“Well,” I observed, my eye catching a ladder beside the garage, “there’s a ladder. We can do no more than try.”
He walked over to the automobile, took a little package out, slipped it into his pocket, and a few minutes later we had set the ladder up against the side of the boathouse farthest away from the house. It was the work of only a moment for Kennedy to scale it and prowl across the roof to the tower, while I stood guard at the foot.
“No one has been up there recently,” he panted breathlessly as he rejoined me. “There isn’t a sign.”
We took the ladder quietly back to the garage, then Kennedy led the way down the shore to a sort of little summerhouse cut off from the boathouse and garage by the trees, though over the top of a hedge one could still see the boathouse tower.
We sat down, and Craig filled his lungs with the good salt air, sweeping his eye about the blue and green panorama as though this were a holiday and not a mystery case.
“Walter,” he said at length, “I wish you’d take the car and go around to Verplanck’s. I don’t think you can see the tower through the trees, but I should like to be sure.”
I found that it could not be seen, though I tried all over the place and got myself disliked by the gardener and suspected by a watchman with a dog.
It could not have been from the tower of the boathouse that we had seen the light, and I hurried back to Craig to tell him so. But when I returned, I found that he was impatiently pacing the little rustic summerhouse, no longer interested in what he had sent me to find out.
“What has happened?” I asked eagerly.
“Just come out here and I’ll show you something,” he replied, leaving the summerhouse and approaching the boathouse from the other side of the hedge, on the beach, so that the house itself cut us off from observation from Carter’s.