Her tea was growing cold and she was growing impatient; the conversation had already gone ten minutes longer than she'd expected, or even wanted, and she silently begged him to hang up. The line had been silent for a few moments, but she could still hear him writing, always writing.
"How about now?" she mumbled, venturing a sip of her drink and hoping that he wouldn't ask her to talk anymore. She had just wanted a nice, quiet Saturday without the girls or Ned or the Hardys, a day to sit and read and even do a little sunbathing. Anything but listen to Frank struggle to understand a riddle from his and Joe's mystery.
His groan of frustration was not promising. "Still wrong! Do you know any other common rules for code?"
She had wanted to sigh under her breath but it came out as nearly an exclamation. "I don't know, Frank! I've been telling you I didn't know for the past half-hour and I still don't and I can't without looking at the paper first and can you please just ask Joe?"
"Jeez, Nancy, I thought you liked helping us out on our cases." His tone was immediately defensive, a little hurt, and she cursed herself, knowing she had set him off. Well, at least they'd both be frustrated now.
"I do when it's not boring code stuff!" As she moved to place the half-full mug on the coffee table a few drops spilled out and landed on her bare knee. She yelled wordlessly and nearly slammed the cup onto the table in reaction. "Where is Joe, anyway? Can't he help you?" She brushed away the drink with her free hand, and rubbed the moisture onto her shorts.
"He's staking out a different suspect," he explained in a tone that suggested she'd asked and he'd answered that question before.
"What about your dad—or Callie, I don't know. I kind of had plans for today and this is just not the best time to talk, all right?"
"Yeah, okay—and maybe we'll stop helping you when you ask for our advice. But thanks for your support, Nancy, I really appreciate it."
The relief she felt at his hang-up was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and irritation at herself. She could relax any weekend; it wasn't every day that the Hardys had a mystery they needed help with! It would've been easy to have simply copied the riddle down and worked it out with him instead of forcing him to decode it by himself. They could have solved it in no time together, she knew.
She stared at the phone for a good few minutes, but with a sigh decided against calling him back. He was hotheaded and could hold onto anger with a passion that both impressed and scared her; better to call him in the evening after the mystery was over and apologize. Then he would laugh about it, embarrassed, and things would return to normal.
A small smile crept its way onto her mouth at the thought, and she set her phone on the couch's arm while grabbing the novel that lay beside her. Her father's return home would be the time to call Frank again, she decided as she cracked it open to the bookmark.
The sudden ringing of her phone was startling, and she silenced it almost immediately.
"He—"
"Have you spoken to Frank recently?" It was Joe, and he sounded harried; it worried her. She glanced at the clock and realized her father would be home any minute.
"No, but I was about to call him, why?
"Did he tell you where he was, the last time you talked?" She had never heard him speak so urgently before, especially not about his brother.
"No, but he mentioned that you were staking out a different suspect, so I assumed he was also staking some—"
"Shit!" The abrupt expletive caught her by surprise, as did the loss of connection between their phones. He had hung up.
It's nothing, she told herself immediately. He's just late to dinner, that's all—he's—he's still working on that code and is at the place he was and lost track of the time. But even as she repeated this mantra her left hand continued to clutch the phone so tightly that she began to feel her pulse in that palm; panicked, she dropped the phone and shook out her wrist.
It's nothing. He just lost track of the time. It happens. It's nothing. He's late. It's nothing.
Her father returned home and kissed the top of her head, but looked at her strangely as he continued past her. "You all right?"
"It's nothing!" she blurted before she could catch herself. "Sorry—yeah, everything is fine." Her smile was stony and her eyes were troubled but he said nothing, only continued on his way to the kitchen. Their housekeeper had the weekends off and the Drews had always taken dinner time as a bit of a father-daughter bonding as they made simple meals together. It was when Nancy did not rise to the sound of his activity at the stove that he knew something was wrong.
"Nancy?" he called, softly.
"Joe called me a little bit ago, Frank was late coming home or something, and he wondered if I knew anything about it." She shrugged helplessly, and looked at him over her shoulder with large, panicked eyes. "I couldn't help."
