Hardy Boys Fan Fiction at the HDA - Boardwalk Bust

At first we thought it might be somebody hurt or maybe even a real shark attack this time. But as we got closer, we saw the people who were screaming were nowhere near the water. They were in the dry sand, gathered around in a big circle about five deep.

It took us a few minutes to push our way through, and the noise was deafening. We got to the middle of the circle and saw what the deal was.

There was a guy with a metal detector. He looked around sixty or seventy with wild hair and a scraggly beard. I spotted what he was holding in his hand. A huge diamond ring, glittering brightly in the sunlight. I knew that one had to cost a lot more than fifteen hundred dollars.

“Where’d you find it?” someone asked the lucky man.

“You think I tell you where I find it?” he asked, his thick accent sounding Russian. “Secret up here,” he said, tapping his find against his temple and grinning.

I looked over at Joe. “I wonder why he told anyone in the first place, if he wasn’t going to share the location?”

Joe shrugged. “Someone probably saw him pick it up. I saw him earlier sweeping the sand with that detector. He was about to mess up that sand advertisement from The Shore Thing.” He looked around. “I don’t know if he did or what, can’t see it from here.”

“Hmmm....” I said. I made my way over to him. “Excuse me, sir. But you know you’re going to have to report the find to the police department. It could be part of the jewelry that was recently stolen.”

Some of the screaming died down and several people started backing up. I thought I saw some of them find a spot and start digging in the sand.

The man stared down at the ring and I got even closer to him. Now I was able to get a better look at it.It was done in a flower design, studded with tiny diamonds set in silver or platinum. The way the man held it, I could see something inscribed inside the band. Melissa & Fred 4ever.

He slowly slipped the ring into the pocket of his raggedy shorts and gave me a long look. “I not find anything.” He got closer and pretended to slit his throat with his finger. “If you say I did...”

I held up both hands and backed away. I nudged Joe away from the crowds. “Come on.”

“What? Do you think it’s one of the stolen items?”

I nodded. “Let’s head back to The Shore Thing. I want to see if maybe Miss Fleming had it.”

“What about the other two places?” asked Joe.

“We’ll get to them. I want to find out about the ring first.”

Joe followed me back to The Shore Thing. At first, Mary Fleming didn’t look that happy to see us again so soon. But after I mentioned the ring, she got busy. She checked in her inventory book and then in her ledger of current orders.

“Yes, here it is – it was scheduled to be picked up today. ‘Melissa & Fred 4ever’.”

“Whoever stole it must have dropped it,” Joe said.

At that moment it occurred to me that the ring was found on the beach, right near the pier where Ricardo Myers worked. I assured her we’d try to get the man to turn it in and we headed for the exit.

She seemed happy about it, which I took to be a good sign. If she had stolen her own stuff, like Joe had suggested, it wasn’t likely that she would have dropped it on the beach.

Ricardo Myers had tried as hard as he could to point the finger at her. I wondered what more was going on there. What did he really have against her – and how far had he gone to get even?

“Where are we going now?” asked Joe.

I pointed to where the Russian had found the diamond ring. We found people scattered up and down the beach, digging like crazy. Not far from us a tall, dark-haired girl was using a beach shovel to dig. She looked up at us, her eyes excited. “So far they’ve found three diamond rings and a silver bracelet in the sand. You’d better start digging.”

I shared a look with Joe. I could understand one ring being dropped by accident but three? And a silver bracelet? I looked around and noticed a knot of people in one area. “Hey, Joe, look.”

Joe leaned forward and frowned. “Frank...he’s selling metal detectors!”

“Joe, doesn’t it strike you as a little odd? In less than ten minutes after someone finds a ring, this guy’s set up shop, selling metal detectors.”

Joe narrowed his eyes and started forward. We had to wait in line but the man was fast. We finally reached the front of the line, right behind a middle-aged man who must have complained about the price.

“I don’t give bargain,” said the metal detector seller. “You want bargain, you go someplace else. Here one price fits all. You buy or no buy, what I care?”

The man in front of us muttered something unflattering and stalked off, leaving us next. I nudged Joe and saw he’d noticed it too. Our businessman had a thick Russian accent.

“You want buy?” the Russian guy asked us.

“What we want,” I said, “is to know how you knew to show up here just in time to cash in on this treasure frenzy.”

