A Game Called Chaos Read online

  Frank and Joe got up. “We’ll go downstairs to get it,” said Frank. He and Joe exited the apartment and went down to the front door.

  When they got there they found a delivery boy waiting with their pizzas. Frank paid the bill and watched the kid walk back to his truck.

  “Doesn’t look old enough to drive, does he?” Joe said. “Hey! Who’s that messing with the van?”

  Sure enough, someone was prowling around the Hardys’ van. The brothers set the pizzas down and dashed out the door for their car.

  “If this is Winters again, I’m going to deck him for sure,” Joe said.

  “Not if I do it first,” Frank said.

  The figure poking around the van didn’t notice the Hardys coming. Joe grabbed the person by the shoulder and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The person spun around. She was a medium-tall, thin woman in a tan trench coat and slouch hat. She had short-cropped black hair and a roundish face. She wasn’t much older than the Hardys, but her outfit—a fedora and trench coat—reminded Frank of something from a thirties detective movie.

  “Me?” said the woman. She seemed shocked at being caught. Frank and Joe nodded solemnly at her. “I was just looking around. I’m buying a new car soon, and I was thinking about buying this kind of van.”

  “It looked like you were trying to break into this particular van,” Joe said.

  “No, no. You’ve misunderstood,” the woman said.

  “Maybe the police should decide if we’ve misunderstood,” Frank said.

  The woman sighed and her shoulders slouched forward a bit. “Okay, you got me. No need to call the police. My name is Samantha Rockford, my friends call me Sam. I’m a private detective working for Ron Rosenberg. Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met,” Joe said. Something about this woman didn’t seem right to him. Perhaps it was her clothes, or maybe it was the way she kept glancing around as she spoke. She seemed to be looking for something, though Joe couldn’t spot what.

  “Well,” Sam continued, “he hired me to check up on Steven Royal. Rosenberg says he’s gone missing.”

  “Really?” Joe said, raising an eyebrow at his brother.

  “And why are you here?” Frank asked.

  “I was checking Royal’s known associates. When I saw you guys fraternizing with Sirkin before, I figured you might know something about the case.”

  “So you decided to break into our van,” Joe said. “Doesn’t ring true to me, Frank.”

  “Me neither,” said the elder Hardy. “Let’s take her inside and let the police sort it out.” He took Sam by the arm and urged her toward the apartment door.

  “This really isn’t necessary,” Sam said. She tried to pull away, but Frank’s grip held her gently in place.

  As they walked toward the apartments, Chelsea poked her head out of the lobby door. She had the pizzas in her arms. “Hey, guys,” she said. “What’s going on?” Then her eyes went wide. “Look out!”

  At the same moment Chelsea screamed, Frank and Joe heard the roar of a car engine behind them. They turned in time to see a blue sedan barreling down on them at full speed.

  8 Crack Up

  * * *

  Frank pushed Sam one way, and he and Joe dove in the other direction. The speeding car whizzed between the two groups, missing them all.

  Before it could change direction or brake, the car slammed into a concrete pylon at the bottom of one of the parking lot’s light poles. The sedan’s engine revved for a couple of seconds more, and then the engine died.

  Frank and Joe got up and looked at the wreck. “Oh, man!” Joe said. “Whoever’s inside there must be really messed up.”

  The brothers ran to the car to try to rescue the driver. Chelsea dashed over to join them. “Frank! Joe! Are you all right?”

  “Better than whoever’s in here,” Joe said, trying to open the crumpled driver’s-side door. He tried to peer inside, but the front and side windows of the car had shattered into a million spiderwebs of glass.

  All Joe could see was a large white blob in the driver’s seat. He couldn’t make out the driver’s head, or even his arms, just an indistinct shape. He feared that the person inside had been crushed beyond recognition.

  He let out a relieved sigh when he realized what had really happened. “The air bag deployed,” Joe said. “But it’s blocking my view. I can’t see anything else.”

