The Missing Square

Clues for the Patient Solver

1. Row one, when complete, names the figure who carries the first act — she for whom the upper balcony came.
   I picked this for row one because I wanted a word a solver might smile at over breakfast — and because I needed a particular consonant in column three to keep the descending diagonal honest. The Hannah Theatre matinee crowd will catch it first, I think. — V.
2. Row three names the small folded thing one finds tucked beneath the milk bottle on a Tuesday morning — four lines, the back of a calendar page, a stub of a #2 pencil.
   An easy row, this one. Three of its letters were fixed by the work I'd already done on the diagonals, and the fourth chose itself. A row a constructor builds in fifteen minutes because the harder work elsewhere is finished. — V.
3. Row four names what the lake does, again, and again, and again, against the breakwall at Edgewater Park on a winter morning.
   I almost made this row spell SHORE instead, but SHORE is five letters and I do not cheat the grid. I went down to the lake on Saturday last to look at the breakwall and decided the word for what it does was the better word anyway — the verb, not the noun. — V.
4. The diagonal that descends from the upper-left corner to the lower-right corner, when complete, spells a four-letter word meaning to lavish patient unhurried attention upon a person — the verb a grandmother does to a grandchild over an afternoon.
   This diagonal cost me two evenings of redrawing — the affection-word had to run through corners I needed pinned without betraying the buried letter to a quick eye. South-facing window. Tea cools — a word lies buried. Saturday strangers. That is the whole construction I built the puzzle around. — V.
5. The diagonal that ascends from the lower-left corner to the upper-right corner, when complete, spells a four-letter word meaning to declare openly — as one does standing before witnesses on a Saturday afternoon at City Hall.
   The ascending diagonal is the one that closes the deduction. Once a solver has rows one, three, and four — and the descending diagonal — the missing letter belongs to a four-letter declaration verb with three of its four letters already showing on the grid. There is precisely one such verb in English. I checked the unabridged at the Lakewood library on Monday afternoon to be sure. — V.
6. Row two names the quiet thing the figure in row one does for her stagehand, that the slip in row three conveys to its recipient, and that the lake in row four rehearses against the breakwall every morning of the world.
   I built the whole grid backwards from row two — chose the four letters first and then constructed six clues that converge on the missing one without naming it outright. A working constructor does not tell the solver the answer. She builds a structure in which the answer cannot be anything else, and trusts the solver to walk into it on her own time, with the toast still in the toaster. — V.

1. The word in the centre of this puzzle is also the word I have been trying to write for three years and have never quite finished writing — I send it to you instead because seventy-three thousand of you reading it on Saturday morning is closer to what I meant than any single letter I might have mailed.