The Perfume Counter
- A case in 10 chapters
- Free to play
- Large print
- Read in order
How the case begins
Hartley's has stood on the square for sixty years, brass doors and wood floors and a pneumatic tube system the children still beg to watch. It is the kind of store where the owner walks the aisles at nine sharp and the staff pretend not to time him. In June, the books develop a leak: the perfume counter comes up short, forty-one dollars, always forty-one, always on a Thursday. Not a round number. Not a payday. Forty-one dollars, regular as a train. Frank Odell, the store detective, is sixty-four years old and retiring at summer's end after three decades of shoplifters, short-change artists and one genuine jewel thief he still dines out on. This is his last case, and it is a strange one to go out on: the register tapes balance, the counter girls count clean, the new floorwalker watches everybody watching him, and a Thursday trap set with marked bills catches, spectacularly, nothing at all. The money is not being taken, and it is missing anyway. Somewhere in Hartley's, arithmetic itself has gone quietly wrong, and one person in the building already knows where.
Each chapter is a short scene and a puzzle, and every puzzle leaves you one clue. Keep all nine. The finale needs them. Your clues keep themselves on this device.
- 1Forty-One Dollars
- 2Clockwork
- 3The Counter Itself
- 4The Paper Archive
- 5Mrs. Bloom's Shoebox
- 6The Standing Order
- 7The Spring Sale
- 8Ten-Point Type
- 9The Last Season
- 10Trust Arithmeticbring your clues
The people of the case
- Mr. Hartley. The owner, third generation. Walks the aisles at nine sharp, knows every clerk's name, and has been oddly serene about losing forty-one dollars a week.
- Frank Odell. Store detective, thirty years. Retiring at summer's end. Wants one clean last case and is getting the strangest one of his life.
- Peggy Shaw. The perfume counter's senior girl, quick and careful. Counts her drawer twice and has started counting it a third time, nerves showing.
- Miles Vance. The new floorwalker, three months in, broke and proud. Aware that every shortage in a store lands first on the newest man.
- Mrs. Bloom. Secretary of the Elks Lodge auxiliary, in every Thursday like clockwork for the lodge's standing order. Pays cash, takes her receipt, argues about nothing.
- Artie Klein. The bookkeeper, precise as a metronome. Trusts the ledgers the way other men trust scripture, which is about to become a problem.
Prefer pen and paper?
The whole case as one large-print booklet: every chapter and its puzzle, a clue ledger to fill in, and the ending sealed on the last page.