Sweetie giggled. “That’s kind of sweet, actually.”
“If you say so.” Getting back to the task at hand, Ashish opened the two small drawers on top, but they were empty except for a couple of old-fashioned ink pens.
“Ooh, look at this.” Sweetie pushed against a panel on the bottom half of the desk. It appeared to be a flat wooden board, but when she pressed it, Ashish heard a distinctive click. “I can’t get it to move, though.” Sweetie pushed harder, but the board wouldn’t give.
“Let me see.” Ashish knelt down, put both his hands against the board, and tried to slide it out of the way. That did it; the board swiped soundlessly to the right, revealing a small hidden safe with a keypad. Ash frowned. “But they’re all numbers, not letters. How could we put in either ‘Mary’ or ‘Matthew’?”
Sweetie, kneeling beside him, studied the keypad, also frowning. Except her frown was, like, a thousand times cuter. Ash found himself staring at her profile lovingly, only to realize several seconds had passed and he wasn’t contributing in any way.
Clearing his throat, he turned his attention back to the keypad and sighed. “This is, like, some Bletchley Circle–level crap. How am I, a mere mortal, supposed to decipher it?”
Sweetie looked at him, her eyes wide, and snapped her fingers. “I got it!” Standing, she grabbed the piece of paper with the clue, flipped it over, and using one of the old-fashioned ink pens, began scribbling on the back.
Ashish stood and watched over her shoulder, realizing what she was doing. “Genius!”
Sweetie grinned up at him briefly before returning to her task. “Each letter has a numerical value: M is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet, A is the first, and so on.” While she finished writing up Mary’s name, Ashish did Matthew’s on the back of the letter from Guinevere to Armand.
“Let’s try Mary’s first?” Ash asked. “It’s a lot smaller.”
“Yep.”
They knelt before the keypad again, and Sweetie punched in 13-1-18-25. There was a clicking sound, and the safe opened, swinging quietly outward.
“Yay!” Sweetie kissed Ashish on impulse before reaching into the safe, and his heart melted into a puddle and dribbled down into his shoes. It was probably one of his most favorite things in the world, when Sweetie Nair laid impromptu kisses on him, like it was no big thing. He didn’t think he’d tell her just what a big thing it was to him. “Ooh, look.”
He turned his attention back to Sweetie. Daydreaming about her while she was right there was becoming a bad habit. “Hmm?” he asked, still feeling a little moony.
“It’s a little piece of… something.” She held a small cylindrical plastic piece that had been painted to look like antique brass. A nub on one end of it jutted out, as if it was meant to attach to something else.
They looked around on the desk, but there was nothing else it might connect to. “Maybe it’s part of a bigger puzzle,” Ashish said finally. “Hey, what do you think the other couple teams are up to? I bet none of them are as fast or as good as we are.”
Sweetie laughed and swatted him. “Well, let’s not rub their faces in it.”
Dimple & Rishi
“What I don’t understand is, if Guinevere was taken away on a ship by her father, why would he choose to take her away on a pirate ship?” Dimple poked at the mast on the ship in the center of the room. The deck was lit with four large LED pillar candles spaced equidistantly from each other. The dim light was annoying her even more; she knew it was supposed to be for “ambience,” but all it did was make it hard to accomplish the task at hand.
“Maybe he’s a pirate,” Rishi teased, raising an eyebrow as he checked out the sails of said ship. The ship looked flimsy, and they’d both agreed they wouldn’t climb aboard to check for clues, which made things infinitely tougher. “Ever think of that? Huh? Huh, Stanford girl?”
Dimple rolled her eyes. “Okay, but then why is there a cardboard cutout of presumably the two of them on the deck of the ship?” She gestured to the annoyingly cloying cutout of the two lovers. “The whole point was they weren’t together on the ship, right?”
Rishi smiled. She could tell it was his you’re precious to me because you’re so intense and different from me smile. Honestly, she was a little baffled he was still so in love with her after all these years. Dimple kept waiting for her luck to run out; surely she’d had more than her share. More than most people’s shares, in fact.
“I love you.” Rishi came over and kissed the side of her head, just underlining her point.
“Love you too.” Temporarily mollified, Dimple walked around the ship, sticking her fingers into every nook and cranny she could see in the shadows. “I don’t think this is very fair. Ashish and Sweetie got a letter to kick them off on their clue, whereas we’re just looking for a clue with nothing to go on at all.”
“Yeah, but you’re a Stanford girl.” Rishi grinned as he moved the cardboard-cutout couple to look for any clues that might be trapped under them. “We don’t need a handout like them.”
Dimple snorted as she began to pull up on a pile of rope that was coiled in one corner of the ship. “I don’t know why you’re so insistent on giving me a big head.”
“Because you deserve to have a big head. You’re the smartest person I know, and you’re still so humble about it. Like, oh, anyone could go to Stanford and be Jenny Lindt’s protégé!”
“That’s just—” Dimple stopped as she realized the other end of the rope, previously hidden in the thick coil, was tied to something. “Hey.” She met Rishi’s eye over the prow, the flickering shadows masking the lower half of his face. “Check this out.”
He hurried to her as she fished the heavy end of the rope over the side of the ship. It was tied to a small book with a ratty fabric cover. “Wow,” Rishi murmured. “It’s like they knew you’d be the one to find it.”
Dimple chuckled at his ability to see omens and prophecies everywhere. “Sure.”
“Think about it.” He was still staring at the old book in wonder. There was no title or author. “You’re a total bibliophile. I mean, I took you to a book bar on our first date, and giving you that old edition of A Wrinkle in Time was, like, what probably sealed the deal, according to you.”
Dimple smiled fondly at Rishi’s absolute certainty that this—her picking up this book in this escape room in Atherton, California—was totally meant to be. It was one of the things she loved most about him. His belief in the mysteries of the universe and the magic of kismet rounded out her absolute worship of logic and science perfectly. “That’s why I’m marrying you, you know,” she said. “So you can continue to enthrall me with the enchantments I miss on a daily basis.”
Rishi flashed the engagement ring she’d given him. She had one on her finger too; they’d each gotten one because Dimple thought it ridiculous that only women needed to wear an engagement ring to show prospective suitors she was “taken.” “That’s the only reason? Because I remember something about ‘I can’t live without you’ being part of it.”