A/N: Thank you for the reads and reviews! Yes, Cherylann, Angel of the Sea is in Cape May, NJ, which I believe is part of the network of bed and breakfasts that host Sherlock Saturdays twice a year! Some people were disappointed by the tie of the last chapter; I felt like the Sherlock Saturday mystery was simple enough that both the boys and girls would solve it (although maybe it just seemed easy to me because I already knew the solution?). What in heck are Michael and the teachers up to? JB

"Hi, Nancy," Joe said when he answered his front door Sunday morning. He was still in pajamas, spiky blonde hair every which way.

"Did I wake you up?" Nancy asked.

"I did tell you 9:00," Joe said. "Come on up."

"Basement," his mother said as she appeared on the stairs.

Joe turned to her. "You think I'm going to make a move on my best friend's girlfriend in my bedroom?"

"Basement," his mother repeated. "Good morning, Nancy. Joe, are you going to ask your guest if she'd like any refreshments?"

"Um," Joe said, "Nancy, did you want to tell my mom if you needed any refreshments?"

Mrs. Hardy rolled her eyes in hopelessness. Nancy greeted her, thanked her again for the great time she'd had at Sherlock Saturday yesterday, and explained that she'd already eaten.

"Some lousy detectives we are," Nancy commented when the basement door was shut and Joe was firing up the computer. "Now we have a witness. What do we do if your mom mentions to Tony later that we were down here together?"

"I don't see any reason why she would," Joe said. "She'll assume nothing's going on because we're not trying to hide anything." He gestured to a chair across the room that Nancy could pull over for herself. Nancy complied while silently agreeing with Mrs. Hardy's assessment of her son's manners.

"Tony thinks I'm at church right now," Nancy said. "My dad gave me today off because he took off last Sunday. Is Tony going to mass?"

"His grandmother decided that it's warm enough today to have their last Prito family picnic of the year," Joe said. "He said he was going over there this morning to help prep the food, and then of course it's an all-afternoon event. So we could sit here for eight hours if we wanted to. Tell me what happened at the game on Friday, every detail, and then show me what you have."

Nancy paused. "Should we get Frank?"

"Frank's not here, probably out for a run. We'll start the research now, then bring him up to speed when he gets home."

Nancy started from the beginning, but it wasn't a long story: how she'd asked Tony to buy her a soda at the football game, then snuck into Michael's truck, found a written prescription, taken a picture of it with her phone, and snuck back to the game via the most poorly illuminated path. Nancy could tell that Joe was fully focused on her, interrupting only to ask a couple of clarifying questions, and Nancy found herself thinking that Joe might turn out to be a very good detective.

"You've got quite a pair of balls, Nancy," Joe commented when she had finished. "Searching Michael's truck right out in the open. We have to remember that anybody at all could have seen you do it and not said anything. To you, at least. They could have told someone else."

"I told Biff about the prescription. He said a small, folded blue prescription slip could definitely have been what Coach was delivering to Michael that day in the gym. It would make sense to hand Michael a prescription and a doctor's phone number at the same time, especially since Dr. Jansen Young is the doctor who wrote the prescription." Nancy pulled up the image on her phone and showed it to him.

Joe's features went slack. "Oh, no. This is not good, Nancy," he said. "I recognize that medication from a horrifying video they made us watch in middle school, and it's nothing good. This mystery just got real."

"What is it?" Nancy asked, and Joe responded by typing in the name on the computer's search engine. He clicked the icon to hear the pronunciation.

"Methadone," Joe repeated. He read from the website. "Commonly used to treat opiate addictions, especially to the drug heroin. Methadone acts on the same opioid receptors as morphine and heroin to stabilize patients and minimalize withdrawal symptoms."

Nancy had no idea what Joe had just said, so she waited and hoped that he would explain himself without her having to ask. All she knew about drugs was what her father had described to her many times: that if she ever tried any illegal drug, even once, her entire life would be ruined and she would never again have one minute of happiness.

"It's like," Joe began to explain, his voice shaking, "if you have an addiction to sugar, and you have to eat a hundred pounds of it a day, you can take a daily pill instead that's only worth fifteen pounds of sugar. So you're not completely cured, there's still sugar in your system, but at least you can start having a more normal life."

Nancy frowned. "That makes no sense. People who are on drugs need to get off drugs."

"Nancy," Joe said, "do you realize what I'm telling you? It looks like Michael has been using heroin. Heroin is one of the worst, most dangerous drugs out there, it kills people all the time, and it's one of the hardest habits to stop."

