CHAPTER 5

Frank rushed in to check on their pulses. After a moment, relief washed over him. "They're still alive."

"This must've happened not too long ago," Joe remarked.

Frank woke the two guards. A few minutes later, both guards gradually started moving, groggy and confused.

One of the guards, a young guy with dark hair and a goatee, straightened on his seat when he spotted the Hardys. "What are you two boys doing here?"

"We were looking for you," Joe replied. "What happened?"

He still had a dazed look on him, one hand rubbing the back of his head. "I'm trying to remember."

"Do you need to go to the hospital? You might have a concussion."

"Nah, I'm fine," the guy replied with a shake of his head. "Just need to, you know, take a breather."

His partner, a hefty older guy in his forties with red hair and jutting chin, was now fully awake. The name tag on his white uniform said Bobby. "They surprised me while I was heading here from my coffee break."

"They?" Frank prompted.

Bobby swiveled on his chair to face him. "I couldn't see their faces. They had ski masks on, dressed in dark clothes. One tall, one short. Oh, they had a gun. I remember feeling it press against my back."

"Are you sure they had a gun? How did they get it through the metal detector?"

"Hmm… You're right. It could've been anything." He slammed a fist on the desk when he realized how he was tricked.

"Then what happened?" Joe asked.

"They forced me to open the door. My partner, Greg, was watching the monitors, saw us coming over. He didn't have time to escape. And then they overpowered us and knocked us out."

"Yeah, that's about right — how it happened," the younger guy, Greg, said and nodded in agreement.

"Maybe your security feed can show us what happened," Joe suggested.

Bobby turned his chair back to the console. "I don't know how much that would help. We couldn't see their faces." He began flipping through the switches and typing something on the keyboard.

Joe was pacing around the cramped room restlessly as Bobby looked for the footage.

"That's strange," Bobby muttered after a while.

"What's strange?" Frank asked.

"The recordings for the past hour — they're missing. I think they've been deleted."

"All of them?"

"Yeah." Then he looked suspiciously at Frank. "You kids didn't have anything to do with this, did ya?"

"Would we still be here if we did?" Joe retorted.

"Then what brings you kids here?"

"My brother lost his bike in the school parking lot two days ago," Frank said. "Do you have the recording for that day? We're trying to find out what happened to it."

Bobby shook his head. "Don't ya kids ever lock up your vehicles?" Then he grumbled and began looking through the files on the drive. After what seemed like eternity, he was still scrolling through the files.

"What's taking so long?" Joe asked with an edge of impatience in his voice.

"Wait… It should be here somewhere, but it's not."

"Could it have been deleted?"

"I don't see how. The recordings for other places in school are still there, except for the one at the parking lot."

Joe exchanged a glance with his brother. Whoever had knocked the guards unconscious must have also deleted those recordings to destroy evidence of his or her presence. It couldn't have been a coincidence.

"This is bad," Greg spoke up. "We're gonna need to report the break-in to the principal."

"And more paperwork," Bobby fumed.

The Hardys left the security office after they couldn't find any more clues.

"Now what do we do?" Joe asked.

They went up the stairs back to the hallway.

"There's another piece of evidence we haven't checked out, yet," Frank replied. "We still have the fake Durville. Someone must have painted it."

Joe snapped his fingers. "Riiight. Whoever painted it might know who planned the switch. C'mon!"

Frank smiled at his brother's eagerness. "Patience. We've got a History Club meeting after this, remember?"

–o–

Joe wearily tossed his backpack into the back of their black van and closed the door. He leaned against the van and waited for his brother to arrive.

His gaze strayed toward the front lawn. The leaves hanging from a large willow tree nearby swayed from the late afternoon breeze, creating a strange calmness in the air. He squinted when he noticed a figure sitting under the canopy of the tree. From the way the long brown hair was arranged, he knew immediately who it was.

As if on cue, Frank was moving down the steps of the school entrance.

"Just a sec," Joe told his brother, who was approaching the van.

The girl didn't seem to notice Joe since her back was facing him. Her head bent low, too absorbed at what she was doing — drawing inside her spiral sketchbook. He crossed the lawn and made his way to her, then paused for a second when he remembered the way she reacted every time she was caught by surprise. He winced inwardly, not wishing to repeat the same mistake. So, he cleared his throat.

She closed the book immediately before turning around to glare at him. "You again? Are you spying on me?" Morgan asked.

"You really love art, huh?"

"It calms me down." She clutched the sketchbook against her chest, her fingers fiddled with the spiral wire like a violinist playing a song that only she could hear.

"You splashed water on my friend during lunch," Joe began. "It was an accident."

"So?" The knuckles on her hands turned white.

"So, it was all a misunderstanding. What you did to Biff was uncalled-for."

Her head tilted to one side, an expression of wonder on her face — just a microsecond before it disappeared. Then she shrugged. "Whatever."

A gray sedan screeched to a halt in front of them. The driver, who turned out to be Dana, honked with a gleeful look.

"What's taking you so long?" Morgan demanded, stuffing her book into her bag. "You said to wait here at three. It's almost four now!"

"Sorry. I forgot I had an appointment with the hairdresser," Dana replied without looking apologetic at all.

Morgan did not look happy to hear her reply, but she climbed into the car and slammed the door shut.

"Careful." Dana was annoyed. "Lighten up, will you? How anyone hadn't died yet because of you is still a mystery to me."

Dana turned to look at someone behind Joe and waved cheerfully. Joe glanced back and saw his brother, whose face had turned crimson at the attention. When Joe looked back at the sedan, he didn't miss the pale look on Morgan's face before the car sped away.

Once the car was out of sight, Joe heard the sound of the van lock opening. Frank opened the driver's door and froze when something on the seat caught his eye.

"Frank?" Joe asked worriedly.

"Someone left this on the front seat," he said, lifting up a cream-colored envelope. A name was written on the front — Frank's name.

"Who could have broken into the van?"

"I don't know. You haven't seen anyone suspicious nearby when you arrived here?" Frank asked.

"Well, Morgan was sitting under that tree over there. But then this could've happened this afternoon, when those guards were knocked out."

Frank opened the envelope. A petal of red rose and a small card dropped into the palm of his hand. "It says, 'What's in a name? That which we call a rose; By any other name would smell as sweet.' It's not from Callie. I'd have recognized her hand– Oh, wait."

"What?"

He pulled out a notepad from his jacket and flipped through it until he found the page that he was looking for. His expression fell. "It's not a match." He showed Dana's name and phone number in large, bold writing and the note's cursive script.

"I'm surprised you've thought of her first." Joe couldn't help grinning. "She could've disguised her writing. Whatever it is, this proves you have a secret admirer."

"Or someone's idea of reciting Shakespeare." He tossed the note into the glove compartment.

"Yeah, keep telling yourself that," Joe said, shaking his head.