the air conditioning rattled away, chomping on his snack. He noticed four or five new puzzle boxes, sitting on top of each other. “What are those?”

“Those are the only other puzzles in this whole place I could find, other than the giant one. I figured we should do the rest of them too.”

“Iris,” said Marshall, “We’re barely going to have enough time to do the big one, let alone the small ones.”

“They’re not that bad. Two of them are five hundred pieces. The other two are a thousand.”

Marshall took a drink of his apple juice and sat down. He fingered the tiny puzzle pieces, falling all over the place like toppings on ice cream. “You have a point. Maybe we should start with the small ones. And work up to the big one? The small ones we could finish in a couple days. It would be good experience for you.”

“How do we go about doing this anyway?” Iris asked. “I don’t know puzzles, remember.

Marshall was suddenly excited. He’d done about a hundred puzzles. All of them were fun; easy; like solving a riddle. “We don’t have any room on the table. We’re
gonna
have to make room on the floor. Here,” he said and pointed to a part of the room, “Up against that wall. We can put a piece of cardboard down, and we’ll keep them all separate.”

She nodded and her bobbed head of curls nodded too.

“You’re uncle’s
gonna
think we’re crazy Iris.”

“Yeah, oh well. He’s the crazy one.”

Marshall stopped. “What?”

“You see how he smokes,” she said. Her eyes looked like deep holes, as if something was down in them if he looked hard enough. “My aunt said before she had her stroke, that he’s dying of lung cancer.”

“Luke?
No way.”
Marshall didn’t believe it. Luke would live for years more. He had to. He had a store to run, a place to keep going, junk to collect and sell.

“You’ve heard him cough right?”

Marshall thought. Yeah, he’d heard him cough. It was a bad one. He figured he was always perpetually getting over a cold, or something.
But, lung cancer?

“Yeah, but, he would’ve told me. I would know.”

“Marshall,” said Iris, waiting for him to look at her, “he hasn’t even told me.”

“Oh.”

“If something happens to him, I don’t know what I’ll do. There isn’t any more family I can live with.” Marshall thought again. That would be like the worst thing ever. No parents, now no uncle, and a sick aunt who can’t do a thing.
Sheesh
, she’d be an orphan
.

He shook his head. “Iris, that won’t happen to you. It just can’t. God doesn’t do that.”

“God does all sorts of things, Marshall. Good and bad.”

Her dead parents, he thought. She’d been through some
really bad
stuff.
No
wonder why she always looked so serious and sad. She
was
sad. But they couldn’t do puzzles thinking about sad stuff. They’d never get them finished.

“You can’t worry about that stuff Iris,” he said, changing the tone. “My mom always says that if a door closes, then a window will open.”

“Like you sneaking out of your house?”

He smiled. She was hilarious for having a sad life. “Yeah, just like that.”

“Okay. I won’t worry about it.” She smiled and picked up a box. “Here’s a five hundred piece one. It’s a picture of a lighthouse, Portland Head, Maine.” She tossed in onto the floor in front of him.

“Good.” Marshall opened it up and dumped out the pieces. “First, we find all the edge pieces, and work on connecting those together. They form the perimeter, see, and once that’s started, the whole thing starts to take shape. After that, we sort ‘
em
by color, and from there, work in sections. You’ll see,” he said patting the floor.

She sat down and tucked her hair behind her ears.
“Yeah, I think I already do.”

Chapter 5: The Truth about Iris

After the first day of school and Marshall
’s run
in with the “girlfriend issue” easing, the three amigos left him alone. Every now and then, they would see Iris and him walking together to class, and a whistle or two would follow. But because they ignored him, the teasing stopped.

On Friday after school, Iris and Marshall went to Luke’s. They ate a snack, while Luke showed them a huge television someone had dropped off, and then they finished the first puzzle. It only took them an hour, and when they finished, they both stared at it. The lighthouse stared back at them, looking silent and beautiful.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually go inside the puzzle?” asked Iris. She was on her knees, peering into the picture. The lighthouse they’d assembled was grand, covered with white and red paint. The rocks below it glistened in the sun with the water running over them back to the sea. It looked like water easing down a dragon’s crusty spine.

“Who says we can’t?” said Marshall, pleased she had an imagination.

“Okay then, so we can.” Iris sat back onto her bottom and crossed her legs. “I’m the lighthouse keeper, and I live in this part of the house,” she said pointing to the picture, where the main house met the lighthouse.