Seven Letters, Starts with L

The puzzle line at the Lakeshore Ledger rang at 7:02 on the Tuesday after Labor Day, as it did every morning a mistake had been printed, and Elias picked it up on the first ring, because there was only one person in Milwaukee who would be calling.

"Florence Wojcik," said the voice on the other end. "Layton Park. Ninety-one years old. You have an error."

"Good morning, Mrs. Wojcik."

"It's not your error, dear. I want to be clear about that. Yours are very rare, and when you make one it's an interesting one." There was a rustle of newsprint, the sound of a woman who had folded the Monday paper into quarters with a single crease, the way it was meant to be folded. "It's his. Monday. Twenty-six Down. Great Lake bordering Wisconsin, four letters. And the answer is ERIE."

Elias closed his hazel eyes and let the moment be perfect for exactly one second.

"Lake Erie," said Florence, "does not border Wisconsin. Lake Erie has never been anywhere near Wisconsin. Lake Erie is in Ohio, with the rest of Ohio. I looked at a map to be certain, and then I looked at a second map, because I didn't want to be unfair to the boy."

"That's very fair of you."

"I've been solving the Ledger since 1958 and phoning in errors since 1979," said Florence, "and that is error number two hundred and twelve. I keep a book. Please tell him." A pause. "Please tell him nicely. He has a lovely clue for OREO in the same grid. Twist ending? I laughed out loud. My cat left the room."

It was not quite eight, and the fourth-floor newsroom of the Ledger was mostly empty: a long room of old desks under buzzing lights, half of them bare since the last round of buyouts, the windows along the river side gray with early sun. The copy desk sat by those windows. On the pillar beside it hung a whiteboard, and across the top of the whiteboard, in Hector Salinas's square capitals, was written THE WAR.

Under it were two columns. One was headed MARCHETTI. The other was headed with Elias's name. Below each ran three years of hidden answers, the insults the two of them had tucked into each other's grids, all of them clued innocently enough to get past the desk. MUSTY, Like some Sunday fare, had started it. BLOWHARD had answered. Then SHOWOFF and PEDANT, GIMMICK and FUSSBUDGET, STUFFED SHIRT and one memorable Sunday in which the long theme entries, read down the diagonal, spelled NOT FUNNY.

Hector had already added a new line to Theo's column this morning, in green marker: PEDANT (again), Stickler, Mon. 17A.

Elias had never met Theo Marchetti. In three years, not once. He filed the weekday puzzles at two in the morning by email and never came in, and Elias filed the Sunday by email too, and came in only on Tuesdays, to proof with the desk. Somewhere out in the city was a man who thought Lake Erie bordered Wisconsin and had called Elias a pedant twice in print, and Elias did not even know what he looked like.

Elias knew a great deal more about someone he had never met at all. On a solvers' forum called the Blank Square, where people argued about crosswordese and posted times, Elias had been trading long private letters for two years with a stranger who called himself Downstroke. They had one rule, made in the first month: no names, no jobs, no newspapers. Inside that rule they had told each other nearly everything else. Last night's letter was still open on Elias's phone. Downstroke had written at two in the morning, as always, about his grandmother, who did the puzzle in pen and phoned him with her complaints, and who had told him on Sunday that his handwriting looked like a spider had died in ink. She's right, he had written. She's always right. It's exhausting. Tell me something true about your week.