“I don’t suppose,” Ellery asked Inga as they climbed the path back to the house in the dusk, “the story has ever had any documentation? Chart, map—anything like that?”
“Nothing that still exists. But it’s said that there was once a letter or diary page or something left by the 1698 Ericsson—it’s been lost, if it ever existed at all—telling about the clue in Captain Kidd’s room, and of course that’s been the big mystery ever since.”
“Clue? Kidd’s room?” exclaimed Ellery. “No one’s mentioned that!”
“Didn’t Eric tell you?” murmured the younger Englishman. “Fantastic fellow, Eric. No imagination.”
“I wondered why you hadn’t steamed up there immejiately,” panted the Colonel. “Fancy your uncle’s not telling Mr. Queen the most exciting part of it, Inga! It’s the chamber the pirate watched the sea from when he took the island over—didn’t you say, my dear?”
“The tower room,” said Inga, pointing through the dusk. “That was in the lost letter, and the reference to the clue Kidd left there.”
“Clue left in the tower room?” Ellery squinted through the twilight hungrily. “And that’s the original room up there, Inga?”
“Yes.”
“What was the clue?”
But the terrace and Long John at the barbecue pit intervened; and since the one-legged caretaker was brandishing a veritable trident as he glowered at the latecomers, Ellery was not answered.
They had dinner. A great moon rose, and the air turned chilly. Ellery wandered to the edge of the terrace with his plate, and a moment later Eric Ericsson joined him.
“Well?” the explorer asked.
“Nothing tangible, Mr. Ericsson. But I agree—there’s something in the wind.”
“What about tonight? I’ve put you next to the Colonel’s room, and I have an automatic, but Inga... alone with...”
“I’ve already fixed that. By a happy coincidence Nikki is going to be so nervous tonight in this primeval setting that she’ll just have to sleep with somebody. Since she’s had a strict upbringing, that means with Inga, the only other female here. A dirty trick to play on a new husband,” said Ellery dryly, “but Tony can console himself with the prospect of a good night’s sleep in the room next to mine.” Ericsson pressed Ellery’s arm rather pathetically. “For the rest of the evening, Mr. Ericsson,” murmured Ellery, “please follow my lead. I’m going to be treasure-hunting like mad.”
“Ha. Caught you whispering,” said a voice at Ellery’s elbow; it was young Hobbes-Watkins with a glass in his hand. “Pumping Eric about that clue, eh, Queen?”
“We were just getting round to it,” said Ellery. “Girls couldn’t take it, I see.” Inga and Nikki were gone.
“Driven to cover by the mosquitoes and gnats,” boomed the Colonel, slapping himself. “Lovely children, but females, what? Ah, there, you dog, don’t shake your head at your old bachelor father! The moon’s bloody, and it’s the hour for high adventure, didn’t some chap say? About that clue, Mr. Queen...”
“Yes, you never said a word to me about Captain Kidd’s room, Mr. Ericsson,” said Ellery reproachfully. “What’s all this about a clue he’s supposed to have left up there?”
“It’s characteristically cryptic,” said the explorer, pouring coffee. “The legend says that just before Kidd was to be hanged in London he sent a letter to my ancestor admitting that he’d buried a treasure on Ericsson’s Island in ’98, and saying that ‘to find it you must look through the eye of the needle.’”
“Eye of the needle,” said Ellery. “Eye of which needle?”
“Ah!” said Colonel Hobbes-Watkins ominously. “There’s the rub, as the Bard says. No one knows—eh, Ericsson?”
“I’m afraid not, Colonel. And no one ever will, because it’s all moonshine.”
“Don’t see why you say that, Eric, at all,” said Tony, almost energetically. “Could have been a needle!”
“Even if there had been,” Ericsson smiled in his moonshine, “two hundred and fifty years make a large haystack.”
“One moment!” said Ellery. “Look through the eye of the needle in the tower room, Mr. Ericsson?”
“That’s how it goes.”
“What’s in that room?”
“Nothing at all. Just four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. I assure you, Mr. Queen, everything’s been tried—unsuccessfully—from hunting for a peculiar rock formation to conjuring up a tree fork viewed from a certain angle from the windows.”
Ellery stared up at the tower. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “How do I get up there?”
“There’s the sleuth for you!” cried Colonel Hobbes-Watkins, hurling himself from his chair. “Been itching to have a go at that ruddy room myself!”
“But Eric’s been so discouraging,” murmured his son.
Nikki and Inga had their heads together before the fireplace, where Long John was laying a fire. Inga fell behind to say something to her young husband, who glanced quickly at Nikki and then shrugged.
The explorer led the way up a tiny narrow coiling staircase, holding a kerosene lamp high. “The tower’s never been electrified,” he called down, his deep voice reverberating. “Better use those flashlights or you’ll break your necks on these stairs.”
“Eeee,” said Nikki convincingly; but it was only a dried-up wasps’ nest. The stairs sagged perilously at every step.
The climb ended in a little landing and a heavy door of blackened oak and handforged iron. Ericsson set his big shoulder to the door. It gave angrily. The lamp bobbed off.
“A couple of you had better stay on the landing. This floor may not hold up under so much weight. Come in, Mr. Queen.”
It was scarcely more than a large closet with miniature square windows. A floor of dirt-glazed random boards, undulant like the sea; a raftered ceiling only a few inches above the men’s heads; and four papered walls. And that was all, except for dust and cobwebs. The windows, of imperfectly blown glass, were closed.
“Open them, Ellery,” choked Nikki from the doorway. “You can’t breathe up here.”
“You can’t open them,” said Inga. “They’ve been stuck fast for six generations.”
Ellery stood in the middle of the room looking about.
“Aren’t you going to get down on all fours, Mr. Queen?” bellowed the Colonel from the landing. “Like the fellow from Baker Street?”
“I find these walls much more interesting.”
But the only thing Nikki could see on the walls was the wallpaper. The paper showed an imitation colored marble design on a grainy background—ugly as sin, Nikki thought, and even uglier for being faded and mildewed in great patches.
Ellery was at one of the walls now, actually caressing it, holding the lamp close to the marbled paper. Finally he began at a corner and went over the paper inch by inch, from ceiling to floor. At one point he examined something for a long time. Then he resumed his deliberate inspection, and he neither spoke nor looked around until he had completed his tour of the room.
“This wallpaper,” he said. “Do you know, Mr. Ericsson, what you have here?”
“Dash it all, sir,” interrupted the Colonel explosively, “are you treasure-hunting, or what?”
“The wallpaper?” Ericsson frowned. “All I know about it is that it’s very old.”
“To be exact, late seventeenth century,” said Ellery. “This is genuine flock paper, made by the famous Dunbar of Aldermanbury. It’s probably quite valuable.”
“There’s a treasure for you,” wailed Inga.
“If so,” shrugged her uncle, “it’s the first I’ve run across on the island.”