Who wants to make up a story? It's the 1970s. Cold war. A man in L.A. with a boat often sailed out and

Question

met another boat. They party. They do business. He always takes his wife along. One time she sees something she isn't supposed to. They move to the East Coast. One day he encounters the same boat. He starts locking his wife in the house and keeping her drugged. What happened? What did she see? Who were the people on the other boat? Why did he keep his wife locked up? If he wanted her out of the way why didn't he just kill her?

No. A brain storm maybe. It's just fun to see what different people will make out of the same set of "facts."

There's no right answer. You can say anything you want.

Answer 1

Mike was a meter reader for the gas company. On his rounds he came to an old house at the end of a short street in a quiet neighborhood. Wiping cobwebs from the glass face to read the gauges, Mike smelled something. There was a gas leak somewhere. Not strong, but definite. Following his nose, he passed a basement window, but the gas smell was not there. Just as he began to follow the smell back towards the meter, Mike glanced down into the basement.

There was a woman on a bed. Dirty and disheveled, she was fitfully sleeping. Then Mike saw it—her hands were tied! He gasped out loud.

Her eyes opened. They swung to the window where the strange man peered in. She tried to yell at him, to warn him, but the only words that came out were “boat!” and “box” and “bomb”.

Mike was straining to hear more, but the woman wasn’t making much sense, “boat…box…bomb.” But what boat, what box, and what bomb?

Suddenly, everything for Mike went dark. Standing over the body of Mike was scowling man holding a bloody brick. Then he smiled. Rushing inside the house and down to the basement, the man unlocked the latch to the window. His wife on the bed squealed in fear, so he found an old rag and stuffed it in her mouth. Then opening the window, he reached up and dragged Mike the meter reader inside and latched the window, but pocketing the lock.

He next batted his wife in the head with the brick, knocking her out. Removing the ties and rag, he then undressed the woman. After undressing Mike, he laid the man atop his wife, the position would leave an obvious suggestion of what the couple were supposedly doing. The man went to a closet where he removed a very heavy box, placing it in the trunk of his car. Returning to the house, he jerked out a gas line from the wall and let it fall in the direction of the basement stairs. Just before he left, he adjusted the hot water heater, a gas heater, to high. Closing up the house, the man drove off, ostensibly on a sales trip, until he got the call from his KGB connection about where to deliver the box, if ever Moscow wanted it used.

The man was far away when he got the call that his house had burned down, that his wife and her lover were dead in the fire. It was a gas leak. The man thought to himself, “That is better than another kind of leak.”

Answer 2

Is this a brain teaser?