CHAPTER 1
"Aw, come on Joe! You know you quit caring what your Halloween costume was when they stopped making Batman suits in your size!" Frank Hardy chuckled at his year younger brother, eyeing the childish pout. Nothing about the tanned countenance suggested Joe had turned twenty-four the previous spring.
"That's not true, brother o' mine. I'm fine without the Batman gear. It's not getting any candy that's a gyp." Joe laughed, ruining the faux petulant expression as a distinct twinkle lit the sapphire eyes. "Besides, I can still get a Caped Crusader suit if I want; I saw one online."
"Whatever, Joe, but I think Vanessa might have something to say about that. I have it on good authority that your wife matched her costume to yours, and I'm pretty sure she has no intention of going anywhere dressed as Robin."
"Who said anything about Robin? Ness would make a smokin' Catwoman." A goofy grin suggested Joe had momentarily forgotten his sibling's existence. "All that black leather virtually painted on and those pointy little ears..."
"Whoa!... Way, way more than I want to know about my sister-in-law! Those of us that are spending the evening stag are trying to keep this strictly PG."
"I know any number of young ladies that would make sure you didn't spend any of your evenings going stag, Frank." Joe waited, leaving the statement hanging.
A heavy sigh escaped the brunette before he answered, toffee brown eyes cast down at his suddenly intriguing shoes. "I thought we agreed not to talk about that anymore."
Joe's blond waves shook in denial as he glanced around the painfully neat living room of his brother's apartment. "No, you declared we weren't talking about it. I never agreed."
Frank managed a small smile, the joking mood of two minutes earlier annoyingly elusive. "Not today, ok? Some of us have a full day's work to do."
"Fine, not today, but you can't fill every minute of every day with work forever."
"Technically, I can, or at least tonight." Frank stood and retrieved a black rectangle faintly shimmering with silver letters from the glass table beside his front door. "The party isn't over until two a.m., and I'm not taking a four hour break unlike some lazy people."
"Hey! The break isn't my fault, you know. How was I supposed to guess you'd agree to work Halloween night? Who does that? All I have to do is pass out a little candy while Vanessa's out with her nieces and then I'll meet you and Dad."
"Nieces?" Frank frowned. His sister-in-law was only child, and unless he'd mysteriously forgotten something rather drastic about his own life, Joe was not an uncle.
"They call her Aunt Vanessa; that makes them nieces." Joe made a noncommittal gesture. "Actually, they're her mother's older brother's grandchildren."
Frank nodded absently, re-reading the invitation between his fingers. "First cousins once removed then. So she's taking them trick or treating and you're staying at the house?"
"Yeah." Joe took a hurried step back from the offered piece of card stock. "Trick or treat ends at nine o'clock, although she might be back before that if the girls give out. The older one's only four."
"Does Vanessa remember how much junk food you can actually consume? If she's leaving you in charge, she better pick up another dozen bags of treats." Frank turned the ebony paper over. "Huh, it says the mansion where the party's being held was named Sunrise in 1757 when Gabriel Hammonds wed Eliza Dutcher on the grounds at dawn. His son, Isaac, inherited the estate upon his father's death in October 1777 at the Battle of Freeman's Farm."
"Wasn't Freeman's Farm up closer to Albany?" Joe felt an eighth grade history lecture clunking around in his skull, but it wouldn't quite come to him.
"Didn't think you remembered anything from New York Studies." Frank snorted at his little brother's grimace. Mrs. Knapp had been truly unpleasant as a teacher, and it took a lot for Frank to say that.
The lecture finally clicked. "Just because I didn't like the class doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. The Battle of Freeman's Farm, led by General Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold started in September. Arnold led an aggressive charge at the British using Colonel Daniel Moore's long riflemen in addition to regular troops, but Gates wouldn't leave his fortifications. The Revolutionary forces still won, but it wasn't the rout it could have been. General Burgoyne was still able to lead another battle in early October and his army didn't surrender until mid-October, I think."
"That's considerably more than I remember about it, Joe. How come you always stayed under the bookworm radar in school? You had a lot better grades than most of our friends realized."
Joe flushed slightly, secretly pleased his academically accomplished brother noticed, before smirking and making sure the coffee table was between them. "I was already better at sports than you, Frank, if everybody knew I was smarter too it would have been embarrassing - for you!"
