September 5, 2000

"FRANK!" Joe had leapt forward as well, almost at the same time as his older brother. He watched in disbelief as the thing puffed out something at Frank and his brother froze for a moment, seeming to be completely frozen before Frank toppled first to his knees and then down to the ground.

"Frank?" Joe called his brother's name as he reached over to pull his brother up and cradled Frank's head in his lap. "Frank?"

There was no response from his brother but Joe knew he was still alive. Frank was breathing, if shallowly and his pulse was strong, if uneven. Joe shook for a moment, then batted at the cylinder, sending it rolling across the floor, causing it to roll almost underneath Frank's bed.

"Hey, hold on!" Connor declared as stepped out of the path of the thing so that it wouldn't hit him. Joe scowled a moment, then turned his attention momentarily back to his brother. "We'd better do something about it, I don't think we want any more of that powder getting out. They'll need a sample at the hospital."

"Wait, don't pick it up!" Joe said, suddenly. "Get away from it, Connor. It could do that again and Mandy will kill me if you get hurt too. Go call Campus Emergency. Hurry!"

Connor moved away to do as Joe asked and Chet grabbed a plastic bag from the garbage can and gingerly rolled the thing into the bag using his toe. He tied the bag at the top, then wrapped it in another bag and tied that one at the top as well before he deposited it in one of Frank's empty drawers and slammed it close.

"Good work, Chet," Joe said with a wry smile. He checked his brother's pulse and breathing again. They were still there, but seemed shallower and weaker than before. "Hold on, Frank. Hold on, we're getting you help."

Connor came back from his task, pulled off his jacket and laid it under Frank's feet, then loosened Frank's collar. He finally settled back to wait for Emergency to arrive.

"What happened?" Connor looked up at the newcomer to the area - the floor's resident assistant, Michael Freedman. "Connor?"

"It was some kind of powder bomb," Connor said to Michael. "It crashed through the window and hit Frank right in the face with some kind of, I don't know what it is, but it was powdery. You can still see it on his face."

"Oh, God," Michael breathed. The thin, angular looking college senior sighed as he shook his head. "I was really hoping for an easy year this year. I should have remembered who was on my floor. Is he going to be all right?"

"It's the charm of having the Hardy Brothers anywhere in the vicinity," Joe, back from making his call to Campus security, muscled his way through fellow residents to kneel beside his brother. "And here, this time, we weren't even looking for any kind of trouble. And, I don't know, Michael."

I wish I did, he thought with a sigh.

"You don't have to look," Michael retorted. He ran a hand through his short-cropped, curly brown hair. "It finds you. It always finds you. I think I'll tell the Dean that I don't want this job anymore. They can find some other loser to do it." Joe leaned over his brother a moment to listen to his brother and then he carefully lifted a small fingerful of the white dust up to his nose and carefully sniffed it. It was odorless but Joe felt almost instantly lightheaded when he smelled it. Whatever this stuff was, Joe had never seen it before in his life.

"Do you have any idea what this could be, Connor?" he asked the older young man. "It's odorless, but it packs quite a wallop."

Connor leaned over to take a careful whiff of Joe's finger and immediately stepped back and held his head. Just as Joe figured, this stuff was very dangerous.

"Get a towel from the bathroom," Joe suggested to Connor. "I think we'd better get this off his face."

Connor nodded, his whole body displaying his distress over his friend. Joe glared up at the doorway, willing the emergency people to arrive and vowing that if they weren't here soon, he was taking Frank to the hospital himself, ambulance be damned. Connor handed him the towel he asked for and, being careful to not destroy the evidence but wanting his brother free of the powder's grip, Joe wiped it off and asked Connor to store it in another plastic bag.

"Who would want to play a prank like this?" Michael demanded. "It wasn't Maidlin was it?"

Joe shook his head. "This wasn't Maidlin and this wasn't some kind of prank. Someone tried to kill my brother!"

"School pranks have been known to get out of hand... what's that note on the mirror?" Michael wanted to know. "This is the first I've heard..."

"We just found it a little while ago," Connor said. "Michael, if this was a prank, someone's playing for keeps. I'm not saying that they wanted to kill us, or Frank at least, but look at it realistically. Someone shot a powder bomb through our window and filled that with something that may end up killing Frank. Put that together with the note and you get too many coincidences that do not add up to 'prank'. I don't think Maidlin at his worst would do something that bad. He's never hurt anyone."

