“Glad you didn’t waste any time getting here, Mr. Ericsson,” said Ellery enthusiastically. “The sooner we get going on it—”
“You know why I’m here?” The explorer frowned.
“It doesn’t take a math shark to put a couple of twos together.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Oh, come, Mr. Ericsson,” chortled Ellery. “If it’s Nikki you’re worried about, I assure you that not only is she the custodian of all my secrets, she also has no interest whatsoever in buried treasure.”
“Buried treasure?” Ericsson waved a charred hand impatiently. “That’s not what I wanted to see you about.”
“It’s... not?”
“I’ve never put any stock in that yarn, Mr. Queen. In fact, the whole picture of Kidd as a pirate in my opinion is a myth and a historical libel. Kidd was the goat of a political intrigue, I’m convinced, not a pirate at all. Dalton’s book presented some pretty conclusive evidence. If it’s real pirates you’re after, look up Bartholomew Roberts. Roberts took over four hundred ships during his career.”
“Then the story of Kidd’s seizure of Ericsson’s Island—?”
“He may have visited the island around 1698, but if it was to bury anything I’ve never seen the slightest evidence of it. Mr. Queen, I’d like to tell you why I came.”
“Yes,” sighed Ellery, and Nikki felt almost sorry for him.
Ericsson’s problem involved romance, it appeared, but not the kind that glittered under pirate moons. His only sister, a widow, had died shortly after Ericsson’s retirement, leaving a daughter. The explorer’s relationship with his sister had been distant, and he had last seen her child, Inga, as a leggy creature of twelve with a purple pimple on her nose. But at the sister’s funeral he found himself embraced as “Uncle Eric” by a golden Norse goddess of nineteen. His niece was alone in the world and she had clung to him. Ericsson, a bachelor, found the girl filling a need he had never dreamed existed. Inga left college and came to live with him as his ward, the consolation of his empty retirement, and the sole heir of his modest fortune.
At first they were inseparable—in Ericsson’s New York household, at the stone house on the island during long weekends. But Inga began to glow, and the moths came. They were young moths and they rather interfered. So Ericsson—selfishly, he admitted—had his yacht refurbished and sailed Inga away on a cruise of the Caribbean.
“Biggest mistake of my life,” the explorer shrugged. “We stopped over in the Bahamas, and there Inga met a young Britisher, Anthony Hobbes-Watkins, who was living a gentlemanly beachcomber sort of existence out on Lyford Cay, at the other end of New Providence Island. It was Inga’s first serious love affair. I should have taken her away immediately. When I woke up, it was too late.”
“Elopement?” asked Nikki hopefully.
“No, no, Miss Porter, it was a cathedral wedding. I couldn’t stand in Inga’s way. And I really had nothing definite to go on.”
Ellery said: “There’s something fishy about Hobbes-Watkins?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Queen.” Ericsson’s heavy, burned-out face remained expressionless, but not his eyes. “That’s what I want you to find out.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Only what he’s told me and a few things I’ve picked up. Captaincy in the RAF during the war, and not much of anything since—I don’t hold that against him, it’s a rocky world. All the British upper class attainments—shoots well, plays an earnest game of polo, grouses about the fading star of empire; that sort of thing. Knew all the right people in Nassau; but he hadn’t been there long.
“His father, a Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, came on from somewhere—England, he said—for the wedding,” continued the explorer, and he shrugged again. “A stout, red, loud, horsy specimen, nearly a caricature of his type. They seem to have plenty of money, so it can’t be that. But there is... something, a mystery, a vagueness about them that keeps disturbing me. They’re like figures on a movie screen—you see them move, you hear them talk, but they never seem flesh and blood. Two-dimensional... I’m not saying this well,” said Ericsson, flushing. “When a man’s tramped mountains and deserts and jungles all his life, as I have, he develops an extra sense.” He looked up. “I don’t trust them.”
“I suppose,” said Nikki, “your niece does.”
“Well, Inga’s young and unsophisticated, and she’s very much in love. That’s what makes it so awkward. But she’s become important to me, and for her sake I can’t let this go on unless I’m satisfied she hasn’t made some awful mistake.”
“Have you noticed anything different since the wedding, Mr. Ericsson?” asked Ellery. “A change in their attitude?”
The explorer scraped the bark of his neck with a limp handkerchief. But he said defiantly, “They whisper together.”
Ellery raised his brows.
But Ericsson went on doggedly. “Right after the wedding Colonel Hobbes-Watkins left for the States. On business, he said. I gave the yacht to Inga and Tony for a three-week honeymoon. On their way back they picked me up in Nassau and we sailed up to New York, meeting Tony’s father here... On three different occasions I’ve come on the Hobbes-Watkinses having whispered conversations which break off like a shot. I don’t like it, Mr. Queen. I don’t like it to such an extent,” said Ericsson quietly, “that I’ve deliberately kept us all in the city instead of doing the sensible thing in this heat and living down at the island. My island is pretty isolated, and it would make the ideal setting for a... Instead of which, Tony and Inga have my apartment, I’m stopping at one of my clubs, and the Colonel is sweating it out politely in a midtown hotel—business, unspecified, still keeping him in the States. But I can’t stall any longer. Inga’s been after me now for weeks to shove off for the Point, and she’s beginning to look at me queerly. I’ve had to promise we’d all go down this weekend for the rest of the summer.”
“It would make the ideal setting,” said Ellery, “for a what?”
“You’ll think I’m cracked.”
“For a what, Mr. Ericsson?”
“All right!” The explorer gripped the arms of his chair. “For a murder,” he muttered.
Nikki stared. “Oh, I’m sure—” she began.
But Ellery’s foot shifted and somehow crushed Nikki’s little toe. “Murder of whom, Mr. Ericsson?”
“Inga! Me! Both of us—I don’t know!” He controlled himself with an effort. “Maybe I’m hallucinated. But I tell you those two are scoundrels and my island would be a perfect place for whatever they’re up to. What I’d like you to do, Mr. Queen, is come down this weekend for an indefinite stay. Will you?”
Ellery glanced at his secretary; Nikki was often his umpire when he was playing the game of working. But she was regarding him with the grim smile of a spectator.
“Come down, too, Miss Porter,” said the explorer, misinterpreting the glance. “Inga will love having you. Besides, your coming will make it appear purely social. I don’t want Inga having the least suspicion that... Don’t bother about a wardrobe; we lead the most primitive life on the island. And there’s plenty of room; the house has tripled its original size. About the fee, Mr. Queen—”
“We’ll discuss fees,” murmured Ellery, “when there’s something to charge a fee for. We’ll be there, Mr. Ericsson. I can’t leave, however, before Saturday morning. When are you planning to go down?”
“Friday.” The explorer looked worried.
“I don’t imagine they’d try anything the very first night,” said Ellery soothingly. “And you’re not exactly a helpless old gaffer.”