The Castle Conundrum (Hardy Boys) Read online

  “Bicycles are friendlier to the environment,” Jean-Claude replied. “And besides, it will be healthy exercise.”

  The others at the table laughed. All of them were getting more than enough exercise every day. The work they did guaranteed that.

  The schedule for the pétanque tournament was posted on the bulletin board outside Sophie’s office. Once lunch was over, Frank, Joe, and the others wandered down to check it.

  Jean-Claude arrived with a helmet on his head and a long canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He took one of the bikes from the rack and swung onto the saddle. “The baguette express is now leaving on track four,” he cracked. “I’ll be back soon.”

  He started to ride onto the steep path to the parking area.

  “Jean-Claude, stop,” Gert called. “Wait a moment. I want to ask a favor.”

  Jean-Claude squeezed the bike’s hand brakes. Frank saw a look of alarm cross his face. He pressed both brake handles all the way against the hand grips. They did nothing at all. The brakes were not working. The cables must have snapped.

  The path grew steeper. The bicycle picked up speed. A terrible crash was only moments away!

  11

  Getting the Brakes

  The runaway bike began to roll faster. Jean-Claude clutched the handlebars and steered around the rocks that dotted the path. On one side the ground fell steeply. The other was an upward slope of rough stone.

  “Jean-Claude, jump!” Joe shouted. He broke into a run, Frank right behind him.

  The French teen crouched over the handlebars. He seemed paralyzed by the danger he faced.

  “Jump!” Joe repeated. Frank shouted, too.

  Jean-Claude suddenly straightened up. With a powerful twist of his arms, he aimed the front wheel of the bike at a solitary bush beside the path. The wheel snagged the branches. The rear part of the bike flipped up. Jean-Claude was thrown forward. He instantly tucked himself into a ball. A moment later he landed hard on his back.

  Joe and Frank were the first to reach Jean-Claude. “Take it easy,” Joe urged. “Stay where you are while we get help.”

  Jean-Claude struggled to sit up. “I am all right,” he insisted. “I need a moment to catch my breath, that’s all.”

  Marie-Laure ran down the path and knelt in the dirt next to her brother. She took his arm and spoke in rapid French. Her voice was full of concern.

  Jean-Claude replied reassuringly. He pushed himself up onto his feet and rubbed his back. “Ouf!” he said. “I will have some blues tomorrow for sure.”

  “Blacks and blues, he means,” Marie-Laure explained.

  “What happened?” Joe asked. “How did you lose control that way?”

  Everybody in the vicinity was crowding down the path. They listened to hear Jean-Claude’s answer.

  “I don’t know,” Jean-Claude said. “The brakes would not work.”

  Frank picked up the bicycle. The rim of the front wheel was bent from the crash. He leaned close to peer at the front brake. Then he did the same with the rear brake.

  “Look at this,” he said in a steely voice. Joe, Marie-Laure, and Jean-Claude joined him. Frank pointed to the nut that held the front brake cable in place. It was loose enough to turn by hand. “The rear brake is the same,” Frank added.

  “I don’t understand,” Jean-Claude said. “The brakes worked as they should when I rode just before lunch. How could this happen?”

  Frank looked over his shoulder at the circle of listeners. Lowering his voice, he said, “I don’t think this was an accident. Someone must have deliberately loosened those nuts.”

  Marie-Laure turned pale. “You could have been injured for life,” she told Jean-Claude. “This cannot be tolerated. We must stop this madness before it is too late!”

  “To stop it, we must learn who is responsible,” Jean-Claude pointed out. He gave Joe and Frank a hopeful look.

  “We’ll do what we can,” Joe promised. “You say you used the bike before lunch?”

  Jean-Claude nodded. “Yes, and everything was as it should be. Then I left the bicycle in the rack as usual and came to the rehearsal in the square. You recall. You were all there.”

  “Then we all went in to lunch,” Frank said slowly. “And after lunch we gathered at the office, right next to the bike rack. By then your brakes had been tampered with.”

  “That means the tampering must have been done while we were at lunch,” Joe said. “But how can that be? We were all together.”

  “Some stranger could have crept up and done it,” Marie-Laure suggested.