"You're getting good at this, Connor," Joe praised his friend.

"Live with a detective for a year and you'll pick up all kinds of things," Connor said, serious as ever.

"I think we'd better get some tests run on that and the fake blood there too," Joe said. "Just in case it's something else."

Connor shrugged. "I can do that later in the chem lab. The hospital personnel will run their own tests on the powder, though and I'll probably find out that the fake blood is fake blood.

"That's fine," Joe said. "But we have to cover every angle here. So far, someone's threatened Frank and now tried to kill him. And you. And it's someone who knows the campus well enough to know just which room belonged to you and him. I'm not going to let this go without some serious investigation."

"Clear out," more voices ordered from the area of the elevators and two campus paramedics appeared, pulling a gurney filled with equipment along behind them. "Clear out, I say. Give us room!"

Connor and Joe stood up to back away from Frank, allowing the paramedics to take their place.

"What happened?" the older paramedic, whose nametag said 'Sullivan' looked up at the boys gathered in the Hallway.

Joe told him in precise terms as well as telling the paramedics what they thought had happened. Both paramedics stopped amid taking vitals for just a moment, then bent close to Frank's face as if smelling for something.

"Do you have a sample of what was used? The doctor's going to want to have a look at it."

"We weren't able to get it all off," Joe said, slowly. "We saved the rest in a bag, it's still on the towel. I didn't think we should leave that on his face if it's what did it."

Both paramedics finished their examination of Frank, both concluding that they had no idea what, exactly, was wrong with Frank beyond respiratory distress.

"We're going to take him into the hospital," Sullivan told them as they prepared to lift Frank onto the gurney. "The doctors are going to have to take a look at him." "I'm his brother," Joe said. "Can I ride with you?"

Sullivan nodded, distracted as he helped his partner lift Frank's prone body onto the gurney that they had positioned beside the older Hardy brother. Joe grimaced as he looked down at his brother's face again.

"I'll call Mandy, Sam and your parents," Connor told Joe. "Mandy, Sam and I will be there as soon as I can round them up."

Joe flashed Connor a grateful look and with a look of worry warring with anger on his face, Joe left with the paramedics.

 

Connor, in the meantime, made the necessary phone calls, telling Frank's parents only that he was in the hospital and that he and Joe would tell them more when they arrived. He told Mandy and Sam even less, only that he needed to pick them up as soon as possible - he would tell them more in the car.

Then, before he went to get the girls, he took his small ice cooler/lunch box and dug into the drawer where Chet had deposited the powder bomb. Chet was packing up Frank's laptop without having to be asked; knowing the Hardy's as long as Chet had, Connor figured that Chet had a better idea than most what needed to be done.

"Boys," a man stepped into the still open door of Connor and Frank's room and Connor looked up at them after closing the lid of his cooler, noting that they had the uniforms of campus security. "We just got a call about an attack of some kind in this room. What's happened?"

Connor filled him in as briefly as he could, with Chet filling in more bits and pieces of the puzzle. Connor was very reluctant to give up the package of the powder bomb to the guards. He knew that Joe would want it as a clue but the security guard insisted. He finally handed over his cooler and mentioned that they should probably be careful with it.

"We will, son," the security guard said, a kind expression on his face. "Did the victim get taken to Bayport General? The police will want to speak with you and any other witnesses."

"Yes, he was taken to Bayport General," Connor said. "But I don't know if you'll be able to speak to him, at least not right away. I can be available later but I need to go pick up his sister and bring her to the hospital."

Lexby, the guard in question, nodded in agreement. "Leave me a number where I can get a hold of you. Better yet, come by the security office tomorrow morning. The police should be able to wait until then."

"I'll be there," Connor said in an even tone. "Do you want Joe too?"

"And you," Lexby nodded over to Chet, who stood to one side, a blank expression on his face.

Both boys nodded and disappeared from the room. Connor led Chet out to Connor's car, a dark green Chevy Blazer. Connor sighed as he took a deep breath and looked over at Chet.

They climbed into Connor's car and drove over to Eldridge Hall to pick up the girls. On the way to the hospital Connor told them what had happened, starting with finding the note on the mirror in his and Frank's room and ending with paramedics taking Frank to the hospital. Mandy's face went slightly pale as she listened, worry lining her face. Samantha's expression was more shocked than anything, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was hearing.

