It took a moment for him to understand what had been written in the blank spaces of the puzzle. Most of the boxes overflowed with letters, their harsh outlines scratched deep into the page outside of the boundaries by the worn pencil. There were only two words on the page: WULF and RHINELANDER. Names, he corrected himself as he read them. The two names were repeated everywhere, scrawled by the unsteady hand of the woman beside him.
Lance looked at his grandmother, her hair floating weightless around her shrunken head, her eyes still staring at the growing storm outside. “Who are they?” he asked, his eyes locked on her face, looking for any signs that she’d heard him. “Can you tell me who they are?”
Nothing. No recognition. She was a husk, hollowed out by time and tragedy. The leavings of a mind all but eaten up, her last thoughts echoing out of an eroded memory and onto the page before her. And nothing that served as answers to his questions.
Lance stood from the chair, giving his grandmother one last look. He crossed the room and stepped into the hall, where the nurse stood staring at an alarming brown stain on the floor near one of the other doors.
“Thank you,” he said.
The bulky woman pulled the door shut and locked it. She grunted in reply and led the way back to the elevator. As the floor hummed its descent beneath them, Lance turned to the nurse.
“You don’t by any chance know anything about the names she wrote on the crossword in her room, do you?”
The nurse sighed through her nostrils. “I don’t know anything about Wulf. Sounds German to me. But Rhinelander rings a bell. He might have been a missing person quite a few years ago. Something like that, but I could be wrong.” Her shoulders rose in a dismissive shrug.
“Why a crossword?” Lance asked.
The nurse shrugged again. “She always gets one, has ever since I started here. Never seen her write on it, though. We bring her a fresh stub of pencil every now and then, and those words are just there, over and over. Heard the scratching coming from her room late one night when I was doing the rounds. It stopped when I got within a few feet of the door, though, and when I peeked in she was just staring at the wall, not moving.”
The image nearly coaxed a shudder from Lance, but he fought it back and followed the nurse out of the elevator as the doors opened onto the first floor.
“If she says anything, please let me know,” Lance said, handing the nurse a slip of paper with his name and number on it.
She took it and chuckled as she neared the office that she had emerged from earlier. “Oh, we will, don’t worry about that. That woman’s almost ninety years old, and the last thirty of it she’s spent writing those two names down. If she communicates anything other than that, we’ll give you a call.” Her laughter followed her into the office and died as the door swung shut behind her.
Lance frowned and walked out into the waiting area and through the exterior doors. The trees were beginning to bend more with the storm’s pressure, and he could almost taste rain in the air. He slid in behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and stared at the dark windows of the building. He wondered which one was his grandmother’s, and as he drove out of the parking lot, he imagined he could hear the sound of a pencil scratching on paper.
The grave sat just where John said it would. After walking to it, Lance wondered how he’d missed it before on his nightly treks through the property. The path that led off the main trail twisted only once, before rising onto a small bluff and opening into a clearing roughly the size of a car.
Lance stood at the opening’s mouth, looking at the short granite headstone. The words were barely visible in the gloom of the day, but he could still read them clearly enough.
“Erwin Metzger, 1920 to 1980. Father and husband. Rest in peace.” Lance’s voice sounded weak in the clearing amidst the rising wind and the constant beating of the waves on the shore behind him. When he turned his head to the left, he could actually see the house, which did nothing to comfort him.