When we last left Nancy Drew, she had been snowed in at Wickford Castle, an old French castle that has been sent to…Wisconsin, for some reason. Someone vandalized the library, and Nancy showed her usual regard for crime scenes by sneaking in and stealing stuff. We found out that that Dexter has a criminal past (quick, check his house for a plastic murder suit!) and Lisa is the protagonist of Orphan Black. And then Nancy heard suspicious noises coming from under the basement, so she decided to go down there, by herself, at night, and kept walking even when it became clear the noises were coming from a freaking saw jesus christ.
But the only thing that can kill Nancy is getting busted for snooping, or doing chores incorrectly, so we’re okay. Instead, we walk in on Jacques trying to saw his way past a metal gate! Quelle horreur!
So Jacques is up to something. Let’s interrogate him, shall we?
Jacques asks us what we’re doing here, like wow Jacques, you think you’re the only one allowed to creep around in the middle of the night? How rude. I choose to have Nancy reply, “Don’t you think I should be asking you that question?”, because that feels more Nancy-ish to me. The second answer sounds kind of like Buffy or Veronica Mars. Jacques begs us not to tell anyone that we’ve seen him down here, because if he fails in his mission, he will have dishonored his family, his country, his fiancee, and probably his cow, too. As it turns out, this is the passage that leads to the Queen’s tower, which has a valuable historical document of some kind — if Jacques can return it to France, he can restore his honor after flopping at the Olympics. It’s also the dying wish of his great-grandfather, who was one of the carpenters responsible for bringing the tower to Wisconsin. Great-Grandpa Brunais found a journal with the royal crest on it, and a very shiny medallion. He kept the medallion, and gave it to Jacques on his deathbed, and asked him to go to Wisconsin to find the journal. Wow, don’t lay the pathos on too thick, there. Jacques is convinced the journal belonged to Marie Antoinette and contains her “confessions”, which apparently will change French history. I think he’s missing the point of history. Anyway, he asks us to help him.
Of course, Nancy is still suspicious: he’s super desperate to find this journal. How do we know he didn’t break into the library looking for it? Jacques is all horrified by this accusation — he would never vandalize the library! Most of those books are French!
Never change, Jacques.
So we agree to help him as long as he tells Christi Lane (the owner of the castle. Remember her? It’s okay, we can’t even call her in this game) what he’s up to. He agrees, and asks us to go look at the medallion in his locker while he “works on something.” Uh, okay. We agree to meet up with him once he’s done. “You’re the best, Nancy!” I know, I know.
(Also, before you go, grab the tip of the sword from the soldier to the right of the gate.)
Snooping through Dexter’s stuff and Jacques’s stuff in one night? Nancy is in heaven. To the right: a letter from Jacques’s fiancee and “petit chou”, Isabelle! She is not too happy with Jacques, seeing as he’s asked her to marry him but hasn’t given her a ring. Also, they’re both broke. “I cannot live on hot dogs and mac ‘n’ cheese forever,” she tells him. You don’t have to, Isabelle! Mix it up with some ramen! Anyway, the gist of it is: Isabelle isn’t going to wait for Jacques much longer. Ooooh. To the right: a letter from U.S. customs, telling him he only has a month before his visa runs out. Ooooooooh. And next to the customs letter: a pamphlet about diamonds. Hmmm.
And then someone knocks us out as we reach for the medallion. Thanks.
We’re woken up by the phone ringing, and it turns out to be Jacques. He’s all aflutter that we missed our rendezvous, and worse: the medallion is gone. “Oh la la!” wails Jacques. We tell him that it was the last thing we saw, but we have no idea where it is now. “Oh la la,” Jacques mutters again before hanging up on us. Hee. By the way, thanks for your concern, Jacques.
Anyway, we also have some voicemail: Dexter needs to talk with us down at the front desk, because he probably has more chores for us to do or something. But before we hop off to do that, let’s call Nancy’s friends. We get the answering machine for Ned (although if you call him earlier in the game, you can have a little talk with him), but George and Bess pick up. Somewhat hilariously, they call Nancy the “prime minister” of snooping. Heh. We tell them about Jacques and his fiancee (Bess wants to know if Isabelle “sounds cute”, which, okay), and Nancy suggests that Jacques is marrying Isabelle just to stay in the country. Suspicious. We also tell them about Dexter’s laboratory, and Nancy — in what is not exactly one of her feats of genius — mentions that Mr. Wickford presumably has a “thinking place” in the garden, but she didn’t see a garden when she came in. To which Bess and George point out that you can’t really see a garden when it’s buried under a foot of snow. Oh, Nancy. So, exploring the outside world it is. Fun times!
