J.M.J.
Author's note: Thank you for reading! Thanks also to all of you who reviewed! In case you didn't catch it earlier, there was also a chapter out this morning, so check it out before continuing on to this one. The next chapter will be out tomorrow. God bless!
October 7 – Saturday Evening
It felt like a dream. The castaways had woken up that morning, half-expecting that they would live through the day, and now they were on their way home. Jack had radioed to the Coast Guard, and they had dispatched a cutter to pick up the castaways, since there wasn't enough room in Jack's plane for all of them. Jack agreed to fly back to Hawaii by himself and meet them there. The Coast Guard had also sent a medical helicopter to pick up Brock and Longheim. There wasn't enough room in it for Joe and Tony, who were the only castaways who were injured, but they preferred to stay with their friends anyway. While they waited for the cutter, they rounded up Earl—which wasn't difficult, considering that he was once again in an inebriated state—and the castaways gathered up anything that they wanted to bring back, which wasn't much.
The biggest difficulty they had had was coaxing Katina onto the cutter. She trusted her fellow castaways, but not so much these strange men who had suddenly seemed to take over the island. In the end, however, they managed to get her aboard, although she refused to leave Biff's side.
There was a doctor aboard the cutter, who examined Tony's hand and Joe's arm, as well as the injuries that both Joe and Nancy had sustained from Brock's attempts to strangle each of them and the general health of all the castaways. Tony's hand was clear of any infection, but the doctor cleaned it again and advised him that he would probably need surgery to repair the damage as far as possible. Joe's arm had the beginnings of an infection, but his throat didn't have any severe injuries. Both he and Tony were prescribed antibiotics. Nancy's injuries were mild and already healing. All the castaways, including Katina, were in surprisingly good health, although the doctor had several preventative recommendations for all of them. He also took a look at Frank's arm, which he thought had healed reasonably well, although when he got home, he would want to have X-rays taken.
After that, the former castaways were eager to contact their families and friends. Commander Nguyen of the cutter told them that they could manage some phone calls to home, but it would have to be limited.
"We can't do any video calls," he warned them. "And it will have to only be calls to your immediate families. Once we get to Hawaii, you can call anyone you want, of course."
"No video calls is okay with me," Biff commented, rubbing his chin. "I wouldn't mind getting a haircut and generally cleaned up before having anyone at home see me."
"Do you have a girl at home we don't know about or something?" Chet teased him.
"A couple of other things to keep in mind, guys," Fenton spoke up. "Under the circumstances, I think you'd better letter Commander Nguyen speak to your families first. Also, you may want to let Nancy go first, so she can get the search for her called off as soon as possible." He turned to Frank, who was standing near him as he had ever since they had been reunited. "Could I talk to you while the others are making their calls, Frank?"
"Okay, Dad."
They moved off to the railing around the deck where they would be out of earshot of the others.
"Are you doing okay, Frank?" Fenton asked.
"I think so," Frank replied. He smiled wryly. "Actually, I have no idea. I haven't quite had time to process everything that's happened today."
"That's understandable," Fenton said. "You've already been through a lot. I'm sorry I wasn't there a few minutes sooner."
Frank shrugged. "You couldn't help it. Do you think Brock is going to die?"
"I hope not. That's a heavy load to bear, even when it's someone like him and when you didn't have a choice."
"You don't suppose there'll be any trouble about it, when we get to Hawaii, I mean?" Frank asked.
Fenton shook his head. "There can't be. That island isn't U.S. territory, so the United States doesn't have jurisdiction over anything that happened there."
"Then they can't try Brock or the others for anything they did there, either," Frank commented. "Well, from the sound of it, they have enough crimes back in the U.S. anyway. Do you think the Coast Guard is going to catch those other two that took off in the boat when they saw you and Jack coming?"
"I think so. Even if they don't, once the story of what that gang was up to breaks, there aren't too many places they can 'll be wanted in more countries than just the U.S. and of course, they won't be safe in any countries that have an extradition treaty with the U.S."
"I guess even if they do get away, they won't be able to cause anybody much more harm," Frank said. "You know, for once, it doesn't even seem all that important thing whether they're captured or not."
"In a lot of ways, it's not. You know, we all thought…"
"I do know, Dad. Nancy told us all about what's been going on at home. Even before that, we suspected you might come to that conclusion."
"Why did you think that?"
"What the police knew about it wouldn't sound very good when we vanished without a trace. Besides that, we didn't think those two guys who took us out on that fishing boat would tell the truth about what happened. It didn't exactly make them look that good. They probably genuinely thought that we wouldn't make it. We shouldn't have, by all rights."
"What did happen?"
