We picked up a notebook at Annie's Blue Ribbon General Store in Brooklyn. On the inside cover it said “Will S.” as the owner. Each page contained a rhyming toast to someone, and the last word was precisely cut out in regular rectangles. Lower on each page was a jagged cutout. In order, there were 4 toasts to Peter, 4 toasts to Alan, 4 toasts to Sophia.
The notebooks and missing words lined up with the grids of the New York Times crossword of December 4th, 5th and 6th. (Which were authored by Peter Gordon, Alan Arbesfeld, and Sophia Maymudes.) When aligned properly, each page revealed, in the jagged hole, a single clue. Finding the extraction from that point proved a lot trickier…
The answer is on our What We Know page.