Secret of the Red Arrow Read online

  “There, I said it,” I went on. “Is everyone scared? Is lightning going to strike me from above? Because that’s how he keeps his power, you know. No one will talk about it. No one will talk about what the Red Arrow is doing.”

  People were squirming now. I looked back at Principal Gorse, and his face wore an expression I’d never seen on him before: pure rage. He was turning scarlet, his eyebrows drawing harsh lines over his eyes, which bugged in horror.

  He began marching down the aisle—as fast as he could manage with the space-age cane.

  “So let’s talk about what he’s doing,” I went on. “He’s beating kids up. Forcing them to do his bidding. Even spying on their cell phone conversations.”

  Principal Gorse reached the foot of the stage and began struggling up the three stairs. Having no idea why he was climbing up, I’m sure, Ms. Jones rushed forward to give him a hand.

  “Who knows how far up his influence goes?” I asked. “Is the Red Arrow connected with the police? With town officials? Even . . . school officials?”

  Principal Gorse lurched up the last step and immediately lunged in my direction. I actually had to swerve away to avoid being tackled by the man. He looked like a hungry wolf, like he would have happily chewed me up and spit me out right there if he could.

  Instead he grabbed the mic. “This speech is over,” he panted. “I need to meet with Frank . . . immediately.”

  The din in the auditorium immediately rose to study-hall levels, all the students wanting to know what was happening, what I had done. Ms. Jones ran over, brows furrowed in confusion.

  “Simon?” she asked, touching Principal Gorse’s shoulder. “What’s . . . happening? Are you . . .?”

  Joe, who’d jumped up in his seat the minute Principal Gorse took the mic, ran up the aisle and onto the stage. “I’ll go too!” he blurted, running to my side. “I . . . I . . .”

  “I suppose we all have a lot to talk about,” I said, giving Principal Gorse a meaningful look.

  He nodded. “Come with me,” he said, moving off toward the wings of the stage.

  With Ms. Jones still mystified, and the teachers in the audience struggling to regain control of their students as chaos broke out, Joe and I followed Principal Gorse through the wings and out a door that led to a quiet hallway behind the gym.

  When he turned to face us, Principal Gorse’s face was completely different. The rage was gone. In its place I thought I saw regret.

  “Okay,” he said, his voice low as his eyes darted around the hallway. “Clearly, you boys are in need of . . . answers. Answers I think I can provide.”

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  He took a breath and stopped. “I would like to do this somewhere private,” he went on. “I promise, when I finish what I have to say, I will leave myself at your mercy. Looking back, I see where I have gone wrong. I know that I must be punished. Understand?”

  Joe looked from the principal to me, and I could tell he was mystified but going to play along. He nodded.

  I nodded too, turning back to the man I believed to be the Red Arrow. “Principal Gorse, you know we’ve always respected you. I don’t want to make this more difficult than it needs to be.” I paused. “But I think I need to call the police now. I hope you understand.”

  I pulled out my phone and started dialing the Bayport PD’s number. Before I could get past the first digit, Principal Gorse silently put his hand on my phone and stopped me.

  “Do you want to know the truth or not?” he asked evenly.

  I looked at Joe. He looked as surprised as I felt. Of course we wanted to know the truth. But I wanted to be safe, too.

  The principal lowered his voice. “Come with me,” he said, “and I’ll tell you everything. Call the police now, and I’ll cooperate, yes—but I won’t answer their questions. I won’t give you any of the answers you want.”

  Joe widened his eyes at me. I didn’t know what to do. I knew we shouldn’t trust Gorse . . . but I needed to know what the Red Arrow really was. Why such a seemingly nice man had done this.

  Principal Gorse eyed me sympathetically. “You may keep your cell phone on, of course,” he said. “If you feel uncomfortable at any time, the police are just three digits away, no?”

  I swallowed and looked at Joe. It sounded reasonable. Maybe we weren’t going to get to the bottom of the Red Arrow without taking a risk.

  “Okay,” I said finally.

