Now you have some grip on the puzzle. You can begin to peel back the skin of the message, to see familiar shapes in the strangeness. Like with a crossword puzzle, there’s no direct, guaranteed route to solving a cryptogram. The solver has to make educated guesses, plug in letters and see if they lead to recognizable words, backtrack and erase if a guess is wrong, try a new letter. Elizebeth quickly got the hang of it, plowing through messages and counting
