Dave

Ball Puzzle Box ((wooden thing) significant object Studio 360)

Jack liked detail. The work bench he labored on was equidistant from all four corners of his shed and parallel to the roadway that fronted his property on Route 79 in Upstate New York. That wasn’t the sort of detail that anyone would notice, but Jack did and he liked it.
###
Jack made his living selling handicraft wooden objects. For four months over the summer, he loaded up his old station wagon with boxes of wooden puzzles and train sets and various other bric-à-brac, and set off after the caravan of DIY affineurs and cheese mongers, bees’ wax soap makers, pagan jewelers and herbalists who rode the circuit of swap meets and farmer’s markets from the Finger Lakes up into New England and down into the Shenandoah mountains. It was a nomad’s existence that made it very easy to go unnoticed.
###
Jack spent most days on the circuit sitting in a corner behind his own unkempt moustache-less beard, tapping away at a piece of hardwood with a block and chisel until someone stopped by his table. Then he’d perform a flourish of movement, hold the piece of cast off wood under a glass lens attached to a retractable arm and stare at it. Like a wizened old clock maker checking alignment down to the micrometer, Jack curled his body up around the glass and stared at the wood grain through the lens for a count of twenty Mississippi.
###
During that uncomfortable pause, Jack didn’t say a word. He sat completely still and waited until the customer grabbed up two or three baubles, then he put down the chisel and block, made the proper change and sent them on their way. Five or six exchanges like that a day was all Jack needed to survive financially, and it freed him up to focus on what he considered his real work.
###
Jack loved to make puzzle boxes most of all. He took his time with those and enjoyed the ingenuity of their design. His favorites were the hinged ball puzzle boxes. From the outside, they appeared devilishly simple, but Jack knew the secret. Each roughhewn wooden box was a marvel, dependent on a delicate sequence of movements to engage the mechanism that unlocked each level and uncovered a hidden treasure pocket at the puzzle’s final solution.
###
These, his favorite, he never sold. Instead he used them to wager with children between the ages of eight and twelve. The wager was simple, the kids were given five turns at the device to solve the puzzle, if they did it they won the puzzle and the treasure, but if they didn’t Jack would solve the puzzle for them and the children would have to forfeit a treasure to fill the next one. As the reports show, Jack took pride in filling each secret alcove with a prize worthy of a child’s most earnest efforts and no child was ever forced to give more than was wagered.
###
Now these wagers didn’t happen every time he set up his little workshop space in a farmer’s market, and it happened rarely enough that Jack was able to spend fifteen years traveling the country before anyone noticed. But when it did happen, when all the moving parts, the unaccountable variables met in congruency and some child took his wager, Jack would disappear for a few weeks with his winnings. Then he would suddenly show back up, without a word and continue tapping away in his corner until the next one.
###
When the authorities finally caught up with him, Jack had almost a hundred of these ball puzzle boxes each meticulously documented in his ledgers. In the time since the first gruesome discovery, investigators have been able to account for all of Jack’s treasures, save one--an innocuously marked Rs 5/ entered into one of Jack’s ledgers. As of this posting, investigators have been unable to confirm either the whereabouts of the missing puzzle box or the contents therein, but continue to hold out hope for its recovery and the closure it will bring to a grieving family.