Nikki introduced him. “This is Mr. Karnak. He writes pieces for an interior decoration magazine, and would like to do a feature story on your fireplace, Cousin Yvette.”
“Someone told our editor about it,” he explained, “and mentioned the beautiful hand-carved stones. Do you mind if I photograph them?” As he spoke, his eyes were busy studying the carvings.
Ms. Lamar readily gave permission. Mr. Karnak snapped a number of pictures, moving closer and closer to the fireplace as he did so.
When he finished photographing, he took out a small penknife and tried to insert the blade around the edges of one of the carved stones.
Nancy, who had been watching all this with a slight frown, suddenly spoke up. “What are you doing, Mr. Karnak?”
“Just, er, seeing if any of the stones are loose. I thought Ms. Lamar might let me take them to my studio, so I could photograph them close-up in better lighting.”
“Wouldn’t it be more polite to ask her permission before you scrape away any of the mortar?” As the man’s gaze flickered uncertainly toward Ms. Lamar, Nancy went on, “In any case, I can tell you the stones aren’t loose and don’t come out. What magazine did you say you write for, Mr. Karnak?”
“I didn’t say.”
“Then would you care to tell us now? And also who mentioned the fireplace to your editor?”
The visitor’s expression hardened nastily. “You don’t seem to trust me, young lady. I’ve been a writer for years, and I certainly don’t have to show you my credentials!”
Turning to his hostess, he added huffily, “If I’m intruding where I’m not wanted, Ms. Lamar, please forgive me!”
Without another word, Karnak stalked out of the room and left the house. Nancy and Nikki watched from the window as he drove away.
Nancy had spoken on the spur of the moment, and the incident left her a bit upset. “Please forgive me if I spoke out of turn,” she said to her hostess. “Somehow I don’t trust that man.”
“Don’t worry, dear, I’m glad you questioned him as you did,” Ms. Lamar assured her. “In my opinion, you took exactly the right tone. One can’t be too careful of strangers these days!”
After an early lunch, Nancy excused herself for an hour or two. She explained that she had to shop for a gift for a friend’s three-year-old child. “I’d ask you to come with me, Nikki,” she added privately, “but after that queer visit from Mr. Karnak, I think it might be best not to leave your cousin here alone.”
Toward evening, it began to rain and the wind rose. After dinner, Cousin Yvette and the two girls gathered in front of the fireplace. Yvette described a thrilling rescue at sea which her uncle had once told her about.
“If only I knew the secret that worried him all those years.” She sighed. “Somehow I feel that’s the key to whatever is haunting this house.”
“Is his room still the way it was when he died?” Nancy asked.
“Yes, everything’s exactly as he left it. Would you like to see for yourself?”
“Very much. We might find a clue.”
The big, chintz-curtained bedroom clearly bespoke a seafaring man. In the closet hung a broad-brimmed sou’wester hat and oilskins; a brass-bound telescope stood on a worktable near the windows; and on the dresser lay several scrimshawed ivory knickknacks.
Gazing about the room, Nancy ran over Louis Lamar’s last words in her mind: “Seven stones tell the truth. But it is better that my secret remain bottled up forever!”
A bottle! Her eyes had just fallen on a hand-crafted toy vessel in a bottle. The vessel was a two-masted schooner. Nancy walked over to examine it more closely. Every bit of canvas, cordage, and other details were scaled to size, evidently by a loving hand. Then she noticed the schooner’s name, painted in tiny gold letters on the stern counter: La Grenouille.
Nancy gasped excitedly and looked at Ms. Lamar. “Do you speak French?”
“I used to, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of it. Why?”
“This schooner is named The Frog !”
Cousin Yvette’s eyes widened, and her faced drained of color. She clapped both hands to her cheeks and sank down heavily on the crazy-quilted bed. “Oh no!” she murmured in a shocked voice. “Now I remember!”
“Remember what?” asked Nikki.
“Why frogs seem so dreadful to me!” Yvette related that once when she was a little girl in the West Indies, she had gone looking for her uncle along the beach one evening. Spying a glimmer of light from a cave overlooking the sea, she peered inside. To her horror, she saw a group of men with heads like frogs, squatting around a fire!