  Gorse gave an abrupt nod. “I appreciate that, boys. If you’ll follow me . . . I know a place where we can talk privately.”

  He took out a key and led us through a small doorway and down a flight of steps. We were entering the fabled Bayport High School basement. Depending on who you talked to, the bodies of failing seniors were buried down there, or the secret room where teachers kept all the answer keys, or a forgotten dungeon. Unlike the Red Arrow, though, those were actual urban legends.

  Principal Gorse paused before a metal door and then pushed it open. Blinding sunlight streamed in. We walked out onto the football field.

  To the right was an area that had been under construction for the past few months. Rumor had it that we were getting a new gym and locker rooms, but right now the place just looked like a mud farm with some construction equipment and storage containers. Principal Gorse approached one of these containers and pulled out a key.

  “This has been my secret office for some time,” he said quietly. “I’ve come out here whenever I was doing something I didn’t wish for anyone to witness. I keep a laptop in here and make all my phone calls on a disposable cell phone.”

  How long had this been going on? I wondered. Had Principal Gorse always been the Red Arrow, even when our dad was struggling with it? I hoped we’d get the truth once we stepped inside.

  The principal unlocked the heavy padlock, pushed the heavy metal door open, and walked inside. The room was narrow, rectangular, and dim, with a tiny bit of light filtering in from a hatch in the ceiling that was open just a crack.

  I looked back at Joe and followed Principal Gorse inside. Joe was close behind. We stood in the room, blinking as our eyes slowly adjusted.

  The room was cold, and totally empty. Then I spotted something strange. The end of a hose had been fed through the narrow opening of the hatch. At that moment, Principal Gorse suddenly lunged at me, swinging his cane at my head.

  “AAUUUGH!” I ducked just in time, but the tip of the cane cracked Joe, who’d been rushing to my defense, in the nose. Blood spurted in all directions.

  “What the—?” I managed, as Principal Gorse brought the cane back and swung it again.

  I careened to the side, but it still hit me flush in the shoulder, knocking me to the ground and making me moan with pain.

  Principal Gorse aimed a quick, nasty kick at Joe’s leg and sent him tumbling to the ground too. He stood over us, brandishing the cane like a baseball bat.

  “You idiot Hardys,” he hissed in a gravelly voice I’d never heard before. Did our principal have multiple personalities? Or was this all a sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination?

  No. He stumbled over to the door, kneeling down to turn something just out of sight. Immediately I heard water trickling into the hose. Within a few seconds, a steady gush poured out of the hose into the container.

  “This storage container is completely watertight,” Principal Gorse went on.

  He grabbed two chairs, then pulled us up roughly, slamming us into our seats, and started tying us up with rope that was lying nearby. “You’ll note there’s no drain in the room. No, this container is going to fill up slowly, leaving you boys plenty of time to ponder your last breath and how you got to this point.”

  I was able to reach into my pocket for my cell phone and quickly dialed 911.

  Nothing happened.

  I looked at the screen. No!

  NO SIGNAL.

  Principal Gorse chuckled. “I’ve made note of the various places around the school where cellular service drops out,” he said.
“There are so many of them! It’s almost as though someone was tampering with the signal.”

  He walked through the door, grabbing the edge to slam it.

  I tried to lunge to my feet, but I couldn’t really move, thanks to the pain and the rope. Gorse let out an eerie laugh as the metal door shut behind him. I heard him replacing the padlock on the chain, leaving Joe and me trapped inside.

  GUSH

  18

  JOE

  I’D NEVER REALLY HAD A FEAR OF DROWNING until that door clanked shut behind Principal Gorse. It’s a pretty terrible way to die, when you think about it. First off, you have plenty of time to realize that you’re dying. Plus, from what I have gathered, slowly running out of air is not really a comfortable way to go.

  “How do we get out of here?” I asked Frank, struggling against the rope. Already the floor was nearly covered by a growing puddle. The water was coming in fast.