Meanwhile, Dexter’s resumed his place at the desk, slowly replenishing his life force. We find out that he’s the one that brought Nancy back to her room after finding her in the basement (thanks, Mr. Egan!) but now he has a question for us: where did all the red dirt on our shoes come from? Now, we have two options here: we can lie and say we have no idea, but we hope we didn’t track it everywhere, or we can tell the truth and say we’ve found the passage leading to the Queen’s tower. Lying doesn’t pay (and also Dexter won’t buy it), so I decide to tell the truth. Nancy Drew is an honest citizen, after all, underneath all the breaking and entering and tampering with crime scenes. Dexter is actually rather tickled by our adventures, and tells us that Ezra Wickford told Baby Dexter that if he could find the tunnel, he’d take him up to see the Queen’s tower. Wacky father/son adventures! Little does Dexter know that we already know about his tragically disinherited orphan past. That’s less wacky. Dexter decides to help us out, and tells us that there’s a skeleton key in the shed that will unlock the gate to the passageway. Nancy says, “I don’t want to press my luck,” then proceeds to press it anyway by asking where Ezra Wickford’s secret garden is. Dexter tells us to go left and look for a wrought iron gate outside. Thanks, Mr. Egan!
Since we’re in his good graces now, is it the time to bring up his criminal past? We ask if he knew Ezra Wickford, and Dexter says, “You could say that.” “Did you know him well?” “THEY CALL IT THE PAST FOR A REASON, OKAY? BECAUSE IT’S OVER.” Uh…well, I guess today is not the day Dexter opens up and tells us about his troubled adolescence. See ya, Mr. Egan!
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Lisa. What’s up, Lisa? She immediately asks what we found in the library like, wow, don’t say hi or anything. Also, how does she know we were in there? We deny it, but Lisa says she can tell we’ve been “on the prowl.” Uh…okay. She asks what we’ve found in there, and I choose to lie and say that it was just books and stuff. (Lying ends the conversation tree there, but if you tell Lisa the truth, there’s a couple more options to keep revealing information to her.) After all, keeping Dexter’s delinquent youth a secret is the Right Thing to Do. Lisa pouts that we’re no fun, so we tell her about Hotchkiss’s Marie Antoinette book. That’ll show her! Nancy Drew reads books about dead French monarchs, she’s way fun. Lisa tells us that the book wasn’t very well-received — most historians think Professor Hotchkiss is a bit of a quack. I can’t imagine why.
If we talk to Professor Hotchkiss, she sends us off to go look stuff up for her, and I can’t be bothered with that right now. To the shed!
So, the shed. If you stay out too long in the cold, you freeze to death, so…don’t do that. Inside, there’s a machine that controls the ski left, as well as instructions for controlling said lift. If you mess with it, Dexter gets very upset and kicks us out, so…also don’t do that. What we’re really after is the key on the desk, as well as a newspaper clipping about Dexter getting out of a jail — after twenty-five years! Wow, do you really get 25 years for passing bad checks? Google says it’s more like a few months to a few years, depending on whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony. Did Dexter do something else? Steal bread from the prison cafeteria?
Now that we’ve got the skeleton key, let’s go off to Ezra Wickford’s secret garden. First we have to pop back inside the castle so Nancy doesn’t freeze to death, but then you can just turn around and head right back out, so whatever.
The secret garden is cleverly disguised with…a bunch of leaves over the gate. Stealthy. Anyway, the key we found in Ezra Wickford’s secret room (which is what I will hereafter refer to it as for the sake of clarity, although “Dexter’s laboratory” amused me much more) opens both the gate and this box, which is in the head of the bust of Ezra Wickford. You turn the sundial to the left, which turns the bust, and then you pull the lever on the back of Mr. W’s head. So hey, we found another medallion! Maybe we can give this one to Jacques to make up for getting his other one stolen.
Jacques is Not Pleased with us. “I can’t believe you lost my medallion!” Although the subtitles say “me medallion,” and it amuses me to think of Jacques talking like a pirate. Nancy snaps that he was the one that sent us to get the medallion — maybe he set us up! Jacques really doesn’t like that and says that he never should have trusted her. “My sentiments exactly!” Nancy says. Oooooh.
Meanwhile, Lisa is trying to be our sidekick. She tells us that she saw Dexter sneaking around the maintenance shack with a “green ornament thing”. Suspicious! What could the handyman be up to around the maintenance shed? Only trouble, that’s what. Lisa can’t go out herself, naturally, because she has to work on her article. I feel like she’s not going to have much to write about, since she hasn’t gotten up from that chair in the entire game.
So we go outside to check it out, and we find a green medallion in the shed. Yay, I guess. We take it even though there’s no real reason to. Pfft, what do you mean, it belongs to Dexter? When we try go back inside, though, the door is locked! Gasp! Is this Jacques’s vengeance for losing his medallion? Because we have two now and he has none? It’s not Nancy Drew’s fault she’s a way better medallion-finder than you, Jacques!
Blah blah Nancy almost freezes to death blah. Remember how we’re not supposed to touch the ski lift controls in the shed? If we do, Dexter notices that something’s up and comes out to rescue us. Thanks, Mr. Egan!
Back inside, Dexter is much friendlier to us now (he greets us with a “Hey there, Nancy!”, aw), so I ask if Ezra Wickford had a certain place he went to in order to think, as per the poem in the library room. Dexter tells us that there’s a private area of the garden, but he isn’t too keen on Nancy checking it out. Fair enough. See ya, Mr. Egan!