  “A stranger could not have known which was my bicycle,” Jean-Claude retorted.

  “Maybe he didn’t care,” Joe said. “What if he simply fiddled with the first bike he came to?”

  “Or with more than one,” Frank added. “We’d better check all the others before anyone goes riding.”

  The van pulled into the parking area and stopped. Kevin got out. He saw them gathered on the path and hastened up to join them. “What’s wrong?” he asked urgently. “Is something the matter?”

  Jean-Claude explained.

  As Kevin listened, his expression became more and more grim. At last he exploded. “Enough is enough! I’m going to find out who’s doing this. And when I do, they’re going to be very sorry!”

  He scowled at the crowd of onlookers. “Please come with me to the office,” he said sternly. “I need to have a talk with all of you, one by one.”

  The teens glanced at one another nervously. When Kevin strode up the path, they hesitated, then straggled after him. Marie-Laure put an arm around Jean-Claude’s waist and helped him to walk. Frank hoisted the damaged bike onto his shoulder.

  “Too bad we can’t eavesdrop on these ‘talks’ of Kevin’s,” Joe said in an undertone. “Hmm … you don’t think—”

  “Not an option,” Frank said crisply. “If he caught us, we’d be on a train to Paris before sundown.”

  The Hardys walked up the path and joined the crowd outside the office. During the wait, Frank checked the brakes on the other bikes in the rack. He asked Luis and Libby to come watch what he did. There was no point in fueling whatever suspicions Kevin might have.

  As far as Frank could tell, there was nothing wrong with the other bikes. The saboteur had chosen Jean-Claude’s bike either on purpose or by chance.

  Manu came out of the office. “Libby?” he said. “You’re next.”

  “How was it?” Antonio asked as Libby went inside.

  Manu shrugged. “I told him I have done nothing wrong,” he said. “Did he believe me? Who knows? He is very angry.”

  “I feel sick,” Siri said. She held her hand to her waist.

  “Go lie down,” Marie-Laure told her. “I’ll explain to Kevin.”

  “Will he listen to you?” Siri asked doubtfully.

  Marie-Laure looked grim. “I think he had better,” she said. “My brother could have been killed. Surely Kevin will not suspect me!”

  “He might,” Frank said. “He might wonder if Jean-Claude knew ahead of time the brakes were rigged to fail. Jean-Claude could have staged the whole incident himself … or with your help.”

  Marie-Laure stared at him in disbelief. “You dare!” she blazed. “After we worked so hard to be your friends! I will never speak to you again!”

  She rushed away in tears. Jean-Claude gave Frank a hostile look and hurried after her.

  “Way to go, Frank,” Joe growled. “You’re a real diplomat.”

  “Hold on!” Frank protested. “I didn’t say I believed it, just that Kevin might. Though if you look at the timing, Jean-Claude had more opportunity to monkey with the brakes than the rest of us. I can’t quite get with the sinister stranger theory. Too noticeable in a tiny, remote place like Fréhel.”

  “There’s such a thing as being too suspicious,” Joe said.

  The afternoon dragged on. At the end only Joe and Frank were left. Kevin called them in together. He had a pad full of notes on the desk in front of him.
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  “As far as I’m concerned, you guys are in the clear,” he said. “This sabotage started before you got here. But I have to ask you. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary? Anything that might tell us who’s responsible for these incidents?”

  Joe looked over at Frank. Was this the time to share what they had learned with Kevin? He was second in command of TVI. He had a right to know. But what could they tell him, really? That one of the teens might be working for Immo-Trust? Without a name and evidence to back it up, that wouldn’t do Kevin any good. It might even point a finger at an innocent person. Better to wait until their case was more complete.

  “Sorry,” Joe said. “Afraid not.”

  “Same here,” Frank said. “But we’ll be on the lookout.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Kevin said. “Okay, then. You can go.”

  Dinner was pretty grim. Marie-Laure acted as if Joe and Frank didn’t exist. It was the same later, when everyone walked up to the ridge to watch the sunset.

  Joe looked for a chance to go over to Jean-Claude. “This feud is really dumb,” he said. “Frank didn’t mean anything by what he said.”