  “Neither can I,” said Frank. He had been trying to look into the passenger side of the car. But that side had crumpled against the pylon. The wreckage prevented Frank from seeing inside. “Maybe the driver’s still alive,” he said, joining Joe on the driver’s side of the car.

  Chelsea looked at the car, then at the brothers. “This is Steven Royal’s car,” she said, a note of fear and sadness in her voice.

  “What a way to end a case,” Joe said. He pulled on the door handle, but the door didn’t budge.

  “Let me help,” said Frank.

  He and Joe positioned themselves so they could both get a good grip on the door handle.

  “On three,” Frank said. Joe nodded at him. Frank counted. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  The brothers pulled hard on the door, and slowly it creaked open, metal scraping against metal. The air bag fell away from the seat as the door opened.

  “Holy cats!” Joe said. “There’s no one inside!”

  Sure enough, the driver’s seat was empty.

  “Just like in A Town Called Chaos,” Chelsea muttered.

  “Cars can’t drive themselves,” Frank said, turning his scientific eye to the sedan’s steering column. “There has to be some kind of remote-controlled steering device here.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Joe said. “But maybe we’d better let the police poke around inside the car. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Now that he was listening, Frank could hear police sirens; they weren’t very far off. Someone in the apartments must have called them.

  “Well, they won’t be able to shrug this off,” Frank said. “Whether it was Royal controlling this car or someone else, this stunt could have seriously hurt us.”

  “And Sam,” Joe said. He looked around. “Say, where did she go? Chelsea, did you see where Sam Rockford went?”

  “Is she the woman in the trench coat who was with you? I was so worried about you guys, I didn’t pay any attention to her after you pushed her out of harm’s way,” Chelsea said. “Who was she?”

  “A PI working for Rosenberg,” Frank said. “Maybe.”

  “She seemed to know Royal was missing, though we didn’t tell Rosenberg that,” Joe added.

  Chelsea sighed. “As if we didn’t have enough trouble!”

  • • •

  The police took Royal’s disappearance much more seriously now. They impounded the wreck of Royal’s car and took it to the police lab for testing. They also spent a couple of hours talking to Frank, Joe, and Chelsea. During the course of the interrogation, the Hardys learned that the police’s new theory was that Royal’s disappearance was part of a publicity stunt.

  They didn’t seem to believe that Chelsea and Viking Software had been trying to keep Royal’s absence secret. “After all,” the lead detective told Chelsea, “you’ve been camped on our doorstep making a fuss for most of the last week. You’ve done your jobs as concerned citizens; now let us do our jobs. The only thing you should worry about at the moment is keeping your noses clean. If any of you are involved in this stunt, then you could all be in big trouble. Let the Jewel Ridge PD worry about Steven Royal. This car wreck proves he’s lurking around here somewhere.

  “And you, Hardy boys,” the detective continued, “make sure you stay out of the way of our investigation. Maybe the police in Bayport need help from amateurs, but in Jewel Ridge, we do things by the book.”

  Frank and Joe silently decided not to turn the mechanical spider over to the cops, though they did mention the ransacking of Tochi’s house. By the time the trio got back into Che
lsea’s apartment, the pizza they’d ordered had been cold a long time. They stuffed it into the fridge and went straight to bed.

  They were awakened late the next morning by the repeated ringing of Chelsea’s doorbell. Joe roused himself from the couch and answered the intercom. “Yeah,” he said sleepily. “What is it?”

  “It’s me, Phil,” said a voice on the other end of the intercom. “Buzz me in, will you?” Joe pressed the buzzer and a minute later Phil came through the door, looking well-rested and eager to begin working. Frank got out of the recliner and Chelsea joined them from the other room.

  The four friends sat around Chelsea’s dining room table and had granola and milk for breakfast. They brought Phil up to date on everything that had happened the last two days. The Hardys also pulled out the remains of the mechanical spider for Phil to see.

  “Seems to me,” Phil said between mouthfuls of cereal, “that you could buy most of the material in this spider at an electronics supply store. Though some of it looks like it might have been scavenged from toys.”

