Chapter Twenty: Haywire

Maybe that was why I was so careless when Dad got home.

Dad arrived the next day, Wednesday, at lunchtime. He was wearing his ‘successful case’ expression, which is pretty close to his normal expression, only happier. He greeted Mom and me and Joe, went upstairs to change, and came right back down to join us for lunch. While we ate, he talked a bit about the wrap-up of his case: He and Sam had managed to pin not three but four more robberies on the bank thief, who’d finally given in and confessed.

I was pretty quiet, but my silence went unnoticed by both Dad and Mom. Joe noticed, of course; he’d been keeping a rather puzzled eye on me ever since he got back from Biff’s and found me in one of the most silent and dour moods I’d ever been in. I hadn’t told him what was on my mind, partly from a subdued desire to defy Mom. She’d told me how she wanted me to influence him, and managed to get me to agree to think about it. My version of thinking about it wasn’t what she had in mind, though; I had decided that the best way to thwart her was to say nothing about it at all to Joe. But mostly I was still reeling from the implications of her request, and I couldn’t decide what, if anything, to do or say about those. The irony was that I didn’t really want to think about it- it hurt too much- but I couldn’t seem to concentrate long on anything else.

After lunch, Dad went up to his study to go through his mail and messages. Mom started some laundry, then left to go to the post office. I went up to my room; Joe followed, trying again to ask what was bugging me so badly. I was musing over whether to give in and tell him or not when Dad appeared in the doorway. “So, everything looks to be settled for the time being, investigation-wise,” he remarked, sounding pleased. “As long as we have some free time, we might as well enjoy it- though I half-expected you two to be out on some new mystery already.”

“Oh, yeah, we’re slacking off a bit,” Joe joked, and I smiled. “Vacation, you know...we get a little lazy.”

Dad laughed quietly. “Well, we never did go into much depth about that last situation of yours. Care to give me a briefing before we decide what to do with our down-time?”

Joe glanced at me; I shrugged. “Sure.” I’d hardly thought about the ‘demon’s den’ case for the past two days; I’d had other things on my mind. “We haven’t written up our case notes on it yet,” I realized suddenly. “We should do that.”

“I’ll get the notebook,” Joe offered. I nodded and followed Dad down the hall and into his study. For some reason, we always talk about investigation-stuff in there. Probably force of habit.

I closed the door automatically, sat down on the old sofa, then asked, “Was there anything new about those brainwashed kids?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. All of the boys are making very rapid progress in the counter-conditioning. Mr. Chester did contact their parents and the families were reunited within twenty-four hours,” he answered, smiling at me with a touch of pride.

“I bet there were a lot of very happy people,” I murmured, trying not to blush as I imagined the scene.

“I’d say that was an understatement. Some of those children had been missing for almost a year. A terrible ordeal for any parent.” Dad turned rather somber. “They’re extremely grateful to you boys.”

I felt my face get hot in spite of myself. “A lot of luck-”

“And a lot of determination. The boy who disappeared from the camp- George Watley- didn’t need the same sort of treatment, of course, but he is undergoing counseling to help him get over the kidnapping. Mr. and Mrs. Watley are going to be sending a reward to you and Joe, by the way.”

Before I could answer that, Joe slipped in and sat beside me, notebook and pencil in hand. Grateful for the distraction, I absently turned and gave the door a push to close it, then settled back and tried to decide where to start.

It took a long time to tell, even though we did our best to keep things more or less in order. Dad didn’t ask too many questions, knowing most of them would get answered further along during the explanation. We didn’t edit the details, the way we had with Mom; we didn’t need to. Dad wouldn’t like the fact we’d been in considerable danger at a number of points, but he wouldn’t have a fit about it or prevent us from taking other cases because of it. So I didn’t hold back from telling him what Lafoote did to us to try and make us talk.

Loggers have a competition where they stand on a floating tree-trunk and keep their balance on it while it spins in the water. Log-rolling, they call it. Lafoote had his henchmen row us out into a lake and try our luck at it- with our hands tied. Behind us. We had lasted maybe half a second before falling in.

Swimming with your hands tied in front of you is difficult, but possible. Swimming with your hands tied behind you is impossible, as we found out the hard way. Lafoote wasn’t going to let us drown before we told him what he wanted to know, but he waited long enough before telling his men to pull us out that I became convinced he’d changed his mind.

After that, he took us to a local sawmill, strapped me on the conveyer belt, and turned the saw on. He did mention, later, that he would have shut it off in time, but I had my doubts. Luckily, even his own henchmen thought that was going too far, and they all left so they wouldn’t have to watch. One of them went even further than that; he surreptitiously loosened Joe’s ropes before he left. Joe got loose, knocked Lafoote out, and got me out of there- I was in mild shock, but the necessity of getting away as fast as possible helped me pull myself together.

