Hardy Boys Fan Fiction at the HDA - Lie To Me

Joe stood in the doorway of the bathroom, looking into his brother’s room. With one arm draped over his eyes, Frank slept fitfully on top of the covers, fully dressed and obviously trapped in some nightmare. The older boy was mumbling as he dreamt, most of which Joe couldn’t understand. But there were a few words he did hear; names that kept the blond from waking his brother as he normally would have.

When Callie’s and Peter’s names passed through Frank’s lips, Joe hesitated. Frank had refused to talk to anyone about what had happened and Joe figured dreaming about it might open Frank up to the possibility.

With a reluctant sigh, Joe silently closed the door before he walked through his room and out into the hall.

Moving with determination, Joe descended the stairs and walked through the living room. He crept quietly past the closed door to his Aunt’s room, where from within he could hear the gentle sound of her snoring. He hesitated briefly before he was turning the knob to his father’s office and stepping inside.

The door closed with a muffled click and only then did he dare to turn on the light. He felt like a criminal, sneaking across the carpeted floor toward his father’s filing cabinets. Joe even wondered if it was worth the risk. His father might not have what he was looking for in the first place.

Still, he had to start somewhere and this was the one place he could do that at this hour of night.

As expected, the cabinet was locked but Joe was not going to be deterred. The lock picks were in his hand and with practiced ease he had the lock open a few seconds later.

Opening the top drawer he came to realize the momentous task before him. There were hundreds of files and none of them had names on them. They were numbered in a system only his father understood. It would take Joe hours to go through them one at a time to find the one he was looking for.

He got to work.

After the first few files, Joe started understanding the filing system a little and was able to determine that the active files were in the top drawer with the solved cases moved to the other drawers in the cabinet. However, after more than an hour thumbing through the solved cases, some going back to the very beginning of his father’s private practice, he realized what he was looking for wasn’t in the filing cabinet.

Closing the drawer with an agitated sigh, Joe walked over to the office’s small closet and opened the door. There were a few boxes stacked on the floor, mostly just supplies, but one was marked ‘Unsolved’. He doubted it would be in there, but it was the last place he could think of to look.

Taking the box out of the closet, he set it on his father’s desk and lifted the lid. There were maybe only a dozen files stacked inside, a testament to Fenton Hardy’s skill as an investigator. These were easily distinguished by the dates that were written on the outside of the folders.

More than a little surprised, Joe found the one he was looking for about halfway through the pile. It was probably the thickest of the lot with printouts and pictures poking out at the edges.

Going through the file, his heart sank little by little, and he sank into the chair behind his father’s desk. The pictures alone made Joe’s stomach churn and, reading the detailed information that had been gathered, made him question exactly why his father never finished the case.

So involved in the papers in front of him, Joe never heard the office door open. He didn’t see his father standing there in his housecoat, but he couldn’t miss the disbelief and anger that filled Fenton’s voice when he finally spoke.

“I like to think I’m a pretty lenient father, but there had better be a damn good reason why you’re going through my files.”

He didn’t dare look up. Instead, Joe just pushed a single photograph across the surface of the desk, offering it as explanation to his father. “Your last notes on this case were almost five years ago. With everything you’ve got here, I can’t understand why you didn’t see this one through to the end.”

Fenton stalked across the room in a near rage, but it diminished almost instantly when he saw which file was spread across his desk. Reluctant eyes fell onto the photo that Joe had pushed toward him and he picked it up with shaking hands. There was no need for the physical reminder, the image having been burned into his memory more than six years past.

Joe lifted his gaze to his father as the elder Hardy moved to the leather sofa and slumped into its cushions. When Joe spoke, he couldn’t keep the accusing tone from his voice. “Why, Dad?”

Mr Hardy sighed sadly. “I tried, son. Believe me I wanted nothing more than to catch these bastards. But it wasn’t just another case. This was your brother we were talking about.”

“You’re right, it wasn’t just another case.” Joe shook his head. “We lost Frank for six months, Dad, and you just let it go.”

“Not by choice,” Fenton admitted, finally looking away at the image of his young son’s battered face. “He was just so scared for you-”

“For me?” Joe had been prepared for a lot of reasons, but that hadn’t been one of them.

