“Good lord! You don’t think it’s myself I’m concerned about! It’s Inga... married and...” Ericsson stopped abruptly. Then he smiled and rose. “Of course you’re right. I’ll have the launch waiting for you at Montauk Point. You don’t know how this relieves me.”
“But won’t your niece suspect something by the mere fact of Ellery’s being invited down?” asked Nikki. “Unless, Ellery, you cook up one of your stories.”
“How’s this?” beamed Ellery. “I met Mr. Ericsson at the Explorers’ Club recently, heard the family tale about Captain Kidd’s treasure, I couldn’t resist it, and I’m coming down to try to solve a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mystery. Simple?”
“Simply perfect,” exclaimed Ericsson. “Inga’s had them half-believing this yarn ever since the Bahamas, and if I talk it up for the rest of the week you’ll have them under your feet—they’ll follow you around like tourists. See you both Saturday.”
“It’s simple, all right,” said Nikki when the explorer had gone. “The simple truth! Shall I pack your extra cutlass, my bucko—and a couple of all-day suckers?”
Eric Ericsson and his niece met them at Montauk Point Saturday morning and hurtled them over blue water in a noisy launch. It was hard to think of wickedness. Inga was a big solid blonde girl with the uncomplicated loveliness of the North, friendly and charming and—Nikki thought—happy as a newlywed could be. The day was stainless, the sun brilliant, the horizon picketed with racing sails; a salt breeze blew the girls’ hair about, and the world looked a jolly place. Even Ericsson was composed, as if he had slept unexpectedly well or the presence of serene, golden-legged Inga gave him the strength to dissemble his fears.
“I think it’s so thrilling,” Inga cried over the roar of the launch. “And Tony and the Colonel have talked of nothing else since Uncle Eric told us why you were coming down, Mr. Queen. Do you really feel there’s hope?”
“I try to,” Ellery shouted. “By the way, I’m disappointed. I thought your husband and father-in-law might be with you in the launch.”
“Oh, that’s Uncle Eric’s fault,” the girl said, and the explorer smiled. “He kidnaped me before I could scream for help.”
“Guilty.” Ericsson’s grip on the wheel gave the lie to his smile. “I don’t see much of you now that you’re Mrs. Hobbes-Watkins.”
“Darling, I’m glad you kidnaped me. I really am.”
“Even though Mr. Hobbes-Watkins is probably fit to be tied?”
Inga looked happy.
But Nikki, the sun notwithstanding, felt a chill. Ericsson had been afraid to leave Inga alone on the island with her husband and father-in-law.
Ellery kept chattering to Inga about the paragon she had married, while Ericsson stood quietly over the wheel. Nikki could have told the great man that he was wasting his celebrated bream: the girl was in the first heaven of wedded bliss, where the beloved hangs in space clothed in perfect light and there is no past.
From the horizon rose a seaweed-hung otter with a fish in its mouth, which changed rapidly into a long low-lying island thinly wooded and running down to a white beach and a pretty cove. As the launch drew near, they made out a shed, a boathouse, and a jetty. A lank, disjointed something stuck up from the jetty like a piece of driftwood. It turned surprisingly into a one-legged old man. His left leg was gone at the knee; the trouser of his bleached, fishy jeans was pinned back over the stump; and to the stump there was strapped a crude, massive pegleg. With a skin resembling the shed’s corrugated roof, a nose that was a twist of bone, crafty and secretive eyes, and a greasy bandana tied behind his ears against the sun, the peglegged old man looked remarkably like a pirate; and Nikki said so.
“That’s why we call him Long John,” Inga said as her uncle maneuvered the launch toward the jetty. “At least Tony and I do. Uncle Eric calls him Fleugelheimer, or something as ridiculous, though I suppose it’s his name. He’s not very bright, and he has no manners at all. Hi, Long John!” she called. “Catch the line.”
The old man hopped sidewise with great agility and caught the line, poorly tossed, in his powerful right hand. Immediately he wheeled on Ericsson, his bony jaws grinding.
“Bloodsucker!” he yelled.
“Now, John,” said the explorer with a sigh.
“When ye givin’ me more money?”
“John, we have guests...”
“Or d’ye want me to quit? Ye want me to quit!”
“Make the line fast,” said Ericsson with a faint smile.
“I’m a poor man,” whined the old pirate, obeying. Suddenly he squinted sidewise at Ellery. “This the great detecative?”
“Yes, John.”
“Henh!” said Long John, and he spat into the water, grinning evilly. He seemed to have forgotten all about his grievance.
“He’s been on the island for years,” Ericsson explained as they went up a rough path in the woods. “My caretaker. Surly old devil—not all there. He’s a miser—hoards every penny I give him, and keeps dunning me for more with the regularity of a parrot. I ignore him and we get along fine.”
And there was the stone house at the hump of the island’s back. Clean wings stretched from a central building whose stones were grimy with weathered age. The old part of the house rose in a clapboard tower. The tower was square, with several small windows from which, Ellery thought, the whole island and a great spread of the sea must be visible. Undoubtedly the lookout tower of the original structure.
To one side of the house someone—Ericsson, or one of his more recent forebears—had built a rough but comfortable terrace. It was paved with oyster shells and there was a huge barbecue pit.
Two men—one portly and middleaged, the other slim and young—rose from deckchairs waving frosty glasses.
And the instant Ellery laid eyes on the Hobbes-Watkinses he knew Eric Ericsson had been right.
It was hard to say why. They were almost professionally British, especially Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, but that did not account for it; and for the rest of the day Ellery devoted himself to this riddle. He did not solve it.
On the surface the men were plausible. Inga’s husband was handsome in a thin, underdone way; he slouched and lolled as if he were hopelessly tired; speech seemed forced out of him; and he drank a good deal. This was the very picture of the young postwar European, spoiled, sick, and disenchanted. Still... The elder Hobbes-Watkins was Colonel Blimp to the life, fussing and blustery and full of oldfashioned prejudices. A warmed-over mutton roast, as Nikki promptly dubbed him in a mumble. But there was something in the Colonel’s bloated eye and occasionally in his blasting tone that had a lean and cynical energy in it, not at all in character.
During the afternoon Ellery, playing his role of historical detective, set off on a survey of the island. Inga, Tony, and the Colonel insisted on accompanying him.
Long John was fishing from a dory off the cove. When he spied them, he deliberately turned his back.
Ellery began to saunter along the beach, the others trotting eagerly behind.
“Needn’t be bashful,” he called, mindful of Inga between the two ogres at his back. “I’m merely casing the joint. Come up here, Inga.”
“Casing the joint,” wheezed Colonel Hobbes-Watkins. “Very good, haha! But I say, won’t we trample the clues?”
“Not much danger of that, Colonel,” said Ellery cheerfully, “after two and a half centuries. Inga, do join me.”
“Glad I ambled along,” said Tony Hobbes-Watkins in a languid voice. It sounded queerly dutiful for a groom. Ellery was conscious of the man’s eyes; they kept a staring watch.
They went around the island in an hour. It was long and narrow and swelled to a ridge in the middle. The vegetation was scrubby and poor. There was no close anchorage except off the cove. None of the trees, which might have been landmarks, looked old; the island was exposed to the sea, and centuries of winter gales had kept it pruned.