Hardy Detective Agency featuring Hardy Boys Fan Fiction

Chapter Twelve: Vacationus Interruptus

Our first night and full day at the cabin were as peaceful and pleasant as any vacationers could have wished. Both our friends seemed to have mellowed out, now that they were no longer cooped up in Biff’s car. Chet took up his coveted position as chief chef and organized us into whipping up a good dinner. After we'd eaten and cleaned up, we all went out to get a better look around and ended up on the lakeshore pier, watching the sun set behind the trees that surrounded the lake. The lake itself was calm despite its size; Biff told us it was five miles across north to south, and three east to west, at the longest points. There were several cross-country ski trails in the area, and at least one snowmobile route.

“Well,” remarked my irrepressible brother, on hearing this, “that’s good to know, in case we get a June blizzard. Hey, ow!” he concluded, ducking as Biff threw a twig at him.

“You shoulda told us before, I would’ve brought my skis,” I joined in, laughing at the dirty look I got in response.

“Wise guys.” Biff was trying not to smile, and the banter went on for a while.

"Let's go inside," Joe suggested as darkness settled in. "There's too many bugs out here. I didn't come on vacation to be a blood-donor for mosquitoes."

"They do get aggressive, unless there's a breeze," Biff admitted. "We seem to've gotten unlucky tonight."

"I hope one of us brought bug-spray," Chet remarked, standing up and slapping at a mosquito. "We didn't buy any at the store."

"I brought some," Biff and I said in unison, and then we laughed.

When we got inside, the light in the cabin seemed uncommonly bright after the dark outdoors, and the air was significantly warmer. Chet went straight into the kitchen and got seconds on dessert; Joe, inspired by the example, followed suit. After I'd watched them gobble the chocolate cake for a few minutes, I caved in and got some for myself. I have a weakness for chocolate. My brother grinned as he saw me cut a slice.

"Figured you wouldn't be able to resist."

"I can resist!" I protested, pulling out a fork. "But I can see that if I do, there won't be anything left to resist- you two will scarf it all. Might as well get it while it's here."

"I like your reasoning," Biff remarked, and helped himself to a bigger slice than anyone else's.

An hour or so passed pleasantly in general chitchat and joking, which slowly faded into yawns and silence. Finally we all had to admit that we were too tired to stay up any longer, and headed for our respective rooms. “If anyone tried to put me to bed this soon at home,” Chet remarked as he was entering his and Biff’s bedroom, “I’d throw a fit. It’s barely even nine-thirty.”

“Traveling,” I replied through a yawn. “See y’in the morning.”

The next morning, Monday, was clear and bright and hot- not as bad as Bayport, but hot enough. We spent the day near the cabin: inflating a few rafts and swimming in the lake; checking out the boat engine, which was skipping, and managing to fix it; assembling fishing poles and tackle boxes; digging bait, and wandering around the vicinity of the cabin to get familiar with the area. We had sandwiches on the big front porch for lunch, but ate inside for dinner, for the bugs were getting bad. Everyone’s mood was chipper; there was a lot of joking and a certain smarty-pants got to take an involuntary swim. We all went to bed a good deal later that night than the previous one, despite our plans for a fishing trip early in the morning.

Tuesday was different. On Tuesday, we found trouble- or, more accurately, it found us, the way it always does.

What Biff hadn’t told us, because he hadn’t known, was that there was a junior scout camp across the lake from us. It hadn’t been there the last time the Hoopers visited, and we wouldn’t have been aware of it ourselves if Joe hadn’t spotted the rotating lights of several squad cars flashing over the water. How he saw them, I don’t know, for it was a very misty morning. We were out in the boat, fishing as planned, but when we saw the lights, we went over to take a look. And in doing so, we landed smack in one of the most dangerous mysteries we’d ever dealt with.

It started as a straightforward enough situation, if a rather serious one. A boy had gone missing from the camp during the night, and no one seemed certain whether he had wandered off and gotten lost, or had been kidnapped. Since he was the son of a famous football player, we concluded it was probably a kidnapping, and the evidence quickly began to point that way.

It ended three days later and several hundred miles north of where we’d begun, on a boat in the middle of the Saint John’s river in Canada. Had we known at the start what that case would entail, we might have hesitated to take it on.

In the process of solving the case, Joe and I found seven more kidnapped boys, all of whom had been brainwashed into believing they were the test-tube creations of a mad geneticist, Randolph Rhee. Candir Karu, a bloodthirsty ‘foreign representative’ who thought his country was paying for cloned athletes, was involved too. But the one we had the most contact with was a sadistic lumberjack, Pierre Lafoote, who was Rhee’s assistant and primary kidnapper. Lafoote had made the local Canadian lumberjacks assist him and Rhee, as a sort of spy-ring/brute-squad combination. Lafoote had also started stories to scare outsiders away- stories about the family of giants, descended from Paul Bunyan, who were ‘terrorizing’ the area.

These three, realizing that Dad and a bunch of Federal agents were hot on their trail, abandoned their ‘demons den,’ as the locals called it, and were planning to haul us all off to Greenland. Rhee had only been waiting until he could add Joe and I to his collection of brainwashed DNA material, as he regarded the boys; he was eager to begin experimenting on us.

We had the spookily accurate prophecy from a bunch of cultists known as Apocalypse to thank for some of this, and an Institute of Health investigation of Dad’s to thank for the rest of it. The government had been searching for Rhee for some time, supposedly in concern over a virus that he and his team had been exposed to ten years previously, but in fact because they feared he’d begun to clone people. Of course, we also had our own talent for landing nose-deep in trouble to thank; the problem was that our ability to get ourselves out of trouble had been more unreliable than usual. Up until the very last minute, we weren’t sure which way things were going to go, and that made us both very nervous. We had a rather desperate plan in place, but right after we implemented it, Rhee came in with a pair of syringes and dosed Joe and I with a sleeping drug. I fought it off as long as I could, hoping to hear the FBI moving in, but it was no use. The last thought in my mind as I succumbed was to wonder, despairingly, where I’d wake up and who I’d be when I did.