Page 42 of One Knight Stand

“Not yet.” I plopped on the couch next to him, and he handed me my laptop. “It’s obvious I need to break this riddle apart, piece by piece. Let’s each take a line. I’ll take the first one. Wally, you take the second line, and Frankie, you’ve got the third. Jot down any and all ideas for what the meaning could be. We’ll tackle the last line together, okay?”

Everyone took their line and got down to work.

I started with mine. A dark 3-D smooch, but just one. What did that mean? A light kiss versus a dark kiss? And why only one?

We worked quietly and furiously. I could hear the tap of fingers on keyboards and the quiet murmur of the others’ voices from the dining room as they worked out a plan to get me to my father safely and dug up more information on my dad and J. P. Lando.

After about forty minutes, I asked Wally and Frankie to stop so we could review what we’d come up with so far in regards to their lines of the riddle. I went first.

“My line is ‘One dark 3-D smooch, not a single kiss more.’” I angled my keyboard toward them so they could see the screen. “Since the title of the riddle is All About Numbers, I came at from a math angle. I think I have the number he wants me to have, but I don’t know how it fits into the rest of the riddle.”

“What number?” Wally asked.

“Well, it seems pretty straightforward. Smooching is kissing, so the first thing that leaped to mind was the kissing number problem.”

“There’s a kissing number problem in math?” Frankie asked. “That’s so weird, but sweet, in a geeky way.”

“Newton’s number,” Wally said. “A 3-D smooch. Good thinking, Angel. It makes sense.”

“It does.” My excitement started to rise.

“Hey, you two!” Frankie snapped her fingers at us. “Can you speak English so I know what’s going on?”

I turned to her. “Sorry, Frankie. The kissing number in geometry—sometimes referred to as Newton’s number—is the number of equally sized spheres that can be arranged together without overlapping, but still touch a common unit sphere.”

“How exactly does that involve kissing?” she asked.

“Good question. I’d never really thought about it before. Maybe touching and overlapping leads to kissing somehow? Wally, you got any thoughts on that?”

“Given my extremely limited knowledge of kissing, I’ve got nothing,” he replied, not looking up from his laptop.

“Math is so complicated,” Frankie said, rolling her eyes. “So, math geeks, how many spheres can be arranged without overlapping?”

“Twelve is what Isaac Newton came up with, and is what’s generally accepted as the correct number by mathematicians,” I answered. “However, there was a long-running disagreement about it between Newton and fellow mathematician David Gregory. Gregory believed the correct number to be thirteen spheres. It wasn’t until 1953 that Newton was definitively proved correct. The kissing number in geometry is twelve.”

“And the riddle says not a single kiss more,” Frankie pointed out. “So, maybe twelve is the answer? If we don’t go a single kiss more.”

“Ifthe Newton number is what this line is about,” I said. “It’s a big assumption, but we have to start somewhere. Wally, what did you discover?”

Wally tapped some keys on the keyboard. “My verse says, ‘Ilion, New York, is starting a war.’ I focused on numbers, too, and while nothing jumped out at me, this is what I came up with.” He adjusted the glasses on his nose. “Ilion is the name of the ancient city of Troy, famous in legends. However, Ilion, New York, is a really small town in the middle of the state. It is only 2.5 square miles and has a whopping population of seventy-eight hundred people. German immigrants founded it, and the town doesn’t seem to have been involved in any major war, Civil, Revolutionary, Native American or other. The town wasn’t even incorporated until 1852. There’s nothing historically significant about Ilion that I could find—it’s just a proverbial small town in America. I can give you the coordinates, but a quick run at them didn’t turn up anything spectacular codewise. Route 51 goes through the north of the village. That’s all I’ve got so far unless you want me to dig deeper and come up with population density, census numbers, and household numbers.”

None of it meant anything to me. I tried to swallow my frustration. “I don’t know, Wally. Let’s see what Frankie found.”

She took a bite of an apple, set it down. “Well, I didn’t find any numbers, so I hope you’re not too disappointed,” she said. “My verse read, ‘Tulinsky, it means something to you.’ Obviously, it means nothing tome, but I pulled up everything I could find that had Tulinsky in it, so maybe that will help you. There’s only one place in the world I found called Tulinsky, and it’s in Russia, where it’s apparently super cold most of the year. I asked Wally to look at the town coordinates in case it meant something numberwise, but he found zip. There was also nothing significant, historically or numerically, about the town that I could find. Other than that, the only Tulinskys I could find were people. Did you know there are millions of people with the last name Tulinsky? However, if I narrowed it down to the most famous of the Tulinskys, they are, in this order, a chemist who had several patents on cell therapeutics, a musician who played the blues, and a popular children’s book author.”

“Nothing jumps out at me.” I sighed and put my forehead in my hands. “This riddle is too hard. Why would he give me something so hard?”

Wally put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s not too hard. He said only you would understand it. He had to write it so if someone else got ahold of it, it wouldn’t make sense to them.”

“But it doesn’t make sense tome.”

“It’s going to make sense to you,” Wally said. “Keep working it. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

“You’ve got this, Angel,” Frankie said. “We just need to give you more information. The answer will be there. It’ll jump out to you. I’m sure of it.”

I blew out a breath and rubbed my temples. “Okay, keep digging on your two verses. I’m going to try and tackle the last verse. Maybe it’s the key.”

I pulled it up on my screen and read it.Check number nine, and you will be through.What was that supposed to mean? Check the number nine how? I went back to the previous line.Tulinsky, it means something to you.Actually, it didn’t, but maybe it should. I’d never been to Russia, never even heard of the town before. Frankie had said some of the famous people were named Tulinsky. A chemist, a musician and a children’s author.

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