HDA - Living in Darkness Trilogy - Pt 2 - The Search

As she slowly pulled herself into a sitting position and stared up into the sky as the ashes from the ill-fated flight of the helicopter owned by Derak Mathews rained down on her head, Deanna Merrill grimaced and gingerly picked out a glass shard from her leg. Her expressive navy eyes looked about at the men who just now started to stand about her, a variety of shocked expressions on their faces.

Deanna blinked and looked back over to her right where she saw the pond in the back part of the lawn, and a vivid memory, the sight of a body which fell from the chopper moments before it exploded and a more vivid memory of sound, of the body hitting the water, caused Deanna to spring to her feet. She groaned in agony and held her stomach then ran, pains and aches all forgotten in a frenzy of activity.

Move it, Merrill, she told herself sternly and kept running, despite the fact that her leg protested it violently. You made a hash of this, now fix it or you’ll have your own head. You won’t even have to have your husband ream you for it.

Several of her most favorite invectives, all of them French, all of them not nice, went through her head as she saw the body lying face down in the pond, and she dove in without a second’s thought. The mentality that made her a good agent also gave her the ability to act instantly, without fail and without regard for her own safety it if meant saving the life of another. Frank Hardy’s limp form floated nearby. Deanna could only pray that she had not been too long, that the boy, or rather, young man, was not already dead. Deanna wasn’t at all fond of losing the life of anyone, much less of people just out of their teens.

Strong strokes took her to Frank’s side and she turned him over in the water so that he was face-up. His face was already a ghastly pale color and she knew without having to check that he wasn’t breathing. She felt for a pulse and nearly panicked for an instant. None. But there was no way this young man was going to die, not on her watch he wasn’t!

Deanna knew she couldn’t perform CPR on the young man in the water, not when she couldn’t touch bottom and she had to tread water to keep her head up above the murky stillness of the pond. Deanna pulled Frank into a lifesaver’s hold and began to tug him toward the shore. Just as she was short of it someone jumped into the water beside her. She saw, gratefully, that it was Sam Radley, Fenton Hardy’s partner.

“Get him on the shore,” Deanna gasped as she pulled herself out of the pond, and, as Sam pulled Frank out of the water, she knelt beside the unconscious young man and began, with Sam doing chest compressions, to breathe into Frank’s mouth.

“One and two and three and four and…” Deanna blew into Frank’s mouth.

“One and two and three and four and…” Deanna blew into his mouth again.

“One and two and three and four and…” Deanna blew into his mouth again and this time, she checked his pulse. She shook her head at Sam and he began again.

“One and two and three and four and…” Deanna blew into Frank’s mouth.

It seemed to go on forever, as if days and weeks passed while the pair of them worked, in unison, to bring some life back into the still form between them. Not dying, Deanna thought wearily as she blew into Frank’s mouth for like the umpteenth time. Not dying, not on my watch.

A few seconds later – or minutes or months, Deanna wasn’t overly sure – they were rewarded with a retching cough and a violent shiver attack from the young man, and Deanna pulled the young detective into her own arms and began to chafe his arms and legs to bring warmth back into them, while she listened as the sirens became louder as they neared the old mansion on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut.

Someone – she realized a moment or two later that it was her partner, Audrey Simpson – wrapped a blanket around both her and Frank, cocooning them into a warmth of wool, and she felt her own shivers subsiding. Frank’s shivers began to die off a little, though he didn’t open his eyes or look up at her. She kept a close check on his breathing and one finger glued to the carotid pulse in his neck. It was slow but steady, the thump against her finger a reassurance that the young man was still alive.

“Drink this, Dea.” Audrey knelt beside her and put a cup in front of her. Deanna reached a hand through the cocoon and wrapped it around a hot cap from the thermos bottle Audrey held in her other hand. Their coffee, from their rental car. Deanna took a drink of it, grateful for her friend and partner’s presence, and thanked her wordlessly while she sipped and let the warmth radiate down into inside of her. She closed her eyes but remained seated upright, one finger still on Frank’s carotid pulse.

