Monday, September 25, 2000 (2:50 PM)

       Frank sat in his third class of the day, lightly thumping his pencil against the desk, not hearing his professor as he spoke.  His mind wandered over the case, over his worry for brother and sister, over the attacks and on just what it all meant.  He knew he should listen as the professor spoke; he had a test later on in the week that he intended to ace if it killed him.  He was filled with too much anxiety to concentrate properly.  He really wanted to just leave the class and go check on Joe.  He very, very much wanted to go and check on Joe.  He felt that thought nagging at the back of his mind, like something might be wrong with his younger brother.  He wondered, briefly, if Mandy felt the same thing.  She normally felt it before Frank did.

       “And in conclusion,” the professor said and Frank sighed with relief.  The class was almost done.  The professor finished his conclusion just as the bell rang to indicate the end of the period.  It seemed that people were no sooner filling past than someone was pulling on his arm to get him out of the room.

       “Come on, Frank, I have a meeting in a half hour,” Connor told his roommate.  “I’m sorry to rush you so bad, but it’s my first time with Doctor Callum and I really want to make a good impression.  He seems to have poor feelings about football players and I want to show him I’m not just your typical campus jock.”

       “All right,” Frank said, placidly.  “Just try not to run me into a tree or something, all right?  Man, Connor, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so worked-up before.  Were you like this the first time you met Doctor Rich?”

       “No,” Connor said.  “But then I wasn’t so worried about good impressions back then either.  And Doctor Rich didn’t have this ‘jocks are brainless mooks’ mentality either.”

       The flight back to his dorm was a hairy one, at least in Frank’s opinion.  He found himself stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk that Joe or Mandy would have warned him about and the speed Connor was taking nearly sent him sprawling more than once.  Finally, he came up short and pulled his hand off of Connor’s shoulder.

       “Frank, what…!” Connor demanded.  “I’m sorry, I’m just really worried about this meeting.  I know I almost killed you about four times there.  We can go slower.”

       Frank nodded and wondered if there was something more bothering Connor than what Connor was saying.  His friend didn’t say anything, however and finally, Frank and Connor walked into their room.  He heard Connor rush across the room, probably to get his lab coat out of his closet.

       “Oh, the message light is blinking,” Connor told Frank.  “You might want to check it.  If it’s for me, just leave it and I’ll check it later.”

       The door to their room closed as Frank made his way to the phone and he checked their voice mail. 

       “Frank, this is Mom,” his mother’s voice sounded frazzled and worried.  “Your father and I are on the way to the hospital.  Joe’s had another setback, Frank.  Dr. Carlisle said he coded.  They were able to get his heart going again.  I’ll call you with more information when we get to the hospital.”

       Frank, however, dialed another number and got his sister’s cell phone.

       “Mandy, did you get a message from mom?” he asked her when she answered her phone.

       “No,” Mandy said.  “I just got back to my room, though.  Why? What is it?  Is it Joe?  I kept thinking I should try to get to the hospital.”

       “Mom said he coded,” Frank said.  “As in his heart stopped.  She said they got it going again.  I want to get to the hospital.”

       “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mandy said.  “Let me call Vanessa.”

       “All right, ten minutes,” Frank agreed.  “See you when you get here.”

       Frank hung up and paced the floor, being careful to stay in a straight line but unable to sit.  What had happened now?  The doctor had made it sound like Joe was going to be out of the woods, that Joe shouldn’t suffer any more problems from his poisoning.  Frank was frustrated as he paced and worried.  What if there really wasn’t a cure for the poison?  What if, the next time, they couldn’t bring Joe back?

       Frank shook those thoughts away.  He wasn’t about to give up on his brother now.  They had been through worse and he was determined they would get through this again.  Frank paced the floor some more, until Mandy and Vanessa arrived for the trip to the hospital.

 

       “He’s all right, Frank,” Laura Hardy told her son the moment Frank, Mandy and Vanessa came flying into the waiting room outside of the ICU center at Bayport Hospital.  “He’s all right, he’s still unconscious but they said they don’t see any reason why he won’t make a full recovery.”