I’ve gone through pretty much half the game without talking to Professor Hotchkiss, but that all changes now. Let’s go knock on her door!
The more time you spend in school, the more you realize that Professor Hotchkiss is actually an accurate representation of history majors at three in the morning.
Professor Hotchkiss tells us that she’s come to the conclusion that Nancy’s an “enterprising and faithful soul,” which basically means that she wants us to do chores for her. Fine. Our first task is to find out how old Marie Antoinette was when she married King Louis. This information can be found in the book in the lounge (my screencap just says “young teenager”, so I’m not sure what the actual answer is. The question is different every time you play, anyway). So we come back to her with the answer, and she tells us that if we want to talk more, she’s having office hours between 3 AM and 6 AM. Hey, that’s when Nancy’s usually awake, anyway.
There’s not much to do before meeting up with Professor Hotchkiss again, but apparently I called Ned before I set the alarm to 4 AM. We haven’t called him at all since the start of the game, so the conversation is just catching him up on our ~latest~ case. Oh, Ned. Always so behind the times. I bet there would’ve been more conversation options for Frank Hardy.
So now it’s 4 AM, and it’s time to go meet Professor Hotchkiss down in the lounge.
Professor Hotchkiss and Nancy bond over doing their best work in the dead of the night. Heh. We ask her about her work, but she doesn’t want to tell us right now, because, uh, someone else in the castle might overhear and steal her crazy Marie Antoinette theory, for the money and fame brought by having articles on JSTOR. Or something. Anyway, she gives us the key to her room and tells us to poke around if we’re really interested in her research. Wow. That was easy.
Snooping time! What’s in Professor Hotchkiss’s room? On the desk is a bunch of Hotchkiss’s notes on Marie Antoinette (“Her favorite color was purple — like me! I wonder if she adored chicken drumsticks?!”) And on the couch in the corner, under the pillow, is the blue medallion! Somehow I find it hard to believe Professor Hotchkiss was the one who whacked Nancy on the head, but anything’s possible, I guess.
In Hotchkiss’s briefcase is a letter from some lady named Helga, who says that Prof. H is onto something important re: the medallions and the stained glass. What stained glass? We’ll have to find out! Helga, like Prof. H and Jacques, believes that the medallions will reveal something mind-blowing about Marie Antoinette and change her image in French history. Furthermore, Helga was in possession of a medallion herself, and she gave it to Professor Hotchkiss. Cool, cool. Finally, there’s a camcorder(!) on the dresser, which contains a tape of Prof. H exploring the castle (“You’d never know it was built in 1920, it’s all sooooo 18th C.”) As she approaches Marie Antoinette’s portrait (not the one in the library, the one in the hall), she gasps — and then the battery goes dead. Not cool, man. So we’ll have to recharge and come back tomorrow.
In the meantime, I call Bess and George, because I can. The conversation picks up with talking about the library and Ezra Wickford’s secret room, which leads into talking about Dexter. Bess suggests that Dexter is behind whatever’s going on at the castle, because he wants revenge. “Revenge on who?” George asks. “Wickford’s dead.” “It’s not logical, George. It’s REVENGE!!” Hee.
Nancy also tells them about Marie Antoinette’s tiara, and explicitly spells out some information that I missed earlier — the tiara had a ruby, a sapphire, an emerald, and a diamond. We presumably have the former three in the form of the medallions, so the question is — where is the diamond? (Or, more accurately, how do we get to the diamond? It’s in the Queen’s Tower. Everybody knows that.) We ask if we should give them back to their rightful owners — in particular, the red one to Dexter — but Bess and George shut that idea down, because…ex-cons don’t deserve honesty? Bess and George are weird. Then we hang up on them, since I’m too cool to need hints. Also, I was using a walkthrough.
Dexter and Lisa don’t have anything useful for us, so let’s skip ahead to 4 AM the next day, and check on Prof. H’s video.
Okay, random capital letters. Even Hotchkiss’s dialogue is 18th century.
Success! The battery is all recharged, and we can see what has Prof. H in such a tizzy: she’s found a peephole in the portrait. “Shall I Peep.” she wonders to herself. “Uh la la! I do believe I’ll peep!” Heh. She drops the camcorder to look in the peephole; somewhat hilariously, the peephole is still in the frame, but we can’t see Hotchkiss. Maybe she’s invisible. “The beauty! The colors!” she says, and then apparently she puts the medallion over the hole and looks through that, which sparks some kind of revelation. “High five, Team Hotchkiss!” Indeed.
So, alright. We’ve got all three medallions, we know where the peephole is, now we shall peep!
We see the aforementioned stained glass through the peephole, and when we place the medallions over it, we get these:
“Le diamant de ma misere dans mon journal.” Journal? The same journal Jacques was looking for? I believe it’s time to head up to the Queen’s tower! Excitement!
Up next: We find Marie Antoinette’s journal, confront Dexter about his shady past, and catch the culprit. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!
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