“Who do you suppose he was?” asked Tom.
“Why, Peter Cotterell, of course,” David answered promptly.
“I don’t know about that,” said Tuckerman. “This handwriting doesn’t look like that of a man who was used to holding the pen. See how he’s gone over some of the letters several times, as if he wasn’t precisely sure how he ought to form them. Sir Peter was a well-educated gentleman. He must have known how to use a quill.”
“Perhaps he wanted to disguise his handwriting,” David suggested.
“Why would he want to do that?” Ben retorted. “Whoever wrote that meant to leave a record of what he’d done with the box. There wouldn’t be any sense in faking his handwriting—certainly not if he intended to hide the parchment away in a secret drawer of the desk.”
“What sense would there be in his cutting it in two then?” Tom inquired.
Tuckerman, who was sitting on the arm of a chair, threw back his head and laughed. “Here we are arguing about something that happened ever so long ago, and we haven’t the least idea why it happened this way.” He turned to the portrait on the wall and shook his finger at it. “You—or some of your household—knew how to make first-class puzzles, Sir Peter.” Then, as he swung around to the three boys, he added:
“My guess is that there’s a pocket in a cliff somewhere on this island, and that there is—or was—a box hidden in it.”
“Find the cliff,” said Tom.
Ben shook his head. “There are dozens of cliffs.”