  Frank groaned. He wriggled around and managed to work his way out. “That cane felt like a baseball bat,” he muttered, making his way over to me.

  “Maybe that’s why he got the metal upgrade,” I suggested. Frank worked at the rope and got me free. I winced as I stood up, rubbing my shoulder. I paused. “For real, Frank, how did you figure out that Principal Gorse is the Red Arrow?”

  “It was the cane.” Frank stood with a groan. “I remembered the debris we saw in the restaurant. There was something that looked like an umbrella handle—remember?”

  Riiiiight. “Yeah. When we got that note we couldn’t figure out.”

  “It wasn’t an umbrella handle,” Frank went on. “It was a cane. Principal Gorse’s old cane.”

  Aha. “And Neal, Seth, Pett—they all got in trouble while at Bayport High.”

  “Maybe they disgraced him in some way. I don’t know,” Frank said. “And I haven’t figured out how Paul Fumusa plays into it. But clearly, Principal Gorse has been hiding a lot from us.”

  He stopped and looked around the room. “Do you see anything we could use to stand on to reach the hose?”

  I looked around. The room was really dark, lit only by the light seeping in from the opening around the hatch. “Not really,” I admitted. “This thing is pretty tall.”

  The water was deepening, up to our ankles now. The stream from the hose splashed into the pool. My feet were soaked, and it was getting harder to walk around.

  “Hey, Frank,” I said.

  He turned around, curious.

  “That was a great speech.”

  He let out a short laugh and shook his head. “I hope it doesn’t turn out to be my swan song.”

  I could tell he was getting nervous. Truthfully, I was too. We’d gone up against a lot of nasty characters before. But the Red Arrow had been operating in Bayport and avoiding detection for years. Even Fenton Hardy feared him. Was he smart enough to defeat us? Had the Hardy Boys met their match?

  That’s when I heard banging on the door.

  “What the . . .?” Frank muttered.

  I sloshed over to the metal door. “Hello?” I yelled.

  I could barely make out the voice on the other side over the rushing water.

  “Frank? Joe? Is that you?”

  The voice was nasally. Female. I looked at my brother.

  Sharelle!

  “Sharelle, are you out there?” I shouted. “Please help us! Can you open the door?”

  I heard grunting and clanking as Sharelle yanked on the chain. “It won’t budge!”

  “Gorse has the key!” I cried.

  “I knew you were acting weird during your speech, Frank,” Sharelle called. “I snuck away from my class and followed you and Principal Gorse out onto the football field. I knew something strange was going on when he led you in here. What’s going on?”

  I shook my head. Sharelle Bunyan. Our hero?

  “It’s filling up with water!” Frank shouted. “This is some kind of old holding tank. He left us in here to drown!”

  I leaned against the door. “Sharelle, can you call the cops for us? Listen. This is very important. You have to talk to Chief Gomez. Okay? Nobody but Chief Gomez. Tell him that we’re trapped in here. Tell him it’s urgent—this container is filling with water!”

  “Okay,” Sharelle replied, “but I’m going to have to go back to the school to get service. This whole field is a dead zone, and I don’t want anybody to see me.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied, “but tell them to hurry. And you hurry back. Please!”

  The water was up to our knees now. Once the water level rose, it wouldn’t take long to push all the air out of the room. We didn’t have a lot of time.

  “Okay!” Sharelle ran off.

  I looked at Frank. He looked like he didn’t know what to do. “Let me try standing on your shoulders,” he said.

  I moved closer and bent down so he could try to climb up. It was hard to see in the faint light, and with the water level rising higher and higher. Soon it was up to our waists.

  Frank climbed up my back and tried to steady himself as he carefully placed his feet on my shoulders. With him holding on to my head, I tried to straighten up slowly, and then Frank started to move from a crouch to a standing position.

  He was close enough to the hatch to make a swipe at the hose.

  I watched, breathless, as his hand pushed at the hose, but it just swung back and forth. It was wedged beneath the heavy hatch door.

