The Castle Conundrum (Hardy Boys) Read online

  THE CASTLE CONUNDRUM

  Danger Zone

  “Back!” Joe shouted. “Everybody back!”

  “Quick!” Frank added.

  Libby, an English volunteer, was a few feet away from Joe. She seemed frozen in place by the sight of the plummeting stone. Joe grabbed her around the waist and pulled her toward the shelter of the nearest house.

  The block of stone crashed down on a pile of rubble at the base of the castle wall. The impact sent a cloud of smaller stones and pebbles flying in all directions like buckshot. One grazed Joe’s bare arm. When he looked down, he saw a line of red forming against his tan.

  Libby was holding her palm against her cheek. Had a rock hit her, too?

  “Are you hurt?” Joe asked her.

  “I … I …” Libby stammered. “Up there. I saw him. Or … or something. It looked like a puff of smoke, but I knew. It was the spirit of the Sieur! He doesn’t want us here. He is saying, ‘Leave!’ Or he’ll drive us away!”

  The Hardy BoysMystery Stories

  #105 The Smoke Screen Mystery

  #107 Panic on Gull Island

  #108 Fear on Wheels

  #109 The Prime-Time Crime

  #110 The Secret of Sigma Seven

  #114 The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals

  #124 Mystery with a Dangerous Beat

  #133 Crime in the Kennel

  #139 The Search for the Snow Leopard

  #140 Slam Dunk Sabotage

  #141 The Desert Thieves

  #143 The Giant Rat of Sumatra

  #147 Trial and Terror

  #148 The Ice-Cold Case

  #149 The Chase for the Mystery Twister

  #150 The Crisscross Crime

  #151 The Rocky Road to Revenge

  #152 Danger in the Extreme

  #153 Eye on Crime

  #154 The Caribbean Cruise Caper

  #155 The Hunt for the Four Brothers

  #156 A Will to Survive

  #157 The Lure of the Italian Treasure

  #158 The London Deception

  #159 Daredevils

  #160 A Game Called Chaos

  #161 Training for Trouble

  #162 The End of the Trail

  #163 The Spy That Never Lies

  #164 Skin & Bones

  #165 Crime in the Cards

  #166 Past and Present Danger

  #167 Trouble Times Two

  #168 The Castle Conundrum The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories

  Available from MINSTREL Books

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A MINSTREL PAPERBACK Original

  A Minstrel Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

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  Copyright © 2001 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-2768-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-743-42768-5

  eISBN-13: 978-0-743-42768-5

  THE HARDY BOYS MYSTERY STORIES is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  THE HARDY BOYS, A MINSTREL BOOK and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Contents

  1 A French Adventure

  2 Up at the Castle

  3 All Wet

  4 Lost in the Maze

  5 United Emanations

  6 Spook Hunt

  7 Head-on Collision

  8 A Breach of Trust

  9 Night Birds

  10 Buried Treasure

  11 Getting the Brakes

  12 Deadly Diversion

  13 Monsieur Tarzan

  14 Breakfast Battle

  15 The Fréhel Treasure

  1

  A French Adventure

  Seventeen-year-old Joe Hardy stared out the window of the train. He turned and trained his blue eyes on his brother, Frank. “Look,” he said excitedly. “On that hilltop. It’s a ruined castle!”

  Frank, eighteen, leaned forward to see past Joe. “Where?” he asked. “All I see is a blur.”

  “Oh, never mind,” Joe said. “It’s already out of sight. You’ve got to be quicker than that. We’re going over a hundred and twenty miles an hour.”

  Frank grinned and settled back in his seat. He and Joe had boarded the superfast train called the TGV in Paris that morning after breakfast. Now, fewer than three hours later, they were already in the south of France.

  Frank and Joe had accompanied their father to Europe, where he was attending a conference on enforcing the UN embargo against illegal diamond transportation. Fenton Hardy was a famous private detective who sometimes asked his two sons for help on tough cases. It had been natural for Frank and Joe to start investigating crimes and solving mysteries on their own. Now they, too, had growing reputations as detectives.

  “Too bad we couldn’t go to the conference with Dad,” Frank remarked after a silence. “Some of the top investigators from around the world will be there. I didn’t realize diamond smuggling was such a big problem.”

  When Joe didn’t answer, Frank glanced over. Joe was thumbing through their TVI brochure. The initials stood for Teen Village International. A friend of Fenton’s had urged Frank and Joe to spend a couple of weeks in the teen program while they were in France. After talking to him and reading the materials from TVI, they had signed up.

  On the cover of the brochure, three laughing teens were lifting a large square stone. Behind them, another guy was spreading mortar on the top of a ragged wall.

  “I know about pumping iron,” Frank cracked. “But pumping rock? That’s a new one.”

  “We’re going to have a blast,” Joe replied. “It’ll be great to meet kids from different countries. And living in a real village from the Middle Ages—how cool is that!”

  “We’ll see,” Frank said, silently wishing he was going with his dad. “Living in an ancient village will be okay. But it sounds like we have to build the village ourselves.”

