Training for Trouble Read online

  Iola and Callie faced each other across the center line, their foils held ready.

  The next few seconds went by so quickly, Frank and Joe had trouble realizing what happened.

  The coach ordered the two girls to fence. Iola and Callie stepped toward each other at the same time.

  Frank saw Callie score a touch at the same time that there was a loud pop! Sparks shot from the tip of Callie’s weapon and Iola flew backward as if she’d been shot.

  2 Human Bull’s-Eye

  * * *

  Joe jumped up from his chair. “Iola!” he shouted.

  Iola lay motionless, her foil rolling idly away from her. Callie stood frozen in shock.

  A fencer from the next strip whipped off her mask and rushed to Iola’s side. The Hardys were there a split-second later.

  As Joe and the other fencer gently removed Iola’s mask, Geneve Montreux came running over, followed by the news crew and a few members of the crowd.

  “Victoria, what happened?” Montreux asked.

  “I don’t know,” the young woman at Iola’s side answered. “Something with the scoring wires, I think.”

  Montreux knelt beside the Hardys. Joe lifted Iola’s head, and her eyes fluttered open as if she were waking from a deep sleep. “My shoulder,” she said, reaching over with her good hand.

  “Oh, no!” Montreux gasped. “I’m so sorry you got hurt, honey.”

  Joe ripped at the sleeve of Iola’s fencing jacket. A rude red welt the size of a half dollar blistered Iola’s shoulder.

  “That’s a nasty burn,” Joe said.

  “Are you okay?” Montreux asked. “How do you feel?”

  “A little shaky,” Iola said, sitting up. “I think I can stand.”

  “She must’ve gotten a shock from the tip of Callie’s foil,” Frank said.

  Montreux sent someone to get one of the athletic trainers, then stood to face the gathering crowd. “Everything’s okay,” she said, waving them back. “We had a minor accident, but it’s okay now.”

  Rachel Baden stuck her microphone in Montreux’s face. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure,” Montreux stated. “We have new equipment that may have been set up incorrectly.”

  Montreux, with the help of Coach Sokal, answered more questions while Joe, Frank, and Callie took care of Iola.

  “I’m fine,” Iola insisted as Joe helped her up. She looked at Callie and laughed. “You’re the one who should see a doctor. You’re as pale as a ghost.”

  “I thought I killed you,” Callie said.

  Frank started laughing uncontrollably.

  “It’s not funny!” Callie insisted.

  “I know,” Frank said, trying to stifle his giggles. “But look at Iola’s hair.”

  Sure enough, the shock had made the hair on the top of Iola’s head stand straight up.

  “You look sort of like a fuzzy caterpillar,” Joe said, and made a rough stab at smoothing Iola’s hair.

  Iola nodded at Callie, who gave Joe a playful whack in the chest. “Be nice!” she said.

  The trainer arrived and helped Callie lead Iola to the training room for treatment. By then Montreux had fended off the news crew. She grabbed the arm of the fencer who was first to help Iola.

  “Who set this stuff up, Victoria? It was you, wasn’t it?” Montreux was so angry her voice trembled.

  Victoria flushed. “You think I did this on purpose? You’re crazy!”

  The Hardys watched as Coach Sokal quickly stepped in. “All kinds of people have had their hands on this equipment in the past few days, Geneve. It was just a freak accident, I’m sure.”

  “But who’s in charge?” Montreux asked. “Who’s supposed to be in charge of fencing equipment?”

  Sokal frowned. “Victoria,” he admitted.

  “And you hired her back,” Montreux said. “So find out what happened and take care of it—now!”

  Montreux strode off and Sokal followed her, pleading Victoria’s case.

  When they were out of earshot, Victoria muttered, “That’s right. Always blame me.” She picked up her mask and turned to look for her own weapon.

  “Thanks for helping Iola,” Joe said.

  “No problem. I’m sorry she got hurt.”

  “So, you work for Coach Sokal?” Frank asked, curious about who might have had access to the fencing equipment.

