Secret of the Red Arrow (13 page)

“You idiot Hardys,” he hissed in a gravelly voice I’d never heard before. Did our principal have multiple personalities? Or was this all a sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination?

No. He stumbled over to the door, kneeling down to turn something just out of sight. Immediately I heard water trickling into the hose. Within a few seconds, a steady gush poured out of the hose into the container.

“This storage container is completely watertight,” Principal Gorse went on.

He grabbed two chairs, then pulled us up roughly, slamming us into our seats, and started tying us up with rope that was lying nearby. “You’ll note there’s no drain in the room.
No, this container is going to fill up slowly, leaving you boys plenty of time to ponder your last breath and how you got to this point.”

I was able to reach into my pocket for my cell phone and quickly dialed 911.

Nothing happened.

I looked at the screen. No!

NO SIGNAL.

Principal Gorse chuckled. “I’ve made note of the various places around the school where cellular service drops out,” he said. “There are so many of them! It’s almost as though someone was tampering with the signal.”

He walked through the door, grabbing the edge to slam it.

I tried to lunge to my feet, but I couldn’t really move, thanks to the pain and the rope. Gorse let out an eerie laugh as the metal door shut behind him. I heard him replacing the padlock on the chain, leaving Joe and me trapped inside.

I
’D NEVER REALLY HAD A FEAR OF DROWNING
until that door clanked shut behind Principal Gorse. It’s a pretty terrible way to die, when you think about it. First off, you have plenty of time to realize that you’re dying. Plus, from what I have gathered, slowly running out of air is not really a comfortable way to go.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked Frank, struggling against the rope. Already the floor was nearly covered by a growing puddle. The water was coming in fast.

Frank groaned. He wriggled around and managed to work his way out. “That cane felt like a baseball bat,” he muttered, making his way over to me.

“Maybe that’s why he got the metal upgrade,” I suggested. Frank worked at the rope and got me free. I winced as I stood
up, rubbing my shoulder. I paused. “For real, Frank, how did you figure out that Principal Gorse is the Red Arrow?”

“It was the cane.” Frank stood with a groan. “I remembered the debris we saw in the restaurant. There was something that looked like an umbrella handle—remember?”

Riiiiight.
“Yeah. When we got that note we couldn’t figure out.”

“It wasn’t an umbrella handle,” Frank went on. “It was a cane. Principal Gorse’s old cane.”

Aha.
“And Neal, Seth, Pett—they all got in trouble while at Bayport High.”

“Maybe they disgraced him in some way. I don’t know,” Frank said. “And I haven’t figured out how Paul Fumusa plays into it. But clearly, Principal Gorse has been hiding a lot from us.”

He stopped and looked around the room. “Do you see anything we could use to stand on to reach the hose?”

I looked around. The room was really dark, lit only by the light seeping in from the opening around the hatch. “Not really,” I admitted. “This thing is pretty tall.”

The water was deepening, up to our ankles now. The stream from the hose splashed into the pool. My feet were soaked, and it was getting harder to walk around.

“Hey, Frank,” I said.

He turned around, curious.

“That was a great speech.”

He let out a short laugh and shook his head. “I hope it doesn’t turn out to be my swan song.”

I could tell he was getting nervous. Truthfully, I was too. We’d gone up against a lot of nasty characters before. But the Red Arrow had been operating in Bayport and avoiding detection for years. Even Fenton Hardy feared him. Was he smart enough to defeat us? Had the Hardy Boys met their match?

That’s when I heard banging on the door.

“What the . . .?” Frank muttered.

I sloshed over to the metal door. “Hello?” I yelled.

I could barely make out the voice on the other side over the rushing water.

“Frank? Joe? Is that you?”

The voice was nasally. Female. I looked at my brother.

Sharelle!

“Sharelle, are you out there?” I shouted. “Please help us! Can you open the door?”

I heard grunting and clanking as Sharelle yanked on the chain. “It won’t budge!”

“Gorse has the key!” I cried.

“I knew you were acting weird during your speech, Frank,” Sharelle called. “I snuck away from my class and followed you and Principal Gorse out onto the football field. I knew something strange was going on when he led you in here. What’s going on?”