  “Which could point to Tochi’s involvement,” Joe said.

  Phil nodded as he ate. “Mm. Or someone with that amount of skill.”

  “Chelsea,” Frank said, “what do you make of the clue we found inside the spider? I thought the forest reference meant the Forest of Chaos game and the caverns meant the Caverns of Chaos game. That would make sense since Caverns was the first game and primeval means ‘original.’ But I can’t imagine that Royal hid clues to finding the prototype in those old games. No one thinks that far ahead.”

  “Could the forest and the cave be real places?” Joe asked. “And if they are, where are they?”

  Chelsea’s eyes lit up. “They could be,” she said. “When I was reading up on Royal when Viking brought him on board, I read a lot of magazine articles on the origin of the Chaos series.

  “Royal and Sakai used to go camping in Kendall State Park, in western Massachusetts. According to one article, the two of them got the idea for the original Caverns of Chaos game when they found a hidden cave somewhere in the park.

  “The reporter couldn’t find any record of such a cave, but he couldn’t prove it didn’t exist, either. Royal claimed that he and Sakai had hidden the cave entrance to keep out snoopers. He wouldn’t say where it was. Even though nobody’s found it since then, maybe it is a real place,” Chelsea concluded.

  “And if it is,” Frank said, “then the prototype—the treasure—might be there. That’s what the clue implies, anyway. That cave would be the place where the whole Chaos series originated. It makes sense.”

  “So all we have to do is find this cave that may or may not exist,” Joe said. “I wonder if this’d be any easier if I’d played the third game.”

  After breakfast Joe, Frank, and Chelsea showered in shifts, dressed, and headed for Viking Software.

  When they got there, Chelsea introduced Phil to Dave Henderson, her boss. Dave seemed upset about the whole situation.

  “It’s like some nightmare I can’t wake up from,” he said. “Like being trapped in one of Royal’s games.”

  “That’s the way I felt last night when that driverless car tried to run Frank and Joe down,” Chelsea said.

  “Chelsea,” Joe said, “you mentioned something about A Town Called Chaos when Royal’s sedan tried to hit us last night. Is there a driverless car in the new game?”

  “Yes. Along with a giant ape, exploding bats, a booby-trapped mansion, the ghost of Katherine Chaos’s evil sister, and a lot of other cool things. Seeing something like that real car doesn’t seem so cool, though,” Chelsea said.

  “And the giant spider was in the second game,” Joe said. “What kind of things from the third game might we find in this forest?”

  “You’re going to Kendall Forest?” Chelsea and Phil asked simultaneously.

  “Right after we get Phil set up here. It seems the only logical thing to do,” Frank said.

  “Well . . .” Chelsea said, thinking, “there were a lot of things from the first two games: more spiders, more snakes, and, of course, the Terrible Bear—the one Tochi thinks is a parody of Bombo.”

  “I don’t know about this,” Dave said. “I’m pretty nervous about you guys poking around in the woods. Shouldn’t we leave this to the police?”

  “The police think your company is behind this whole thing,” Joe said. “They’re still concentrating on the publicity stunt theory.”

  “Well, if I can track down where those first e-mails actually came from, maybe we can stop that,” Phil said.

  “I’ll take you to a workstation,” Dave said. He led the Hardys and Phil to an empty cubicle. Chelsea went back to her office. Even on a Saturday morning, Viking Software bustled with energy. Several projects were so close to their deadlines that nearly everyone on staff was working overtime.

  Frank and Joe helped Phil get set up, then they headed out to the van to begin their trip north to Kendall State Park. But when they got into the Viking Software parking lot, the door of a red Volkswagen Beetle opened up next to them and out climbed Samantha Rockford. Apparently, she’d been waiting for them.

  “So,” Sam said, strolling up to the brothers and falling into step beside them, “what’s our next move?”

  “What do you mean ‘our’?” Frank asked.

  “And where did you hurry off to last night?” Joe said. “I think the police might want to talk to you.”

