Author's Note: Thanks for all the reviews, especially anglicakiss. As I don't have a beta and writing is not one of the strong suits I welcome criticism. Hopefully, this chapter is a little better for tense. I hope ya'll enjoy my take on why on earth Nancy didn't make a move to escape way before noW.
- Kes
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Frank and Joe are in downtown Los Angles at the federal building. "Well, there is not much here gentlemen. As far as I'm concerned you are free to examine it. We just switched the case over to the inactive file." Agent Helms told the brothers. He was a heavyset middle-aged man with a receding hairline.
"You mean this is all you have," asked Frank.
"Well, this is anything and everything we thought might be relevant to the case." The fed starts to pick up a few items, "Here's the wallet found in the street where Ms. Drew was abducted. Here's a notebook a couple of reports that she must have been working on before her disappearance. But I'm afraid there just isn't anything in this stuff. Our lab in D.C. went over every item with a fine-tooth comb."
Helms starts to chuckle and takes a sip from his coffee, "Fenton Hardy's kids huh. I hear you have helped your old man solve a few cases."
Joe gives him a disgusted look and replies, "Well, we've solved a few on our own."
The agent gives the younger Hardy a disbelieving look, "Really ... well, I've known your dad since he was a with the New York PD. Fine man."
Frank gives the detective a once-over, his patients starting to run out. Joe picked up his brother's mood and quickly asks, "May I Uh ...?"
"Oh sure, look over everything. Just make sure you leave it here when you go. Now I've got a lot of other cases to attend to so I'm going to excuse myself. You go right ahead and feel free but let me tell you something. She is gone and if we can't find her then she just doesn't exist anymore. You know what I mean." And with that, the older man left the room.
Joe and Frank watch him leave and then turn to each other. Frank has Nancy's notebook in hand. Joe asks, "What's that?"
"Oh, just some general notes. There is a design of some kind." Then Frank gets a bit excited, "Hey wait a minute listen to this. 'I now know that I have only found the tip of the iceberg it appears that all must have something to do with the brother.' Well Keller had a brother, didn't he?"
Joe thinks to himself for a moment and shakes his head, "Yeah, but they checked him out. He's a doctor or something that lives in Minnesota."
"He hasn't seen his brother in over twenty years," finished Frank disappointed that his reasoning wasn't adding up. "What do you got," Frank asks his brother.
"Well," Joe pulls a white windbreaker out of Nancy's overnight bag. "This is rather light, isn't it?"
"What do you mean?" Frank questions not quite following.
"Didn't Mr. Drew say that the week that Nancy disappeared they were going to New York? New York was under eight inches of snow."
"Yeah, he did."
"Who would pack this to go to New York under eight inches of snow?" asks Joe.
Frank takes the jacket from Joe. "Well, I don't know, maybe she was packing to go on some trip before she went on vacation with her father."
Joe replies, "I think we should check it out anyway."
Joe picks up the notebook that Frank had discarded and starts to leaf through the pages. "Well seeing as it is the only piece of evidence that we have we should check it out," agrees Frank. "I also want to check out her laptop."
When Joe comes to the page that Frank had read out earlier, he takes the opportunity to take it out of the notebook and places it in his pocket. "Well, I guess somebody has to go see Keller."
Frank gives Joe a wry smile, "Yeah, I'll stay here copy her hard drive and check out the airlines."
Leaving Joe to wryly comment, "Well I guess I'm off to prison."
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Nancy is picking the last lock on her door, there are three deadbolts and a pin tumbler on the knob, with a wire coat hanger. It takes a few minutes, but she is able to unlock them. Slowly she opens the door and tentatively steps out of the room.
She walks into a sitting room furnished with the best furniture money could have bought twenty or so years ago. Looking around she can see the one hope for escape, the elevator. She just needs to reach it, and all of this will be over.
As Nancy passes the room's bar, the security system picks her up and starts to play loud music. Startled she looks around for the source of the noise. The music stops just as suddenly as it started.
"Where are you going, Greata?" asks Nancy's captor as he walks into the room. Nancy turns to face the old man. "It's almost lunchtime," he continues looking at a pocket watch, "you know we always eat at two o'clock."
In desperation, the young woman takes a step forward and pleads. "My name isn't Greata, it's Nancy."
Just then the elevator doors open, and a tall middle-aged man in a tan suit with brown hair steps out. The old man pays no attention to the newcomer and Nancy refuses to turn from her capture even when she hears the ding of the elevator followed by the slide of the doors opening.
Nancy continues her appeal. "Nancy Drew! I'm not a part of your memories. I'm a real person! I'm me, you can't have that you can't take that away from me. You've tried for six months, but I've never been Greata! Do you understand that Mr. Rathbone, I've never been the person you want me to be?"
The newcomer calmly watches the exchange between the young woman and Rathbone. He's heard variations of this conversation multiple times over the last few months. In the beginning, it was a few times a day, then once a day, then once a week, now it happened when the girl got bouts of courage, the last time had been a month ago.
Rathbone sighs and shakes his head, "I know." He puts the watch back in his pocket, "but you'll always be Greata to me."