The guy scowled at me. He had a big, bushy mustache that drooped down on either side of his mouth and his gray hair was long, tied back with a piece of string or something.

“You shut face, okay?” he said to me. “Why it’s your business what I do? Is free country.”

“You’ve got to admit, it looks pretty suspicious,” said Joe.

“Suspicious? What are you, junior police officers? I come to this country to make decent living and be free. Not to live in police state. Now, get lost. In this country, I have right to sell what I want.”

“You’re right,” I said and the man seemed to calm down a bit. “I’m Frank Hardy and this is my brother Joe. We’re just worried someone else might assume...since some of the jewelry being found was stolen from local jewelry stores...”

The man grunted. “Vladimir Krupkin.” He blinked as what I’d said registered and then started laughing. “You think Vladimir is such a stupid? Why I steal jewelry and then throw away? Is crazy! Ha!”

He had a point – it didn’t make any sense. But then, nothing about this case was making much sense. Yet. We could still hear him laughing as we climbed the stairs to the boardwalk.

Joe sighed. “I can’t think when I’m hungry.”

I looked at him. “That’s right – we never got our Texas wieners!”

We raced back to the hot dog stand and the man was good enough to have kept them warm. We paid for them and ate our lunch, then headed to a nearby ice cream vendor for some of the best soft-serve ice cream we’d ever had.

Joe was staring out across the water, savoring his ice cream cone. “So...something’s rotten in Ocean Point.”

“Definitely.”

“But what? And who’s behind it?”

I nodded. “That is the question.” I stared up and down the boardwalk at the various vendors and stores who seemed to be doing a brisk business. “Joe, who would benefit if a group of people found jewelry lying around the beach?”

“The people who found the stuff?”

“And?”

Joe looked up and down the boardwalk himself. “The stores, shops, vendors...the entire town.”

“Right. The treasure hunt would bring in more people, prices would go up and all the local businesses profit.”

Joe started munching on his waffle cone. “Okay...I can see that working but how are we going to figure out which one of them is behind the scheme?”

I shrugged. “It could be a group of them working together in a conspiracy.” I finished off my ice cream cone and bought a bottle of water to wash off the stickiness. I took one look at my brother and handed him the bottle of water as he finished off his cone.

I dried my hands on my swim trunks. “I don’t think, though, that a little popcorn stand or souvenir store owner would throw away thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry just to increase tourism. Only a very wealthy person could afford to throw away gold and diamonds. Anyone else would try to turn it into straight cash.”

Joe nodded. “I’ll buy that.” He drank down what was left of the water and tossed the container in a nearby trashcan. “That still leaves us with a lot of people as suspects – and most of them we haven’t even met yet.”

“We’ll go to the other jewelry stores in a minute.” I turned to talk to the ice cream vendor. He wore a pale yellow shirt with the name Wyatt embroidered on the left shoulder. “Excuse me, sir.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you own this place?”

“Me?” Wyatt let out a belly laugh. “I don’t own the shirt on my back.”

“Well, who does on it?”

“Same guy who owns half the shops and restaurants on the boardwalk – Carl Jardine.”

Joe came up to us. “Carl Jardine? Is he the richest man in town?”

“Oh, by far. He’s a multimillionaire,” Wyatt said. “You’d think he’d spread it around a little – give his workers health benefits or something – but no. He just uses his money to buy up more stuff.”

I nodded as the man continued to let him know I was listening.

“You think he works hard, like everybody else? No way. He spends all his time on the beach, building sand castles and stuff.”

I grinned and heard Joe chuckle.

“You think I’m kidding,” asked Wyatt. “That’s him right down there. You don’t believe me, go see for yourself.”

We walked over to the railing near the beach and scanned the area, expecting to see a man building a sand castle. What we saw was...the Taj Mahal.

I kid you not – this sculpture was so big that the man building it looked like a midget next to it. He could barely reach the top of the Taj’s tower to finish it off. In fact, he was standing on a big cooler to do it.

We thanked the ice cream man for his time and headed over to meet the richest man in town. The closer we got to the sculpture, the more incredible it looked. The thing was the size of a small house, but it was the details that were really amazing.

I’d seen pictures of the Taj Mahal in India. I don’t remember exactly how many thousands of workers built it, taking over twenty years to finish it. It’s built out of white marble, commissioned by a Mogul emperor for his second wife. He had planned on building a matching mausoleum in black marble for himself on the opposite bank of the Yamuna River but the project was never completed so the Taj Mahal houses them both.