After we’d finished explaining, Dad went back over a few points, questioning and clarifying. He was particularly interested in the Apocalypse cult and asked several questions about them. Then he asked a few more about the camp director, Smith; about Lafoote, who had worked with Smith in lumbering camps before, and about the Peapack camp, where we had not had a friendly reception. In fact, Dad asked for so much clarification that I decided it was a good thing that he’d actually been involved and already knew the general outline. I obviously hadn’t done a very good job of debriefing this time. Joe’s habit of hopping in with details had helped, too, but I felt a touch of exasperation at myself for being so flutter-headed.

“Sounds like this one shook you up a bit more than I thought,” Dad remarked kindly, looking at me. “You’re a bit disorganized, son.”

“Maybe we should’ve written it down sooner,” I offered, feeling sheepish. Or maybe Mom’s little request was getting to me even worse than I’d realized.

“Probably not a bad idea. The sooner you write it down, the better, and you didn’t get home for a week anyway,” he agreed. “Still, I had the general gist, and it’s plain you two made some good snap decisions at the time. I wish you’d been able to make your stalling plan a little more foolproof, but it worked.”

He was referring to the way we’d sabotaged Rhee’s boat to prevent him from getting to the nearest airfield and taking off for Greenland . “I wished that myself,” I agreed, frowning. “My biggest worry was that the brainwashed kids would fall back under Rhee’s manipulation and let us down- or turn on us entirely.”

“Fortunately, very few people re-submit to someone, once it’s been revealed that that person has manipulated them,” Dad assured me. “Once they get past the disbelief, there’s generally a great deal of anger, and it would have taken Rhee a lot of time to work past that and re-condition them to obey him. He probably wouldn’t have managed to make them trust him again, and the secondary conditioning would likely have been more fragile than the first.”

“That’s good to know,” Joe murmured, sighing.

“It certainly is,” came Mom’s voice, and all three of us started in shock. I turned swiftly, and stared in dismay at the study door. It was open just a crack- just enough to see Mom standing on the other side. I couldn’t see more than her outline for a moment, but I wondered, very uneasily, how long she’d been standing there. Quite a while, from the icy anger in her voice.

“Laura?” Dad said in surprise.

Mom flung the door open, but didn’t step inside. I winced a little as the doorknob banged against the study wall, but most of my attention was taken by the look on my mother’s face. She was furious.

“What’s not so good to know,” she went on, “is that not only have my sons been lying to me about the dangers involved in their so-called missions, my husband is obviously approving of and assisting in these- cover-ups.”

“We didn’t lie,” Joe said, his voice soft. I knew that tone; he was afraid of becoming the target of her anger, but he was also determined to defend us. “We didn’t, we just left stuff out. It’s not the same.”

“You did it to deceive me!” Mom turned on him. “There’s a name for that, Joseph Hardy- lying by omission!”

Joe didn’t reply. I glanced over at him and wondered if I was as pale as he was. I certainly felt like it, and my stomach was churning; I hated confrontations, but I couldn’t let Joe take the brunt of this one. “We didn’t tell you about the danger because we knew you’d get upset about it,” I told Mom, and she fixed that daunting glare on me. “You always do, even when you know it’s all over and we’re fine. So we figured there was no point in worrying you with stuff that was already finished.”

“Are you trying to tell me you were protecting me?”

“Well- I- yes-” I fought the urge to drop my eyes.

“No, Frank, you weren’t. You were protecting yourselves! You knew I would be upset. You decided I might be less likely to let you run off and fling yourselves into danger at the drop of a hat. And you concluded that as long as I didn’t know how dangerous it was for you, I wouldn’t step in and prevent you from working on these idiotic cases! So you lied! It never occurred to you that if I wanted to stop you, I would- danger or no.”

“Laura,” Dad’s voice came through the ringing in my ears. “The boys...”

I didn’t hear the rest, not clearly. Idiotic cases? Flinging ourselves into danger?

Dangerous for us?

Stop us?

“Stop us?” I repeated aloud, barely realizing I was on my feet. “Hey, Mom, if you’re so bent on people telling the truth, why are you lying through your teeth?” I heard her give a sort of hiss, but went on, feeling fury and fear churn inside me. “You don’t want to stop us from working on these ‘idiotic’ cases. You don’t give a red cent if we fling ourselves into danger. All you care about is making sure he-” I pointed at my brother “-doesn’t get hurt. Dad and I aren’t of any consequence at all, in your mind- Joe’s the important one, and you’ll do whatever it takes to force him out of this idiotically dangerous profession.”

