Hardy Detective Agency featuring Hardy Boys Fan Fiction

Chapter Seventeen: The Half-Star Hotel

The trip home was more or less the reverse of the trip up, with a couple minor exceptions. The first was that we got packed and had the cars loaded by eleven a.m. , even with the complications of breakfast and tidying up the cabin. We managed that by splitting the chores; Joe and I loaded up both cars while Chet and Biff did the cleaning up part. Chet packed up all the remaining food into the plastic grocery bags from the last shopping trip and put half the bags in the backseat of each car. “So we’ll all have plenty of stuff to snack on if we need to,” he explained. “Better than pulling over and sharing stuff out.” Everyone agreed this was sensible and Joe remarked that we might not even need to stop for lunch.

Once Biff had locked up the cabin and made sure no one could take the boat, we got under way. I let Joe do the driving until we got to the Interstate. It took nearly three hours before we saw Interstate sign, and when we paused at a gas station to change places, he actually seemed relieved to give up the driver’s spot. “Gets to your arms after a while, doesn’t it?” he said ruefully, rubbing his shoulders.

“Be grateful we have cruise control,” I told him, readjusting the mirrors. “Otherwise your leg would be in even worse shape than your arms.”

“I can believe that,” he admitted. “Y’know, I’d think being on the Interstate would be easier than back roads- no stop signals, no slowing down for left turns. Just hit the cruise control and let the graded road take care of the majority of the curves.”

“Not that simple,” I explained. “There’s always the chance of a traffic slowdown, for one thing. And then you’ve always got to be alert on who’s coming up behind you- and who you’re coming up behind. Everyone’s always going a little slower or a little faster than everyone else- or a lot, sometimes- so it’s always this big...well, not a game exactly, but like a competition of who is passing whom and at what point. The patterns are always shifting and you don’t dare let your concentration lapse. If you do, you could end up road pizza.” I fell silent for a moment to make the merge into traffic, then added, “And there’s always on and off ramps changing the pattern, too.”

“I do dislike merges,” my brother muttered. “I always think we’re going to get sideswiped.”

“We won’t,” I assured him.

Forty minutes later, Joe was asleep, leaning back in the seat and slowly slumping towards the passenger door. I wondered briefly if his fatigue was due to the driving, to a bad night, or from rising early. Then I dismissed it and let him sleep for a while. As predicted, we didn’t stop for lunch. When my stomach started to rumble, around two, I woke Joe by turning the radio on. He was a big help, organizing a sandwich for me and even holding the steering wheel steady once or twice so I could eat without dropping anything.

We stopped for supper around seven, but we had a no luck when it came to finding a hotel that wasn’t all booked up. Finally, exasperated, we got back on the highway and proceeded to the next exit...and the next...and the one after that. “This is ridiculous,” I complained, rubbing my tired eyes with one hand. “There has got to be at least one decent hotel around here that isn’t full up.”

“What I can’t figure is why they’re all full,” Joe mused.

“It is vacation season,” I reminded him. “And it seems there’s been an outbreak of weddings lately, too.”

Joe laughed a little at that. “In that case, we better start trying at the places no bride in her right mind would send her guests. Like two-star, not three and four-star.”

“I’ll even settle for half a star,” I muttered. “Better than sleeping on the side of the road.”

The motel we eventually ended up in was about that bad, too. It consisted one small main room, containing two double beds, two chairs, a small table, two lamps, and the inevitable television and clock radio. The bathroom was about the size of a closet, with a shower but no tub. It was non-smoking, but dreadfully crowded, musty and shabby. The table had definitely seen better days- two of its legs had been broken and repaired with duct tape- and the rest of the furniture was scuffed and battered; the sheets were worn and the mattresses lumpy. Biff optimistically pointed out that there was no sign of either rodents or insects, which was some consolation, even though Joe suggested that the local animal and pest population had taken off due to lack of human guests. We took turns in the bathroom, ignoring the shower on the grounds that the faucets were rusted too tight to turn, sprawled out on the beds- and quickly discovered another feature of our abode. The noise.

Not the typical traffic noise; just the opposite. We’d left the Interstate quite a ways behind, gambling that this tiny town- not much more than a village- would not be booked solid, unlike the larger towns. We were correct, of course, but when you stay in an old, weather-beaten room far from lights and civilization, you can find yourself getting a bit creeped out by the intensity of the silence. And the darkness. No streetlights, no headlights, no brightly lit store signs shining against the curtains, just solid blackness. It should have been peaceful and familiar, since we’d just spent two weeks alone in the woods, but this was different. Up in the Hooper’s sturdy, well-cared for cabin, we’d had nothing much worse than some very noisy crickets and frogs.

This motel room was another story entirely. Once the lights were off and the quiet darkness closed in, I started noticing all the other noises. The creaks and groans and poppings of wood settling. At least, I was pretty sure it was just the wood settling; but all the same, the sharpness and suddenness of some of those creaks and cracks was downright unnerving. And the thunk of something solid landing on the roof every so often didn’t help either. I couldn’t figure what that was about: acorns, maybe, except it was too early for acorns. I could tell Chet was uneasy- he was restless- and for once, Biff didn’t joke about ghosts. I guess he was feeling creeped-out himself and didn’t want to make things any worse.

I finally got too tired to worry about the noises anymore and drifted off into a surprisingly peaceful sleep. I did wake up twice- once when Chet was snoring, which stopped when Biff dealt with him, and once when Joe crawled out of bed to use the bathroom- but falling back asleep was no problem.

The room seemed much less threatening the next morning, more pathetic than creepy, but we never did figure out what those bangs on the roof had been. I didn’t point it out to the others, but I think Joe noticed, as I did, that there were no trees overhanging the area close enough to have dropped anything- and there was nothing to be dropped, either. No fruit, nuts, berries or pinecones. After we’d had breakfast and were back on the highway, Joe suggested that perhaps some pranksters had been in the area, throwing stones to scare the motel’s patrons. It seemed like a fine explanation to me, so we left it at that- even though I hadn’t seen any footprints, either.