“I know what was in that box.”
“Out of the zillions of different things it could have been, you know the one thing it was, hey?” Priam grinned. “I like your nerve, Queen. You must be a good poker player. But that’s a game I used to be pretty good at myself. So suppose I call you. What was it?”
He raised a glass of whisky to his mouth.
“Something that looked like a dead eel.”
Had Ellery said, “Something that looked like a live unicorn,” Priam could not have reacted more violently. He jerked against the tray and most of the whisky sprayed out on his beard. He spluttered, swiping at himself.
As far as Keats could see, the others were merely bewildered. Even Wallace dropped his smile, although he quickly picked it up and put it on again.
“I was convinced from practically the outset,” Ellery went on, “that these ‘warnings’ ― to use the language of the original note to Hill ― were interconnected; separate but integral parts of an all-over pattern. And they are. The pattern is fantastic ― for instance, even now I’m sure Lieutenant Keats still suspects what Hollywood calls a weenie. But fantastic or not, it exists; and the job I set myself was to figure out what it was. And now that I’ve figured it out, it doesn’t seem fantastic at all. In fact, it’s straightforward, even simple, and it certainly expresses a material enough meaning. The fantasy in this case, as in so many cases, lies in the mind that evolved the pattern, not in the pattern itself.
“As the warnings kept coming in, I kept trying to discover their common denominator, the cement that was holding them together. When you didn’t know what to look for ― unlike Mr. Priam, who did know what to look for ― it was hard, because in some of them the binding agent was concealed.
“It struck me, after I’d gone over the warnings innumerable times,” said Ellery, and he paused to light a cigaret, so that nothing in the room was audible but the scratch of the match and Roger Priam’s heavy breathing, “it struck me finally that every warning centrally involved an animal.”
Laurel said, “What?”