Foreword: So, as I promised, this will be another update for this week. But don't worry; I'll be updating on Tuesday as well, so you won't need to wait for too long. Anyway, this chapter will start with a flashback of the past. I will be adding little bits of how Maria Voorhees died, and that will surely help you make the connection on who the killer might be and his or her motive. The next chapter will start the same way. Well, I don't want to spoil too much for you, so I'll let you get started on the reading. Enjoy and REVIEW, please!

11

The Mystery Incarnate

The night was long and dreadful. Next to her piano, the famous pianist sat with her hands on her head, her beautiful auburn hair covering her face, which was distorted with despair. As she looked up, she saw that the sky was turning gray again, as gray as her feeling. Maria placed her hand on the keys and played.

Music seemed to seep through the ceilings and walls and out to the outside world, blessing it with the beautiful melody. But the music didn't last long.

Something creaked behind the pianist's back. Surprised, she turned around. "Who is it?" she called, frightened. There was nobody in the house except for her, and the girl was afraid it was a burglar. But when she saw the face her expression eased. "Oh, it's you… What brought you here?"

"I was just coming by to say hi," the visitor said, smiling. "Just came here to see how you were doing."

"Oh?" Maria asked, suddenly becoming suspicious. "What seems to be the matter here?" She detected a slight uneasiness in the person's face.

With a grunt, the mysterious visitor took something out. It was a bat. Maria's eyes were wide with shock. "What is this? Is this some kind of sick joke?" She saw the visitor raise the bat.

Then, it was swung down onto the pianist's head.

Frank was frantically thinking of a way to save Nancy. Thinking up nothing, he turned to the scythe which was smeared with fake blood. "I think we should go to the hotel room," he said, standing up. Joe and Bess looked at Frank with a quizzical look.

"What do you mean?" asked Joe.

"I mean that we need to do some research," was the answer.

"What research?"

Frank looked at Joe impatiently. "We need to use your computer to find what Jack Rocky and Katrina Berkeley have in common. With your hacking—I mean, researching—skill, that can be made in a snap."

Joe grinned understandingly. "Got it." He turned to Bess. "You coming?"

Bess nodded stubbornly. "Of course! She's also my friend, if you didn't notice! Besides," she smiled at Joe, "I'd like to observe your 'researching' skill Frank was talking about. If you didn't know, I'm a sort of mechanic, too. And George is nearly professional at gadgets. You can tell that we are cousins by simply looking at those facts."

"The only way," Frank thought mischievously. The reason was that Bess and George, her cousin, had almost nothing in common. Bess enjoyed her feminine pleasure while George preferred the hardboiled action. Bess was slightly plump, and George was as athletic as a girl of age eighteen could possibly get.

"So let's go," Joe urged. "We need to move faster than this if we want to save Nancy!"

Agreeing, the three detectives went to their cars and drove straight to the hotel room which the two Hardys shared.

Opening his laptop, Joe introduced his latest hacking software. "Here," he said with a mischievous grin, "is the RoboHack."

Frank then said to Bess, "That's the software Joe begged his friend to make for him. Can you believe that he actually spent a month's worth of allowance to make him create that software?" Bess giggled.

"The latest version, 1.1.6," Joe added, ignoring the two detectives.

Frank then said, "But there were so many problems with the first version, so Joe asked that friend to make patches for that software. There were actually sixteen patches, but there are still twenty or more problems to fix in this software."

Joe typed in the names of the two victims and searched the Internet with it. "You may say that it's just like ordinary search engines," he said. "But this program can actually let me hack into websites in which only certified people could visit. This program lets me plant a little bug into the website, and when a person logs on, the bug will automatically memorize the log-on ID and password. So we'll just have to wait for a few hours before a person logs on."

"Okay, so we basically need to search the sites of universities. If my instinct is right, I'll be that those two went to the same university."

In fact, Frank's intuition was right after all. Within minutes, the younger Hardy found the site which had the names Brian McMillan and Katrina Berkeley. "But the website is strictly for the students and staffs only. Therefore, I need to set a bug here and wait for the next person to log on," Joe said.

The detective did so, and after thirty or so minutes, the computer beeped. "Someone logged on!" Bess shouted in joy. "Let's log on now!"

"Hold it," Joe said, holding his hands up so Bess wouldn't run to the computer. "We can't log on just yet. The person who logged on is still using the website, and we have to wait till he or she logs off. Otherwise, theuser will be suspicious, since there are two computers logging on at once."

Bess nodded. And so, the detectives waited. After another thirty minutes, the user finally logged off, and the detectives logged on using the password and user ID. But Bess gasped as she saw the person who last used the website: Matilda Fontaine.

"That's Mrs. Fontaine's name!" she said with a shocked expression.

"What?" shouted the two guys, even more surprised that she was.

The dark-haired detective nodded. "I remember now. When we first met Mrs. Fontaine, she introduced herself to us, and her first name was Matilda!"

Joe and Bess looked at the name on the screen. "Why was she logging on to the university's website?" Bess asked.

Frank shrugged. "But this is another piece of the puzzle."

Frustrated, Joe scratched his head. "Yeah. We don't know why she was at the concert hall that time Frank was almost smashed into by a falling light. And we don't know how and why she logged on to a university website in which even her daughter doesn't attend."

Agreeing, Frank was still wondering why the woman might have access to the website. Surely a woman of her age wouldn't be a student in the university that's thousands of miles from her home. Is she a staff member there?