I shook my head. Sharelle Bunyan. Our hero?

“It’s filling up with water!” Frank shouted. “This is some kind of old holding tank. He left us in here to drown!”

I leaned against the door. “Sharelle, can you call the cops for us? Listen. This is very important. You have to talk to Chief Gomez. Okay? Nobody but Chief Gomez. Tell him that we’re trapped in here. Tell him it’s urgent—this container is filling with water!”

“Okay,” Sharelle replied, “but I’m going to have to go back to the school to get service. This whole field is a dead zone, and I don’t want anybody to see me.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, “but tell them to hurry. And you hurry back. Please!”

The water was up to our knees now. Once the water level rose, it wouldn’t take long to push all the air out of the room. We didn’t have a lot of time.

“Okay!” Sharelle ran off.

I looked at Frank. He looked like he didn’t know what to do. “Let me try standing on your shoulders,” he said.

I moved closer and bent down so he could try to climb up. It was hard to see in the faint light, and with the water level rising higher and higher. Soon it was up to our waists.

Frank climbed up my back and tried to steady himself as he carefully placed his feet on my shoulders. With him holding on to my head, I tried to straighten up slowly, and then Frank started to move from a crouch to a standing position.

He was close enough to the hatch to make a swipe at the hose.

I watched, breathless, as his hand pushed at the hose, but it just swung back and forth. It was wedged beneath the heavy hatch door.

“Darn it!” Frank shouted as his right foot slipped. I tried to grab my brother, but he tumbled into the water, where he splashed around, trying to find his balance.

“It’s wedged in there anyway,” he said when he stood up, holding his head. “I don’t think I can push the hose out.”

I checked my phone again, which I’d moved to my shirt pocket to keep it dry. “Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “I can’t take this. There has to be something we can do!”

Frank’s eyes kept going back to the door. “Do you hear anything?” I asked. I had to admit, I was wondering how much we could trust Sharelle. Even if she had really run out to call the police, it was entirely possible that it would just take them too long to get here. The water might have filled up the container by then. And Frank and I . . .

I couldn’t think about it.

Just as I was losing hope, I heard Sharelle’s yell.

“They’re coming! I called!”

I sloshed over to the door. “Did you talk to Gomez?”

There was a pause. “He wasn’t available,” Sharelle said finally. “Or at least that’s what they said. I talked to the officer who came to the house the other night. Olsen?”

“Olaf,” Frank corrected her with a groan.

Officer Olaf was not exactly the cop I’d choose to hold my fate in his hands. He, well, hated us. And he’d tried
so hard to convince us that the Red Arrow was an urban legend. Was he connected somehow?

There was nothing to do now but wait. The water was at our chests now.

No sign of the police.

“Sharelle,” Frank shouted, “can you go out front to look for the police and bring them right to this container? I don’t want them to waste any time.”

“Of course,” Sharelle said. “Are you—are you guys okay in there?”

I looked at Frank. I had the unsettling sense that he was sending Sharelle away because, if worse came to worst, he didn’t want her to have to listen to us drown while she was stuck on the other side of the door, helpless.

“We’re just ducky,” I replied, but it was hard to force levity into my voice. “Quack, quack.”

I could feel her hesitation. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “I’ll be right back with the cops. Don’t worry!”

I looked at Frank.

“Help me get on your shoulders again,” he said simply. “We might as well try.”

I crouched down under the water, holding my breath—not really easy with a broken nose. Frank grabbed my shoulders and tried to scramble up. We were both shaking, though, scared and amped up on adrenaline, and this time he didn’t even get both feet onto my shoulders before he
pitched forward into the water, taking me with him. As he fell, I accidentally inhaled, and water flooded my nose and mouth. I was disoriented and scrambled around with my hands, finally finding the floor and standing up.

“I didn’t like that,” I said, sputtering.

“Let’s try again,” Frank said, not looking me in the eye.

We tried again. This time he got up onto my shoulders and took another swipe at the hose before losing his balance. The hose stayed put.

The water was nearly up to my neck.

“Frank,” I said.

He wouldn’t look at me. “Again,” he said. “We have to keep trying.”