“Is he…is…he?” Deanna opened her eyes and saw Fenton Hardy, Frank’s father, standing over the both of them. “Deanna?”

“He’s alive,” Deanna said in a raspy voice. “Fenton, he’s alive. He’ll be all right, the hospital will want to check him out but he’s alive. Don’t worry.”

“I’m a father.” Fenton looked like hell and Deanna thought he should probably sit before he fell. He, after all, had also made a fateful plummet from the doomed copter and while he had been conscious enough to break his own fall, Deanna seriously doubted he should be doing anything strenuous. “I was born to worry.”

“Fenton, sit down before you fall on your nose,” Deanna told him. “Frank’s getting warmer, he should be waking up any minute.”

“Be better to get him out of those wet clothes,” Audrey observed.

“I think I’ll let the paramedics take care of that one.” Deanna looked very pointedly at her partner, her look turned to a full-blown glower when Audrey smirked at her. “Remind me next time that I want to work with Billy, not you.”

Audrey made kissy faces at her and Fenton laughed; the laughter lit up his brown eyes as he slumped down on the ground beside them.

The blare of sirens got even closer and died as soon as they pulled up just outside the old mansion. Deanna couldn’t see them from where she sat but she suspected they were right in the front driveway, and knew it would be only a minute or two before they made it to the back lawn. The ash and debris from the chopper were strewn about the lawn, with the largest portion that remained still burning about a hundred yards away, near the edge of a small grove of trees.

Several other pieces were very close by the pond and a little too close to the house for comfort. Not that saving the house had been a huge priority.

“Dad?” Frank stirred in her arms, and Deanna pulled her finger away from his neck and loosened some of the blankets. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Agent Merrill, Frank,” Deanna said in a low voice. “Your dad’s right here. How do you feel?”

Frank laughed a little and then started coughing. “Probably as bad as I look,” he gasped. He struggled to sit up but unable to do so, collapsed against Deanna again.

“Just sit still,” Fenton Hardy told his oldest son as he motioned for someone behind him. Deanna noted with pleasure that it was the paramedics coming their way. Two of them knelt beside Deanna and Frank, and Deanna surrendered the blanket to Frank and scrambled back out of the way to give the attendants room to work.

“How long was he out?” one of the medics, whose nametag read ‘Spacey,’ asked Deanna and Fenton.

“I’m not sure of the total time,” Deanna said and she flashed a questioning look at Fenton, who shrugged. He didn’t know either.

“Four minutes,” Audrey said from behind. She had a camera now and was taking pictures of the lawn. “Four minutes and maybe a few seconds on top of that. From the time he hit the water until he responded to CPR.”

Deanna knew Audrey had still been inside the house when the explosion happened or else she would have beaten Deanna into the water.

“Audrey,” Deanna turned to her partner and motioned her forward. “Get a water sample. I don’t know what was in that pond but I don’t want either Frank or me getting an infection from it. And have New York send us another team, ASAP. I want them here yesterday.”

Audrey nodded and turned away, cell phone in hand, to speak to the New York Branch of the F.B.I. One of the paramedics began to check Deanna out and tsk’d when they came to the nasty cut in Deanna’s leg. His probing about inside it caused Deanna to swear again, and she apologized almost immediately to both Frank and to Fenton, who looked rather surprised to hear such things coming from her mouth.

“You didn’t spend time as a sailor did you?” Fenton asked with a grin.

“No, I learned all of those from my husband,” Deanna said. “All of them right after he got shot once. I never heard such language in my life but it obviously made an impact.”

“I think you need to get to the hospital. I see a couple more pieces embedded deep but I’m not allowed to dig that deep,” the paramedic told her.

“How’s Frank?” Deanna nodded to the student who lay on the ground with two more paramedics prodding him in a manner that looked somewhat painful to Deanna. She winced sympathetically.