“I was scared to death!” she went on. “Then one of the creatures jumped up and pulled off his frog’s head, and I saw that it was my Uncle Louis. He had just been wearing a mask. By then I was crying and screaming. He calmed me down and took me home and warned me I must never ever tell anyone what I’d seen!”
“How weird!” said Nikki with a shudder. “What do you suppose he and his friends were doing?”
Cousin Yvette shrugged weakly. “I can’t imagine. But I had nightmares for weeks afterward.”
Nancy’s brain was whirring quickly, seeking further clues. “Let’s go back to the living room,” she exclaimed. “I’ve just had an idea!”
Moments later, pointing to the carved stones of the fireplace, she went on, “You’ll notice the vessel in all these carvings is a two-masted schooner just like the one in the bottle.”
Nicole nodded. “You’re right—but so what?”
“The seven stones are arranged like an arrowhead pointing upward. I’m wondering what they point to.” Nancy ran her fingers upward from the topmost stone—then stopped just below the mantel. “Wait till I get a flashlight from my car!”
When she returned, Nancy aimed the flashlight so as to dispel the shadow cast by the mantelpiece. Etched on one of the stones with a line so fine it could barely be seen was the outline of a frog!
“And the stone’s loose!” Nancy added, pressing it with her fingers. There was a creaking noise. A bookcase on the right of the fireplace suddenly began to swing outward from the wall!
“Look!” Nikki gasped. “There’s a stone staircase inside!”
The steps went downward. Hearts beating nervously, the trio set out to explore where they led. Nancy took the lead, followed by Cousin Yvette, with Nikki bringing up the rear.
At the foot of the stairs was a gloomy passageway. Their steps echoed hollowly in the darkness as they walked along. Guided by the flashlight, they made their way to a stone-walled room.
At the far side of the room stood an old sea chest, with a cement frog perched on top of it. On the wall behind the chest hung a pike or boat hook crossed with an old-time sailor’s cutlass.
“Oh g-g-goodness!” said Cousin Yvette in a shaky voice. “Dare we open the chest?”
“Why not?” said Nancy boldly. “We came down here to solve the mystery, didn’t we?”
With Nikki’s help, she lifted off the heavy cement frog, which had seemed to be protecting the chest like a watchdog. Then they pried open the creaky lid.
The chest was heaped with jewelry! Rings, bracelets, gold watches, necklaces, pearl stickpins—a bewildering variety of valuables!
There was also a folded paper, which Nancy opened and read. Nikki, meanwhile, was fingering through the jewelry. “Where did all this come from?” she asked in an awestruck tone.
“Who cares?” said a harsh voice which Nancy and her two companions had heard earlier that day. “The important thing is you’ve found it!”
All three looked up and saw Mr. Karnak!
The craggy-faced impostor chuckled as he entered the room, clutching a weapon in one hand. Madame Zurga followed close behind. “How kind of you to unravel Louis Lamar’s secret for us, Miss Drew,” she taunted. “What a pity you won’t be able to enjoy the results of your clever detective work!”
“What makes you think I won’t?” Nancy said calmly.
“Because we
intend to shut all three of you up in this underground crypt,” rasped Karnak. He stooped down to gloat over the treasure, adding, “By the time you’re found, if ever, none of you will be alive to tell the police what happened!”
“I’m afraid you’re forgetting something,” said Nancy.
“Indeed? And what might that be, Miss Busybody?”
Nancy pointed to the passageway, and her voice sank to a fearful hiss: “The Curse of the Frog!”
An ominous croaking resounded through the stonewalled chamber. Glup! … Glup! … Glup!
Karnak stared in open-mouthed disbelief. Madame Zurga clutched her throat with a look of dumbfounded terror. A huge green frog was hopping toward them!
With their attention distracted, Nancy seized her chance. She snatched down the pike and cutlass from the wall! “Ned! Catch!” she cried, and tossed them through the air.
