“I appreciate the scenic tour,” I said, getting off my bike and wiping the spiderwebs from my face. In the distance, I could hear the wailing of a police car arriving on the scene. “But I think it’s time you come with me.”
• • •
About an hour later, Joe and I were at the station, giving our statements to the police. Adam Parker had met us there and was currently identifying the stolen items that the officers had retrieved from Max’s house.
After we’d finished talking to the police sergeant, he left us in his office to go file his report. Joe was slouched in his chair, holding a can of cold soda against the black eye that was rapidly developing on his face. He caught me staring at him and sniffed. “You should have seen the other guy,” he said.
“I did see the other guy,” I countered. Gavin Cook had been angry when the cops pulled him out of the house, but otherwise unscathed.
Joe huffed. “Yeah, well, he hit me with a dictionary—the punk. Who does that? Anyway, I got him, didn’t I?”
“You sure did,” I agreed, and as if on cue, the interrogation room door opened, and a familiar voice—Max Kingsley’s—rang down the hall.
“Listen!” Max was shouting as the officers led him and Gavin back to the cells. “I keep telling you—we stole the stuff, okay? I admit it. But the back door was unlocked; the house was practically inviting us in! And we didn’t assault anybody or play any pranks! We were only in that house once, I swear—the day before the estate sale. You’ve got to believe me, man!”
“Uh-huh,” I heard the officer mutter.
“Look, they got their stuff back, okay?” Max was pleading. “No harm, no foul, right? Nobody got hurt!”
“Tell it to the judge, kid,” the officer said, and closed the door to the cells behind him.
Joe leaned back in his chair, popped open his can of soda, and took a long swig. “Well!” he said, smacking his lips. “Looks like another job well done by the Hardy brothers! I guess you were right, Frank. No ghosts this time—just a couple of superfans with criminal tendencies.”
“What about Peter Huang?” I asked. “Could those two have still been working with Peter? Maybe they took care of the stealing and he did the rest?”
Joe thought about it and sighed. “I don’t know, Frank. Maybe I was reaching with all that stuff Peter said. If he was in on it, don’t you think they would have given him up to the police by now, to save themselves?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. But if Peter had something on them—blackmail or some other kind of threat—then they might not be so eager to throw him under the bus right away.” I paused, mulling it over. “Although it would be easier to believe that they’re just lying, and really did do the whole thing themselves.”
“Occam’s razor,” Joe added, referencing the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the one that’s true.
“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in mock surrender. “For now, let’s assume that we’ve done our job and the case is solved. I’m sure the police will keep questioning them—maybe a night in lockup will loosen their tongues a bit.”
Just then the sergeant poked his head back into the office. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “You’re all set. Thank you for your statements—we’ll be in touch if we need anything else.” He shook hands with Joe and me, and we left the room. On the way out, we passed by the evidence room, where Adam Parker was still filling out paperwork with a young officer.
“Hey, Hardy brothers!” Adam called, waving us in.
We walked into the plain white room, which held a large table in front, and row upon row of shelves in back, each one piled with bulging brown paper bags and white filing boxes. The contents of one box, which included what looked like several first-edition copies of Nathan Foxwood’s books, a man’s wristwatch, and some other items, were arranged on the table, each one sporting a yellow label or tag.
“Guys, I don’t know what to say,” Adam said when we approached. He was wearing one of his trademark bow ties—this one was green and covered in tiny mustaches. It was fascinating. I wondered what his closet looked like. “Thank you so much. I can’t believe how quickly you two managed to catch the perpetrators!”
“Yeah,” I said, still feeling a little uncomfortable with the idea that the case was solved. It just felt too . . . easy. “I can’t believe it either.”
“No problem at all,” Joe said smoothly, and stepped in a little closer to Adam. “And if you could, uh, just put in a good word with Mrs. Foxwood, I would absolutely love to get my hands on one of those first editions. You know, if she was wondering what type of thank-you gift I’d like . . .”