  “I know that,” Jean-Claude replied. “But my sister is very upset by all that has happened. She does not know at whom she should be upset. The result, she is upset at Frank. Give her time. She will realize she is being unfair.”

  “I hope so,” Joe said. “We need to pull together. Unless we solve this case quickly, someone else may get hurt, worse than you did.”

  At breakfast Sophie announced, “Because of the disruption yesterday, the pétanque tournament will resume at five this afternoon. The playoffs will be tomorrow.”

  “That does not give much time to practice,” Antonio complained.

  “So what?” Welly said. “The way we play, practice won’t help much anyway.”

  Sophie pretended not to hear. “And as you know,” she continued, “this morning we visit Peyrane and its world-famous ocher mines. Be at the parking area in twenty minutes.”

  “What’s an ocher mine?” Frank murmured to Marina.

  “A place where people dig up ocher,” she replied. “You’ll see. It is quite remarkable.”

  This time Frank and Joe rode in the van with Kevin. The Fréhels started to get in, too. Then Marie-Laure saw Frank. She spun on her heel and went over to the old CitroÎn. With an apologetic look, Jean-Claude followed her.

  Joe noticed the van’s mileage counter. It read 9976 km. “How long a trip is this?” he asked Kevin.

  “Peyrane? Not far,” Kevin replied. “Fifteen or twenty kilometers.”

  Joe sat back, satisfied. So they might be able to watch the counter roll over from 9999 to 10000. Cool!

  Once down from the ridge, they drove along narrow roads lined with fields of grapevines. After a few minutes, the countryside became more rolling. Ahead Joe saw a new range of hills covered with dense brush and scrub trees. He glanced out at the shoulder of the road.

  “Hey, guys, look,” he said. “The dirt here is bright yellow!”

  “Just wait,” Kevin said. They rounded a curve and topped a rise.

  Joe felt his jaw drop. Ahead was an entire cliff colored dark orange. Beyond it, another was bloodred. The landscape looked like a spectacular sunset.

  “What you’re looking at is called ocher,” Kevin explained. “It’s a natural mineral. You mix it with paint to get different colors.”

  “Oh, sure,” Frank said. “I’ve seen the name on tubes of oil paints. Yellow ocher.”

  “Right,” Kevin said. “If you go back a hundred years, paints all over the world were colored with ocher from these hills. Then somebody invented a cheaper synthetic substitute. That was the end for the ocher mines of Peyrane.”

  Kevin turned off into a parking area. The CitroÎn was close behind them. They parked by a big wooden sign that read “Active Ocher Mill—1892” in several languages.

  “This place is interesting,” Kevin said. “Then there’s a path along the cliffs from here into town. You’ll have time in Peyrane for lunch and a look around the town.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” Libby asked.

  Kevin shook his head. “I have to run some errands on the other side of the valley. I’ll come back later to pick you up.”

  The tour of the ocher mill did not take long. Most of the teens were not that interested. While Joe watched the big mechanical hammers that pounded the ocher into fine granules, the rest of the group started up the trail.

  “Come on,” Frank urged. “Let’s catch up.”

  Joe took the lead. The rough path followed the edge of the cliff. Through gaps in the bushes they could see across a narrow valley to other cliffs striped in shades of yellow, orange, and red.

  Joe was turning to point out a view to Frank when the ground gave way under his feet. Startled, he grabbed the nearest bush with both hands. A moment later he was dangling over a sheer fifty-foot drop.

  12

  Deadly Diversion

  “Joe!” Frank shouted. “Hold on!”

  “I will,” Joe gasped. “But hurry!”

  Frank flung himself to the ground and crawled toward the edge of the cliff. As he went, he tested the ground in front of him with his hand. If he, too, slipped over the cliff, there would be no hope for either of them.

  As he drew closer, Frank took a hasty look at the bush Joe was clinging to. He could see its roots. The strain of Joe’s weight was gradually pulling them up from the thin soil. How much longer would they hold? A minute? Less?

  “Don’t worry,” Frank called. “I’m coming!”

  “Good thing,” Joe said faintly. “I forgot my parachute.”

