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“Deal.” I grinned. I held out my hand and we shook on it.

  “Oh, it’s a very sweet reunion. I might even clap if my hands weren’t tied up,” Angus said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “But we’re still locked in a dungeon, in case ya hadn’t noticed, and those kids are after my treasure!”

  “So it’s your treasure now, huh?” I asked. “Until a few minutes ago, you didn’t believe it even existed.”

  “My castle, my treasure,” he insisted defiantly. “Now stop your dawdling, and let’s go after them.”

  “And how do you propose we do that?” Charlene asked, pointing to the locked dungeon door.

  “I may not have left me tower much these last years, but in my younger days, I did quite a bit of exploring in these halls, and I happen to know there’s a secret entrance,” he revealed. “If you open the iron maiden in the corner, you’ll find a trapdoor that circles back around to the hallway.”

  Standing in the back corner was a human-shaped iron casket with a lady’s face sculpted into it. It looked a bit like the type of sarcophagus you’d find a mummy in.

  “Pull open the lid and give the spikes along the top of the maiden’s back a tug,” Angus instructed. “Mind your fingers, now, laddie.”

  I did as Angus instructed, cringing at all the nasty-looking spikes lining the inside of the iron maiden, and pulled the ones on top toward me. There was a groan as the spiked back wall of the maiden swung open in response, revealing the doorway behind it.

  “What’s the quickest way under the tower?” I asked.

  “Untie me and I’ll lead us there,” Angus urged.

  “No offense, Angus, but I’ve heard your knees creak,” I pointed out. “Charlene and I will be able to get there a whole lot faster without you.”

  “I suppose I can follow behind,” he relented. “Ain’t as spry as I used to be. Ye won’t steal my treasure, will ye?”

  “Promise,” I said.

  “Promise,” Charlene agreed. “I just want the story.”

  “Go back to the chamber where you found Filmore and take the other corridor. It’ll zigzag and meander easterly, but as long as ye don’t turn off the main path, ye won’t get lost. Hang a right at the first big fork and keep going. It looks like a dead end, but there’s a crack, and a ways beyond that is a leaky chamber next to the old well shaft. It’s the lowest point of the castle that I know of. There’s another entrance from above, but that’s the fastest route from here,” he instructed. “Now untie me and let’s get a move on!”

  “I’m really sorry to do this, Angus, but you’ve confessed to multiple crimes and you’re known to threaten shooting people with a blunderbuss. I’m not sure I trust you running around unsupervised,” I said.

  “You tricked me!” he shouted.

  “We never said we’d untie you,” Charlene informed him.

  “I promise we’ll come back for you as soon as we can,” I assured him.

  “Don’t leave me here!” he cried after us as we exited through the doorway in the iron maiden and took off running for the treasure’s hiding place.

  * * *

  When we burst into the chamber, it was already too late.

  “Nooooo!” I screamed as Xephyr’s ax cut through the air toward Joe, who lay weaponless on the ground below her, too far away for me to help.

  Mine wasn’t the only scream to pierce the air, though. A mighty war cry froze Xephyr in place. When she turned, she found Sir Robert Braveheart in his kilt and long, flowing wig rushing toward her with the claymore sword she’d designed raised and ready to strike.

  Robert swung, meeting Xephyr’s ax midair, only instead of the clang of metal against metal, there was a quiet swish as the ax blade sliced clean through Robert’s foam sword, severing it in half.

  “Uh-oh,” Robert murmured.

  “So we meet again, Sir Robert,” Xephyr spat as Robert backed away, still gripping the claymore’s useless foam hilt. “I told you I’d get revenge.”

  While she was threatening Robert, she wasn’t paying attention to Joe. He kicked her leg out from under her, knocking her to her knees, and then he rolled across the ground to grab his fallen sword.

  “Here!” he yelled to Robert, sliding the weapon across the stone floor. Robert snatched it from the ground just as Xephyr lifted herself to her feet and raised her ax to strike. Their weapons met in the air again, and this time there was a clang. And another and another as the Bayport Adventurers Guild’s two best gladiators faced off in real combat for the first time.