Frank described it, and then finished by saying, "We were miles from land. If it hadn't been for Tony, we wouldn't have had any idea which way to head. In the dark, there's no reason we shouldn't have gotten turned around. We didn't have a drop of drinking water and it was hot that day. We really shouldn't have been able to make it, and I doubt those guys would have let us go if they had thought for a moment that we might."
"I wonder why they did let you go," Fenton commented.
"Who knows? The whole escape, from beginning to end, was nothing short of a miracle." Frank smiled. "You know, none of us are going hold it against anyone for not immediately assuming that a miracle had happened. I'm just sorry you had to go through all that."
"Compared to what you boys have been through, it doesn't seem like much."
"Oh, I don't know," Frank said. "At least we knew what had happened and that we were still alive. And we did all right on the island, apart from a few incidents. We'll just probably need a little time to recover."
"I know. I wish I could give you some of that time, but there is something you should know. It might come up accidentally when we call home, or someone else's family might mention it."
Frank turned to him with a serious expression. "Is something wrong at home?"
"We wouldn't have found you if it hadn't been for Callie," Fenton said. "She was able to get the coordinates of that island, although we're not exactly sure how."
Frank felt his pulse quicken. "Why not? What happened to her?"
"She's alive and she should be all right," Fenton assured him preliminarily. "She was kidnapped and we think she was trying to escape, but she was shot."
Frank gripped the railing. "Are you sure she's going to be okay?"
"Yes, I'm sure of it. I just didn't want you to hear it accidentally thrown out there."
"Thanks." Frank let out a long breath. "I've spent so much time thinking about what might change at home if we were stuck on that island for too long, but I never thought something like that would happen. I thought she might have moved on or something like that."
"You weren't gone nearly long enough for that, no matter what she thought had happened to you."
"No. No, I guess not. I should have known her better than that, too. It's just that when you have nothing to do but wonder about things like that, it's easy to imagine the worst. And things are going to be different than they were before when we get home. We're not the same as we were when we left. I'm not so sure I'm the same as I was this morning."
"No, but that's okay. You can't stop things from changing, even without anything as dramatic as this happening. It's all going to be okay."
HBNDHBNDHB
The autumn sunset was gorgeous over the western side of the Morton farm, but even though Iola was staring at it, she wasn't in any mood to enjoy it. The last week had been eye-opening, to say the least. She had been acting like she was the moral superior of everyone in her life for months now, but when it came right down to it, she had left Callie behind and run to save herself. Everyone kept telling her that she did the only thing she could, that getting recaptured wouldn't have helped Callie. But it didn't make her feel any better about it. As she needed to feel even worse, she had spent the last several months haranguing at those very same people for not doing enough about the boys being missing. That hadn't been fair, she had come to realize, but not a single one of them took the opportunity to point out to her how hypocritical she had been or how her actions really could be criticized. They only tried to comfort her.
Iola heard the back door open behind her and she looked over her shoulder to see her mom. Mollie smiled at her and then sat down next to her.
"How are you doing?" Mollie asked.
"Better than I deserve, I guess."
Mollie put an arm around her shoulders. "Beating yourself up over this isn't going to help anything, you know."
"I know, I know. I can't help it."
"You like having something concrete to do," Mollie said. "It's been hard for you all this time, not being able to do very much."
"Oh, Mom, please. If you can't ream me out for being so awful, at least don't try to excuse me." Iola put her face in her hands.
From inside the house, she heard the phone ring. She had a faint hope that her mom would get up and answer it, but she knew she wouldn't. Sure enough, Mollie stayed put and just let the phone ring. It stopped after a few rings, and Iola guessed that her dad must have gotten it.
"Iola, it's a good thing to be able to realize that you made a mistake and to be sorry for it and want to do better in the future," Mollie told her. "But it doesn't count for anything if you just let it paralyze you. Or if you're trying so hard to find fault with yourself that you let it cloud your judgment. The best thing you could have done for Callie in that moment was to escape. Maybe it doesn't sound heroic or brave, but sometimes the wisest thing to do doesn't sound that way."
Iola was thinking of some retort to make to that, but she was distracted by a very loud What! from inside. Both she and her mother turned to look at the door, not that that told them anything. They glanced at each other and then they jumped up and hurried inside to see what was happening, some instinct telling them that it was more important even than the conversation they were having. They found Chester Morton sitting in one of the armchairs in the living room as if he had simply dropped into, a shocked look on his face. At first, Iola was afraid that there was some terrible and unexpected news, but her dad seemed to be recovering too quickly for it to be bad news.
"Are you sure?" he asked. There was a brief pause and then he said, "Hold on. I need to tell my wife and my daughter." He took the phone away from his ear and looked up at them.
"Is something wrong?" Mollie asked before he had had a chance to reply.