       The look in his son’s eyes totally alarmed Laura.  She put a hand on his arm holding onto it as she tried to get that wild look out of Frank’s eyes.  He looked more frazzled than Mandy who looked a pasty white color. 

       “What happened?” Frank asked in a harsh voice filled, not with anger, but frustration.  “He was all right the last time we saw him and supposedly out of the woods then.  What happened this time, Mom?”

       “The doctors aren’t sure,” Laura admitted.  “Doctor Carlisle said Joe woke up earlier today and he was doing very well and Doctor Carlisle checked him twice during the day.  Joe had been sleeping both times.  Then, this afternoon, the code blue went off in his room.  He was unconscious when the trauma team got to him and he was convulsing.”

       “He’s all right now, if a little weaker,” Laura looked over at Fenton when he spoke.  Her husband looked suddenly very tired; there had been too many trips to the hospital this month.  “The doctor would like him to rest for a while before anyone goes in to see him and Con Riley wants you to go talk to him at the police station, Frank.  He’s found out some more on the man you’ve been looking for.”

       “I’ll stay until I can see Joe,” Vanessa said.  “Go on, Frank, you’ll just wear a hole in the carpeting if you stay here and I promise to you call you as soon as Joe wakes up again.”

       Laura saw Frank frown and she patted her son’s arm as she looked up at him.  While not a short woman, Laura always found herself looking up at her husband and her sons.  Frank’s six feet one topped Laura by a good five inches.  She saw the worry on Frank’s face warring with the desire to find out what Con wanted to tell him.

       Mandy came over to her older brother’s side and took his other arm.

       “Come on, Frank,” she said in a soft voice.  “Let’s go talk to Con.  We can come back later, when Joe’s awake.  He’d want you to go see Con too, you know.”

       Laura saw Frank’s features soften and he finally agreed to go with Mandy to the police station.  Laura kissed his cheek as he and Mandy left.

 

       “Have you and your family considered going into a hiding for a few days?” Con Riley told Frank after Frank and Mandy filled Con in on the attacks of late and on Joe’s latest setback in the hospital.  “I know you boys can get into trouble without really trying but this has to be rather hard on your parents.”

       “Hiding doesn’t really seem to help,” Frank said.  “They’ve come to our house, at least twice now.  The man, Pankovic or whatever his name is, doesn’t seem to understand ‘boundaries.’  Anyway, we’ll be better off if we can just catch him and lock him away so that he can’t get to us anymore.”

       “On that note,” Con said and Frank heard him typing on the keyboard on his desk.  As a full detective, Con had his own small office, though Frank knew Con rarely used it.  “I ran a complete listing on Doctor Malachi Rich, including any personal tidbits that were available to us, mostly because I was looking for a tie-in to Thomas Pankovic, so we could settle that fear of yours before you asked about it, Frank.”

       “What did you find out?” Frank asked, curiously.  “Anything that will help us?”

       “Several anythings, maybe,” Con said. 

       Frank heard Mandy gasp then and he heard someone, either Mandy or Con, repeatedly hitting a key on the keyboard, probably to scroll.  Frank looked over at his sister, a frown formed on his face.

       “What is it?” Frank asked her and wished he could see it for himself.

       “Doctor Rich,” Mandy said, softly.  “It says that he has two children, Frank.  One is a son by his wife, Colleen.  His son’s name is Jason Mathew Rich.  That’s not what got me going, though Frank.  He’s got a daughter too, by a woman named Donna Phillips.  His daughter’s name is Anna!”

       “Anna!” Frank exclaimed.  “Anna is Doctor Rich’s daughter?”

       “Do you know her?” Con asked. 

       “She’s this flake of a girl that’s been driving all of us crazy lately,” Frank told Con in disbelief.  “She’s the one that Joe rescued the day that this whole mess started.  It was that night that Joe was taken into the woods.  Maybe…”

       “It can’t be her,” Mandy protested.  “First of all, she is a flake.  Second, she wouldn’t just attack herself and you saw what she was like when we saw her last night!  If her last name is Phillips, well, that doesn’t mean that her father even knew her or she knew her father.”