The detectives logged on, and after a while got the information that Jack and Katrina were in the same class just two years ago and graduated last year.

"So this fits," Frank mumbled.

Exiting the site, Joe looked at Frank. "Is there any new lead now?"

"Yeah… We should go talk to Mrs. Mott."

"Huh?" Bess asked, not following Frank's train of thought. In fact, her mind was frantically chasing after it, hoping to hop on. "Why her?"

"I noticed that when we first came here and met the suspects, Mrs. Mott pulled Nancy out of the room to the next practice room. I didn't hear what was going on, and we all left the place after a short while. A minute later, I saw Nancy coming after us. She and Mrs. Mott must've been talking about something. I know she's a suspect and we can't trust her completely, but she is our only lead. We need to hear what she was talking to Nancy. Her talk may be involved in Nancy's kidnapping."

"But for those who didn't know," Joe said, "it's already eleven at night! What kind of idiot would welcome three strangers into their home when we knock on her door at midnight?"

Frank nodded solemnly. "So we should continue this investigation tomorrow. Meanwhile, stay alert. We don't know who the kidnapper and killer is. We certainly can't afford to get a red herring. Come here tomorrow at about three o'clock. All right?" he said, facing Bess as he finished speaking.

Bess understood and left in her car.

The very next afternoon, the detectives went to talk to the manager of the quartet. She opened the door and smiled graciously. "Hello, detectives," she said in a pleasant tone. "How can I help you all?"

"We need to ask you if you could tell us what you told Nancy when we were at the concert hall," Joe said. Mrs. Mott seemed confused and blinked several times, not understanding what Joe had spoken.

Sighing, Frank restated the question: "What did you tell Nancy after she and you went to the practice room?"

Mrs. Mott still looked confused, but then nodded, finally understanding what they said. "Please come in," she said, gesturing for the teenagers to come in. They did so, and the woman closed the door behind them.

Once in the living room, Mrs. Mott became very worried. "I had this niece named Maria Voorhees. Because she was an orphan, I was in charge of being her legal guardian. But one day, she killed herself in her own home, just a year ago. I was wondering if Nancy could help me solve the reason she killed herself, and maybe the real truth."

"The real truth?" Bess repeated.

"Yes. There was something strange about Maria's body after I found her dead in her bedroom. She drank cyanide and had died there peacefully, but I never understood how she made that ugly bump on her head."

"A bump?" repeated Frank.

The woman nodded. "My guess was that someone knocked Maria out by hitting her with something hard. She was then brought to her bedroom by the killer. Then, he or she poured cyanide into her mouth and killed her. That was my guess, but obviously the police didn't seem to notice. In fact, they said that it was maybe made when she fell or something. But I knew that was nonsense!"

Frank understood. "Yes. If someone fell, he would have a bump on his forehead or the back of the head, never actually on the head itself. That means someone had smashed something hard onto her head. The blow was strong enough to knock her out, but not quite as strong as to kill her at that spot."

Mrs. Mott took out her handkerchief and started sobbing. "That's not the only reason. Just a week after her death, she was supposed to play a few songs for me as a birthday present for my turning forty-five. But I never did hear that beautiful melody of hers. I should've come sooner, so she wouldn't have been killed by that awful murderer!" She then crumbled down on the floor with tears rolling down her white cheeks that didn't seem to cease.

The detectives looked at each other and nodded. "Sorry to interrupt you this early. We'll be leaving now," Frank said. Without waiting for a response, they went out through the door.

Once outside, Frank said, "That sure seemed realistic. I'd actually say that she was crying, not faking it."

Bess nodded. "But looks are always deceiving," she added, "especially when most of the cute guys I dated before turned out to be a spy or a police or—on a worst-case scenario—even the culprit himself!"

Frank and Joe laughed heartily. "All right. Time for a quick break," Frank said. "We'll just need to do one more thing…"

"What is it?" asked Joe.

"We need to go to the library to research the murder of Maria Voorhees."

Bess groaned. "So much researching! And not much investigation."

Joe snickered. "Well, you can investigate to your heart's content after we finish the researches."

The local library was only twenty minutes away. The detectives went inside and looked for the newspaper section.

"Let's see," Joe murmured, opening his laptop. "According to my search online, the article should be on the "USA Nowadays" newspaper. It's the June 30 newspaper."

"Gotcha," Frank said, stepping into the section where the newspapers from up to thirty years ago were stored. He found the newspaper in three minutes. "Here."

Bess looked at the newspaper. The story of the day was "S.S. Cobalt Lost At Sea." As she flipped through it, she asked Joe, "What section of the newspaper is this article on?"

"It should be on the eleventh page."

Flipping to the tenth page, Bess gasped. "You guys! Look!"

Frank and Joe looked at what Bess pointed to. All of their eyes got round with surprise. The article stating the death of Maria Voorhees was cut out and was nowhere to be seen.

Postscript: Mrs. Fontaine is turning out more and more suspicious by the minutes! Is she really connected to this serial murder? And who took the newspaper clipping of the death of Maria Voorhees? The investigation gets yet another startling turn as the detectives continue their research on the three deaths!

Attention! The next chapter will be the LAST one before I reveal the killer! So if you want to make a guess on who the killer might be, please notify me via your review by the time I put up Chapter 13 (which will be on December 15).

The title of the next chapter is: The Cat and Mouse Chase...

The next update: December 12