Nancy was stunned into silence. She felt a lump form in the back of her throat as she thought of what this would do to Tony. She thought that only a week and a half ago, it had looked like Michael had been enjoying himself in a college class and might have been thinking about enrolling. She hoped that she was misunderstanding the concepts and asked Joe repeated clarifying questions until Joe cut her off.

"You understand me, Nancy. You're stalling," Joe said. "So where do we go from here? I feel bad to even tell Frank and Biff about this, and then they have to live with it just like we do, but maybe there's a different explanation that we can all figure out together. Until we know more, I definitely don't think we should tell—"

"Joe!" Mrs. Hardy called as the basement door opened. "Tony!"

Joe and Nancy heard rapid footsteps as the door closed. Tony appeared around the staircase in seconds.

Joe and Nancy's reactions were so poorly timed that the situation would have been comical under other circumstances. Nancy exited out of her phone pictures as Joe exited out of the methadone website.

Tony slowly approached. "You two played me," he said. "I've been the third wheel all along."

"Um," Nancy said.

"Tony, man, it's nothing like that," Joe said uncertainly. Tony stopped walking when he stood directly in front of Joe.

"I know that it's nothing like that," Tony said to him, with a spark in his eyes that Nancy didn't like at all. "My girl doesn't cheat. But Nancy told me she was going to church this morning, so you can see why I'm surprised that she's sitting here with you right now. Your phone is off and so I came to invite you to my family's picnic today. You both look guilty as all hell so don't pretend that this is anything good. What are you hiding from me? What was on the phone and what was on the computer?"

Nancy turned to Joe. Later she couldn't believe that she had said something so stupid. "But we promised Frank and Biff that we'd vote on it before we told him," she said helplessly.

"Oh, of course. My girlfriend needs Biff Hooper's permission to speak to me." Tony grasped Joe's open backpack next to the computer and roughly upended its contents against the wall. Nancy flinched; the movement hadn't hurt anyone, just made a very big mess and a very loud, startling noise.

"Knock it off, douchebag," Joe snapped, his own temper flaring. "You're in my house and Nancy is sitting right here. Give us one second to think."

"You want me to give you time to think up a good lie, asshole? Nope. I'll clean up your basement when I think you've told me the truth." Tony sprinkled the contents of the trash can in a semicircle around Joe's chair.

Nancy tuned out Joe and Tony's argument as she realized that she had only met Tony less than six weeks ago; and, while she had seen a tender side of him that no one else had, she had also never fully seen a darker side of him that everyone else had. Frank's words returned to her from last month: Tony went through a mild destruction of property phase a couple of years ago…he is not tame, Nancy. She finally understood why Michael kept a tight leash on his little brother.

Tony began to gather the cushions from the furniture and throw them around the room. One of them knocked over the box of video games, scattering them with a noisy clatter.

"Stop it!" Nancy cried out. "You're scaring me!"

That stopped him. Tony lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling. "I can't believe both of you would keep secrets from me," he said, sounding hurt and defeated. "Please tell me what's going on."

The door to the basement opened. "Joseph!" Mrs. Hardy called.

Joe held up an urgent finger to Nancy and Tony, signaling them to be quiet. "We're fine, Mom. Sorry, we'll clean it up," he shouted.

"Yes, you will. I've told you a million times. Take the roughhousing outside." The door closed.

Joe exhaled and looked at Tony. "If she'd walked down the stairs and seen this mess, you might never have been allowed in our house again."

Tony apologized to each of them. He began to clean up the basement by himself while Joe whispered with Nancy. They both agreed that the best course of action was to tell Tony everything, even without asking Frank and Biff about it first. There had been nothing but papers in the trash can so the only time-consuming part of Tony's clean up was getting Joe's assignments back in the correct folders in his backpack. Then the three of them sat on the couch, Tony in the middle.

Nancy's heart rate had returned to normal. Tony once again looked like the boy she liked, not an angry stranger. She took his hand. "I started this and I dragged everyone into it," she said. "So it's my job to tell this to you. Joe will help me out if I forget anything. I've already told you everything about the mystery up until…Michael got involved."

Tony frowned at her, his eyes widening.

Nancy told him everything that had happened since then: Michael's meeting with Coach Hafetz in the school gym the Friday before last, when Biff had seen Michael receive the script and the doctor's phone number; Nancy finding the script in the glove box of Michael's truck on Friday night; yesterday, when Iola had told her at the cemetery that Coach Hafetz's sister had died of a drug overdose; and, finally, she showed him the picture of Michael's script for methadone on her phone.