Her tall, husky boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, and Burt Eddleton, a fellow member of his college football team, had suddenly appeared out of the darkened passageway. Ned caught the pike, and his pal the cutlass.
Before Karnak could collect his wits and react, Ned swung the pike and knocked the crook’s weapon from his hand!
Half an hour later, Karnak and Madame Zurga were seated in the living room with their wrists tied, waiting sullenly for a police car to come and take them away. Ned and Burt, meanwhile, were using an electronic detector to “sweep” the house for eavesdropping bugs.
“I—I still don’t understand where that huge frog came from,” said Cousin Yvette in bewilderment.
Nancy’s eyes twinkled. “I bought it today at a toyshop. Ned stuffed a little tape recorder inside to play the croaking noises.”
The tape recorder, she explained, came from a clump of bushes under Yvette’s bedroom window. Inside it was a tape cassette on which amplified frog croaking had been recorded. And a slide projector hidden inside a hollow tree in the garden had beamed the ghostly picture of a frog at her window curtain. “Ned says both the recorder and projector were radio-controlled,” Nancy added.
“Wait a second! You’re going too fast!” Nikki begged. “How did you discover all this?”
“I guessed last night that this was how the ghostly frog trick was played,” Nancy replied. “It was the only possible explanation. So when I went out to shop, I phoned Ned and asked him to come in quietly through the back garden and search for the equipment without disturbing you two.”
Karnak’s snooping visit, she went on, convinced her that somehow he must have overheard their conversation about the fireplace stones—which meant the house must be “bugged.”
“So I knew if we did find out Uncle Louis’s secret,” Nancy said, “Karnak and Madame Zurga would probably overhear and try to take over. That’s why I had Ned prepare the toy frog and stay around to keep watch—so we could use their own trick against them.”
Finally, a little more relaxed, Yvette opened the note that had been found in the chest. The letter told where the jewelry came from. As a young man, Yvette’s uncle had joined a pirate gang. Wearing frog masks, the gang would attack yachts and cabin cruisers and steal whatever valuables they could find aboard.
Troubled by pangs of guilt, Uncle Louis had finally quit the gang and fled to the United States, taking the loot with him. Stashed at the bottom of the chest was the pirate schooner’s log, which contained the names of every boat they had robbed. With this information, Louis Lamar hoped someday to return the stolen jewelry to its rightful owners. But hiding out fearfully from the gang’s vengeance, he had never found time or courage to carry out his plan.
At the end of his life, he had half hoped, half feared that his niece Yvette would find and return the loot for him. Therefore he had left her various clues. The bottle of pebbles was a “red herring” to throw off anyone in the gang who might come looking for the treasure.
When the police arrived and questioned Karnak, he sullenly admitted he was the pirate leader’s son. Although trained as an electronics engineer, he had spent years trying to track down Louis Lamar.
After finding out Louis was dead, Karnak had learned that his niece Yvette liked to go to fortunetellers. So he hired Madame Zurga to terrorize her into revealing where the treasure was hidden. He himself had posed as a telephone repairman in order to get into the house and plant the bugs.
“What about Madame Zurga’s frog?” asked Nikki, who had listened in fascination while Nancy explained her detective work.
“Well, actually, that she used a frog as a means of tempting everyone was just a coincidence. It’s a pretty clever frog too. Ned says it probably contains a heat-sensitive switch,” replied Nancy.
Her boyfriend nodded. “That’s right. When the frog gets warm from being held in someone’s hand, the switch closes. And that’s what turns on the mechanism to make it go glup-glup-glup … at least, that’s my guess.”
“But if you expect us to go to her fortune-telling parlor tonight and find out for sure—no, thanks!” Nancy added with a smile. “Let’s sit here and tell ghost stories!”
Greenhouse Ghost
“Nancy, how would you like to own a little house in the country with a beautiful garden, a swimming pond, a greenhouse—?” Mr. Drew asked his attractive eighteen-year-old daughter, rumpling her reddish blond hair.
“Sounds great, Dad,” she replied, “but what’s the occasion? It’s not my birthday, or Christmas, or …”
The tall, athletic-looking lawyer smiled. “Does there have to be an occasion for me to give you a gift?” he countered.