There was, surprisingly, silence. Mom was staring open-mouthed, Joe was white and wide-eyed, and Dad was frowning in a mix of displeasure and puzzlement. I felt a weird tingling in my hands, a strangely disconnected sensation in my head. Adrenaline; I’d felt it before, though never quite like this. My nervous system was going haywire, but my voice was incredibly steady.

“You proved it yesterday,” I said into the silence. “Yesterday, when you came to me and tried to get me to talk Joe out of investigating. Oh, you made it real clear, Mother. You don’t mind if I keep working with Dad. That’s fine; if I want to do that, I’ve got your blessing, right? I can go on flinging myself into as many dangerous situations as I care to, and you won’t bat an eye. But you want me to use every bit of my influence over Joe, to keep him away from this profession, to talk him out of investigating- you don’t even care if I lie to him in the process or not, so long as I give it my best shot. ‘If you tell him that he’s better suited to some other interest, he’ll listen to you,’ those were your exact words.”

Joe wasn’t white anymore; he was turning scarlet with anger. Dad’s jaw was clenched tight, and his dark eyes seemed to bore into my mother. Mom didn’t look at him; she raised her chin and glared at me. “I did not suggest,” she started.

“You’re right, you didn’t suggest, you damned well said it straight out!” I shouted. “ ‘I don’t like the thought of Joe being a detective, and I can’t seem to persuade him that there are other options. You have the most influence on him, maybe you could manage to divert his interest.’ And the hell with me, right? Never mind that working without a partner is a lot more dangerous than working with one- I’d be long dead if it weren’t for Joe!” I wanted to go on, but I was shaking and breathless. And some small voice inside me was warning me that I had better stop there, before I said what I really wanted to say. It would only end up hurting my brother.

Joe said it for me, though. He had been silent until then, but now he crashed to his feet, knocking his chair over, and took two swift steps towards Mom. “You bitch!” he hissed, reaching out to clutch my shoulder. “You- you talk about liars, what are you, you backstabbing bitch! So much for caring about your sons- don’t you mean son, singular? Your whole life’s a lie, you pretend you care about us, but it’s always me. Oh, don’t deny it, anyone with eyes can see it! You aren’t even subtle about it anymore! Like Monday, when we were doing the yard work and you came out and gave me a glass of lemonade and didn’t bring Frank any. Well, guess what, Mom, I gave him half! I’m not letting you play favorites with me, I don’t want your rotten privileges and your smothering affection!”

“I- he- he wasn’t working as hard as-” Mom started, stammering a little, flushing guiltily.

“Bull!” Joe bellowed at her, his hand tightening. “He did all the weeding, all of it, all four of the beds, he pulled over a hundred weeds,” he added savagely to Dad. “And what did you say at supper? ‘Nice job on the lawn, Joe,’” he mimicked, wheeling on her again.

I noticed, vaguely, that Dad had risen from his chair and was scowling. Mount Hardy number three was about to erupt, I thought, half-shocked at my own irreverence. Why was everyone talking over my head this way, acting as if I wasn’t right there, couldn’t understand? I gave myself a little shake, forced my mind to concentrate on Dad’s deep, angry voice.

“-hoped that I was misinterpreting your behavior, Laura, since the last time I brought this up-”

The last time?

“You noticed too, then.” Joe seemed to pounce on the words as swiftly as I did.

“We’ve discussed this before and your mother promised to stop-”

“Why?” I demanded, interrupting Dad as I looked at my mother. “Why?” Joe had noticed, I had felt it, Dad had known and even tried to talk to her about it- why was she bothering to deny it? She was playing favorites deliberately, but why?

Mom returned my gaze and I could make nothing of her expression. “You’re misinterpreting, all of you-”

“Misinterpret?” I hardly recognized my own voice. “How the hell else is there to interpret it? You don’t love me- admit it!”

“That will be quite enough out of you!” Her finger jabbed towards my face and I recoiled, feeling Joe’s hand drop from my shoulder. “You-”

I shoved past her, through the open door, then turned to give one last shot. “If I needed any more proof, there it is,” I told her, my voice shaking despite all my efforts to control it. “Look what you’re trying to scold me for- being the victim of your favoritism. Meanwhile, look who’s calling you a bitch and a backstabber and getting away with it!”

“He’s right,” Dad said grimly. Mom turned on him with a cry of anger, Dad barked something back at her- and then I was running, running down the stairs, through the living room, out of that house.

***

 

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.