  Joe grabbed a wet, splintered board from the smashed-up planks and joined the fray, whacking Xephyr in her armored ribs. The knight’s armor protected her, but the force of the hit knocked her off-balance, giving Robert the advantage.

  Charlene and I watched in tense amazement as the costumed warriors clashed, a medieval knight, a Keystone Cop, and William Wallace locked in deadly combat in what had to be one of the most time-bendingly bizarre battles in history.

  Xephyr deflected Robert’s next blow, then knocked Joe away with an armored elbow and took a one-handed swing at Robert with her other arm. The strike nearly knocked the sword from Robert’s hands, but it also left Xephyr with her breastplate exposed.

  Joe didn’t hesitate. He teed up with the board in both hands and swung it like a baseball bat. It hit her square in the chest.

  Xephyr dropped her ax and tumbled backward, splashing into the open hole in the floor and smashing into the crates beneath. She tried to regain her footing, but although the hole only came up to her chest, she seemed stuck, weighed down in the water by her armor.

  Charlene and I sprinted toward Joe and Robert from one side while Murph, who must have followed Robert through the other entrance Angus mentioned, sprinted up from the other. The five of us stood over the hole, staring down at Xephyr as she flailed around in the debris. She’d crashed right through the crates, spilling their contents into the water.

  It wasn’t gold Xephyr was floundering around in, though. It was a few hundred years’ worth of thick brown muck.

  “Where’s the gold?” Murph asked eagerly.

  Words slowly materialized beneath the water’s surface as a fragment of wood bearing an engraved plaque floated up from the ruined crates. I reached in to pick it up and studied the faded letters. The word “Gold” didn’t grab my attention as much as the ones describing it. Everyone was dead silent as I read them aloud.

  “ ‘Glasgow Gold, Fine Scottish Tea.’ ”

  The silence continued as we processed it.

  “I’d say it’s pretty well steeped by now,” Robert finally observed, breaking the silence as we all stared down into the muddy water, where Xephyr was still sputtering.

  “Looks like you were right about part of it, Murph,” I said. “Robert’s ancestor Paul Magnus really did hide smuggled goods in the castle to avoid paying taxes to the British Empire.”

  “Yup,” said Joe, picking up where I left off. “It just wasn’t gold.”

  We all looked at Joe as he finished the thought. The ancient treasure that Filmore Johnson had burned down his own business and died at Angus’s hands trying to find? That Murph committed fraud because of? That Xephyr and Dennis robbed, sabotaged, and kidnapped for?

  “It was plain old fancy Scottish tea.”

  26 THE DOG NOSE ALL

  JOE

  I’M PRETTY SURE CHIEF OLAF wasn’t expecting our mismatched fellowship of ragged, costumed adventurers to march back into the party with Xephyr and Angus in chains.

  “We’ve got a Halloween present for you, Chief!” I called out as Frank, Charlene, Robert, Murph, and I walked our prisoners into the main hall, where the chief was busy assaulting a helpless corn dog. “Sorry for solving the case without you.”

  “Whainaworldisgoinonher?!” he said through a mouthful of corn dog, mustard smeared all over his fake Teddy Roosevelt mustache.

  It took us a while to convince him that it wasn’t another Halloween gag and that we really had cracked the Comic Kingdom
burglary case. And Filmore Johnson’s cold-case disappearance from the 1970s. And a super-cold-case missing treasure map mystery from the 1700s.

  We conveniently left out the part about Murph conning Robert. Murph had confessed the auction-house scam to Robert on his own and we decided to leave it to them to work out. Not that Robert wasn’t mad, but Murph had helped unravel the rest of the case and was going to work off his part in the crime in indentured servitude to Comic Kingdom—Robert had a new job vacancy to fill now that Xephyr was (obviously) fired. Murph had also worked his way back into everybody’s good graces by retrieving Robert to help us, and defeating an armored knight in real combat was going to give Sir Rob LARP bragging rights until at least the end of time. And now that we’d recovered the notorious missing pages of Sabers & Serpents #1, he could brag about knowing what was on them without lying.

