J.M.J.
Author's note: Thank you for continuing to read! Thank you especially to Candylou, MargaretA66, angelicalkiss, and max2013 for your reviews on the previous chapter! I hope you enjoy this one! God bless!
Chapter VII
It was the middle of the next morning. All the members of the Hardy family as well as Sam Radley were seated around the dining room table at Fenton and Laura's home. There was a platter of Christmas cookies in the middle of the table, but no one had touched them, nor was it likely that anyone would. Fenton, Frank, and Sam each had notebooks in front of them, with several pages already full of notes, though there was room to take more. They had gathered to try to make some kind of sense out of everything that was happening and make a plan, as well as make sure everyone was brought up to date.
"Let's start with just listing off everything that's going on," Fenton suggested. "I already have one written down, but we'll see if anyone has anything to add." He cleared his throat and read:
Evangeline released from prison on parole
Mario attacked
Black and white roses left on Tony's grave
Lisa followed
Darcy murdered
Gomez's theory about a powerful enemy
"I think that about covers it," Frank said.
The others agreed.
"So the first question now is whether there is any possibility that any of these events are connected," Fenton said.
Joe shrugged. "The connections seem clear enough to me. Evangeline was paroled and then attacked Mario. The other three could all be connected to each other, with Black Rose being the common thread. They make the most sense to be out to ruin us, and they could very well have been the ones that murdered Darcy, although my money's still on Angelo. Either way, they're part of the motive."
"Couldn't all five events be connected?" Callie asked. "Evangeline was connected with Black Rose, wasn't she?"
"Loosely," Fenton said. "She was never formally a part of the organization, as far as we know, although both she and her father seem to have made alliances with them when it benefited them."
"She might have reformed that alliance to get her revenge," Sam suggested. "She is disabled and, even if she wasn't, she would need help pulling it off. Belle said that Mario was stabbed. That means it was at close quarters. I can't see Evangeline managing that on her own."
"Speaking of that, has anyone heard how Mario is doing?" Laura asked.
"Belle called again earlier this morning," Fenton replied. "The surgery was successful, but he apparently sustained a head injury in the attack, too, and is in a coma. The police think he hit his head when he fell, but of course, they don't know for sure."
"But then that means he was standing or sitting when he was attacked," Frank said. "I could see that Evangeline might have snuck up on him while he was asleep, but I don't see how she or anyone working with her could have gotten close enough to stab him when he was awake."
"Are you saying you don't think it was Evangeline who attacked him?" Sam asked.
"We don't know for sure that it was her," Frank pointed out. "She's the likeliest suspect as far as motive goes, but you said yourself, Sam, that Mario was pretty worried about Evangeline being released. He would have been on his guard. We know the attack happened at his apartment late at night. Someone who's worried about getting murdered isn't going to let a stranger in their home at night, let alone Evangeline herself. The attacker must have been someone Mario knew and trusted."
"That doesn't mean Evangeline couldn't have paid them off," Fenton said. "It would have been a clever way to get at him."
"But I don't think that Moretti woman would do that," Aunt Gertrude interjected. "Someone who wants revenge as badly as her isn't going to hire someone else to do the honors. At least, I'm sure she wouldn't."
"I have to agree with Aunt Gertrude on that one," Frank said. "Evangeline learned how to shoot using sound to aim instead of sight, just so she could personally kill Dad, Sam, Mario, and Mitch Johnson. She wants to do this herself."
"Couldn't the attacker have broken into Mario's apartment and surprised him?" Laura asked. "Then it wouldn't have needed to be anyone he knew."
"That could be," Sam agreed. "In fact, it seems like the most likely scenario. Of course, if we could just get the police to talk to us, we could know with some certainty from exactly where the stab wounds are and whether they appear to have been all made by the same person."
"Maybe Belle could tell us that," Joe suggested.
Fenton shook his head. "I asked her. She doesn't know. He was already in surgery by the time she reached the hospital and now that he's all bandaged up, she says she can't tell and the doctors and nurses either won't or can't tell her."
"This whole reputation thing really stinks," Joe complained. "Any other time and we could have just asked the police."
"Before we go into that, let's tie up what we know about Mario," Fenton said. "Or, rather, what we don't know, since we know so little. There are two possibilities: either the attacker was someone he knew and trusted and invited into his home or it was someone who broke in whom he may or may not have recognized. There may, of course, have been multiple attackers, particularly if one of them was Evangeline, who would most likely need assistance. Evangeline is the only suspect that we have right now."
"Could it have been Black Rose?" Callie asked. "Mario and his family do have some background with Black Rose. Maybe they attacked him as some kind of warning to Angelo, or something."
"That could be," Sam agreed. "Again, if the police would just talk to us, we could find out whether or not Black Rose left their calling card at the scene."
"All right, so what about this reputation thing?" Fenton asked rhetorically.
