"But surely you refer to mere coincidence?" Nancy gave an elaborate shrug. "Certainly Mother would not have-It must have been Bushy Trott!" she exclaimed suddenly, remembering a particularly nasty crook. "That criminal was a misfit his whole life. When he imprisoned me in the attic with that tarantula it must have been in revenge for what my father must have done to him for what he must have done to my mother. He could have abducted her and planted the note. The deathbed speech was a ruse and a clue! My mother knew I would solve the mystery of her tragic fate!"
Draco S. Wren threw up his hands. "But, Nancy, I have proof that she went to Alaska because she loved another man! I even have the minibar of Ivory stamped Ice Palace Hotel to prove it!"
Nancy could feel the wheels spinning in her mind. "There must have been a secret passage!"
Draco S. Wren seemed stunned by Nancy 's remark. "Well, Nancy, this will stir your imagination. I have a locket here containing a lock of your own hair. My mother gave it to me on one of her rare trips home. I was thirteen."
The significance of the number thirteen did not escape Nancy. The lock of hair was unmistakably blond. "So?" she queried nonchalantly.
Draco S. Wren stared silently into Nancy 's eyes for several long moments. He drummed his fingers on the table. "Bon-Bon. Candy. Bon-Bon. Nancy, don't you understand that you are my long-lost sister? Candy Wren was your mother too."
The revelation was unthinkable, not to mention absurd. "But my mother was married to Carson Drew," Nancy said. "And Candy is a common name."
"They are one and the same!" Draco S. Wren declared triumphantly, bouncing a lemon bon bon on the table. "Candy ran away to Alaska with Andy C. Wren and had a second child- me. Hadn't you guessed the meaning of my name?"
Nancy averted her gaze. As she looked around the room, Lilac Inn seemed suddenly antiquated. The lilacs had disappeared.
"How can Candy Wren be my mother as well as yours?" she asked distractedly. "She was a children's author."
"There is even more. Carson Drew, not Andy C. Wren, was my real father."
Nancy tossed her golden top. "But you are relating nothing but coincidences-a whole set of coincidences which, obviously, have no meaning." Rainy tears threatened to burst through the dreamy cloud of her afternoon. The beautiful stranger before her was still a stranger, although perhaps there was a resemblance to her father in the determined set of his jaw. She remembered that her first impression linked him to her father.
"Dad sent me money all my life for my upbringing," Draco S. Wren continued, lapping at his tea. "I think he felt that you would eventually find out about me, with your uncanny sleuthing skills."
"I was never even suspicious," moaned Nancy, crestfallen. Her sleuthing abilities had lapsed. She had even neglected to bring her magnifying glass with her. But, rallying, she remembered that she had one clue left to refute this stranger's bizarre theory.
"Did you send my father a parcel recently?" she asked accusingly.
"A parcel?" queried Draco S. Wren guardedly. "Yes, if you mean a little ivory igloo?" "Why did you send it?"
"Because he was my father, and I knew he would admire it. It was an old museum piece, an exquisite carving. I do hope you have kept it." Draco S. Wren crammed his mouth full of strawberry jam biscuits.
Nancy then informed Draco S. Wren-in her most even tones-of her knowledge of the ivory igloo. It was Draco S. Wren's turn to be mortified. He insisted that he never knew about the poison in the harpoon, but he was not surprised, since it was an old piece and might have been used for purposes of iniquity sometime in antiquity.
"Yes," Nancy said. "You realize, of course, that you might be held responsible in some way for Father's death, if the facts were known about that ivory whale-hunter in his igloo." For a few moments she felt she had returned victoriously to her proper role-Nancy Drew, girl detective.
Nancy looked at Draco S. Wren intently. "You see the resemblance, don't you?" he said, grinning. "Here, look at this." He took a miniature leather album from his leather jacket and removed two faded photographs. "This is a picture of me at age three. And here is a picture of you at age three. They could be the same child except for your curls and lace."
Nancy stared in disbelief at the two pictures. One showed a short, fat, dark-haired boy, the other, a slim, golden-haired girl. The resemblance escaped her, but she could not deny the conviction of Draco S. Wren's words. And there was no questioning the fact that both young noses were cute buttons.
"What is your favorite color?" said Nancy faintly.
"What is yours?" Draco S. Wren countered coyly.
"Blue."
"Blue? Why, that is my favorite color!"
Nancy stared long and hard at Draco S. Wren, this clever stranger who had stolen her heart. His stories were preposterous but irrefutable. Her intuition had never failed her, and her intuition still told her that here was a truthful and good man.
Draco S. Wren looked back at Nancy. His eyes were definitely not beady, nor dark and piercing. He said, in heartfelt tones, "I must confess, Nancy, that when I met you, I wished desperately that you were not my sister, for I would have fallen in love with you in a moment."
"And I did fall in love with you," said Nancy uncharacteristically.
Resolution
In the end, Nancy Drew bowed to her duty. She pledged to be loyal and true to her brother, to take care of him as she had her father (choosing his bandanas carefully, and giving him new appointment books for Christmas), and to make up for their lost childhood. Nancy promised to protect him from any question that should arise concerning a certain ivory gewgaw. She told Bess that the fluid had been analyzed and found to be whale oil. Nancy let it be known that Draco S. Wren was her long-lost brother but refused to divulge the details, so the aflair encouraged prominent newspaper headlines and casual gossip. Some said Draco S. Wren was a fraud, falsely claiming a share in Carson Drew's legacy, like the impostor prince in another story about a jewel box. Others maintained quite a different story.
Draco S. Wren moved into the fashionable three-story brick Drew residence and established a law practice in River Heights. Nancy continued to solve mysteries, helping Draco S. Wren on his cases as she had once assisted her father. Nancy continued as the champion of her fan club, addressing its monthly meetings with her "Eye Openers." Her younger fans were loyal, and she sold lots of copies, but the grown-ups talked behind her back. Nevertheless, Nancy 's larkspurs continued to win first prize in the flower show year after year, and she still danced in the River Heights talent show.
"I don't think this will do," Nancy said with a sigh as she finished writing. "I have tried to tell my true life story. But my life didn't turn out as it was supposed to."
She wondered if she should have mentioned the servant girl. And the fact that Draco S. Wren had now disappeared, taking all Nancy 's priceless souvenirs from her mysteries. Nancy felt bereft. A real brother would not have acted that way. She thought now that some of his brotherly kisses reminded her somewhat of Ned Nickerson's busses. And recently Draco S. Wren's eyes had started to pierce darkly.
"I suppose with some revision-" She paused in thought. The emptiness she felt was not the same emptiness Nancy Drew, girl detective, usually felt as her story drew to a close and she wondered what mystery was in store for her next.
Running from Legs by Ed McBain
Mahogany and brass.
Burnished and polished and gleaming under the green-shaded lights over the bar where men and women alike sat on padded stools and drank. Women, yes. In a saloon, yes. Sitting at the bar, and sitting in the black leather booths that lined the dimly lighted room. Women. Drinking alcohol. Discreetly, to be sure, for booze and speakeasies were against the law. Before Prohibition, you rarely saw a woman drinking in a saloon. Now you saw them in speakeasies all over the city. Where once there had been fifteen thousand bars, there were now thirty-two thousand speakeasies. The Prohibitionists hadn't expected these side effects of the Eighteenth Amendment.