Adam chuckled. “Sure thing, Joe,” he replied. He blew out his cheeks, a look of relief on his face. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “the only people who are going to be upset about this arrest are the press! They were so excited about this whole Gray Hunter ghost story—they’re going to be pretty disappointed when they find out it was just two troublesome teenagers behind the whole mess.”
Yeah, I thought. So will Peter Huang. All his beloved hype will be—poof !—gone. Will Nathan Foxwood fade back into obscurity before Peter can get one last bestseller out of him?
“I’m sure they’ll get over it,” Joe said. A moment later his eyebrow quirked up in thought. “Hmm, maybe I should give Aisha a call. I bet she’d love to have an exclusive with the guy who caught these two thieves red-handed. . . .”
I rolled my eyes.
“Well my friends, I’m off,” Adam announced. “I’ve got some things to take care of over at the manor tonight. Maybe now that this is all over, I’ll finally have time to start writing that book of my own. Let’s make a plan to see each other soon—and thanks again!” With that, he walked out of the room with a spring in his step.
The young officer began loading the evidence back into the box, which was labeled FOXWOOD CASE #051517. “Adam doesn’t get to take those things back with him?” I asked.
“Not yet,” the officer replied. “Not until after the judicial process is finished. For now, it will just sit in this room with all the other Foxwood evidence. It seems like we’ve been building quite a collection lately.”
“You mean all the stuff from Mr. Foxwood’s accident?” I said.
“Nasty business, that accident,” the officer muttered.
My ears perked up. “Were you on the scene that night?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Yeah, I was there,” he said. “The car was an almost unrecognizable wreck at the bottom of the cliff near the house. The gasoline in the tank must have ignited when it hit the ground—it was still smoldering when we got there hours after the fact. And as far as Mr. Foxwood . . . well, there wasn’t much left of the guy. Just a bunch of blackened bones and rags, really. Pretty gruesome—though I’ve seen worse.”
“That fire must have burned pretty hot,” Joe said.
The officer shrugged. “Must have. I mean, it probably burned all night! No one knew it had happened until the next day, because the manor is so out of the way, and no one else was home except Mr. Foxwood. And it was plenty hot, believe me.”
Joe glanced over at me. I saw a look of uncertainty pass over his face, but he quickly shook it away, like a buzzing fly.
“How was Mr. Foxwood’s body identified then?” I asked. “Dental records?”
“No need,” the officer replied. “It was his car, the tracks led straight from the manor to the cliff side, and we found his wedding ring on the body. And anyway, his wife had seen him earlier that day and confirmed that he’d been acting very irrationally, which was why she left, for her own safety. The guy was clearly off his rocker and just drove off the cliff—I mean, it’s no wonder. Have you read his books?” The officer gave an exaggerated shiver. “Ugh, creepy stuff. Probably drive anyone out of his mind. Anyway, there was just nothing to investigate—it was an open-and-shut case. Mrs. Foxwood wasn’t interested in a deeper inquiry—she just seemed to want to put the whole awful mess behind her.”
“I can understand that,” I said.
The officer pushed a lid onto the box, slid it up onto a shelf with the other evidence, and ushered us out of the room.
Joe and I walked out of the coffee-scented police station and onto the sidewalk in downtown Bayport. It was dusk, and the sun was setting in a riot of pink and orange clouds. The air was warm for a change, and the street was bustling with people. It was a perfectly nice day, and we had just solved another mystery. I should have been on top of the world.
So why did I feel like we had missed something?
9
THE HUNTER STRIKES AGAIN
JOE
IN THE DREAM I WAS at the beach on a warm, sunny day. The sand was white and soft, and the ocean was a perfect, clear blue. Aisha was there. She was in the middle of telling me that I was a hero, and that she was going to feature me on the front page of the newspaper, when suddenly I was attacked by a huge, buzzing swarm of bees.
Nothing like having a nice dream and then ending up covered in bees.