  “Yeah.” The young woman tucked her mask under her arm and shook hands with Frank and Joe. She was small and compact, like a gymnast. Her blond hair was parted in the middle and hung down a few inches below her shoulders. “I’m Victoria Huntington,” she said. “I used to be the number-one foil fencer on the Olympic team, but not anymore.”

  “Foil fencer?” Joe asked.

  Victoria picked up her foil and showed it to Joe. “There are three fencing weapons,” she explained. “The saber has a heavy blade with a sharp edge. The foil has a thin rectangular blade, no edge—”

  “And the épée is even thinner, with a rounded guard to protect your hand,” Frank added.

  Victoria nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So why aren’t you number one anymore?” Frank asked.

  Victoria hesitated. “Well, let’s just say Madame Montreux and I don’t get along,” she said finally.

  “But you’re here,” Joe said.

  “Barely,” Victoria replied. “After Montreux forced me off her precious fencing team, Coach Sokal hired me to be one of his assistant coaches.”

  Frank took the foil from Joe and hefted it. “What does Montreux think of that?”

  “She hates it,” Victoria said. “Sokal leads all the junior teams—judo, fencing, archery, biathlon. But he mostly knows judo and archery. He needed someone who knew fencing to help him out.”

  Joe took a step toward the scorer’s table and its bright red lights. “I want to check that stuff out,” he said. “See how Iola got zapped.”

  Victoria quickly stepped in front of him. “Don’t worry about it, Joe,” she said.

  “She is my girlfriend,” Joe said sternly. “I tend to worry.”

  “This is my responsibility. I’ll find out what happened.”

  “Maybe we can help,” Frank said. “I know a little about electronics.”

  Victoria grabbed his sleeve. “I said, no thanks.”

  Seeing what was happening, Coach Sokal stepped over and calmly made Victoria release Frank’s shirt sleeve. “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem,” Victoria said. “I was promising Frank and Joe that I’d find out what happened with the scoring apparatus.”

  “Scoring apparatus?” Joe muttered. “More like a giant toaster.”

  Victoria glared at him.

  “We just want to see the gear,” Frank said, trying to keep Joe and Victoria from getting into a fight.

  “Tell you what,” Sokal said, “I don’t think we want a bunch of people touching the equipment, possibly messing it up, right? So I’ll take care of it myself.” Sokal handed Victoria his clipboard. “Joe, why don’t you see how your girlfriend’s doing. And, Frank… hold on.” Sokal waved another athlete over and introduced him.

  “This is William Moubray,” Sokal said, gesturing to a guy about Frank’s age. He wore loose-fitting jeans, a white long-sleeved T-shirt, and a dark gray fleece vest with a U.S. Archery patch on the chest. “Moubray is one of the best archers on the junior team. He’ll be happy to show you around.”

  “Absolutely,” Moubray said.

  “Just don’t call him Bill,” Sokal added. “He hates that.”

  Moubray smiled. “That’s right.”

  Frank wanted to hang out with Moubray, but he couldn’t help feeling as though Sokal was smoothing him over so he’d leave the scoring gear alone.

  Joe trotted toward the training room, and Frank followed Moubray. When he glanced back, Sokal appeared to be ordering Huntington and another facility employee to pack up the equipment.

  Moubray led Frank down a flight of steps to the basement of the trai
ning facility. “So how do you like this place?” he asked.

  “It’s great,” Frank said, “but we’ve had a little too much excitement so far.”

  “Yeah, that incident was freaky,” William said. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting shocked like that before. Come on, I’ll show you our deluxe archery center.” Moubray emphasized the word deluxe to make it sound as if he were kidding.

  He was.

  The basement of the training facility remained unfinished. Stacks of drywall, five-gallon paint drums, and piles of sawdust lined the walls. The space was still mostly open. A few offices and storage rooms had been framed in, but much of the floor was open space punctuated by round white columns.