  “I try never to become involved with police,” Sam said. “Look,” she continued. “I figure you and I should team up. You guys got to this case ahead of me, but I probably know a lot more about Royal than you do. I’ve studied him. I know all his friends and acquaintances, all his usual haunts.”

  “Then,” Frank said, trying to walk away from her, “you should have no trouble finding him on your own.”

  “Hey,” she said, tagging along, “we’re all on the same side here.”

  “If we’re all on the same side,” Joe said, “let’s see your PI’s license.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s see yours.”

  Frank stopped walking and looked Sam straight in the eyes. She was wearing the same cheap thirties detective outfit she’d worn the night before, he noticed. “Personally,” he said, “I’d settle for seeing just your ID.”

  “I left it at home,” Sam said. “I never carry ID when I work. It might compromise my employers.”

  “A likely story,” Joe said.

  Just then Chelsea Sirkin came out of the front door of the building. “Frank, Joe, you’ll never guess what I found,” she said. Then, noticing the woman in the trench coat and fedora, she added, “Oh. I’m sorry. Who’s your friend?”

  Joe stepped aside so Chelsea could get a better look at Sam. “Chelsea Sirkin, I’d like you to meet the ubiquitous Samantha Rockford.”

  Chelsea’s jaw dropped open. Looking straight at Sam, she gasped, “What are you doing here?”

  9 Samantha’s Secret

  * * *

  “She’s trying to tag along with us,” Joe said. “But I don’t think we’re buying.”

  “B-but her name’s not Rockford, and she’s not a PI!” Chelsea stammered. “Her real name is Teri McLean, and she’s a fan who’s been stalking Royal for years.”

  McLean turned to run, but Joe grabbed her by the wrist and held tight. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’re not going to pull that disappearing act again.”

  “You’ve got nothing on me,” McLean said. “Let me go or I’ll scream for the cops.”

  “She’s wrong about that,” Chelsea said. “We’ve got enough for the cops to hold her. Royal took out a restraining order against Teri that prevents her from being this close to him, his house, or his place of work. She’s in violation of that order right now.”

  “Guess you aren’t as innocent as you pretend,” Joe said.

  Teri didn’t reply, only tried to slide out of Joe’s grip. Joe had to use some of his wrestling skills to keep hold of her, but he didn’t l
et her get away. After a while, she gave up and stopped struggling.

  Chelsea was angry now. “You bet she isn’t innocent. She used to follow Anne Sakai around, too. Royal says that this woman is the reason Sakai left the country before she died.”

  “So, you’re saying that if it wasn’t for Ms. Sweetness-and-Light here, Sakai might not have died in that plane crash?” Frank asked.

  “That’s a lie!” Teri McLean screamed. “Anne and I were good friends. She invited me down to that island!”

  “You were on St. Cecile before Anne Sakai died?” Chelsea asked, wide-eyed.

  A cold calm passed over McLean, and her whole attitude changed. “I’m not saying anything more,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t clam up now if I were you,” Frank said. “You’re in enough trouble as it is. You’d better come clean if you hope to get out of this.”

  McLean didn’t say anything, and Joe, who still had her by the wrist, began to pull her back toward the Viking Software building. As they neared the door, McLean suddenly yanked free and dashed to the red VW. She started to tug the door open, but Frank stopped her. “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  “You can’t stop me,” she said. As she pulled on the door, something fell out of the pocket of her trench coat. She scooped up the item but not before Frank and Joe saw what it was: a fairly new set of lock picks. McLean glared angrily at the brothers. “This is illegal detainment,” she said.

  “On the contrary,” Joe said, stepping in behind her. “We’re just holding you for the police.” McLean was now trapped between her VW and the car next to it, with the Hardys cutting off her only avenues of escape.

  She tried to yank open the door again, but Frank stopped her. “Let me go, you two!” she cried. “Steven’s life is in danger! I’m the only one who can save him!”

  “I doubt that,” Joe said. Then something in the Beetle caught his eye. “Hey, Frank. Take a look inside the car.”