“But this is no ordinary one,” Nancy said. Knowing her astute father’s knack for teasing, she added, “What’s up?”
“Okay,” he admitted. “There is such a property for sale, but no one will buy it unless you solve the mystery of the greenhouse ghost.”
“Tell me about it,” she said eagerly.
Mr. Drew explained that the owner, now deceased, had prided himself on producing the finest orchids in the country. “Nancy, you must have heard of La Forge orchids.”
“Oh yes, I have. Brides love them for their wedding bouquets.”
“Exactly,” the lawyer continued. “Mr. La Forge built up a very prosperous business with his wife. Then suddenly trouble began. A vandal—or vandals—smashed glass, stole or ruined flowers ready to be shipped out, and caused terrible havoc at the estate. Poor Mrs. La Forge died of a sudden heart attack, and her husband passed away soon afterward. I’m co-executor of the estate with the bank. Their children want to sell the property but a rumor that the greenhouse has a ghost keeps people from looking at the place.”
“That’s a shame,” Nancy remarked. “It all sounds very mysterious, but I’m not afraid to go out to the place with you. Let’s drive out and meet this ghost!”
Before they could start, Nancy’s little dog Togo ran up to her, whimpering and giving staccato barks.
“So you want to go along too,” she said, and opened the door of her father’s car. At once Togo jumped up and settled himself on the front seat. Nancy climbed in on the passenger’s side as Mr. Drew sat down behind the wheel.
On the way, Nancy and her father discussed the raising of orchids. Mr. Drew said that while they grew in several countries with tropical climates, they were first discovered in Malaysia. “That’s where Mr. La Forge went to pick out various varieties to bring back here and propagate for commercial use.”
“Our florist told me,” said Nancy, “that Mr. La Forge was secretly trying to produce a deep blue orchid and guarded his secret well. He’d almost finished working out the formula, when he suddenly died.”
“Interesting,” Mr. Drew replied. “I heard that too. His children can’t find it, though. Oh, look, here we are.” He slowed down to enter a shady driveway with stone entrance pillars. On one had been carved the word Orchidiana. “That’s what the La Forges called this place,” the lawyer told Nancy.
The girl detective was charmed by the picturesque gardens of cultivated and wild flowers. When she saw
the house, Nancy gasped.
“Dad, you said it was small!” she exclaimed. “Why, it would take a week just to clean the windows!”
Her father explained that the family had used only the center section to live in. One wing was for displaying the orchids. The gardener occupied the other, smaller wing.
As if he had heard his name called, a man came from the left wing. The short, rotund, dark-haired man introduced himself as Joe Hendricks.
“I’m Nancy Drew and this is my father,” she said. “What a beautiful place this is. I can’t wait to see it all!”
“I’m on my way to the large greenhouse,” the gardener said. “Would you like to see that first, or the house?”
Nancy glanced at her father, who nodded.
“I’d like to go to the greenhouse,” she said. “Maybe you can tell me something about the ghost.”
Hendricks eyed her intently, and his shoulders twitched. He did not reply for several seconds. Regaining his composure, he replied, “Oh, you’ve heard the story? Don’t pay any attention to it. Rumor, that’s all. There’s no ghost in the greenhouse.”
Nancy said no more. She and her father followed the man and presently came to an enormous greenhouse. It was dome-shaped and made entirely of glass. Nancy assumed that the panes shattered by vandals had been replaced.
The visitors followed Hendricks inside. At once, a young man came forward and was introduced by Hendricks as Kiki. “He’s my assistant,” the gardener explained.
Nancy, who had been in Hawaii some time before, asked Kiki, “Your name sounds Polynesian. Are your ancestors from that area?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me,” Nancy said, as she and her father followed him down a long aisle between arbors of exquisite dendrobium orchids, “what smells so sweet? Not the orchids?”
“No. We also grow roses and several varieties of lilies,” Kiki answered. “They’re sold mostly to the local florists.”
The Ghost of Blackwood Hall Page 10