"Captain Gomez thinks there might be someone out to ruin our reputation intentionally, not necessarily out of revenge, but to make sure we don't get the opportunity to investigate them," Frank explained.
Laura wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully. "It seems strange that all this started so soon after that man warned you that it would. I don't see how he would have known it so clearly. What was his name again?"
"Edmund Wight," Frank told her. "I can't say I have too high an opinion of him, but I don't see how he would be involved."
"I checked into Wight when we first ran into him," Fenton said. "He checked out. He really is a British agent who has clearance with the governments of several countries, including the United States, to investigate Black Rose and a few other international organizations like them. That's not to say that he couldn't have any skeletons in his closet, but it seems to me he would be more concerned about the governments he interacts with digging into those than some private detectives that he had encountered once."
"He was still the one who warned us that all this could happen," Frank insisted.
"Or 'threatened' might be a better word," Joe added. "I still don't see why. I mean, there's no reason we would have ever investigated him if he would have just kept away from us. Dad just said that he checked into him, so that would have been all we would have ever done if he hadn't showed up again."
"There's no reason we know about that we'd investigate him," Frank reminded him. "It's possible he does have something more to do with this whole business and that he knows we would find that out if we were able to investigate Black Rose further. In that case, it's obvious that we would try to investigate. He may be trying to put some obstacles in our path."
"It's a lot of work just to put out some obstacles, if you ask me," Aunt Gertrude said. "He would have to influence dozens—maybe hundreds—of people, and all just to slow you up a little. He would have lost more time doing the damage than you would have. And besides that, how would a spy have so much influence? Aren't they supposed to keep a low profile?"
"With his connections in the government, he'd be able to have that much influence and keep a low profile at the same time," Sam pointed out. "In fact, if we forgot about looking for a motive for a moment, Wight is one of the few people who even could pull this whole thing off."
"But when you say 'few', you mean in comparison to the general population," Fenton said. "There are still a lot of other people who could do the same, and it could be one of those others whom we don't know."
"Right, but ordinarily, I would still say that we should look into Wight first, since he's the one suspect we know about," Sam said. "Considering the situation, there's not really any way to do that, though."
"Unfortunately, no," Fenton agreed. "Otherwise, I would say you're absolutely right."
"Could this Edmund Wight have anything to do with Evangeline Moretti being paroled?" Laura ventured to ask. "It sounds like he might have the influence, and he could have done it as a distraction for us."
"Or a way to ruin our reputation even more," Joe added. "You know, so everyone will say we're the ones still holding the grudge and going after the poor blind woman who grew up in the foster system and wound up in jail and has reformed now. She's also a first-degree murderer, but that's beside the point."
"It's something to look into," Fenton conceded, but he sounded skeptical.
"That is, it would be, if we could," Sam added.
"Do we have any news on what Evangeline is doing?" Frank asked, changing the subject slightly. "Do we even know where she's at?"
"Generally, we do," Fenton told him. "She's up in Ocean City. At least, she has to report to her parole officer there. I don't know what she's doing or what kind of living arrangements she has."
"And as Sam would say, we don't have any way of finding out," Joe said. "Unless we just go up to Ocean City and do some scouting around. Maybe she has a nosy neighbor or something who noticed that she wasn't around last night, or else noticed that she was, which would give her an alibi in the attack on Mario. On the other hand, if she was out for long enough, that would indicate that she probably had something to do with it."
"Ocean City isn't all that big, but it is big enough that blindly roaming around, trying to find out whether a woman who has only been living there a week was there last night would be the proverbial needle in the haystack," Sam objected.
"Then how can you investigate her?" Callie asked, squirming a little with impatience. She wanted to see Evangeline back behind bars, and the sooner, the better.
"That's not going to be easy," Fenton admitted. "We can't get anywhere close to her and we don't have anyone who can do it for us."
"It's the same with Darcy's murder," Joe pointed out. "From the sound of it, Gomez gave Frank all the information he's going to. Maybe the best thing we can do is focus on Lisa for the time being. She, at least, is willing to let us investigate her case."
"The poor girl," Laura added. "She must be scared to death and after everything she's been through."
"If you ask me, she's getting exactly what she deserves," Aunt Gertrude said with only a slight upturning of her nose. "She should have known better than to get mixed up in a cult. And her being a teenager at the time isn't an excuse. Every single one of us here was a teenager once, and none of us joined any cults."
In spite of himself, one corner of Fenton's mouth turned upward slightly. "We all had our foibles. If they turned out less tragically than Lisa's, it's more by chance than because we were any better than she was."
"I don't think it's wholly by chance," Joe interjected, "but for me, at least, it's certainly not because I'm any better than her. I don't think Lisa deserves what she's getting. She's been trying for years to straighten herself up, and in spite of all that effort, she gets this thrown at her. And even if you could convince me that she deserves it, you'll never convince me that the rest of her family does. Don't you think they've been through enough already?"
