Case 029: Love Hurts

Celest St. Claire's Notes

Hey,

As I mentioned in my note, I’m sure that my conclusions will match Sullivan’s. That being the case, if you’ve already asked him about these clues, you probably won’t learn anything new here.

If you do choose to use this site, you’ll still need to email Sullivan about the next Location where John’s ex-girlfriend intends to strike. You’ll also need to email him the case’s Solution once you’ve figured out who is trying to kill John. 

If you haven’t emailed Sullivan yet, you can visit SleuthKings.com/Case-029 to send him your first email. When you want to address either of the issues above, just include the appropriate underlined word from above in the body of your email.

If you want to see my thoughts on any of the clues in your case file, just click the corresponding button below.

So far, what I’ve figured out is that the pattern we need to use has split all of the words beside each other into pairs. For example, “ARAT THTIST” is a pair, as is “SATS HEARYS,” etc. What’s important to remember is that letters will only swap between words that are paired together.

I got it! The first word in every pair is made up of its first two letters, followed by the last two letters of the second word. The rest of the letters from the first word are then just tacked onto the end of the second word.

It might be easier if I give you an example. The first pair of words is “ARAT THTIST,” right? If you take the first two letters, “AR,” and look at the letters in the second word, you should be able to find a string of letters that completes a word. In this case, it’s “artist.” Then, when you move the “AT,” which were at the end of “ARAT” to after the “TH” from the second word, you get the words “Artist that.”

When you use the pattern to untangle the rest of the paired words, the message says:

“I’m an artist that says hearts mean love, Cupid’s arrows reveal truth, and roses are romantic.”

This is great! Not only does this tell us that the person after John is an artist, it also talks about the sketches on the drink list marked as Clue 2. This message has to be telling us what each of the sketches stand for! Now that we know that, we should be able to start making some progress on that message.

You may have already noticed this, but the number of similar objects (such as roses or hearts) in each drawing is different. The number of similar objects in each picture has to be pointing us toward a letter or something in whatever word the applicable picture stands for.

It looks like I was right – the number of similar objects in each picture points to a specific letter in the word the picture represents.

Clue 1 said that hearts stand for love, cupid’s arrows stand for truth, and roses stand for romantic, right? That means we need to use each picture to figure out which word we need to look at and which letter in that word to focus on.

For instance, the first picture – which has five arrows – is telling us to look at the 5th letter in “truth,” which is “H.” The next picture, which consists of four roses, wants us to look at the 4th letter in “romantic,” which is “A.”

When you do that for each drawing, you get “hair color.”

Given the rest of the message, it sounds like whoever is after John shares a similar trait to most of his other girlfriends – probably their hair color. When you look at John’s long, kind of creepy list of ex-girlfriends, the majority of the women he’s dated are blonde, which means whoever is after him is probably blonde, too.

I don’t know how this helps us yet, but you might want to write down what we’ve learned so far just in case it’s important later.

There’s no doubt that Sullivan’s Clue Analysis was right – the magnet is definitely involved with this message. I’m pretty sure, however, that the only thing we need to pay attention to is what number is beside each symbol on it.

I think the symbols in the diary stand for whatever number they’re beside on the magnet. If I’m right about that, that means the symbols are trying to point us to something in the diary page’s line that they’re beside.

Good news! It looks like I was right – the symbols really do just stand for the number that they’re beside on the magnet.

If you replace each symbol with its applicable number in the diary, things start to get much easier to look at. Once you’ve done that, the trick is to look at the words indicated by the numbers.

For example, the first line has a “1” and “6” beside it and says, “We are over. My love met its end today.” When you only look at the 1st and 6th words, you get “We met.”

When you do that for each line with a symbol beside it, the message says:

“We met the way you meet most of your dates.”

So, it sounds like this person has something else in common with John’s other ex-girlfriends. How does he meet so many women, anyway?

Wow. According to his creepy list, most people he dates start off as his clients. Talk about unprofessional! Who does this guy think he is – Bogart? Give me a break!

Sorry – tangent. I guess, aside from John’s lack of professionalism, the main takeaway here is that the person we’re looking for was one of John’s clients. That doesn’t really narrow things down much, but I’d recommend writing it down for now anyway. It might help us out a little later.

I’m pretty sure writing the alphabet out should make cracking this a whole lot easier. Once you’ve written it out, I think the trick will be to look at the letters that match up in each line.

For instance, the first letter of line “1” is “R,” and the first letter of line “5” is “V.” Alphabetically, that should read “R S T U V.”

I haven’t quite figured out where to go from there, but there are a few other things that should help give us some more direction. First, the numbers beside the lines are important. Instead of being labeled with a “2,” the second line has a “5” beside it. There’s no way this was on accident.

The other thing that might be helpful is that the murder mystery sheet talks about how the killer was “right in the middle of everything.” I don’t know how that applies here yet, but I have the feeling that it’s the key to figuring this out.

The killer being “right in the middle of everything” really is the key – it’s telling us exactly what we need to do.

When you find the positioning of the two equivalent letters from each line, what you have to do is figure out which letter is between them in the alphabet. Since “3” is exactly between “1” and “5” – the numbers beside each line – that means we’re looking for the third number in each sequence.

For instance, the first letter of line “1” is “R,” and the first letter of “5” is “V,” right? Like I mentioned earlier, that means the alphabetical sequence is “R S T U V.” When we look at the third letter in that segment of the alphabet – which is the one directly in the center – we get “T.”

If we repeat that process for each letter in the message, we get:

“This killer’s description fits me in the morning.”

That’s vague but, according to the murder mystery sheet, the killer was known as “Grumpy Gwen.” I’m pretty sure that means the person we’re looking for is grumpy in the morning.

As much as I want to say that’s not going to help us find this person, I think it actually will. I’ve been trying to figure out how everything we’ve learned up until this point is supposed to help us identify John’s ex-girlfriend, and I think I finally have.

Take a look at the bowling score sheet. There are four questions at the top that each require a 6-letter answer. Believe it or not, “grumpy” fits for the fourth question, which asks what her morning attitude is. I’m pretty sure the other traits we’ve learned from the other clues should help fill in the rest of the answers, too.

This should help you figure out where John’s ex-girlfriend is going to target next. As much as I enjoy helping you and Sully, though, I think I’ve got to call it quits with this one. The more I learn about John’s love life, the less I want to know! I’m sorry, but if I’m ever going to have to work with him again, I can’t know anything else about this!

Don’t worry – Sullivan will be able to help you finish things up. When you think you know where John’s ex-girlfriend plans to strike next, you can send him an email with the location. When you do, just make sure you include the word Location in the body of your email so that he knows what you’re talking about.

If you haven’t emailed Sullivan for this case yet, you can visit SleuthKings.com/case-029 to send him your first email.

Good luck!