"No. No, nothing's wrong at all. It…" Chester stopped himself. "You'd both better sit down."
There was a loveseat directly behind Mollie and Iola and they both sat on it in one accord.
"It's a Commander Nguyen from the Coast Guard. He says that they found the boys. Alive and well."
"What?" both women asked at once, echoing Chester's reaction.
"Is Chet there?" Mollie asked quickly.
Chester pressed the button to turn the phone on speaker before he asked, "My son…Can we talk to him?"
"I'm afraid you can only talk for a few minutes," Commander Nguyen replied. Then his voice softened into almost a chuckle. "But there is someone at my elbow who is very eager to talk to you."
He had barely finished speaking when a familiar voice said, "Hi, Dad!"
For several seconds, no one could speak.
Finally, Chester managed to ask, "Chet? Is that really you?"
"Sure, it's me, Dad. Man, is it good to hear your voice. Are Mom and Iola there?"
"We're here," Mollie said, her voice shaking. "Are…Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Mom. I'll be even better once we get to Hawaii tomorrow…"
"Where have you been all this time?" Iola interrupted him.
Chet laughed. "It's good to hear from you, too, Sis. We were on an island, but I can't go into the whole story right now. We've only got a few minutes."
"Is Joe all right?" Iola asked.
"Yeah, he's okay. We all are. Well, some of the guys are more okay than others, but we're all fine. Joe can't talk right now, but he'll call you when we get to Hawaii tomorrow."
"You're going to Hawaii?" Chester asked. "We could meet you there."
"We won't be there long," Chet asked. "By the time you could get a plane, we'll probably be on our way back to Bayport. At least, we'd better be. I'll let you know more tomorrow, but that commander is saying I need to get off the phone and let one of the other guys have a turn. I'll talk to you tomorrow. I love you guys."
There was barely a chance to respond before the call was ended. For several seconds, the three of them simply sat there in stunned silence.
Then Mollie began to cry softly out of sheer emotional overload. "I can hardly believe it," she repeated over and over.
Chester came and sat between her and Iola, put an arm around each, and pulled them close while he was close to joyful tears himself. They hadn't thought it possible, but their family was going to be whole again soon.
HBNDHBNDHB
"If we pool all our money together, we might be able to rent a plane," George was saying as she waited in the hallway of one of the police stations in Auckland. "Then we'll just have to follow the course that plane took until we find it."
"But what if it changed direction as soon as it was out of sight?" Bess pointed out. "It must have, or the New Zealand authorities would have picked it up on radar."
George tapped her foot impatiently, but she didn't respond. Bess was right, of course. Besides, it had been long enough now that they would never be able to catch up with a plane. She was just tired of sitting around and feeling like she was doing nothing. There had been too much of that in this case so far and now things were even worse. Finally, because she had to do something to use up some of her spare energy, she stood up and started pacing up and down the corridor.
Bess wished she could expend some energy the same way and glanced wistfully at her braced ankle. It was sprained rather than broken, but it was a bad sprain and would still take weeks to heal. She was supposed to keep it elevated, which had necessitated pulling another chair up so that she could put her foot on it. The position was making her feel very self-conscious, and so she turned to Ned to have someone to talk to and distract her. Ned hadn't been taking part in the cousins' conversation. Instead, he was working on something in a notebook, while referencing his phone. It looked like a lot of math problems.
"Are you doing your homework?" Bess asked, surprised and a little appalled.
"No. I'm trying to figure out how far that plane could have gotten, which will give us the area to search. You're right that it might have changed direction, but it still had to go roughly north or east, so that cuts down the size of the search area."
"You know why they didn't search like that for the Hardys and the other guys, right?" Bess asked. "Because it would take forever?"
"This is different," Ned insisted. "It had been a couple weeks with them and nobody had any idea of the direction. We can cut south and west completely out of the calculations."
"So it'll only take half of forever."
Ned paused in his calculating. "You're encouraging."
"Sorry. I'm just tired of the run-around-in-desperation-not-really-accomplishing-anything method that seems to be the only one anyone can come up with," Bess replied.
"Yeah, me too." Ned picked up his pencil again as if he was going to continue writing. "If I would have just kept it from happening in the first place…"
"It's not like you purposely let her get kidnapped."
"Of course not," Ned replied. "But I was there. I should have been able to keep it from happening."
"I don't think we can blame you too much for this," Bess said. "The only way to keep Nancy out of trouble would be to stop her from solving mysteries altogether."
"I wouldn't want to do that, even if I could. You can't take something that's that important to someone away from them. Besides, I'm proud of Nancy for what she does. Even after something like this."
Bess smiled wryly. It could be a little conflicting being friends with Nancy.