  The only parts of the case that had gone unsolved were DM Dennis’s whereabouts after he left Frank, Charlene, and Angus locked in the dungeon, and, of course, the location of the stolen comic. Okay, so that was a pretty big one. Angus was still insisting he’d gotten rid of it and was claiming innocence of theft by insisting that Robert had stolen it from him first and you can’t steal something someone else stole from you first. There was no shortage of secrets and deception in the McGalliard family, that was for sure.

  “I bet that chamber was still dry when Paul Magnus stashed the smuggled tea there back in 1774,” Frank noted as we rehashed what we’d found in the chamber under Angus’s tower. “It wouldn’t have taken long for that tea to steep into nothing after the well started leaking. But once everything was submerged, the water would have created an anaerobic environment that helped preserve the wood. Otherwise we might not have found anything at all, and the mystery never would have been solved.”

  Ha! I knew Frank would have a scientific theory for why the wood hadn’t rotted!

  “That dog of yours has a sharp nose,” Chief Olaf complimented Robert when we got to the part about Lucky leading us to Filmore’s skeleton and the comic’s missing pages. “I worked a canine unit when I was younger, and bloodhounds are amazing creatures.”

  “He was supposed to be one of your lot, but the coppers rejected him,” Robert told him. “All nose, no discipline, they said.”

  “In this case, I think that lack of discipline may have paid off big-time,” the chief said. “From what y’all have told me, when Lucky ran over that Dennis kid at the party, the kid already had the stolen comic’s scent on him from the chewed-up page he found in Angus’s tower. Sounds like it was chewed up because Lucky already came into contact with it earlier around Angus, and when he smelled it again, it triggered his hunt instinct, and off he went trying to find it.”

  “That’s how we figure it,” Frank agreed. “We learned early on in the case that Lucky likes to use important pieces of paper as chew toys. When he tried jamming his nose in Dennis’s wizard costume at the party, I’d thought he was going after candy, but now we know it was the torn piece of back cover he’d chewed on earlier. To him it was just a toy.”

  “It’s still odd that he continued chasing the scent of the comic in a new direction after that,” Chief Olaf pondered. “Usually there’s some kind of verbal command the handler will give to let the dog know it’s time to follow a particular scent, but you boys didn’t know he’d smelled the comic or what command to give.”

  “Hold on a second,” I said, replaying the incident from the party in my head. Lucky had yanked on the leash right before running over Dennis in his wizard costume, cutting off Frank midsentence just as he said—

  “Find it!” Frank interjected before I could finish the thought. “I was talking to Joe about the comic and said I was hoping our surveillance would help us find it, when Lucky pulled me off-balance, causing me to yelp out the last two words.”

  “That would do it,” the chief agreed. “ ‘Find it’ is the basic command a lot of trainers use. Lucky didn’t know you’d said it by accident.”

  “Well done, Lucky, my lad, wherever you’ve run off to this time,” Robert said to his absentee dog.

  “Normally once a bloodhound finds its target, its handler gives it a reward as positive reinforcement after a successful run and the chase stops,” Chief Olaf expounded expertly, clearly taking pleasure in his expertness. “Since you boys didn’t know to give him one, he must have kept on going after he found the comic. Jumping up on a target’s chest is what they’re trained to do, and from the way you boys describe, that’s exactly what he was doing when he bowled over that suit of armor with Filmore Johnson’s remains inside it.”

  “No wonder he went so wild after he found the missing pages. He was expecting us to give him a treat!” Frank said. “The poor guy was barking and bouncing all around and we just ignored him, so he ran off.”

  “A little bit of praise and a doggie biscuit usually does the trick,” the chief said.

  “I think we owe him a whole box when we see him again,” I said.

  Flashing blue and red lights outside alerted us to the arrival of Chief Olaf’s backup. Two of his other off-duty deputies had been at the party as well, and they were already waiting outside with Xephyr and Angus.

  “Well, I’d better escort our prisoners back to the station and write all this up,” Chief Olaf said, grabbing another corn dog for the road and turning back to Robert. “This has been some party, McGalliard, but next year please skip the falling bodies and multiple felony arrests, will ya?”