"Oh, well, I didn't mean…" Aunt Gertrude stammered a bit, which was out of character for her, and her face reddened. However, she quickly regained her composure. "I didn't mean that what happened to Tony was deserved, either by him or by Lisa, and I certainly wouldn't wish any more harm on anyone in their family. Maybe what I said was unfair."
Joe quickly calmed down again and let the subject go with a sarcastic, muttered, "Just a little."
"What is her best option?" Frank asked, bringing the conversation back on topic. "I understand why she didn't want to ask anyone for help at first. In a way, she's right. Nobody's been able to stop Black Rose yet and there's no reason to think this time would be any different. She has too much at stake to put it on such a long shot bet."
"You've stopped Black Rose," Callie said. "You've done it several times."
"Not really," Frank insisted. "It was mostly rogue members who were working for their own benefit. The only time we ever went up against Black Rose as an organization was in Ziyou, and if that's what it takes to stop just one faction of them, I don't think we'd survive to stop the entire organization."
"You can say that again," Joe agreed. "But there's got to be something we can do or somebody can do."
"Black Rose is probably after her because she got out of the organization," Callie said. "This is a long shot, I know, but what if she joined them again? I mean, just to infiltrate them and get more information."
"No way," Joe countered. "She'd be the third person we know of who tried that, and it didn't work for the others. Don't forget that Alyssa Roche is a trained spy and Angelo has spent nearly his whole life conning people. They both have way more credentials to pull something like that off than Lisa does, and they couldn't do it."
"Besides that, it would take months or even years for Lisa to work her way into a position of enough trust that she could learn anything useful to us," Fenton added. "In all that time, she and her family would be in constant danger of her real motives for joining being discovered. It really wouldn't help matters at all."
Frank shook his head. "We can't do anything that's going to put Lisa or her family in danger. We need to make their safety our first priority and still somehow find a way to get Black Rose to leave them alone."
Everyone was silent for a few minutes as they tried to think what a possible solution could be. It seemed like such an impossible situation. Black Rose had proven itself virtually untouchable.
It was Aunt Gertrude who spoke up first. "What we need is for Lisa to be in a position where Black Rose can't get to her but they don't realize she's trying to hide."
"Do you have an idea?" Fenton asked.
Aunt Gertrude pursed her lips as she thought about it and then nodded decisively. "Yes. It would be perfect. If she was in a position where she couldn't be threatened and where it wouldn't do any good to try to harm her family because she wouldn't know about it and where it would seem obvious to any reasonable person that she didn't intentionally get into this position. It would take some work to arrange it, but I'm sure it could be done."
"What exactly do you have in mind?" Fenton asked.
"Suppose Lisa had an accident and ended up in the hospital, unconscious? Or maybe even killed?" Aunt Gertrude suggested.
Everyone looked startled at the suggestion. A few mouths even fell open in shock.
Frank recovered himself first. "Uh, you know, Aunt Gertrude, we're not really in the business of arranging accidents."
Aunt Gertrude gave him a withering look. "I don't mean a real accident. The whole thing would be staged. Then Lisa can just stay at the hospital, supposedly unconscious, until you can rid the world of Black Rose once and for all. Thinking it over a little more, I think we had better just have her be unconscious instead of dead. If it went on for very long at all, we would have to have an entire sham funeral, and that would be a good deal too much to put the Pritos through, all things considered."
"I'm not sure if that's crazy or brilliant," Joe said as he tried to process the plan.
Fenton rubbed his chin. "There's one big problem with it. Black Rose might sneak someone into the hospital to check, and they would see right through it. If we don't want them to realize she told anyone about being followed, there would be no reason for any security to be posted."
"Unless there was someone else supposedly trying to get to her," Frank suggested. "What if instead of an accident, she was the sole witness to a crime and the criminal tried, unsuccessfully, to silence her. Naturally, the police to want to protect her then."
"We wouldn't want it too farfetched," Fenton cautioned. "Black Rose aren't idiots. We would have to make it convincing."
"So it would have to be a serious crime and one that Lisa would reasonably witness," Joe said. "That would most likely mean we would need another victim. Where do we come up with one of those?"
"There is a crazy woman trying to murder all of you," Aunt Gertrude pointed out. "Lisa is a close enough friend to you that it wouldn't be unreasonable for her to be in the same space in the event that Evangeline would try something. It would be an unsuccessful attempt, naturally, but that would only make Evangeline all the more eager to silence the only witness so she doesn't get hauled back to jail before she can make a more successful one."
Joe grinned. "This actually sounds like it might work. I'd be willing to be the second victim."
"It would make more sense if it was Sam or me," Fenton pointed out. "What do you think, Sam?"
"I think it's the best plan any of us are likely to think up. We need to plan it carefully and we need to get Collig, the hospital, and Lisa to go along with it," Sam replied. "I think it's a good plan. We should definitely have some security around the Pritos' house in case it doesn't work, but I think it's worth a try."
"Then we'd better get to work on it," Fenton said. "There's no point in wasting time."