Ned's phone rang and he scrambled to reach for it, hoping that it was some news. He saw that it was Carson Drew, and he hoped it would be good news. He wasn't sure what he would say if it was anything else. "Hello? Mr. Drew?"
"Ned, I just heard from Nancy," Carson replied. "She's all right and she got away from those gangsters."
"Thank goodness." Ned breathed a sigh of relief before relaying the message to Bess and George, who were looking at him inquisitively.
"We should have known Nancy could get out of trouble by herself," George commented.
"That's not all," Carson went on. "She's on a Coast Guard cutter, headed for Hawaii. When she gets there, she'll call you and tell you all about everything that happened, but she said to go ahead and pass along the biggest news."
"What's that?"
"She found Frank and Joe and the others. They're all okay."
"Seriously?"
HBNDHBNDHB
Joe leaned against the railing of the cutter. His dad and Frank were still talking, so Joe had figured that he might as well let all his friends call their families first. He had to smile as he listened to those brief, overjoyed conversations one after the other. He cleared his throat, hoping he'd be able to sound a little less raspy when it was his turn. He probably wouldn't. It would take more than a few hours for that to heal.
A few hours. It seemed incredible that just that morning, none of them had had any idea whether they would see their homes again. It seemed more like a lifetime ago already.
Katina sidled up to him while he was standing there, probably because he was the only one of the former castaways who wasn't near one of the strangers. She had had a dazed and overwhelmed look to her ever since they had gotten her on the cutter. It must have been hard for her to have no one to talk to and not really understand what was happening.
"Once we get back to Hawaii, I'm sure we'll be able to find your parents," Joe told her, although he cringed at how raspy his own voice sounded.
Katina looked up sharply at him. "Hawaii?" she repeated.
"You remember?" Joe asked.
Whether she did or not, she didn't understand the question, and she couldn't give an answer that Joe would understand. It left a little time to think. He really meant it when he said he thought they could find Katina's parents without difficulty. Provided that "Katina" really was her name—and there was no reason to think it wasn't—and she really was abducted from Hawaii about five years ago, it would take probably less than an hour for the police to get the contact information for her parents. But that didn't mean everything would be straightened out for her that quickly. Her parents could be out of the country. Even if they were on the mainland of the United States, they might have difficulty getting to Hawaii quickly enough. Then, too, there was the possibility that her parents might be deceased. It was even possible that they had abandoned Katina all those years ago and that was how she had wound up in the gang's clutches in the first place. But fortunately, the most likely possibility was that her parents would want her back. Even then and even if they happened to be in Hawaii, it would all take some time, though. Katina might be nervous to go back to them after all this time, and she might need to have a DNA test before the authorities would let them have her. Who knew what the next few days, weeks, and months would be like for her?
"Joe?"
Joe turned around to see his dad behind him. Katina had also looked up, and she stepped slightly behind Joe, as if to hide.
"It's all right, Katina," Fenton tried to assure her, and Joe echoed his words.
Katina, however, wasn't consoled by words she didn't understand, and she moved away to where the other castaways were gathered.
"It's been kind of tough, not really being able to talk to her," Joe said and then cleared his throat.
"No doubt," Fenton agreed. "It's a fortunate thing that you boys were able to win her trust anyway."
"What do you think is going to happen to her now?"
"I don't think we'll have any trouble finding her parents."
"I know. It's just that I don't feel quite right leaving her alone in Hawaii if all of us go back to Bayport right away. I mean, alone with strangers."
"You're practically strangers," Fenton pointed out. "You've never even actually talked to her."
"True," Joe conceded.
"But you probably have a point," Fenton quickly went on. "It might be hard for her not to have anyone familiar around. She was old enough when she was kidnapped that she should remember her parents, though, and hopefully they're nearby. In that case, I don't think you need to worry. She'll be better off with them."
"What if they're not nearby?"
"There is another side to all this. After everything you've been through, you have some recovering to do before you can help anybody else."
Joe smiled ruefully. "I've done plenty of thinking about Number One lately."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm not that proud of how I've acted the whole time we were on the island. Thinking about it, it seems like we were bickering most of the time. And, uh, I didn't get all these bruises from Brock." Joe cleared his throat once more and looked at the waves passing by.
"We've all made mistakes the last few months," Fenton said. "There are several things that I wish I would have handled differently. But as for you and the other guys, it looks like you're all still friends."
"Yeah, somehow." Joe rubbed one of the bruises on his cheeks. "Frank really packs quite a punch, though. Uh, not that I didn't start things."
Fenton grinned wryly and then pulled Joe close to him in a hug. "It's good to have you back, Joe. I love you."
"I love you, too, Dad."
Fenton let him go. "All right. Let's go call your mom now."
