Trick-or-Trouble Read online

  “Which would make the prize in this pumpkin the limited edition Geronimo motorcycle…” Joe said. He tossed the small orange sphere casually into the air and caught it again. “…And the cause of all this trouble.”

  “There were two tricky parts of this mystery,” Frank said as he sipped coffee the next morning. The brothers, Callie, the Mortons, and the Soesbees had gathered together at the Book Bank to celebrate the end of the contest. They all sat on chairs around one of the store’s reading tables, sharing coffee and donuts.

  “First was that there were two main culprits,” Joe continued. “Ren Takei, and Rod Magnum.”

  “They weren’t working together?” Iola asked.

  “No,” Callie said, “which was confusing. Takei was just out for prizes—any way he could get them. He didn’t know anything about Magnum.”

  “So Ren was the devil-masked man,” Daphne said.

  “And he was also the man in the scar-faced mask who was trading clues with Allison,” Joe added.

  “Which is pretty ironic,” Chet said, “considering he stole clues from her the first day.”

  “He was playing all sides of the game,” Frank said, “both legal and illegal. He nearly clobbered us at Pratt’s windmill, and then again at the West’s pumpkin farm.”

  “And both times he got away with the prizes,” Joe concluded. “He wasn’t so lucky when he tried the same stunt last night.”

  “I can’t imagine wanting to win that badly,” Iola said.

  “I can understand stealing prizes,” Kathryn Soesbee said. “What I don’t understand is Mr. Magnum. He was one of the contest’s sponsors.”

  “That was the second tricky thing,” Joe said. “We kept thinking that someone was causing this trouble trying to win prizes—when, in fact, Magnum was trying to keep people from winning prizes.”

  “Specifically, he was trying to keep anyone from winning the Geronimo motorcycle,” Frank added.

  “He must have promised it as a prize and then realized he couldn’t really afford it,” Callie said.

  “That’s what Con Riley, our friend down at the Police Department, thinks, after a preliminary check of Magnum’s finances,” Joe said.

  “Backing out would have given his shop a lot of adverse publicity,” Frank added. “And he was already struggling to make ends meet. Backing out could have put him out of business.”

  “So Harley Bettis and the Kings didn’t have anything to do with any of this?” Iola said.

  “Well, Missy and Jay may have put out the lights and released the bats at the party,” Joe replied. “But that might have been Takei as well.”

  “We think that Magnum was using Bettis as a decoy—someone who could be blamed for any crimes that Magnum was committing,” Frank said. “Magnum was pretty careful to make sure Bettis had no alibi when Magnum was doing his dirty work.”

  “That’s rotten,” Daphne said, “hiring someone just to make him a fall guy.”

  “With his record, Bettis was tailor-made for the part,” Chet said.

  “He’s been trying to stay clean though,” Frank said. “We even saw him try to shoo Missy Gates away from his workplace, though at the time, we thought the two of them were up to something shady. Ironic that he was trying so hard to hold on to a job working for a guy who was trying to frame him.”

  “So who broke into my vault and locked you all in?” asked Ms. Soesbee.

  “That was Magnum,” Joe said. “Nothing being stolen from the vault puzzled us. But he didn’t need to take anything—he only needed to check on which clues led to the Geronimo cycle. That way, he could change them and throw people off.”

  “He changed the clue in the old dock warehouse so that no one could follow it,” Callie said. “But we almost caught him at it—just like we almost caught him in your vault.”

  “With his experience in auto and cycle repair, hot-wiring Dracula’s Dragster was a piece of cake,” Joe said.

  “Working with car and cycle keys also gave him the skills to pick the Book Bank’s door lock once he lured Chet out to pick up the pizza that none of you ordered,” Frank added.

  “Clever guy,” Callie said.

  “Last night, he pretended to have been robbed of his own clues,” Frank said, “when, in fact, he’d burned the clues himself in a barrel behind his shop just before we showed up. It was just another attempt to keep clues to the cycle out of players’ hands.”

  “He used his own security system—which he’d conveniently left without recording tape—to spot us coming into the store, and go into his knocked-out act for us,” Joe said. “Like Callie said: clever.”

  “But not clever enough to avoid the long arm of the law—in the form of Joe and Frank Hardy,” Chet said, raising his cup of coffee in a toast.

  They all laughed.

  “The Bayport Merchants Association is very grateful,” Kathryn Soesbee said. “They’ve decided to give you three one of the unclaimed prizes from the contest. Would you prefer flying lessons, or boating lessons?”

  “Hmm,” Callie said. “I’m thinking flying lessons. We’ll have to talk that over.” She gave Frank a quick hug.

  The elder Hardy leaned back in his chair. “What do you know,” he said. “We may not have won the big prize, but we ended up with a pretty nice treat after all.”

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed, “we got the treat—but the trick was on Rod Magnum!”