It took a moment for the comment to register and by then his younger sibling had rounded the end of the table and snatched a huge wrapped golf umbrella out of a sleek black stand. Frank lunged at him, snagging an unused cane from the obsidian cylinder on the way by. Ten sweaty minutes that Zorro would have applauded later, both of them were still intently focused on an intricate series of thrusts and parries, having abandoned the living room in favor of the back deck.
"Ahem... Ahem!... AHEM! CHILDREN!"
Sudden silence descended, a red cheeked Joe frozen with the furled umbrella above his head in both hands, neatly blocking the down-swinging cane.
Slowly both of them lowered their hands to their sides and their eyes to the floor, chests heaving. Frank found the air to speak first. "Uh, hi Dad. Didn't hear you come in."
"Obviously not." Fenton looked from one to the other, seeing the mischievous boys they had been rather than grown men. They were clearly sheepish at being caught horsing around rather than angry with one another. "Might I inquire as to what in the blazes you two are doing?"
"Reviewing New York state history. Frank started it." Joe's expression and delivery were dead on earnest, eliciting a quickly suppressed smile from his father and an incredulous stare from his brother.
"I started it? Who grabbed my umbrella and turned it into a sword?"
"You started it." Joe managed to spit this out as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "You told me about the history of the Sunrise mansion, which made me ask about the Revolutionary War, which led you to remembering what a phenomenal student I was, which necessitated a reminder that I wasn't merely some brilliant scholar with a display of my equally amazing fencing abilities. Ergo, you started it."
"Well that certainly makes perfect sense." Fenton shook his head. "Anything broken?"
"Us or the house?" Frank propped the cane against the deck rail.
"You two."
"No."
"Then we can get to work, I assume?" Fenton walked back through the kitchen, casting a glance at the two Continental Army uniforms on the back of the closet door, one plain spun, the other formal, but tattered and blood streaked.
"That's all you're going to say to him, Dad? He could have busted half my furniture!" Frank produced a wonderful imitation of the whine everyone outside the family seemed to think was exclusive to Joe.
"But he didn't. Besides, it's not my house." Fenton flashed a conspiratorial grin at his younger son.
"Fine." Frank gave up any pretense of being annoyed, an open grin lighting his face. "It always works when he tries to get me in trouble, though. Heck, it almost worked just now."
"Yep," Joe winked, plopping his feet on Frank's desk. "It's good to be the baby..."
Fenton cleared his throat, tapping one finger on the map he had unrolled on the table. "If the baby could possibly refocus his attention and recall that he's married with a full time job... One I pay him for, I might add..."
Frank snickered.
"I sign your checks, too, Frank." Despite the dry words, Fenton was happy to see the high jinks. His older child had been far too serious of late. "The gate house is here and will have regular security guards that work for the estate year around as well as two officers from the Bayport police department. They're as much there to direct traffic as anything else, though, so once the guests are inside, security is pretty much up to us. Officially, Chief Collig doesn't provide staffing for private parties at taxpayer expense. Unofficially, a number of senior off duty officers made the guest list and will be available if we need them."
Joe scanned his eyes over the roster of expected attendees, noting the who's who of Bayport and all the bigwigs of the local university, which stood to reason since the Sunrise estate was currently owned by Bayport U. The house had been restored to its 1777 state, thankfully well documented in Isaac Hammonds' journal.
Party was a rather loose term for the event as far as Joe was concerned. The majority of those invited would be working the first half of the evening as the various ghost and goblins of a haunted house, with the admission cost serving as a fund raising drive for university programs. After the haunted mansion closed to the public at eleven o'clock, then the evening morphed into a social gathering. "Once the doors close, I don't see this group as being particularly rowdy. The main task is to ensure that everyone not on the guest list actually leaves when the public portion is over."
"I agree." Fenton paused, pointing out a few places on the grounds he didn't consider well secured. "While most of the guests are locally prominent, there's no one attending that would warrant hiring personal security. The university's primary reason for hiring us is to protect the antiques in the house."
Frank couldn't really picture the gathering of volunteer businessmen, professors, and trustees as rambunctious either. "All of the furniture is original to the period and fairly valuable, but it's a little large to walk off with under a ghost's sheet. The focus of any theft would almost have to be the displays of Eliza Dutcher Hammonds' jewelry and the artwork throughout the mansion. This painting and this one are worth roughly a million dollars apiece." He shuffled his desk to display the appropriate photographs.
Joe nodded. He'd gone over all of this with Frank days ago, but this was the first opportunity they'd had to run it through with their father who had been out of town. "There may be one thing working in our favor that you haven't mentioned, Dad."