  William directed Frank around a corner to their right. There Frank saw what looked like an extra-wide hallway. It was so long Frank couldn’t see all the way to the end. The long space faded into complete darkness.

  William flipped a couple of light switches and illuminated the long space.

  “This is our indoor target range,” Moubray said.

  Frank saw three archery targets down at the end of the wide hall, about sixty yards away. One of them had fallen over. Square signs marking the various distances to the targets hung from the ceiling.

  “Is there really room for three people to shoot down here?” Frank asked.

  William laughed. “No way, man. It isn’t finished yet. Two people are the most you’ll ever have down here at once.”

  “Unless you want to shoot each other,” Frank said.

  William nodded. “Montreux doesn’t care too much about us archers.” He pushed open a door at the head of the hallway.

  “What do you mean?” Frank asked as they entered a small room lined with lockers and furnished with a couple of bare wood benches.

  “She was a champion fencer,” Moubray explained. “So she tends to give most of the money and attention to the fencers.”

  “That stinks.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if it’s intentional or not. The tiny indoor range doesn’t bother me too much. I almost always shoot outside anyway,” Moubray said. “But a few people are upset about how things are going here.” He spun the lock on one of the lockers and withdrew two cases.

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” William said, placing the cases on a bench and zipping them open. “I figure this place is a whole lot better than nothing, so I keep quiet.”

  William withdrew the pieces of two complicated and expensive-looking target bows. Frank helped him screw the limbs to the lightweight magnesium grips. After that, a long stabilizer bar with counterweights was clamped on below the arrow rest. Finally, William calibrated and mounted the sights and, holding one limb between his legs, flexed the other one down, and strung first one bow and then the other.

  “There,” he said, handing one to Frank.

  “Cool,” Frank said. The entire bow weighed only a couple of pounds.

  William then unlocked an equipment cage at the back of the room and got Frank a belt quiver to put around his waist, a bunch of target arrows, and a leather wrist guard.

  “All right,” William said. “Let’s slide on outside.”

  “Outside?” Frank asked. “It’s dark.”

  “Not a problem.” William led the way up the stairs and out a back door. They stepped out on the opposite side of the building from the parking lot. The moon was only a sliver, and Frank couldn’t see farther than ten or fifteen feet.

  They walked along a recently paved path that curved into the woods behind the facility. About fifty feet in, they came to a clearing. William went to a stout aluminum pole and pulled a lever. Six sets of stadium lights snapped on, throwing an eerie yellow-green light over the outdoor range.

  “Amazing,” Frank said.

  “This is more like it, huh?” William said.

  Eight-foot corrugated steel walls enclosed an area the size of a football field. To keep stray arrows from hurting anyone, the range was carefully oriented toward a steep hill. The bright lights aimed down at them made the surrounding darkness darker, and the trees rose up behind the walls in long, spidery shadows.

  William and Frank walked down to the fifty-meter marker. Frank could see his breath in the chilly fall air as he set his bow in a wooden rack and pulled on his wrist guard.

  William went first. He took a pair of wraparound glasses from a vest pocket and put them on. Then he nocked an arrow, raised the bow, and pulled the arrow back in one smooth motion. His hand stopped right beside his nose and held there.

  He became totally still. Finally, at the exact moment that Frank began to wonder when he would release the arrow, it was gone. It simply seemed to disappear from William’s bow.

  Frank heard a soft thunk and looked down the range to see William’s arrow buried in the yellow bulls-eye.

  “Sweet!” Frank said.

  William adjusted his sight, then sent five more arrows into the heart of the target.

  Frank tried to take his time. As soon as he had his arrow drawn, he noticed his heart beating. Whump, whump, whump, it went, making the tip of the arrow bob up and down. Frank held his breath and released. The arrow took off with a mild thwang.

  It landed in the black area at the lower edge of the bull’s-eye.

  “Not bad,” William said. He showed Frank how to make his release a little smoother by not using his thumb.