Another weary sigh escaped Mr Hardy’s lips. It was too late to be having this conversation, but it was one that had been a long time coming. Slowly, he got up from the sofa and stood beside Joe. He placed several of the photographs on the top of the pile of papers, images he’d never wanted to see again.

“He couldn’t remember much,” Fenton began slowly. “He had been gone six months and could only really remember the few days when he’d been handed over to those gangsters. He woke to being confined in that room, isolated and restrained…”

Joe shuddered as the pictures before him were now suddenly alive and real through his father’s words.

Fenton reluctantly continued. “He had tried to escape a few times and that was when they got heavy handed. Physically, Frank had minor cuts and bruises. But what they did to him psychologically?” He pulled out a picture of the masks the gangsters had used. “They literally tried to scare him into compliance. The masks, the lights, the music, were all calculated to keep him submissive.”

The urge to be sick was almost overpowering, and Joe had to fight to keep his composure. He desperately wanted to tell his Dad to stop, but he had wanted to know what happened to Frank for a long time. But seeing the pictures and reading emotionless reports were a lot easier to handle than hearing the horror in his father’s voice as he told what he knew.

“Frank never stopped fighting them. They did the only thing they could do in that position. Threatening his life wasn’t enough anymore, so they started threatening yours.” Fenton started to gather the pictures together into the discarded file again. “Frank told me the one that we didn’t catch said they would come after you if he didn’t get me to stop the investigation. He begged me to leave the investigation alone, not because he was afraid for himself, but because he was terrified that the threat against you would be followed through with.”

“Oh my god...”

Mr Hardy sat on the edge of his desk now that the pictures were tucked away. “So when your brother begged me to leave it alone, what else was there for me to do? I told the FBI and the NYPD that I would no longer be assisting them. They came several times over the period of a year with new leads, new possibilities for where the one we missed went, but I had made Frank a promise. I wasn’t going to let him down.”

The stillness of the night hung over father and son.

Joe felt it a struggle to keep the tears from spilling over his lids. He remembered the nights he would wake to find Frank at the foot his bed; the way Frank would react if Joe had been late coming home from school. He knew Frank had been scared, he’d just never known the reasons why.

“What prompted this?” Fenton asked, his voice softly breaking the spell.

Joe swallowed the lump in his throat with a cough and leafed through the pile of papers again. He took one out and handed it to his father. “Wherever Frank was those six months, Peter McKay had been with him.”

The blood in Mr Hardy’s veins froze when he saw the list naming the missing kids. McKay’s seem to stick out like a neon light. He had hoped never to divulge that information to his younger son, but he hadn’t counted on Joe’s insatiable curiosity.

“Whatever happened six years ago,” Joe continued morbidly, “is why McKay fixated on Frank. It didn’t just go away because Frank couldn’t remember, or because you didn’t investigate. Our friends are dead, Biff is paralyzed, and my brother is blaming himself for everything because of this. It needs to be finished, Dad. And if you can’t do that because of a promise you made back then, then I’ll do it myself.”

There was another moment’s silence before Fenton spoke. “How did you figure this out, that McKay was one of the kids?”

“When Biff and I were crawling through the vents,” Joe explained. “I heard Peter talking to Frank about something that happened six years ago.”

That was a surprising revelation, one that brought back a sliver of the father’s anger. “And you didn’t think to tell me about it? Instead of breaking in to my confidential files?”

“With everything that’s gone on this past week,” Joe answered, “I honestly didn’t think about it until tonight. Frank woke me up.”

“He came to talk to you?” Fenton asked with relief. No one had been able to get his eldest son to talk about what had happened.

Sadly, Joe shook his head. “I wish he would. He was having a nightmare, a bad one by the sound of it. That’s when I remembered what Peter said and decided to try and help Frank the only way I could think of.”

All traces of anger faded away as pride filled the father. Joe had the strength and courage to do what Fenton could not. “Have you told Frank about this? That you want to start looking in to what happened?”

“No.” For the first time in his life that he could remember, Joe made the conscious decision to lie to his brother. “And I don’t think we should. I love Frank more than anything, Dad, but right now – with everything he’s dealing with – he’s not strong enough to handle this.”

“I agree,” Fenton said regrettably. “But if we do this, we do it right. In the morning, I’ll make a few calls to get things in motion but we do nothing unless I say so. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes sir.”

“Good.”

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Disclaimer

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.