       “Think about it, Manda,” Frank said, using his childhood nickname for his sister.  “It’s possible that she’s been playing us all along, trying to get close to us so she can get some kind of weird revenge for her father having to leave.  Just because she’s a flake, or she acts like a flake, doesn’t mean she’s not capable of malicious intent.  You remember Diane, don’t you?  She acted a complete flake and the whole time we knew her she was trying to get rid of Vanessa so she could have Joe.”

       “I guess,” Mandy sighed and by the squeaking of the chair, Frank knew Mandy had leaned back in her seat again.  “But what about that large guy?  How does she tie into him?”

       “That’s the rest of it,” Con interrupted a moment later.  “Thomas Pankovic was a cohort of Doctor Rich’s, back in the days when Rich worked for the army.  From what we’ve found out, so far, Pankovic helped Rich with several of his more sensitive experiments during a period of about two years, after which Pankovic got a job in the private sector for more pay and more responsibility than he received in the Army.  It was about four years after that when Pankovic got into the trouble that got him put into jail.

       “I haven’t been able to determine if Pankovic and Rich had contact with each other after Pankovic left the army,” Con continued without skipping a beat.  “However, well, there seems to be a good chance that they do still know each other, if Pankovic is still alive and is behind the attacks on you and Joe.”

       Frank shook his head.  It all still seemed to be such a stretch but the gap was closing quickly.  If Pankovic was somehow working for Doctor Rich, then perhaps Doctor Rich was trying to get rid of Frank and Joe because they could testify against him if he ever came back to the States.  Still, how did Anna Phillips tie into it all?  She seemed more connected now than before.  Perhaps she was just a good actress, he thought.  She still seemed too flaky to be some kind of mole.

       “Come on, Frank,” Mandy said a moment later as she tugged on Frank’s arm.  “Let’s go back to the dorm.  Thank you, Detective Riley, for your help, we really do appreciate it.”

       “No problem, Mandy,” Con said to them.  “I do hope you will take some advice, Frank and lay low for a while.  If this is Pankovic, he may be more dangerous than any of you think.”

       “We’ll be careful,” Frank promised.  It was the same as lying low but it would have to do.

       Mandy led Frank out of the police station and out to her car.  She drove them back to the campus while Frank thought.  He still didn’t have quite enough information to figure out the whole case or to know, exactly, what Pankovic wanted with him or Joe but it seemed to be getting closer.  He just needed a couple more pieces of information and then he would have it all in a nice neat package.  Or so he hoped.

       “I want to go talk to Anna,” Mandy told Frank.  “And see if I can scare her into giving us some more information.  Maybe I can get her to slip up and tell us something we don’t know yet.”

       “All right,” Frank said, slowly.  “But I don’t want you to go alone, Mandy.  See if Samantha can go with you.”

       “All right,” Mandy agreed placidly.  “I don’t think Anna’s all that dangerous but if it will help you feel better…”

       “It will,” Frank said somewhat curtly and he apologized a moment later.  “Sorry, Manda, I’m just on edge about Joe.”

 

       Later that night, Frank sat in his dorm room, typing notes into his laptop and having the machine read the information back to him.  He spent a fruitless hour trying to study for his upcoming test and had given it up to concentrate on the case, since that where his mind kept going.  He was adding onto the file he had made earlier and added in the information they had found out about Pankovic and Doctor Rich, as well as the information about Rich’s son and daughter.

       I should have had Con run a listing on Anna, Frank thought a moment later.  I’d better call him tomorrow morning and see if he’ll do it for me.  Maybe she’s got a history of mental illness or some kind of criminal record or something.  Of course if she played the good little daughter before Doctor Rich left, there may not be anything.  And I should see if we can figure out where his son is.  Jason, I think Con said.