  “And try to shoot between heartbeats,” William advised.

  “Yeah, right!” Frank said.

  William laughed. “It takes practice, but you’ll figure it out.”

  By his sixth arrow, Frank was into the blue circle, only a few inches from the center.

  “You’re on fire!” William said.

  “I’ll get the arrows,” Frank offered. He set his bow in the rack and jogged down the range to the target. At one point he looked back at William, but the glare of the lights whited out everything behind him.

  At the thick cork target, he pulled the arrows out one at a time. Most came out smoothly.

  Frank pulled the last one out and turned to walk back. He thought he felt a bit of his hair lift at the side of his head, a breath of wind.

  But the sound was unmistakable. He swiveled to look back at the target. An extremely thin arrow shaft protruded from the target, still quivering from the impact.

  It had missed him by an inch.

  3 A Pointed Message

  * * *

  Frank ducked low. He looked back toward William but was still blinded by the glare. Something buzzed past his ear.

  Another arrow!

  It sank into the gut of the target, so close Frank could have reached up and grabbed it.

  He dove for the ground. “William!” he shouted. “William!”

  He got no answer.

  Frank lay as flat he could. He could smell the earth and the cold, frost-covered grass.

  He thought to crawl behind one of the targets to use it as a shield. But as he started crawling, the lights suddenly shut down.

  The night went completely black.

  Frank remained perfectly still. He heard a groan—a person falling, maybe—then the distinct sound of footsteps, of someone running away.

  Frank scuttled back to the spot where he and William had been shooting arrows. He was ready to drop flat to the ground again. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spotted William’s bow lying in the grass. A few target arrows lay strewn around it. The arrangement looked like a dangerous game of pickup sticks.

  Frank fell flat again. He heard someone running, coming closer.

  William burst out of the darkness, his chest heaving for air.

  “Frank! Are you okay, man?”

  “Yeah, but someone tried to ventilate me with a couple of target arrows.”

  “Me, too.” William pointed to a spot on the ground a few yards away. The bright yellow shaft of an arrow stuck up out of the ground.

  William picked up his bow as Frank pulled the arrow from the ground. �
��That was insane!” William said. “You dropped, then I see this shadowy outline of a person standing over there by the trail.”

  “I shouted your name,” Frank said.

  “I heard,” William said. “At that moment I was diving for my life. Whoever that idiot was started lobbing arrows at me.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  William shook his head. He and Frank each had an arrow ready, in case their attacker returned. “I scrambled to turn off the lights,” William said. “I figured we’d be safe in the dark.”

  “Good thinking,” Frank said.

  “Then I went after him, but I couldn’t catch up.”

  Frank and William walked back to the target. Once they were close enough to see through the darkness, Frank noticed something he hadn’t seen before.

  “Check it out,” he said. “One of the arrows has a note attached.”

  William withdrew the arrow and slid the folded square of paper over the tip. Holding it close, he read aloud: “‘Can’t you take a joke? I could have hit you if I wanted!—Milli Le Walt.’”

  “Who’s Milli Le Walt?” Frank asked.

  “No clue. Maybe the name is part of the joke.”

  “Some joke,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, I’m not laughing,” William agreed.

  The two teens turned on the lights again but didn’t find any new clues.

  William shut off the lights, and then he and Frank followed the path back to the sports facility. Inside, visitors’ night was still going strong.

  Allen Frierson was showing a young girl how she could take down her older brother with a sweeping hip throw. The fencing strip where Iola had been injured was shut down, but the sound of swords ringing came from the other two. A burly coach held the end of a thick rope while a kid climbed the thirty-five feet to the top and rang a bell hanging from the rafters. His parents clapped and cheered.

  Frank and William found the director of the center having a conversation with Bayport’s mayor.

  With a relaxed smile, Montreux introduced William to the mayor as a top hope for an Olympic medal in a few years.

  “I already know Frank Hardy,” the mayor said after he’d shaken hands with William. “He and Joe have helped me out many times.”