Tony had said nothing throughout Nancy's explanation, a variety of emotions crossing his face. He looked at the floor and appeared to be processing this information for a long moment after she'd finished speaking. "So it looks like Michael has been doing drugs," he said. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and buried his hands in his hair. He swore softly. "All those lectures he gave me. That hypocrite. I hate him."

Nancy looked over Tony's back at Joe and gave him a questioning look. Joe shook his head, conveying his opinion that he didn't think Tony would have another outburst. Nancy began rubbing Tony's back in gentle circles.

Tony accepted the backrub for a minute. Then he leaned back on the couch and reached for Nancy. Nancy wrapped her arms around him and held him.

Joe waited a respectable amount of time before speaking. "Tony," he said. "Out of the five people who know about this, you're the most valuable out of all of us. If we're going to get this thing solved, you know Michael the best and you have the most opportunity to keep an eye on him. He might need help. Or we could go to an adult. Or we can forget about this while we still can. He's your brother so it's your decision."

Tony disentangled himself from Nancy and sat up straight. He blinked a few times and rubbed one eye. "No adults," he said. "Drugs are illegal and I don't want him in jail. And there's no way I can forget about it. I'm sorry again for throwing things, guys. I can see why you kept this from me. I mean, what can we do about it if he's on drugs?"

"Let's start by brainstorming the more pleasant theories, the ones where Michael isn't on drugs and our teachers aren't part of an underground prescription drug-dealing ring," Joe said. He returned to the computer to resume his internet search and Tony and Nancy followed him.

"Maybe the prescription is for someone who can't afford it, so Michael is helping out by making his health insurance pay for it," Nancy suggested.

Tony shook his head. He looked tired and unhappy but holding it together. "Nobody in my family has insurance," he said. "We don't go to the doctor much and we pay cash when we do."

"I do think there's got to be a chance that Michael is getting the script for someone else," Joe said.

"But then why would the script be in his name?" Tony asked. "How many rides has he given each of you? Michael works, helps our family, and tries to see Polly once in a while. That is all he does and that is who he is. Although it looks like maybe I don't know him as well as I thought I did. But I do know that if anybody in our family needed medication—hell, if a perfect stranger needed medication—Michael would drive them to that doctor an hour and a half away and wait for them for six hours to drive them back."

"Blackmail? Somebody wants Michael to get them methadone and doesn't…want to go to the doctor themselves or something? Or doesn't really need methadone but wants to get high off it?" Joe said, but none of them were convinced. Joe clicked on a few articles and the general consensus was that, if a person wanted to get high, they would probably choose a different drug than methadone.

"Joe—Joe, scroll down," Nancy said, peering at the methadone article. "Guys, it says that methadone is also a very powerful painkiller, prescribed for people in extreme pain. Michael is in extreme pain!" Nancy said happily.

Tony gave Nancy a half-smile. "Thanks for trying, Nancy, but I think we would be able to tell if Michael were in extreme pain. Plus he would go to a doctor's office like a normal person, and he would tell anyone else in pain to go see a doctor, too. But, again, I feel like my opinions on him are worth nothing because I never would have believed he would be caught up in anything like this."

"You've got to trust your gut instinct," Joe told him. He clicked on a few links. "Don't start second-guessing yourself. Oh, and good news—methadone is an eighty-year-old drug so it's pretty cheap. The cost of a daily dose is enough to be annoying to someone without much money, but if Michael and our teachers were dealing drugs, I think they would choose a drug that's a lot more expensive than this one."

"I kind of wish he were dealing drugs instead of doing them," Tony said quietly. Then, more vehemently, "I mean, Michael? Michael? I've lived with him my whole life! Does he look like he's on drugs to either of you?"

They googled "can you hide it from other people if you are high." They had to revise their search and choose more specific words, but they eventually clicked on enough links to learn that, yes, unfortunately, some experienced users are excellent at acting normally when they are high.

"But he works construction all day, and then makes pizzas at night. And doesn't slice himself up on anything. People who are on drugs can't work," Nancy said.

They googled "can you still go to work and have a job if you are on drugs." They found a lot of legal advice about prescription drugs that they had to sift through, but finally found even more disappointing articles; yes, there was such a thing called a "high functioning substance use disorder," which meant that some people who were on drugs still held down jobs. They were either under the influence at work and could make it through the day anyway, or started their drug habit immediately after their work shift.