  “ Re-build,” Joe corrected. “That’s the point. Once the village is finished, it’ll become a center for refugee children from all over. We have fun, and we do something worthwhile at the same time.”

  The rhythm of the train wheels changed. Frank glanced out the window. A few houses, white with red tile roofs, flashed past. Then a thicker cluster of buildings. They must be getting near a town.

  From an overhead speaker, a chime sounded. “Avignon,” a voice said. Some quick words of French followed. Then Frank heard, “This stop is Avignon. Passengers for Avignon, please prepare to debark.”

  “That’s us,” Frank said. “Come on.” He stood up and grabbed his backpack. Joe did the same. They joined the line at the rear of the car and caught a glimpse out the window of a wide boulevard choked with traffic. On the other side were the high stone walls of a fortified city. Frank hoped they would have time to explore it.

  The train entered a glass-roofed station shed and glided to a stop. The doors hissed open.

  On the platform, Frank and Joe stepped out of the stream of hurrying passengers and paused, looking around.

  “What now?” Joe wondered aloud.

  “We let them find us,” Frank replied with a quick flip of his dark hair. He grinned and added, “And I think they just
did.”

  A guy in faded jeans and a blue T-shirt with big white letters, TVI, walked down the platform toward them. He was about six feet tall, Joe’s height and an inch shorter than Frank. He had the lithe movements of a soccer player. His blond hair was cut short, and aviator sunglasses hid his eyes. He reached up and took them off. He was a little older than Frank had first guessed, probably in his late twenties.

  “Joe? Frank?” he asked. “I’m Kevin Pierce, from TVI. Welcome to Provence. I’ve got a car outside.”

  Frank and Joe shook Kevin’s hand. They followed him down some steps and through a tunnel to the station entrance.

  “You’re American, aren’t you?” Joe asked as they crossed a crowded parking lot.

  Kevin smiled. “Half,” he replied. “My dad is. He was in the Air Force, but he retired a few years ago. My mom is French.”

  “Where did you grow up? In Europe?” Frank asked.

  “Mostly,” Kevin said. “But I attended American schools a lot of the time. And I went back to the States for college. Here we are.”

  He pointed to a blue minivan with TVI painted on the door. The van’s lights flashed briefly, and the side door slid open. Frank realized that Kevin had a remote control in his hand. The Hardys slung their packs in the back. Frank took the front passenger seat. Joe sat behind him.

  “Pretty cool,” Joe remarked, pointing to the two tinted moonroofs. One was over the front seat and the other over the back.

  “Pretty hot, you mean,” Kevin retorted. “It gets to be over thirty-five degrees most afternoons. That’s the high nineties in Fahrenheit. And it’s usually sunny. We’re lucky to have A/C in the van. Most people around here don’t—it uses too much gas.”

  He backed out of the slot and joined a line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot. Soon they were driving along the boulevard that followed the city wall. It led them onto a highway lined with furniture shops, tire dealers, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants with familiar names.

  “We could almost be back home,” Frank said. “This looks like the outskirts of Bayport—except for the French words on the signs.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kevin replied. “Pretty soon you’ll know you’re not in the US anymore. Did anyone brief you on the program, by the way?”

  “Not really,” Joe said. “We just know what we read in your brochures.”

  Kevin nodded. “Then you’ve got the basic concept. Teenagers from all over the world come to Fréhel to work on restoring the village. Some, like you, come for a week or two. Others stay for one or two months or even longer.”

  “What about you?” Frank asked. “How long have you been there?”

  For a moment Kevin looked blank. Then he laughed. “I’m not a volunteer,” he said. “I work for the organization. I’m the assistant to Sophie Parmentier, the director. Not only that, I live in Fréhel. Well, sort of.”

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked.

  “It’s a weird coincidence,” Kevin said. “My mother’s family actually came from Fréhel. They left over a hundred years ago, but they never forgot.”

  “That’s amazing,” Frank said.

  “Well, the connection was one reason I took the job,” Kevin explained. “And a few months ago I bought the cottage my great-grandparents used to live in. It had been empty for years and wasn’t much more than a pile of stones. Now I help reconstruct the village during the day, and evenings and weekends I work on my own house.”

  “Cool,” Joe said. “I don’t even know the house where our great-grandparents lived.”

  “Are you planning to live there full-time, once the house is done?” Frank asked.

  “I hope so,” Kevin said. “It all depends. If TVI pulls through, and if they want me to stay on, I’d love to. If not … well, I can always get a job in the city and spend vacations there.”

  “You make it sound as if the program’s in trouble,” Frank observed. “What’s the problem?”

  Kevin glanced over at him for a moment. Then he turned his attention back to the road. “Say, you’d make a good detective,” he said in a teasing voice.

  “As a matter of fact …” Joe began to say.

  Frank turned and shot Joe a warning glance. He wanted the kids at TVI to treat them as regular members, not as celebrity detectives. Joe bit off the rest of his sentence.

  Kevin didn’t seem to notice. “It’s the usual problem,” he continued. “Money. TVI’s a nonprofit organization. Sophie spends half her time going around plugging the program and begging for contributions. Our volunteers mostly pay their own way, so we’re okay for now. But once we start welcoming refugees, it’ll be different. We’ll need lots of money.”