“Ah!” I woke up with a start, slapping my face and body all over to repel the imaginary insects that plagued me. After a second I realized I’d just been dreaming, but for some reason I could still hear the buzzing. I turned over to see my cell phone buzzing itself silly on top of my nightstand. It was an unknown number. My clock read 5:20 a.m.
“Do you know what time it is?” I croaked into the phone after accepting the call.
“No,” a familiar voice croaked back. “I have a concussion.”
“Adam?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Is that you? Where are you? What’s going on?”
“I’ll answer your questions in order,” the voice replied. “Yes; at the hospital; and I took a swan dive into a side table after being chased by some kind of evil poltergeist. Possibly. The jury is still out.”
I jumped out of bed. “What? You mean in the manor? Someone attacked you?”
“It’s okay, I’m fine,” he said, his voice slurring a little. “I mean, my head is totally not fine, but the doctors said I’ll be up on my feet again in a couple days. Right now I feel a little . . . funny.”
“Listen, don’t move—Frank and I are coming to see you.”
Adam chuckled. “Oh, I can’t move, Joe! I’ve got all these tubes attached to me. If I moved, what would happen to the tubes?”
Oh boy. The guy got a bump on the head, all right.
“Listen,” Adam continued, obviously trying to focus. “The press got wind of what happened to me and are going wild about it. They’d dropped the whole ghost story angle after those two boys were arrested, but now that there’s been another attack with those two out of the picture, they’re all excited again. There might be a mob of reporters outside when you get here, so just tell the doctors who you are, and they’ll let you in to see me.”
“Okay, Adam,” I replied. “Be there soon.”
I hung up the phone and ran to Frank’s room, shaking him out of sleep.
“Wha? Hey, Joe—quit it!” he protested. “Man, the sun isn’t even up! What do you want?”
“Adam Parker just called me,” I told him. “He’s in the hospital. Says someone—or something—attacked him in Cliffside Manor last night. It’s not over, Frank.”
Upon hearing this, Frank stood up quickly, his fists clenched. “I knew it! I knew something wasn’t right! Max Kingsley was telling the truth—they weren’t the ones playing at being the Gray Hunter and frightening people. Someone else is behind this—maybe we were on the right track with Peter Huang and Edwin Queen. But why attack Adam? Why now?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s go talk to him—he might be able to shed some light on the situation.”
• • •
After pushing through half a dozen reporters stationed in the hospital lobby, waiting to talk to Adam, we walked into his hospital room about an hour later and found him watching some kind of nature show about bears. He had gauze wrapped around one side of his head and was dressed in a hospital gown, but he may as well have been naked without his bow tie on. Poor guy. “Hey, you made it,” he said when we walked in. “Check it out—bears. I love bears.”
Frank and I exchanged a meaningful look. “Hey, Adam,” I said cheerfully. “We brought you some ice cream.” Frank had protested the stop at the corner store for some medicinal dairy products, but I’d insisted. If anything can bring a man back to himself after a traumatic experience, it’s ice cream.
I handed the carton over to him with a plastic spoon, and he took it gratefully. “Oh, thanks, man. Peanut butter cup! My favorite!” He popped open the lid and shoveled several large spoonfuls into his mouth, closing his eyes as he ate. When he opened them again a minute later, he seemed a little more focused than before.
“I really needed that,” he finally said with a sigh. “It’s been a crazy night. Those reporters are really clawing at the door! I guess I’ll have to talk to them eventually. But you guys get the scoop first. I’ll tell you everything I can remember.”
I elbowed Frank in the stomach. “See?” I whispered. “Ice cream!”
