CENTRAL PARK was anything but sinister when seen in the pleasant light of afternoon. It was a melody in green, tempered by streaks of rocky gray, broken with the sheen of blue pools and ponds, plus a few spots where pleasant streams came into sight.
Of course there were paths and drives, along with occasional buildings. People were everywhere. Margo wondered how long they would stay around after dark, particularly if they thought in terms of a banshee’s wail.
Probably everyone was thinking in such terms, for the newspapers were full of the banshee business. Nothing quite like it had come along since the days of the famed Jersey Devil or the more recent Mattoon Madman.
Rather fun, having such a mystery right in your own front yard, which was what Central Park was to all Manhattan. Only the police had placed strong restrictions upon anyone trampling around in search of the vanished sprite. In fact, Commissioner Weston had issued an edict to the effect that officially the banshee did not exist.
Central Park did look like a huge front yard from where Margo viewed it and that was why the trees, people and everything else looked proportionately small. Margo’s vantage point was the top story of the sizeable Chateau Parkview, a huge apartment-hotel that towered from the lower side of Central Park South, once called Fifty-ninth Street.
This apartment belonged to Niles Ronjan and Margo had come here before with Lamont Cranston. The place was so curious that despite herself, Margo began to forget Central Park and its mystery of last night.
If the place was curious, so was Ronjan.
Here was a man with the genius of an inventor, the urge of an adventurer, and the air of a fanatic. He was sallow, quick of eye, and with shaggy, unkempt hair that fluttered on any provocation. Ronjan gave it plenty of provocation, the way he bobbed around the room.
Ronjan had to hop around because the room was large and the whole center was occupied by a large tank the size of a billiard table and similarly mounted on heavy legs. The tank was full of water, and the metal bottom was shaped irregularly, as though representing part of the ocean bottom, which it did.
Not only did Ronjan sail boats in this tank, he sank them. At present one was under water, hanging to a submerged ledge, while another was floating nearby. The two boats were connected by a curious piece of metal hose which was made in joined sections.