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voice, “he told me he’d left something for me in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk in the study. This is what I found.”
    She handed Nancy an envelope addressed to My darling daughter Joy. “Open it.”
    Nancy did so. Inside was a slip of paper bearing an odd message:
    Iris = ? = Old Glory “How strange!” Nancy murmured. “Do you
    have any clue at all as to what it may mean?” As Joy nodded in response, Nancy saw her eyes mist over. “Iris was my mother’s name.” Nancy hesitated a moment. “Do you have any recollection of her?”
    “None at all,” Joy said sadly. “I don’t even know what she looked like. Daddy didn’t even have a snapshot to remember her by—and he always regretted it.”
    “Hmph!” Mrs. Yawley, who was lunching with them, had been glowering at the two girls ever since they began their conversation. Now she uttered an audible sniff of disapproval. “Is it really necessary to discuss all this with a stranger, Joy?”
    The teenage redhead gave her a calmly defiant look. “I invited Nancy here to help me find out what Daddy’s letter means, Aunt Selma. I can hardly expect her to do that, can I, without her knowing a few facts about my family.”
    The thin-lipped woman sniffed again and frowned irately, but remained silent for the rest of the meal.
    Joy told Nancy that her parents had been young and poor when they got married; her mother, unhappily, had not lived long enough to enjoy John Trent’s eventual success. Partly
    because he had no picture of his wife, Mr. Trent had surrounded himself with irises in various forms.
    “For instance, if you’ll notice,’’ Joy went on, “this room has iris-patterned wallpaper. After lunch, I’ll show you some other examples.”
    When they rose from the table, she led Nancy through several rooms, ending up in her father’s study. In every room, there was at least one bowl or vase filled with irises. There were also ceramic and glass likenesses of the flower, wall paintings of irises, iris-decorated drapes, and numerous other such objects or furnishings.
    “Your father must have cherished your mother’s memory a great deal,” Nancy murmured.
    “Yes.” Joy nodded and was silent for a moment, then went on. “Yet because of his grief, Daddy could never bear to talk about her much. So I really know very little about her.”
    “I suspect one of these examples of the iris motif may hold the answer to that cryptic message he left you,” Nancy mused aloud. But for the moment, she was at a loss to unravel the puzzle—even though, privately, she had a feeling at the back of her mind that she had already sighted a clue somewhere in the house. So she asked Joy for time to think over what she had
    just learned, and promised to resume their conversation later.
    After leaving the Trents’ house, Nancy returned to the amusement park. She wanted to ask Leo Novak why he had told her the lead horse was replaced because of breakage, when actually the original had been sold to Joy Trent’s father.
    “Aw, that was way back when the Trent girl was just a little kid,” he retorted impatiently. “It happened when Mr. Ogden owned the carousel—and the trailer. If you don’t believe me, her dad had a photograph taken at the time and gave Ogden a copy—it’s still stuck up on the wall of the trailer. I thought you wanted to know about the last time the lead horse was replaced. The truck accident I told you about happened after I took over the carousel.”
    “I see,” Nancy said politely. “Well, thank you for explaining that to me, Mr. Novak.”
    Her next call was on the owner of the boat that had been stolen on the night she and Ned kept watch on the carousel.
    The owner, a gas station operator named Vic Marsh, told her he had been fishing on the river that night, just below the park, when suddenly he saw the carousel light up and start playing music.
    “Startled me out of my wits!” Marsh added with a chuckle. “So I went ashore and