Adam steepled his fingers in front of his face and furrowed his brows in concentration. “Let me see,” he murmured. “So after I left you guys at the police station, I headed straight over to the manor—it was dusk, so that must have been around six o’clock. I ended up going through all the papers from the estate sale and sorting some of Mr. Foxwood’s manuscripts—all in boxes in the second-floor study—for historic preservation. It took a while, longer than I’d anticipated. By the time I finished up it was late, almost midnight. I was about to go get a glass of water from the kitchen when I was startled by this loud noise—like a splintering crash. I froze, and after a few seconds I heard it again. And again. Every few seconds. I thought maybe some kind of animal, like a raccoon or something, had gotten into the house. So I picked up a poker from the fireplace in the office and crept out into the hallway. It was dark—that house gets real dark at night, never had enough modern lighting installed. The sound was coming from a room at the end of the hallway, an old bedroom that the Foxwoods had never used. The door was ajar. When I looked in, I saw a man standing in front of the mantelpiece, hacking at an oil painting on the wall with an ax. But this was no ordinary man. He was”—Adam paused—“glowing. With this weird, bluish light. He was tall and broad, and wore these strange gray clothes and black boots, like something from another time. I looked at the painting that he was destroying and saw that it was a portrait of the man who’d built Cliffside Manor, the one that the Gray Hunter supposedly killed in that old story.”
Adam stopped for a moment and shook his head, as if he himself couldn’t believe the things he was telling us he saw. “I must have made a noise,” he continued. “A gasp, something—because the man stopped what he was doing and turned around. His eyes were like black, empty holes in his head, and when he spoke, it was as if his voice was somehow amplified all around the room. Like it was everywhere at once. He said, ‘They took my land from me. And now they’re dead. Is that what you want too?’ He started to advance toward me, the ax at the ready—and I panicked. I backpedaled out of the room and turned to run back down the hall, but there was a wrinkle in the carpet and I stumbled and fell. My head smashed into the corner of a table and I blacked out. I’m not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had just enough wits about me to pull out my phone and call an ambulance.” Adam sighed and rubbed his temples. “Anyway, that’s it. Believe it or not, that’s what happened.”
Frank was slumped over in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Well,” he finally said. “Max Kingsley and Gavin Cook were in jail overnight, so clearly they couldn’t be the ones who attacked you. So now we have to investigate the possibility that they weren’t working alone. Let me give the police a call real quick.” He pulled out his phone and dialed the local police station, asking to speak with the officer who had interviewed us yesterday. After a short conversation, he hung up, shaking h
is head. “Officer Webb says that Max and Gavin have sworn up and down that not only were they not working with anyone else, they have no idea who this ‘Gray Hunter’ could be. Apparently”—here Frank rolled his eyes—“they think that it really is a ghost. They told the police that that’s who killed Nathan Foxwood. Ran him off the road.” Frank looked at me with an expression that dared me to agree with them.
I threw my hands up in surrender. “Hey, look, bro, I’m not going to argue with you. It’s probably not a real ghost. But right now we don’t have a good explanation for all this glowing-guy-with-a-hatchet stuff, so until we come up with one, we’ve got to at least try and play by his rules.”
Frank crossed his arms. “Okay, I’ll bite. So what are the rules?”
“Well,” I said with relish, “if this was one of Nathan Foxwood’s books or movies, then the heroes—that would be you and me, Frank—would naturally then decide that the only way to find out more about the ghost would be to stay in the haunted house. Overnight.”
I watched as the color drained from my brother’s face. “Oh,” he said.
“If there aren’t really any bloodthirsty apparitions, as you say,” I added, “then we’ve got nothing to worry about, right?”
“Unless it’s actually just a bloodthirsty murderer instead,” Frank argued. “You know, a live one?”
“Hmm, true,” I said. “But listen—I’ve got a great idea. Whether it’s Peter Huang or Edwin Queen or someone else entirely behind this, it seems like at least part of their motive is to make a scene—create drama surrounding the manor. So if we feed into that—give my reporter friend a heads-up that we’re staying in the house overnight, for instance—they’ll be unable to resist using the opportunity for their own gain.”
Frank eyed me with suspicion. “So, you want us to be bait. In a ghost trap.”
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