       Frank input that information into his computer and then had the computer read back everything that Frank typed.  He changed some of the earlier information to update what they now knew and Frank sat back a moment to think.  He really wanted to catch the guy trying to kill Joe.  He wasn’t so worried about himself, at least not right at the moment but so far Joe had been dragged into the forest, stabbed and poisoned.  That made it far more personal to Frank than any personal attacks might have.

       He was interrupted a moment later by the phone ringing and after groping for it for a couple of rings, he finally pulled the receiver to his ear.

       “Frank, this is Vanessa!” Vanessa told him in a rushed voice.  “Joe woke up a little while ago.”

       “He did? Is he all right?  How does he feel?” Frank demanded and he wished that either Connor was home or Samantha and Mandy had checked in with him. 

       “He’s tired and sore,” Vanessa said.  “But, get this, Frank.  He said he thinks he knows who caused his heart to stop.  Just before it happened he remembered waking up and seeing a nurse in his room, or someone he thought was a nurse.  She did something to his IV, that’s what caused his heart failure.”

       “A nurse?” Frank asked, confused.  “Why would a… oh my gosh…”

       “Yeah,” Vanessa said.  “And he said he remembered her saying something to him before he went unconscious.  He couldn’t remember it for a little while but he said he remembers now.  Frank, the nurse said, ‘You are going to pay for what you did to my father.’”

       Frank froze in his bed.  Pay for what he did to her father?  His mind froze then too as a very bad thought came to him.

       “I have to go, Van,” he told her.  “Sam and Mandy just went to find Anna.  She’s the one who’s behind this.”

       “Anna Phillips?” Vanessa sounded incredulous.  “Are you sure?  She’s a mouse, Frank!”

       “She’s Doctor Rich’s daughter,” Frank told her.  “Ask Joe if that nurse looked anything like Anna Phillips, then call me back, I have to call and warn Samantha and Mandy that they’re walking into trouble.”

       Frank hung up quickly with Vanessa and just as quickly hit the speed dial for Samantha’s cell phone.  He paced the floor again as he waited for her to answer the phone and she answered on the third ring, just before her voice mail would have kicked in.

       “This is Samantha,” she said.

       “Thank God!” Frank exhaled in a rush of air as he sat down on the bed and rubbed at his forehead.  “I thought… well, never mind.  Are you and Mandy all right?”

       “Why shouldn’t we be?” Samantha asked.  “We’re fine, Joe.  Anna’s not in her room and we haven’t been able to find her.  We were just on our way back to you.  Mandy got a phone call from your parents.  Did you know that Joe’s awake?”

       “Yeah, that’s what got me worried,” Frank said and he passed along what Vanessa had told him.  Samantha whistled in surprise and Frank saw her, in his mind, with one eyebrow slightly raised and he smiled, though she was across the campus.  At least, he thought with pleasure, he still vividly remembered what she looked like.  “Don’t try to approach her on your own, Sam, I think she’s been behind a lot of the attacks.  Did Mandy tell you what we found out from Con?”

       “Yes,” Samantha said.  “And, I have to admit, that floored me.  I would never have connected Anna to Doctor Rich.  She was always a nice girl, if a little strange and just a little too fixated on Joe.  Do you really think she might hurt me or Mandy if we found her?”

       Frank shrugged.  “I don’t know what she’s capable of, at least, not really.  I just don’t think we should take any chances.  She’s been in the area, at least, when Joe’s been hurt and when he was poisoned.  And now with the connection to Joe’s latest problem, well, better safe than sorry.”

       “All right,” Samantha said, slowly.  “Mandy’s getting impatient so we’d better get going.  Do you want us to come by tonight?  It’s getting too late to go see Joe but we could go.”

       Frank thought that over.  He really did want to go see Joe but he also knew that Joe would probably be asleep again when he got there.  Frank thought it over for a minute or so before he finally decided.

       “No,” he sighed and shifted his position on the bed.  “I’d love to go sit with him for a while but I’ll wait until after my morning classes tomorrow.  See you tomorrow?”