  The chief was almost out the door when we heard Lucky let out one of his signature creeptastic howls from the direction of the kitchen. Everyone instantly froze in place. If there was one thing this case had taught me, it was this:

  “Follow that nose!” I yelled as the five of us and Chief Olaf all took off running.

  We found Lucky baying furiously when we reached the kitchen. We also found Dungeon Master Dennis. He was cowering in the corner hiding behind a chair as the big bloodhound barked at him.

  “Good boy, Lucky!” Frank called as we piled into the kitchen around the dog and his cornered perp.

  Dennis conspicuously slid his hand behind his back as soon as he saw us.

  “Oh, um… hey, everybody,” he said casually as if nothing was wrong.

  “Hand it over,” Frank demanded, holding out his palm.

  “Hand what over?” Dennis asked innocently.

  Frank, Charlene, Robert, Murph, Chief Olaf, and I all scowled at him. Lucky growled.

  “You know what, dungeon master,” Charlene hissed.

  He looked like he was about to deny having it, but he must have realized it was useless. “Guess I’m not going to be able to roll my way out of this one, huh?”

  Frank and Charlene firmly shook their heads no. He pulled his hand from behind his back, and sure enough, there was Comic Kingdom’s stolen copy of Sabers & Serpents #1, slightly chewed and missing a back cover.

  “My comic!” Robert shouted, quickly plucking it from Dennis’s hand.

  “My evidence,” said Chief Olaf, snatching it from Robert.

  “Be careful!” Murph cried, gently taking it from the chief with a tissue and setting it on the table. “You don’t touch a comic this rare with your bare hands! Don’t you know anything about collecting?”

  “Good boy!” Frank gushed, scratching a very happy Lucky behind the ears. Charlene and I both joined in, showering the bloodhound and his amazing crime-solving nose with praise. Chief Olaf even gave him the rest of his corn dog.

  “Lucky being so stubborn turned out to be a good thing,” Frank said. “He was determined to get his reward for tracking that comic.”

  By this point, my pretend Chief Olaf costume was a total mess, and Frank’s Sherlock and Charlene’s Nancy weren’t much better off. Chief’s Teddy Roosevelt was still in decent shape, but with his mustardy mustache, we made a ridiculously ragged quartet of costumed detectives.

  Robert looked at us and started guffawing. “How many detectives does it take to fi
nd a rare stolen comic book?”

  “Four,” I answered. “And one Baskerville hound.”

  We all joined in laughing. Even Dennis, although his smile faded when Chief Olaf escorted him to the police car.

  “We’re usually the ones to beat Chief Olaf to solving the crime, and Charlene was determined to beat us,” I said. “But the dog out-detected us all!”

  “Looks like Lucky beat you to the scoop on this one,” Frank said to Charlene.

  “I wonder if he’ll give me a quote,” she said, smiling.

  “Now that I have a complete comic, I might just have to do that midnight webcast after all,” Robert pondered. “Still a shame about the condition, though.”

  “I don’t know,” Murph said. “It doesn’t get much rarer than a legendary one-of-kind comic full of bloodstains from an actual crime. When the collecting world finds out about tonight and the real story behind Filmore’s disappearance and that map, I bet it could be worth even more than it would be in perfect condition.”

  I didn’t know who technically owned that comic, Robert or Angus, but I had feeling they weren’t going to have any more trouble paying Castle McGalliard’s bills.

  More from this Series

  Return to Black Bear…

  Book 20

  Secret of the Red Arrow

  Book 1

  Mystery of the Phantom…

  Book 2

  The Vanishing Game

  Book 3

  More from the Author

  Demolition Mission

  Bug-Napped

  READ ALL THE MYSTERIES IN THE

  HARDY BOYS ADVENTURES:

  #1 Secret of the Red Arrow

  #2 Mystery of the Phantom Heist

  #3 The Vanishing Game

  #4 Into Thin Air

  #5 Peril at Granite Peak

  #6 The Battle of Bayport

  #7 Shadows at Predator Reef

  #8 Deception on the Set