She breezed into my office one cold September morning. I�d been enjoying a hot cup of Starbuck�s finest and surfing the web for local news. The famous lexical semanticist Professor Edgar Nettleston had been found dead, a gunshot wound to the head. The police verdict was suicide. She held out an elegant hand as she floated towards me and I glimpsed a wedding band with a stone the size of a peanut M&M. �I�m Edith Nettleston.� �Sorry about the old man.� �I�m not. He loved me, but he loved words more. I�ll be brief. My husband was working on a paper that will rock the very foundation of lexical semantics. It�s worth a fortune in lecture tours, but nobody can find it. I believe his suicide note is a clue to its whereabouts.� She removed a scrap of paper from her blouse. �edith. i�m not going to whine, i�ve had a good life. i�ve found wealth and happiness as a teacher, a seller of knowledge. but i find myself depressed beyond hope ... and so I�m choosing the hour and manner of my own demise. i have treated you badly. i demanded you dyed your brown curls blonde. i thought i could buy you. i called you a witch. i�d complain: where�s the woman i married? if i wanted change, i should have used a carrot rather than a stick. you probably wanted to wring my neck. forgive me. farewell.� �It�s all written in lower case. My husband was a stickler for correct grammar. I refuse to believe it doesn�t mean something.� �Mrs. Nettleston, I think I can help you. There�s a couple of odd things about this letter. Firstly, as you say, it�s written entirely in lower case. Mr. Nettleston was a world-renowned lexical semanticist, not a teenager texting his BFFs.� �Secondly, it has a more than usual number of homophones, words where there is another word with the same sound but different spelling and meaning. When dealing with a lexical semanticist, that�s surely no accident.� �If we read those homophones in order, we have: whine, seller, hour, manner. And translating to their homophones: Wine cellar our manor.� Several hours later, we arrived at the Nettlestons' country house and immediately headed for the basement. A flip of a light switch revealed tunnels filled with rows of dark bottles. �Where is it? It would take years to search this place.� �Not so fast, Mrs. Nettleston. First I have to ask you something: your wedding ring diamond, how large is it? �It�s eight carats. Edgar wouldn�t stop talking about it.� �That�s what I feared.� I pulled out my trusty revolver. �How you must have hated him and his lexical semantics! You figured you�d kill him and keep the money from the paper yourself. You forced him to write that suicide note, thinking you knew where it was. But he was suspicious and he�d already hidden it. And he had another surprise for you: the rest of the note, it doesn�t reveal where the paper is, it reveals his killer. The final homophones: dyed buy won witch where�s ate carrot wring. That is: died by one which wears eight carat ring.� As the cops left with Mrs. Nettleston I took a quick trip round the maze of tunnels. It didn�t take me long to find it. Most of the wine lay unpacked on racks but in one corner two cases sat stacked, one on top of each other. Carefully, I opened the lower one.