The words relaxed him a bit; a bit of a smile eased his expression as he turned back to the soup that slowly heated on the stove. "He's a teenage boy, he'll turn up," he reassured his daughter.
From his position he could not see her grip her phone that much tighter.
She didn't touch the food her father had put together, and as a result he watched her carefully over his evening paper. She had asked him to keep the radio off, so they sat in a strangely uncomfortable silence, the first one between them in years.
Anxiety was rippling off Nancy in nearly visible waves and her father wished for nothing more than to offer her some word of comfort that might pierce through her worry, but nothing did.
She nearly jumped from her skin when the phone rang again, late into the night; immediately it was at her ear.
"Joe?"
"Nancy, we found Frank." His voice was so weak, not just a whisper but also completely devoid of emotion. "He was at a stakeout location and his suspect was our guy. He sh—." How horrifically Joe's voice now trembled on the other end. She could hear him swallow, again and again. "He shot Frank three times in the chest. They said he was dead by the time he hi—by the time he hit the ground."
She was laughing—she couldn't help it, it ripped through her and tore at her throat.
"Nancy!" His cry was hoarse, his voice was ruined. She could hear him crying.
She hadn't seen her father jump from his chair; she had forgotten he had been lying there, half-conscious, waiting for her to get her call. His arms wrapped around her, safe and strong. "What's happened?" His throat was thick with exhaustion.
"He died." Suddenly the laughter died in her throat, decomposed and rotted on her tongue. She heard her own words, and repeated them. The words twisted and tumbled on the third repetition and she found herself screaming, screaming, scream—
She was so cold, and it was so dark, and the voice was so loud in her ears, that screaming, somebody had to stop that—
The blankets were tangled around her legs, her thin tank top twisted all around her middle, and her hair was all over her face. But it didn't matter as she reached and reached in the darkness for her bedside table, for the familiar cool rubber touch of her phone.
He can't be dead, he can't be dead, he can't be dead. She chocked on her sobs, and her tears spilled over each other as they slipped down her cheeks to stain the pillows and sheets.
The other line answered, a voice murmured a thick, "Hello?" and her sobs became wails. She clutched herself into the fetal position and shivered, and waited for the crying to pass.
"Nancy? Is that you?" The voice was clearing, the voice she loved was clearing. "Are you okay? Nancy? Nancy, please, talk to me."
No. You need to keep talking—you need to keep talking, not me, you need to prove that you're alive.
"Nancy, this is Frank Hardy. Please stop crying." She loved that nervous desperation in his voice, loved it. "Please talk to me."
She forced herself to regain her breath, to quiet her sobs for just a moment. "I dreamed you were dead," she said in a quick rush before the tears could overwhelm her again. And how they did—and how simply saying it allowed jogged that horrific empty feeling once more, how brief it had been in her dream and how strongly her brain now exaggerated the pain.
She could imagine it so easily now, the loss of him. The rough and ragged hole it would punch through her, the loss of that one person she truly trusted her life with, the loss of that one person who knew her, knew every fear and want and doubt and desire like no one else ever had. The thought of reimaging, re-understanding her life without him was almost too painful to bear.
His responding chuckle was full of relief. "I'm not dead, okay? I think I'd know—if I were…dead."
There was one last overwhelming cry and then the tears were gone, and she was left exhausted. "Please try to stay not-dead," she murmured as she sighed. "I couldn't—I can't—" And she was forced to stop.
"You, too."
"Frank, don't hang up—if I don't talk. Just—stay on the line? For a little?" With some of the strength that remained, she pulled the blankets over her tightly wound form. She smiled wanly at their warmth.
"Would you…like me to read you to sleep? Would that help?" He was clearly struggling for something to cheer her up, but his suggestion was all it took for her weak smile to grow strong.
"Yeah, that would help a lot."
She didn't recognize what he picked, but his voice was soothing, so soothing and so comforting and she was wrapped inside its warmth and its familiarity as she drifted back to sleep.