  “Pretty tough,” Frank said.

  Kevin nodded. “Believe it. Still, you fellows don’t have to worry about all that. Just work hard, have fun, and make friends. Oh, and always wear a hat outside. The ProvenÁal sun can be brutal.”

  Frank could see what he meant. Even through the van’s tinted glass, the bright sunlight made him squint. They were out in the countryside now. Fields lined both sides of the two-lane highway. Off to the right, in the distance, a rocky ridge rose steeply from the plain.

  “How long a trip is it?” Joe asked.

  “About an hour and a half,” Kevin told him.

  “It was nice of you to meet us at the train,” Joe said.

  “No problem,” Kevin said. “You’d have had a hard time getting to Fréhel if I hadn’t. Besides, I did a few errands while I was in Avignon.”

  Frank looked at the plants in the nearest field. “Are those melons?” he asked.

  “You better believe it,” Kevin replied. “The melons from around here are the best in the world. The inside’s like cantaloupe, but the skin is smooth with green and white stripes. You’ll get to try them at breakfast tomorrow. The day after, too. Well, actually, every day.”

  A few moments later they passed a truck parked on the side of the road. The back was heaped high with green and white melons. A hand printed cardboard sign read, “Melons—5/10F.”

  “Hey, I can read French!” Joe joked. “Melons, five of them for ten. But what’s the F?”

  “It stands for ‘francs,’” Frank told him. “Didn’t you know? The French named their money after me!”

  Joe leaned forward to punch his shoulder. Frank grinned and dodged the blow.

  “Take a look up on the left,” Kevin said. “Through the trees on the hillside. See where I mean?”

  Frank looked. At first he saw only a steep slope with dusty trees that looked ready to tumble down into the valley. Then his eye picked out a jumble of regular shapes the same color as the rocks. “Is that a town?” he asked.

  “More like a village,” Kevin replied. “Maybe thirty houses and a church. It’s pretty typical of this area. People farmed their fields down in the valley. Come nightfall, though, they went up into the hills to be safe.”

  “That’s not Frèhel, is it?” Joe asked.

  “No, we’re still twenty kilometers away,” Kevin told him. “About twelve miles. But you’ll see. Fréhel’s built on the same pattern, except there’s a castle, too.”

  The first notes of “FrËre Jacques” sounded, then repeated. Kevin pulled a cell phone from his belt and glanced at the display. “Wrong number,” he grunted, and put it back.

  Frank sat back and gazed out the window. He let the strangeness of the setting sink in. It wasn’t any single detail that did it. It was everything: the cars, the houses, the plants along the roadside, the shape of the landscape, even the way the center line on the highway was painted. Their day in Paris and the trip on the TGV had been exciting, sure. But now he was really starting to feel that he was in a foreign country… .

  “Frank?” Joe was shaking his arm. “Frank, wake up. We’re almost there.”

  Frank blinked. His neck and shoulders felt stiff. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Jet lag, I guess.”

  “No problem,” Kevin assured him. “That’s Fréhel up ahead,
on the left.”

  It was hard to make out against the backdrop of a long, steep ridge. A rocky spur jutted out into the valley, twice the height of a tall building. At the very top, the rocky cliffs merged into the massive stone walls of a ruined castle.

  “You can’t see the village from here,” Kevin continued. He slowed and turned off the highway on to a narrow lane. “It’s on the slope behind the castle.”

  The lane started to climb and wind around a hill. The pavement ended suddenly, and the van did a little sideways slide on the loose dirt and gravel. Kevin muttered and swerved to dodge a pothole. “I wish we had the money to fix this road,” he said.

  Frank wished so, too. On his side, the van was only inches from the edge of a thirty-foot drop. And, of course, a little back road like this one didn’t rate a guardrail, just a few skimpy bushes.

  As they rounded a curve, something caught Frank’s eye. A tree branch stuck up out of the grass beside the road. Someone must have put it there on purpose. The thick end of the branch was at the top. As they drew near, Frank had the impression that something almost too faint to see stretched from the branch across the road in front of them.

  Then they were past. Frank was about to look back when he sensed a movement ahead and to the left. He stared. A big rock had started to roll down the steep hillside toward the road. It was going to crash into the side of the van!

  2

  Up at the Castle

  “Kevin, look out!” Frank shouted. He pointed at the falling boulder. “Stop!”

  Kevin held tight to the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The van bucked and began to skid sideways, toward the edge of the drop. Frank grabbed the door handle and braced his feet against the firewall.

  As suddenly as it had started, the crisis ended. The van came to a stop in a thick cloud of yellow dust. Through it, Frank saw the big rock rumble across the lane and disappear over the cliff. A moment later a clatter from below told him it had landed at the bottom.

  “Whew!” Joe said from the backseat. “That was close. Do you have a lot of falling rocks in this area?”

  Kevin backed up a few feet and straightened out. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “At TVI, our unofficial motto is Expect the unexpected. Why did that stone decide to start down the hill just then? No reason … but strange things happen around here. You’ll get used to it.”