"What's that?" Fenton was meticulous in cataloguing all the pros and cons of any situation, whether it was an international terrorist plot or a simple case of a college that didn't want their historical artwork stolen. Still, if Joe saw something he didn't, he was all ears.
"The premise for the haunted house itself..." Joe trailed off, searching for the best description. "It's a bit, ah, dull."
Fenton's expression shifted toward quizzical. "How so?"
"By keeping to the revolutionary era and the story of the house itself, it limits the sort of monsters, for lack of a better word, that you can portray. I know ol' Gabe here," Joe affectionately smacked at his brother's shoulder as Frank would be dressing as the long deceased Colonel, "is supposed to haunt the place, but a bunch of phantom soldiers isn't as scary as what most kids are looking for on Halloween. I think the wilder college bunch will end up at the haunted corn maze out on route thirty five."
"Wild college kids wouldn't be likely to steal eighteenth century art, anyway, Joe."
"True," Frank conceded, "but Joe has a point. The less mayhem around, the easier it is to spot anyone who does want to help themselves to a picture or a diamond or three."
"I suppose that makes sense, although the fact that the house is actually rumored to be haunted rather than a corn maze that is strictly imaginary may skew interest toward the estate."
"For the crowd that matters in this case, it will." Frank shrugged.
"And what crowd would that be?"
"The one that writes donation checks to support the university." Joe finished his brother's thought. "So, you have all your lines down pat, Frank?"
That was the disadvantage of being selected to be Gabriel. Frank was expected to guide groups through the outer cemetery and into the main house while spinning a yarn. "Yeah. Gabriel's story is relatively simple. He was wounded at Freeman's Farm and died there four days later, along with about half of Van Cortlandt's New York regiment. By the time Halloween rolled around three weeks later, most of the household staff insisted they'd seen him wandering his home in the days before and after he died, trying to regroup the soldiers under his command. Eliza finally found him and led him down to his grave; convinced him he was dead. Trouble with that theory is that she'd been dead a decade herself by then. Whatever happened to start off the stories, sightings of Gabriel on the grounds have been reported intermittently ever since."
"You are going to jazz that up a bit tonight, right?" Joe shot his brother a query completed with a single upraised eyebrow.
"Yes. For Pete's sake, Joe, I can spin a ghost story. I just find the whole idea vaguely ridiculous." Frank huffed a breath up through deep brown hair just verging on too long. "You shouldn't be too bored once you bother to arrive, though, little brother. The entire upstairs is devoted to other horror legends that existed at the time, which still counts in witches, vampires, werewolves, ghouls... All of those tales have been around pretty much forever."
"Still, it leaves out all the Freddy Kruger, Chainsaw Massacre types."
"Clearly that's a drawback." Fenton's wry sarcasm ground that line of discussion to a halt. He picked up the silver embossed invitation Frank had initially tried to give Joe and firmly planted it in his younger child's hand.
"You'll need that for the directions on the back."
Joe's nose wrinkled up as if he'd been handed a half decomposed skunk dipped in swamp muck. "Uh, the GPS will be fine."
"I don't trust that contraption. Take the paper, just in case." Fenton shrugged. "Why don't you want the thing? Usually you humor me when I get in technophobe mode."
"It's that poetry on there. It's creepy. What kind of poem is that anyway?"
Frank studied the pale graphite calligraphy scrolled behind the bolder silver on black lettering before stuffing the item in his sibling's pocket. "A bad one. You can barely even see it, Joe."
"I can read it perfectly well, Frank. I can practically feel it and I tell you it's creepy!"
"Sure, o-kaaaay." Frank paused, suddenly disquieted, before shrugging. "Whatever. I'll see you at nine thirty."
Fenton looked from one child to the other, sensing the dynamic change but uncertain what caused it. His eyes strayed to the fake musket and long rifle accompanying the costumes. "Have fun passing out candy, Joe, and don't worry about hurrying on the way up there, the road's curvy."
He handed his child the simple clothing of a militia soldier, including the prop rifle. "I can trust you two not to brain each other over the head with those, right?"
Both sons genuinely smiled at him, the strange moment relegated to the past with a laugh. "Of course. If we wanted to shoot at each other, we'd have done it before now. Like when Frank backed over my mailbox, for instance."
Frank groaned. "You moved it to the other side of the driveway, Joe. Exactly how old do I have to get before you stop bringing that up?"
"A hundred and sixty two."
"Great. I'll pencil it in on the calendar."
