A/N: I've never read a Hardy Boys book, but I relied on two websites, the Hardy Boys Drinking Game ( tv_drinking_ ) and the more hilarious paragraphs of their Wikipedia entry ( wiki/The_Hardy_Boys). Check them out for a laugh!
ndndnd
Nancy hiccupped, feeling that sudden shudder that always arrived a few minutes after a hard crying session. She was glad that the drive home was on a straight-and-narrow highway, mostly deserted now that it was past three a.m. She put the cruise control on and blasted Celine Dion to make it all that much easier to wallow in her post-breakup misery. There was a half-pint of Rocky Road still in the freezer that she knew would work wonders tomorrow.
Ned had had a wounded, grieving look on his face, the "What did I do?" question imprinted all over it, exactly what Nancy had been dreading to see. It had taken several faltered beginnings until Ned finally coaxed the conversation out of her, and Nancy had been all that more disgusted with herself that he had had to be the one comforting her.
Nevertheless, it had gone better than she had expected; Ned had listened quietly, asking questions while knowing her decision could not be reversed, and after a lot of long and painful silences had moved on to questioning her about rules and boundaries from now on. Would she still call him about sleuthing cases? Was he still invited over for Thanksgiving weekend? These questions gave a permanency to the situation, an 'end of an era' that brought on a fresh round of tears. Nancy wasn't sure whether she was upset because he had been upset, or because she had wanted him to be even more upset.
Nancy felt her cell phone vibrate in her pocket, and rolled her eyes as she silenced Celine. "Come on, Dad, I'm eighteen," she muttered, and pressed the speakerphone on.
"Nancy—it's Joe," a familiar voice said urgently. "You have to come to the Bayport hospital. Frank's been injured."
"What?" Nancy got a quick reminder of why to never phone and drive at the same time, swerving onto the shoulder and slamming on the breaks. "What happened?" she asked, her heart pounding, her hands suddenly becoming slippery with sweat.
"I'll tell you when you get here. He might be fine, if there's no permanent damage. Sorry to do this to you, but he's been mumbling your name over and over again."
"See you there." Nancy peeled out and spent the next hour and fifteen minutes distracting herself with a game called How Many Traffic Violations Have I Committed? If speeding throughout only counted as one, then at least she was still in the single digits by the time she skidded into the hospital's nearest parking spot.
She almost forgot to shut her car door before sprinting to the ICU and repeatedly pressing the "Call Nurse" button like an ADHD kid in an elevator. "Come on, come on, incompetency," Nancy muttered, glancing at her watch.
A suspicious-looking hag gingerly opened the door like she was afraid of a fire on its opposite side. "Past visiting hours, ma'am," she said curtly.
"Yes, but this might be my only chance to—"
"If your loved one is in the ICU, then they must need to rest." For this woman, trauma was a routine part of the everyday experience.
Nancy wasted no more breath and saw her list of options scroll before her eyes. The call button wire appeared to be connected to the door locking mechanism, and if she cut that, there were at least two good hiding spots over the woman's shoulder. Or, once she found out Frank's room number, her grappling hook and rope might not be seen on the outside wall of the hospital if she threw rocks at the light bulbs in the parking lot and sprayed most of her can of fake fog.
Joe came up behind her. "Thank you, Nurse Ratchett, we'll wait until visiting hours, if you're unable to notify us before then when he wakes up. Come on, Nancy," Joe said pleasantly, with a strong hint of warning in his voice as he put a brotherly arm around her and steered her firmly to the empty waiting room. A thought came to Nancy unbidden that Joe really could be her brother in the fullness of time, and the thought made her blush before the next round of anxiety.
"Joe, if this is my last chance—"
Joe shook his head impatiently. "Frank's been through worse. I just thought you should be here right when he wakes up. Why is he saying your name now, in the middle of our case? Usually he's got a one-track mind."
Nancy willed her blood to return to a slower and more consistent pace through her circulatory system.
At her silence, Joe's face exploded into a smile. "No kidding!" he said with genuine happiness. "You two finally had your talk?"
"You should be talking right now, not me," Nancy snapped, although secretly pleased.
Joe narrowed his eyes in a we'll-talk-later expression, but took her bait. "Well, this case all started when Frank and I were sitting around the breakfast table, discussing our father's latest case. Aunt Gertrude had just reamed us a new one for not immediately putting our clean laundry away, and our mom was making us sandwiches to take for the day. Come to think of it, I've never seen my mom do anything but make sandwiches…and I could have sworn there was one day last summer when she went outside to make sandwiches and didn't come back for three weeks…"
"Joe," Nancy prompted impatiently, although she had wondered herself what Mrs. Hardy did all day.
"So our dad was telling us about this new case of smugglers trying to get their hands on a top-secret microfilm at the military base just outside of the city. It's incredible, Nancy. Never were so many assorted felonies committed in a simple American small town. Over the years Frank and I have discovered and prevented murder, drug peddling, race horse kidnapping, diamond smuggling, medical malpractice, big-time auto theft, espionage, and the hijacking of strategic materials."
"Sounds like a great place to raise your kids," Nancy said, and felt a fresh wave of pain.
"Well, even though my dad was the best in his field at the NYPD"—Joe accented each letter and swelled with pride—"he tends to be forgetful. Sometimes he only tells us enough about each case to mislead us into mortal danger, but it's probably because he knows that we will come out victorious anyway. Well, my dad forgot to set up guards at the military base for that night, but he knew that Frank and I could do as good of a job, so he let us loose in there and gave us access to all kinds of top-secret and experimental technology."
Nancy was starting to get bored. Most of the Hardy Boys' mysteries started out similar to this.