       “Sure,” Samantha sounded like she was smiling and Frank had no problem picturing that either, or the fact that she probably had a lock of her red hair wound around one finger.  He had seen her do that often enough in the last year and he had to smile as he thought of it.  “I’ll come pick you up after your first class and we’ll go hit the hospital together, all right?”

       “Thanks, Sam,” Frank said.  “Love you.”

       “Love you too,” Samantha said and they hung up together.

 

       “That position can’t be comfortable,” Connor closed the door of the room he shared with Frank and saw Frank open his eyes and sit up, slowly, on his bed.  Frank still had his laptop open; it was sitting precariously on Frank’s legs as Frank sprawled out on the bed.  “What’s going on?”

       “Someone tried to kill Joe again,” Frank told Connor.  “And we found out that Anna Phillips is Doctor Rich’s daughter.”

       “Say what?” Connor asked and wondered if he walked in halfway through a conversation.  It sounded suspiciously like Frank just said Anna Phillips was Doctor Rich’s daughter. 

       “What I said,” Frank commented.  “Con told us that today too.  Joe thinks he remembers her saying something to him just before she tried to kill him.  Well… to be honest, I guess he doesn’t know for sure that it was Anna but from what she said to him when she did it, it matches Anna.”

       Frank told Connor the rest of the story and Connor whistled as he plopped down backward on his bed and stretched.  He had managed to pick up a couple of kinks during football practice and the extra hour after, drilling and drilling Coonby was not improving Connor’s temper at all.  Connor yawned and stretched again.  He had to get changed to go meet up with Mandy later.

       “How did your meeting go?” Frank asked, curiously. 

       “It was rough,” Connor said.  “But I think Doctor Callum and I will eventually get along.  He’s very intelligent but he doesn’t bother to stop to explain things twice so if you don’t catch something the first time, you’re on your own.  I don’t know if he put on that show just for my benefit or not but I’ll learn a lot from him, so that’s good.”

       Frank smiled over at him and tossed back his long, silky brown hair.  His brown eyes looked past Connor but were not filled with a vacancy of any kind.  Connor still saw the same light of intelligence in his friend’s eyes that had always been there.  Frank processed things much faster than Connor did, though Connor didn’t mind at all.

       “Well,” Connor said with a smile.  “I need to get changed and go meet Mandy.  She hasn’t called, has she?”

       “No, but I have a feeling she’ll be here soon,” Frank told Connor.  “I’m going to study some more, I have a big test at the end of the week and I barely heard a word the professor said today.  I need to listen to the whole tape again.”

       “I don’t envy you that at all,” Connor commented.  Connor ducked into the bathroom to take a quick shower and he said goodnight to Frank as he raced out of the room to meet Mandy.

 

       Later that night, Frank rewound part of the professor’s dissertation for the day and replayed it into his headphones as he typed out some notes on his computer to go over later.  He often took meticulous notes in class but now he found it easier to just keep listening to the professor’s words and then to the parts of the books that had been read out for him by Sam and Connor that he thought he needed the most.  He just hoped there wasn’t more that he was missing.  He hadn’t been able to find the book for this class on CD or tape.

       He continued to listen to his professor’s speech as he lay back then rolled over on his side to get comfortable.  He stared out into his personal darkness as he listened, trying to block out thoughts of the case so that he could concentrate on his studying.  The case kept interfering.  The involvement of Anna Phillips raced through his mind, as did the connection between Pankovic and Rich. 

       Frank yawned and was on the verge of sleep when he suddenly felt a hand slip over his mouth.  He protested as a rock-like arm slipped around his neck.  A moment later, as he struggled, he felt a sharp needle prick in his upper bicep.  The person holding him kept a tight grip on him for a few minutes as Frank continued to struggle to get loose.

       A few minutes later, Frank started to sway and he felt his strength ebbing.  Finally, like a light being suddenly extinguished, Frank lost his battle and slipped into unconsciousness!

The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. I've only borrowed them to play with for a while but I promise to return them whenever I've finished with them.  (I make no promises as to condition, that's entirely up to them).  I promise, I'm only writing for fun and I'm not making a single dime off of this (unless you count personal fulfillment).