Jardine had done an amazing job, down to the huge reflecting pool and the gardens that surround the building. He even had the outlying towers. The reflecting pool even had water in it. He must have lined it with something so the water wouldn’t drain out.

“Mr. Jardine?” I asked as we came closer.

He looked over at us, appearing distracted. “Yes?” He gave us the once-over. “Do I know you?”

I smiled. “We were told you build sand castles.” I pointed to the dome of the sand structure. “This is pretty much more than sand castles.”

Carl Jardine laughed softly as he brushed away a few loose grains of sand. “I add a touch of concrete to make it hold together.”

I cleared my throat. “I understand you’re the richest man in Ocean Point.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t go counting other people’s money.”

“You don’t need to count it if you’re throwing it away – or burying it in the sand,” Joe muttered under his breath. I shot him a glare.

Mr. Jardine was still talking, so he hadn’t heard. “I’ve done pretty well, though. Got quite a few businesses going, but they mostly run themselves at this point. I collect the checks and put them in the bank. I’m seventy-two years old – I’ve got more important things to do than work in an office.”

I watched him smooth a hand down the wall of the Taj Mahal. He was in good shape for 72. He wore a beach hat, shorts and a faded T-shirt. “How did you get started in the business?” I asked.

He looked over at me and grinned. “My first venture was a little saltwater taffy store on the boardwalk. I’ve still got that place, rented it a Russian guy, Mikhail Ylanovich. Seems an okay guy.” He stepped off the cooler and slipped on some well-worn flip-flops. He studied his creation. “Saltwater taffy was big in those days. We didn’t have fast food places on our boardwalk back then. Now I’ve got lots of different businesses along the boardwalk.”

“Would you say you have any enemies in town?” I asked.

“Enemies?” He looked puzzled and then shrugged. “Well, I guess you don’t buy up half the town without running into some opposition.” He brushed the sand off his hands and looked us over again. “You two are asking an awful lot of questions. You look a little young to be reporters.”

“Did you know that some of the stolen jewelry from the robberies recently has turned up in the sand, near the pier?”

Jardine looked over at the pier. “Really. Now why would someone do that?”

I waited a moment before answering, waited until he looked back at me. “We figure that whoever is scattering the stolen jewelry on the beach for people to find doesn’t have much need for the cash that jewelry would bring.”

He folded his arms across his chest and stared at us. “Someone like me, you mean.”

“I’m afraid so.”

He frowned. “You think I robbed those stores and buried thousands of dollars in jewelry to create a tourist boom out of which people like me would make millions. Is that right?”

I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. “More or less.”

“Let me tell you something, boys. I understand your theory. I can see that you’ve given it some thought. But you’ve got the wrong culprit. I have so much money that I have no need to make more. I already have more than I could spend in a lifetime. I don’t need more. I just want to be left alone, to do whatever I want.”

Joe stepped up and cleared his throat. “Who do you think is behind it?”

Jardine turned to look at his sculpture again. “I think that your theory is fundamentally sound but you need to adjust your sights lower – a level of wealth lower than my own, but not at the bottom of the ladder, if you know what I mean. Go find a list of the members of the Chamber of Commerce and go from there.”

I thought about it for a moment. “How many people are on that list?”

“Dozens, I should imagine. There are the businesses on the boardwalk but Ocean Point has more to it than just the boardwalk.”

Joe groaned. “Frank, how can we possibly check them all? We’ve only got a few more days here.”

Jardine arched an eyebrow. “Can I ask why it’s of so much interest?”

“We can’t ignore a mystery.”

“Well, good luck. Too bad you can’t stake out the beach day and night. But there’s no camping allowed here. The boardwalk lights go off at 3 A.M. and it’s dark as pitch out here after that, especially when there’s a new moon, like tonight.”

I shared a look with Joe and he grinned. I knew exactly what he was thinking. The richest man in Ocean Point had just given us our next plan of action: an all-night stakeout on the beach.

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The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. The Hardy Boys Fan Fiction authors of the Hardy Detective Agency have just borrowed them for an adventure or two. The authors promise to put the boys back when they are done with them. The authors do claim copyright to the original characters in this story. Please do not borrow original characters without express permission of the authors.