Paramedic Spacey looked over at his partners and then shrugged. “We’ll know more at the hospital.”

“I really, really, really hate hospitals,” Deanna informed the medics. “Audrey!”

Her partner, who stood to one side, talking on her cell phone, held up a hand at her.

Deanna sighed and shook her head.

“Is there a problem?” the paramedic asked.

“Just that I swore no doctor but my own was ever going to be poking me, sewing me or otherwise causing me discomfort. I wonder if he makes a few hundred mile house calls…”

“Quit being a crybaby, Dea,” Audrey told her. “What do you want?”

“Call Daniel? And Kelly?” Deanna asked her. “Or call Daniel and have Daniel call Kelly?”

Audrey raised an eyebrow at that. Deanna glared at her for showing off – again.

“Deanna, sweetie, I may be your best friend in the whole world and love you like a sister, but I am not going to tell your husband, our boss, that you are going to the hospital. Again. If there is going to be anyone chewed out today, it’s going to be you.”

“He doesn’t chew out on the phone,” Deanna reminded her. “He chews me out in…uh, never mind.”

Deanna actually blushed and looked away. She had been about to reveal something that was better not known by all and sundry. She’d really rather face a thousand demons than face her husband again after this whole fiasco. She messed up very rarely but whenever she did it was usually dramatically.

“This wasn’t your fault,” Fenton protested. “Why should he chew you out?”

Deanna wished she had Audrey’s art of raising an eyebrow but she thought she got the point across with the slight frown she flashed at the detective. Deanna grimaced as the paramedic asked her to stand and get on the gurney. She leaned back gratefully and accepted the warmth. She jumped a minute later when Audrey’s cell phone chirped.

“Agent Simpson,” Audrey said into the phone. “Oh, AD Merrill, we were just talking about you.”

Audrey grinned and handed the phone over to Deanna. Deanna sighed and shook back her wet blonde hair, then put the phone to her ear.

“Just what the hell is going on up there?” Daniel Merrill asked his wife without preamble. “And why am I finding out about this on the news?”

“Gee, Daniel, I love you too,” Deanna said to him in a weary voice. “Look, I know you’re dying to chew me out, love, but can this please wait? I’m exhausted, my leg hurts and the paramedic is threatening to break the phone if I don’t let go of it in like a half minute.”

“No it can’t wait,” Daniel grumbled. “Good God, love, when I hear news about blown-up helicopters in a region of the world where my wife just happens to be, I tend to get worried. I’m going to have to resist the urge to wring your neck when you get home again. Now what’s this about paramedics? Don’t tell me you were in the helicopter…?”

“No, I was right below it,” Deanna said and grimaced when the paramedic strapped her down to the gurney. “I’ll be all right, honey, I just got a bit of shrapnel in my leg, is all.”

“Don’t say that so calmly, Deanna Lynanne,” Daniel grouched and then he sighed and Deanna saw his smile, even hundreds of miles away. “You’re really all right?”

“I’m really all right,” Deanna promised.

“Be expecting to have to fill out lots of reports when you get back,” Daniel warned her.

“I’m following this one through to the end, babe,” Deanna warned him. “We still haven’t found the perpetrator or the captive.”

On the other end of the line, Daniel sighed. “I knew you were going to say that, love.”

Deanna’s smile turned to a grimace when they lifted the gurney on which she lay.

“Darling,” she said. “You know worrying about me is useless. I know how to stay out of trouble. Kiss the kids for me.”

“As long as you remember that I’m not cut out for single parenthood,” Daniel reminded her. “I love you.”

“Ditto,” Deanna laughed at her favorite movie reference and then disconnected. She handed the phone back to Audrey just as her sadistic paramedics lifted her up into the ambulance.

“Any instructions?” Audrey asked from the back of the ambulance.

Deanna made a face at her and Audrey laughed. “Right, then, see you later.”

The door closed with a sense of finality.

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Disclaimer

The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. The authors 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.