The basement door opened and closed. "Hi, you guys," Frank said as he came down the stairs, rounding the corner and towel drying his hair.

Tony, Joe, and Nancy all greeted Frank in joyous tones. Frank would figure this out for them.

Frank gave them all suspicious looks as he pulled up a chair to the computer. "Somehow I don't like it that you're all so happy to see me," he said.

Joe quickly brought Frank up to speed; for a moment, both brothers were entirely focused on each other, Frank seeming to finish Joe's sentences and Joe anticipating Frank's questions. Nancy couldn't believe that she hadn't until this moment picked up on just how strong Frank and Joe's relationship was and how in tune they were with each other. She felt a little sorry for the criminals that the two brothers would catch.

When Frank learned of Michael's methadone script, he looked sharply at Tony, who was staring at the floor. Frank clapped Tony once on the shoulder, a gesture of support, and then began to slowly pace. "I think you guys started with good questions, trying out different theories on how Michael is involved. And now it's time to look into how everyone is involved. Coach Hafetz is forever lecturing us about drugs. He does random urine tests on the football team all the time. That solves the mystery of why the adults wouldn't speak to us about Sophie Conners' death, by the way: death by drug overdose is considered shameful, and the adults think we're too young to hear about it. I agree with Callie's assessment, that the 'never again' Coach was saying at his sister's gravesite was a promise to help other people who had her same problem. Most people on methadone are going to a clinic every day, so why wouldn't Michael? Coach must have a very good relationship with this Dr. Young—who isn't even really qualified to prescribe methadone—to get a script for a twenty day supply."

"I've always wondered how Miss Swain is involved," Joe said. "Why was Coach meeting with her, and then suddenly meeting with Michael instead? The only way that Miss Swain knows Michael is from the flirting at Mr. Pizza at the end of summer, right?"

"And then Miss Swain got a new boyfriend recently," Nancy remembered. "Tony, have you seen her in Mr. Pizza since she got her new boyfriend?"

Tony considered this. "No. Although of course I'm not there most of the time. And so, what, you guys are thinking that Miss Swain was getting Michael's methadone for him and then stopped because she got a new boyfriend?"

That was in fact what Nancy had been thinking, although she didn't feel happy about it.

"What does an average day look like for Michael?" Nancy asked, in part to distract Tony.

"These days he's not usually home when I wake up," Tony said. "Sometimes he comes back to the house in time to drive me to school, and if he's not there by a certain time, I just walk to Joe's. I never ask Michael where he is because I learned a long time ago that he doesn't like it. He and my dad drive separately to whatever construction site they're doing that day. He heads over to Mr. Pizza for the lunch rush, goes back to construction, then back to Mr. Pizza for the dinner rush, and finally gets done maybe around eight. My parents don't usually give him a schedule because he's good at figuring out where he's most needed. If he wants a few hours off, he lets them know. Weekends are more flexible but as you guys know, my family doesn't really take much time off work. Michael hasn't been at home in the evening much since school started, really, and I'd assumed he was with Polly."

Frank sighed. "But she has night classes some days of the week. We could ask Iola if Polly has been home, but there are already five of us who know about this. She's going to want to know why we care all of a sudden and we really need to keep this mystery tight if we don't want it getting out."

They re-affirmed their commitment never to let the mystery move beyond Frank, Joe, Nancy, Tony, and Biff. Tony said that he didn't want to confront Michael about anything yet, as it might make the situation worse, and they agreed to continue to monitor the situation for now.

Frank crouched in front of Tony's chair. "And now," he said, "let's review all the positives about this case."

Tony raised his eyebrows, looking downward at him.

"Having a script for methadone is perfectly legal," Frank said, speaking kindly and never breaking eye contact with Tony. "Michael hadn't filled the script at the pharmacy as of Friday night, two weeks after he got it, so he doesn't actually have the methadone and there could still be a logical explanation. And—if it's the worst case scenario, and Michael does have an addiction—the fact that he has a methadone script means that he's trying to get off heroin."

Frank's words had an effect. Tony's shoulders lifted and he looked more hopeful.

Nancy realized with a jolt how mesmerized she had been by Frank's talk. He had such a powerful, soothing bedside manner; she knew that one day he would be great at comforting survivors and gently encouraging hysterical people to stay focused; and, of course, playing the good cop to Joe's bad cop. She felt some of her old attraction to Frank return and she stubbornly ignored it.

Tony headed over to his grandmother's quite late to help prepare for the picnic. Nancy headed over to Biff's to update him about the case.