“Frank,” I said again, feeling my throat burn, “what if the Red Arrow’s bested us?”

That’s when I heard it. Sharelle’s voice.

“They’re here!” she yelled through the door. “Frank! Joe! Are you okay?”

The next few minutes were a blur. Finally grasping the dire situation we were in, Officer Olaf used his pistol to shoot out the padlock. A few seconds later, the door was yanked open, sending a flood of water cascading onto the grass.

Immediately the water level sank from where it hovered beneath our chins.

We were saved!

•   •   •

“I suppose I owe you two an apology,” Officer Olaf said later that afternoon, as Frank and I sat, still wrapped in blankets, across from his desk at the police station.

Chief Gomez really was out that day, it turned out. His three-year-old daughter had the stomach flu, and he was staying home with her, since his wife had to be out of town on business.

Now Officer Olaf stared down at some paperwork he was shuffling across his desk, as if to avoid looking Frank or me in the eye.

“You do?” Frank asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

Olaf sighed. “It’s possible,” he said, “that I may have taken your accusations about the Red Arrow less seriously because of my personal . . . well . . .”

“Animosity?” Frank supplied.

“Burning hatred?” I suggested.

Olaf rolled his eyes. “Deeply held suspicion,” he said finally, “of you two. But it seems that everything you’ve told us about Principal Gorse is true. After we got him at the school, we have been interrogating him for a few hours, and he’s confessed to being the mastermind behind Bunyan’s attack, the blackmailing of Pettigrew Macken, and the explosion at Paul Fumusa’s yet-to-be-named restaurant.” He paused and looked down at his notes. “He had his connections set up hi-tech surveillance and carry out the actual attacks, since he couldn’t.”

“See, that’s the one I don’t get,” Frank said, shrugging
and leaning back in his chair. “Why Paul Fumusa?”

Officer Olaf looked at him. “Because he wouldn’t pay a ‘protection fee’ to the Red Arrow to avoid these types of attacks,” he said, and sighed. “Which is apparently a form of extortion that the Red Arrow has been pulling in Bayport for years.”

I leaned forward. “Has Gorse always been the Red Arrow?”

Officer Olaf signed a paper and frowned. “Well, we still aren’t positive the Red Arrow actually exists.”

“You said he confessed to everything,” I pointed out.

“Correction. He confessed to everything
he
did,” Olaf clarified. “He won’t talk about the Red Arrow. At all.”

Just then we heard the door to the interrogation room open, and two police officers led Principal Gorse out in handcuffs. He had a strange expression on his face that I can only describe as disturbed. He was staring at his clasped hands like they held the secrets to the universe, and I was just waiting for him to rub his hands together and cackle, Mr. Burns–style.

Olaf startled and looked at us. I got the distinct sense that Principal Gorse was not meant to see us there.

He looked up and caught sight of Frank and me, still damp, but very much alive. His eyes bugged, and he pointed one bony finger at us (dragging the other hand with it because, you know, handcuffs). “You!” he shouted, in that low, gravelly voice from before.

The cops leading him tried to hustle him along, but
Gorse dug in his heels. “You think you’ve stopped it,” he said, “but the Red Arrow cannot be stopped. Cut off its head, and another will grow in its place. It’s only a matter of time, boys. I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last!”

The cops had succeeded in dragging him down the hall by then. But Gorse twisted his neck to fire one last parting shot.

“Good luck sleeping tonight,” he said, his voice a snakelike whisper. Then the cops dragged him around the corner to the lockup, and he was gone.

I looked at Frank. Seriously, had the whole kindly principal thing been an act?

“Yeesh.” Sometimes there are no other words.

Frank nodded. He looked at Olaf. “Do you believe us about the Red Arrow now?”

Olaf was still focused on his paperwork. He took out an actual rubber stamp and brought it down on the top of a form. The corner of his mouth quirked up as he replied, not lifting his eyes, “I suppose anything’s possible in this town.”

Y
OU WANT TO OPEN WITH A JOKE,” JOE
suggested, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his Maximum Mocha. We were at the Meet Locker, trying to get some studying done. “It disarms the audience. Puts them on your side.”