  “Darn it!” Frank shouted as his right foot slipped. I tried to grab my brother, but he tumbled into the water, where he splashed around, trying to find his balance.

  “It’s wedged in there anyway,” he said when he stood up, holding his head. “I don’t think I can push the hose out.”

  I checked my phone again, which I’d moved to my shirt pocket to keep it dry. “Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “I can’t take this. There has to be something we can do!”

  Frank’s eyes kept going back to the door. “Do you hear anything?” I asked. I had to admit, I was wondering how much we could trust Sharelle. Even if she had really run out to call the police, it was entirely possible that it would just take them too long to get here. The water might have filled up the container by then. And Frank and I . . .

  I couldn’t think about it.

  Just as I was losing hope, I heard Sharelle’s yell.

  “They’re coming! I called!”

  I sloshed over to the door. “Did you talk to Gomez?”

  There was a pause. “He wasn’t available,” Sharelle said finally. “Or at least that’s what they said. I talked to the officer who came to the house the other night. Olsen?”

  “Olaf,” Frank corrected her with a groan.

  Officer Olaf was not exactly the cop I’d choose to hold my fate in his hands. He, well, hated us. And he’d tried so hard to convince us that the Red Arrow was an urban legend. Was he connected somehow?

  There was nothing to do now but wait. The water was at our chests now.

  No sign of the police.

  “Sharelle,” Frank shouted, “can you go out front to look for the police and bring them right to this container? I don’t want them to waste any time.”

  “Of course,” Sharelle said. “Are you—are you guys okay in there?”

  I looked at Frank. I had the unsettling sense that he was sending Sharelle away because, if worse came to worst, he didn’t want her to have to listen to us drown while she was stuck on the other side of the door, helpless.

  “We’re just ducky,” I replied, but it was hard to force levity into my voice. “Quack, quack.”

  I could feel her hesitation. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “I’ll be right back with the cops. Don’t worry!”

  I looked at Frank.

  “Help me get on your shoulders again,” he said simply. “We might as well try.”

  I crouched down under the water, holding my breath—not really easy with a broken nose. Frank grabbed my shoulders and tried to scramble up. We were both shaking, though, scared and amped up
on adrenaline, and this time he didn’t even get both feet onto my shoulders before he pitched forward into the water, taking me with him. As he fell, I accidentally inhaled, and water flooded my nose and mouth. I was disoriented and scrambled around with my hands, finally finding the floor and standing up.

  “I didn’t like that,” I said, sputtering.

  “Let’s try again,” Frank said, not looking me in the eye.

  We tried again. This time he got up onto my shoulders and took another swipe at the hose before losing his balance. The hose stayed put.

  The water was nearly up to my neck.

  “Frank,” I said.

  He wouldn’t look at me. “Again,” he said. “We have to keep trying.”

  “Frank,” I said again, feeling my throat burn, “what if the Red Arrow’s bested us?”

  That’s when I heard it. Sharelle’s voice.

  “They’re here!” she yelled through the door. “Frank! Joe! Are you okay?”

  The next few minutes were a blur. Finally grasping the dire situation we were in, Officer Olaf used his pistol to shoot out the padlock. A few seconds later, the door was yanked open, sending a flood of water cascading onto the grass.

  Immediately the water level sank from where it hovered beneath our chins.

  We were saved!

  • • •

  “I suppose I owe you two an apology,” Officer Olaf said later that afternoon, as Frank and I sat, still wrapped in blankets, across from his desk at the police station.

  Chief Gomez really was out that day, it turned out. His three-year-old daughter had the stomach flu, and he was staying home with her, since his wife had to be out of town on business.

  Now Officer Olaf stared down at some paperwork he was shuffling across his desk, as if to avoid looking Frank or me in the eye.

  “You do?” Frank asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

  Olaf sighed. “It’s possible,” he said, “that I may have taken your accusations about the Red Arrow less seriously because of my personal . . . well . . .”

  “Animosity?” Frank supplied.

  “Burning hatred?” I suggested.