  Frank was almost close enough to grasp Joe’s arms. But if he did, what would stop both of them from sliding over the edge? He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. A few feet to his left was a small, gnarled tree. He rolled toward it. Clasping the trunk between his calves, he crossed his feet at the ankles to lock the grip. Then he reached again for Joe.

  No good! His grip on the tree held him too far back to reach Joe’s arms. He needed to be about five inches closer. It didn’t sound like much, five inches. But if he couldn’t close the gap, it was as bad as five miles.

  “Frank?” Joe said in a strained voice. “I think I’m slipping.”

  “Hold on!” Frank repeated. No time for half measures. He unhooked his ankles and slid forward. He left only the toes of his right foot tucked in back of the tree trunk. Stretching to the limit, he reached forward and touched Joe’s wrists. He closed his fingers around them with all the force he had.

  “Okay, get ready to let go and grab my wrists,” Frank shouted. “On three … one … two … three!”

  All of Joe’s weight was suddenly pulling at Frank’s arms. He heard a pop in his left shoulder. A moment later he felt it, too. He blocked off that part of his mind and concentrated on pulling Joe up.

  Everything worked together—arms, abs, thighs, even the muscles in his shin that kept the right foot’s grip on the tree. Slowly, he moved back from the edge, pulling Joe with him.

  Soon Joe’s upper body was on level ground. He twisted to the right and got his foot and knee up on the cliff edge. Frank gave an extra hard tug. Joe flung himself into a roll that took him well away from the drop. He lay on his back, his chest heaving from the strain.

  “Whew!” Frank said, once he had caught his breath. His shoulder ached. “How did you miss the path?”

  “I didn’t,” Joe gasped. “The path leads straight over the edge.”

  Frank sat up and looked around. Joe was right. “I wonder how the others missed falling the way you did,” he said. He stood up and followed the path back the way they had come.

  About twenty feet back, he noticed a second path forking off. A broken tree limb blocked it. He touched the broken end. It was still damp with sap. As he scanned the underbrush, he noticed a flash of white. It was a wooden sign on a stake with big red letters that Frank assumed warned people n
ot to go on the path he and Joe had taken.

  Joe joined him. “So that’s it,” he said. “Somebody blocked the right path, then took the warning sign off the dangerous one. Another booby trap, even more deadly than the others.”

  “Deadly … and personal,” Frank said. “This must have been rigged after the rest of the group went by. It was aimed directly at us!”

  Joe helped Frank replace the sign. Then they strode quickly along the real path. Ten minutes later they caught up to the group. Marina heard them and looked back. She burst out laughing. The others looked and started laughing, too.

  “What have you two been doing?” Welly asked.

  “Gathering local color!” Libby gasped out. She laughed so hard she had to hold her sides.

  Frank looked at Joe, then down at himself. The ocher dirt had dyed their clothes and skin bright orange.

  “We took a fall,” he said.

  “You mean a dirt bath,” Luis said.

  Sophie stepped forward. “I’ll arrange for showers and clean clothes in Peyrane,” she said. “I’m afraid what you’re wearing may be ruined. Ocher stains are very hard to get out.”

  “That’s for sure,” Siri said. “On our first visit, I got ocher on a pair of white socks. They’re still orange.”

  “Have all of you been here before, then?” Frank asked.

  Most of them nodded. Valentina said, “Not I. I was not feeling well the last time.”

  Frank’s heart sank. He had hoped to eliminate some of the teens as suspects. Whoever set the trap had to know about the treacherous path. But that could be any of them except Valentina.

  “When we were trying to catch up,” he said, “I thought I saw somebody up ahead and heard a voice call us. Was it one of you? Or were you together the whole time?”

  “It couldn’t have been one of us,” Marina said. “We were together the whole time. Oh—except when Marie-Laure stayed back to tie her shoelace. But she was just away a couple of minutes.”

  Frank looked at Joe. Marie-Laure had made no secret of being angry with them. Angry enough to set a dangerous trap?

  If so, did that mean she was behind the other dirty tricks? No, that was impossible. She wouldn’t have risked tampering with her brother’s brakes. Unless … what if Marie-Laure and Jean-Claude had staged the whole bike incident to throw off any suspicion of them?