By the time they got to the hospital, Connor saw Frank, Joe and Mandy's parents getting out of their car and he and the two girls met up with them on the way into the hospital. They found Joe waiting in the waiting room near the Emergency Entrance, pacing the floor from one end of the room to the other.

Joe quickly hugged his parents and his twin sister and listened with only half an ear as Connor finished telling Laura and Fenton Hardy what had happened to their oldest son. Joe held tightly to Mandy's hand for a while, the bond that only twins had as evident as ever to those around them. Mandy's face had regained some of its normal color but she said nothing, communing only with her eyes and only with her twin brother. Whatever she said in that secret language that twins shared made Joe hug her again.

"Frank feels like an outsider sometimes too," Samantha said as she came to stand beside Connor as he watched his girlfriend and his girlfriend's brother. "He told me once it always amazed him how much Joe and Mandy could say to each other just with a look. He swears it's not psychic or anything, just that they seem to always be able to talk by looks and gestures alone."

"It's a little disheartening," Connor admitted.

Everyone but Joe eventually made it into some of the chairs in the waiting room, most of them off in their own separate worlds, as if they lived in separate small boxes that fully contained their emotions. Joe, however, continued to pace the room, unable to sit still for even a moment when he worried about his brother. Occasionally Mandy would ask him to sit with her but he would only shake his head at her and continue his stalking moves up and down the room.

Finally, after what seemed to be years but proved to only be about fifty minutes, a doctor appeared in the doorway.

"Mr. and Mrs. Hardy?"

Fenton and Laura looked up and stood as the doctor came toward them. He motioned for them to sit again and the guarded expression on his face had the others sitting on the edges of their own seats. Joe stood beside his parents, a blank expression on his face, while Mandy held onto her mother's hand, gaining support from her mother as well as adding support of her own. Connor held Mandy's other hand in a tight grip while Samantha stood with her arms wrapped around herself, in front of Chet.

"We're still running some fairly extensive tests on him," the doctor began to speak. "But right now I can only tell you that Frank has gone into respiratory arrest four times since he was brought into the hospital. We've completely cleaned off the substances used in the attack on him, but I can't make any promises about that. So far, we don't have a clue what it is. We won't have the results of the tests we're running for another hour or so."

The doctor's blue eyes were kind but the guarded expression never wavered. He would not lift their hopes without being positive that his words would not come back to haunt him later. Connor gripped Mandy's hand even tighter, saw the pensive expression on the face of Mr. Hardy and the look of sheer fright on the face of Mrs. Hardy.

"When can we see him?" Laura asked in a soft voice.

The doctor regarded her for a moment. "We really need to locate the source of his ailment before we can allow anyone into his room. If it is a poison of some sort, we have no way of knowing if it can be transferred by contact. In fact, I want to check out anyone else in the vicinity of that powder, if possible."

Connor blinked and looked over at Joe who looked belligerent enough to want to refuse. When Joe worried for his brother, Connor noticed, Joe seemed to shut out everything else, his own aches and pains, even members of his family. Connor, in the unique perspective of living with Frank and dating Mandy, knew Joe quite well indeed, perhaps better than either Mandy or Frank.

"If you think it's necessary," Connor said placidly and he squeezed Mandy's hand before he stood. "Come on Joe, Chet, let's go get a once-over."

Joe glowered again then sighed, the tension leaving his shoulders. He nodded once. Fenton and Laura hugged each other, then hugged Joe before he went to be seen by the doctors.

"You three go ahead," Fenton told Joe and Connor. "We'll wait out here for you both. I'd like to not have more than one son in danger at a time, if you please."

The three young men nodded in almost perfect unison, causing Mandy to actually smile a very small smile, before they turned to follow the doctor into the examining rooms. The emergency room was fairly busy with patients waiting in the holding areas as well as on gurneys along the hallway, waiting to get into an exam room. Connor watched one small girl walk across the hall into another room, holding up an arm that had just been applied with a cast. He looked up again, glimpsing something out of the corner of the eye.

A cart filled with medical supplies, one of which seemed to be a portable EKG, flew down the corridor, bearing in on Joe with the load it carried. Connor leapt away, hoping to snag Joe out of the way, when the cart stopped, suddenly and Joe fell suddenly to one side.

 

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).