"Then Chet wandered in at mealtime, followed by this gorgeous, petite young blonde. As Chet polished off breakfast and the leftovers from the fridge, she tearfully told us her story of her missing parent, who had been a prominent scientist. I wanted to respect Chet, but I was totally smitten. Before I knew it, I'd invited Chet and Malindaleebeth to come with us to guard the citadel that night. I said that maybe we could use our top-secret access to research what had happened to her dad."
"Hmmm," Nancy said.
"So promptly at 7:00, after Frank's dinner with you, Mom kissed us goodbye and Dad gave us the keys, fake passports, and the usual unlimited credit cards. We all split up to guard a different corner of the military base, so in case anyone tried any funny business, someone would see it and we could attack one at a time. Frank knows JavaScript as well as Klingon, but it still took him a few tries to hack into the 'even more top secret' parts of the security system."
Nancy could detect Joe's slight eye roll at this.
"I soon heard Frank whisper urgently to me over the walkie talkie that Malindaleebeth was actually the daughter of the leading smuggler after the microfilm! I raced to meet up with Chet, and sure enough, I took him with me and we both saw Malindaleebeth unscrewing the microfilm from its glass case within the deepest chasm of the military base. She must have done quite a dance through all the moving sensors. I was going to sneak up behind her with chloroform, but then—"
"Chet burped," Nancy finished for him.
Joe seemed to sulk a little. "Hey, he's good to have around in a sleuthing pinch," he protested. "Malindaleebeth whirled around and looked at us all nasty-like. 'My name is actually Jane,' she sneered, 'and I never cared about either of you.'"
Nancy put a comforting hand on Joe's shoulder.
Joe continued. "Well, the fake name I should have been able to figure out, but it really stung to find out she didn't care. Nevertheless I grabbed a lamp and threw it at her. She ducked and said something into her Blackberry. From the outside, a large saw-like machine carved a circular hole in the ceiling."
"I hope you jumped on the bottom rung of the ladder that came down, and went with her?" Nancy asked.
"I was about to, but the ladder never appeared. She climbed into a military cannon and blasted herself through the hole in the roof and into a waiting helicopter. Then I heard muffled cries from behind me. Chet was being kidnapped! The door to a secret passage was rapidly closing, so I stuck my foot in it, but I only ended up losing the tip of one of my best Reeboks. By then Chet and Jane"—Joe wiped a tear away—"were long gone, and I realized Frank was totally by himself. I'm terrified at leaving people alone in those situations because whenever we leave our father alone for a little while, we typically later find him emaciated, dehydrated, semi-conscious, and delirious, and have to succor him back to reality with candy bars and water, carting him through tunnels in a double fireman's carry."
"Sounds terrifying," Nancy said supportively, although at this point in the story she was experiencing her own terror. She looked down at her hands, which were shaking as they gripped each other.
"At first I couldn't find Frank in the top-secret location I'd left him, so I searched the closets. At last I found him in the last broom cabinet on the left, jammed in the bottom drawer. He had been knocked unconscious. There was a bootprint upside his head."
Nancy's eyebrows creased with worry.
"Nancy, I did CPR, the Heimlich, doused his head in toilet water, gave him a few slaps, threw him down the stairs, pressed all pressure points at once, and opened his eyes forcibly with spaghetti tongs, but when he still didn't come to, I grudgingly called an ambulance. I had to walk back home dragging him so they wouldn't find me coming out of the military base. They asked what happened and I said that Frank must have been mugged while I was taking a leak in the side bushes. Aunt Gertrude heard that through the upstairs window, ran outside, and reamed me another new one." Joe groaned and held his head in his hands.
Nancy waited for more, and then felt her lungs stop working. "So that's it?" she gasped. "That's where we are right now? The microfilm gone to smugglers, Frank unconscious, and Chet kidnapped?"
"At least my dad isn't kidnapped," Joe muttered defensively.
"Of course not—he used to be in the NYPD," Nancy snapped, standing up. "I can't take this—"
Nurse Ratchett swung the door open abruptly, a cigarette dangling hands-free between her lips. "Just in time," she said out of each corner of her mouth. "He's awake, and visiting hours have begun."
Nancy thought briefly how lucky the hospital was to be saving hundreds of dollars in repairs, as she would have reverted to either Plan A or Plan B if this Plan C had not cropped up. "Thank you, ma'am," she said with an efficient nod, Nurse Ratchett's beehive flapping in the wind from the speed at which Nancy and Joe ran past. Joe could have sworn he saw a couple of bees chasing them down the hallway.
"Oh, my darling," Nancy breathed, forcing herself to grab only Frank's hand, although she wanted to throw her face in the crook of his neck, squeezing him tightly in their newfound feelings for one another. "Nancy," Frank groaned, his eyes having difficulty focusing. He twitched nervously on the hospital bed, his mind far away as Nancy gently helped him sit up. "Nancy," Frank said again, holding his head and wincing.
Joe tried not to appear jealous that now Frank was uttering a woman's name after waking up from head trauma, when it had always been Joe's name.
"Nancy…" Frank tried a third time.
"I'm here, sweetie!" Nancy said vehemently. "I will not leave you again."
Frank opened his eyes fully and let his eyes rest on Nancy's face. "Nancy Drew…" He blinked rapidly five times. "…is the enemy."
Joe and Nancy gaped at him in shock. Joe was the first to recover. "Oh, no," he moaned. "Frank's been hypnotized."
A steely determination had settled on Nancy, and she squared her shoulders and lifted her head, taking out her all-purpose weapon/explosive/magnifying glass/rope/scissors/wooden spoon/pen. For a moment, Joe was more afraid of the look in Nancy's eyes than the situation they were in. "I know who did this, Joe," she said quietly. "Protect your brother. I'm going out."