Rathbone gives the man a nod of the head. The man in the suit makes to grab Nancy by the arm. Nancy tries to run past him to the elevator but doesn't get far. He catches one of Nancy's writs quickly followed by the other. "No, let me go," she cries, as she tries to pull away from the younger of the two men. But it's no use, she doesn't have the strength she had six months ago, and she is always dizzy thanks to whatever they had been giving her to be docile.
Tears slide down Nancy's face as she is forced back to her room. The man shoves her in. Nancy manages to stumble over to her small sitting area. She slumps into her armchair exhausted. Her plan had failed. She had gotten caught, and now they knew that she could get out of the room if she wanted to. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man bend down and pick something up near the door. Her wire. Good going Drew she thought to herself now they will take all the hangers so she can't get out again
Seeing her father on the television had renewed her determination to get the hell out of here. As she saw it, she had a few obstacles.
First was the fact that they had been drugging her for months. The world she lived in now was vague, soft, and fuzzy; she found it hard to concentrate on anything. In fact, if she wasn't actively trying to concentrate the waking world didn't even feel real. When she moved about it was like walking in mud, her feet were so hard to move. Her eyesight was so blurry that she had found herself staring at a word for well over a minute trying to decipher what it read.
At first, they were just drugging her food. Then she had gone on a hunger strike. So, Rathbone had brought in a nurse who knew how not to talk, and the nurse had put an intravenous tube in her left elbow so that the nurse can inject the drug directly into her system each day. She had resisted this new norm as well; she had made it known she wouldn't just sit still by removing the IV every day after the nurse had left. This, of course, led to Rathbone's creative punishments, which in turn led Nancy to decide the IV wasn't worth fighting over.
The second was the younger man that was here today. He didn't speak much in Nancy's presence but the way he looked at her. Like he was just waiting for Rathbone to tell him, that there was no more need for Nancy. Then she was dead. He wouldn't play games like Rathbone. But she felt confident that he would most likely take her someplace else before killing her. Possibly giving her a chance to escape. But only if the Rathbone had no more use for her.
Then there was Rathbone himself. She shutters. He was her biggest problem. The man was crazy. He had had her kidnaped because she reminded him of Greata. He dressed her in Greata's clothes or clothes the Greata would have liked. He gave her Greata's room. He taught her and now expected her, to wear her hair and makeup the way Greata would. She knew there were times that he watched her sleep and times when he goes further than that.
Nancy tucks her feet underneath herself and wraps her arms around herself. She reminds herself not to dwell on what she can't control, but she is frustrated with her lack of progress. She hates being the damsel in distress. Usually, she was able to thwart anyone who wanted to do her harm and when she couldn't she was able to leave a trail for her friends to find and follow. Since no one knew she was working on a case they might not find the trail she had been incidentally leaving.
But it had been six months was anyone looking for her? Sure her father had just gone on tv to plead for her return, but he was likely to leave the investigation to the police. What about her friends? She tries to think back to the special her father had done, and the memorial shots. Even though she had spent most of the program studying her father, she knew her trained eyes picked up who had been at the service, she just needed to concentrate.
Doing her best to focus her mind on just the service, her fuzzy world is replaced by the memory of a TV screen. She can see near the front of the mourners Ned with his arm around George's shoulders. Nancy's brow crinkles she might be making it up, but it seems to her that Ned is glaring at someone to his right. She shifts her memories to focus on the crowd to the left, there she sees a blonde couple that seems to be the recipient of Ned's glare. The woman had her head buried in the man's chest and he was holding her close while studying the crowd. It didn't take her long to recognize the hansom features of Joe Hardy, which gave her the identity of the woman in his arms, Bess. A small smile plays across Nancy's lips. Whatever hot-cold relationship those two had, they shared a genuine connection and Joe was always very protective of Bess. She was glad he was there for Bess. She knew from experience what a comfort a Hardy's arms could be.
Now she was frantically searching her memory of the memorial for her Hardy. If Joe was there surely Frank would … but the faces she found were family, friends of the family, and people she had gone to school with. She saw Fenton standing near her father but still no Frank. Her heart started pounding faster. Why would one brother be there but not the other? But then it came to her, all the times that Joe or Fenton would go missing and Frank would do anything to find his missing family including putting himself in danger. He would never accept that someone he loved was dead till he had found the body himself. For Frank going to the memorial would be accepting defeat, and her stupid stubborn Hardy wouldn't care how it looked to anyone else only how it felt to him like a lie.
Nancy felt her eyes start to water. She just knew, somewhere Frank Hardy was looking for her. She knew that putting together that Rathbone had kidnaped her was going to be difficult, but if anyone could do it based on what she had already gathered it would be the brothers.
The stress, the futility of her situation, and the relief in realizing the Hardy brothers would be looking for her has drained what strength she had managed to pull together earlier. Soon her head fell back as she found her favorite daydream. It involved the warm arms of a blue-eyed brown-haired young man, holding her to his chest as he gently brushes her hair away from her face. She whispers to her delusions, "Hardy, please find me before I lose what is left of my mind." The man in her mind holds her closer and kisses her forehead.
