I nodded to myself, mentally marking another box on the mystery checklist. Dennis had the torn back cover hidden in his wizard disguise when Lucky ran over him at the party, which explained how my canine sidekick picked up the scent that sent him after the long-lost pages he found hidden in the suit of armor with Filmore’s skeleton.
“We would have gone on thinking the comic we stole was a complete copy if it weren’t for your detective work, Frank,” Dennis continued. “I didn’t know Angus was lying about the missing pages until just a little while ago, when I followed Joe to that chamber where you found Filmore and the map. Thanks again for decoding it, by the way.”
Dennis looked past me to Angus.
“Turns out the joke’s on you, Mr. McG. The treasure is real, and we know how to find it.”
“Nonsense,” Angus snapped. “You’re as delusional as Filmore was if you think that map leads anywhere.”
“Oh, not just anywhere,” Dennis said. “It leads right under the tower you live in. The Hardy boys figured it out. You’ve been sleeping right on top of a pile of gold all these years.”
“It can’t be,” Angus muttered in disbelief.
I gave him a reluctant shrug. “We kind of think it could.”
Even after everything Angus had done, I couldn’t help feeling bad for him. Filmore had obviously been disturbed, but he hadn’t been delusional about that map. If Angus had listened to him, Filmore might still be alive and Angus might be wealthy instead of struggling to keep the castle lights on.
“Speaking of the treasure,” Dennis interjected, glancing down at his watch. “Wow, time flies when you’re living out a fantasy. There’s a lot of gold to carry, and I should probably make myself scarce just in case anyone else figures out we’re down here. It’s been a lot of fun being your dungeon master, and I wish I could keep hanging out, but I’ve got to run. See you around.”
Then he stuffed the keys into his pocket and started to walk away.
“You can’t just leave us here!” I shouted. “No one knows we’re here, and we don’t have any food or water. Someone could get seriously injured or worse!”
He let out a conflicted sigh and came to a stop. “Oh, man. These kinds of choices are a lot easier when you’re just role-playing an adventure. The real thing is kind of stressful. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you guys, but if I let you out, you’ll just try to capture me. Kind of puts me in a pickle, you know?”
“You’re already in deep trouble, Dennis. Don’t make it worse,” I warned him. “The police will go a lot easier on you if do the right thing and let us go.”
“Yeah, that might make sense for the old guy, but my plan involves not getting arrested at all. Running away and starting a new life with a bundle of treasure seems like a better option. Sorry.” He turned back down the hall and kept going.
“You’re lying to yourself if you still think you’re a good guy, Dennis!” I yelled after him. “Only villains leave their friends and the elderly gagged and helpless in a dungeon. You’re not chaotic good. You’re neutral evil!”
At first it looked he was going to keep walking, but then he hung his head and turned around.
“Man, you’re right. This quest has my character alignment totally out of whack. I just don’t know how to do right by both of us at the same time.” He suddenly snapped his fingers. “I know!”
He reached into the pocket of his wizard’s robe, but the object he pulled out wasn’t the key ring like I’d hoped. It was the silver twenty-sided gaming die he carried everywhere. “Tell you what. You can roll for it.”
“You want me to roll a D20 to determine whether we possibly live or die?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just like in a game. We let the dice decide. Roll high, something good will happen. Roll low, and, well…” Dennis made the thumbs-down sign. “Like I always say, the die don’t lie.”
“Seems fair to me,” Angus said. “You ask me, life often feels like a roll of the dice anyway. At least this way you know the odds ain’t rigged.”
I turned to Charlene, who gave me an are you really considering this? look.
I shrugged, turned back to Dennis, reached through the dungeon gate, and grabbed the D20.
I crouched down to the floor, closed my eyes, and rolled for it. I could hear the metal die clink to a stop on the ancient stones.
“Ooh,” Dennis said in that super-suspenseful game-master way he has when a roll is either good or bad but he hasn’t told you which yet. I found out when I opened my eyes.
“Critical hit!” I shouted as I soaked in the number 20 staring back at me from the die. “Yes!”
“Way to go, laddie!” Angus cheered.
Dennis looked a bit stunned. “A crit. Wow. Clutch roll, man. I didn’t expect that.”
I held up the die. “Trade you for the keys.”
Dennis pulled a rusty old key from the key ring and handed it to me. He didn’t seem in a hurry to run away, though, and when I put the key in the dungeon lock, I understood why.
“Hey, it doesn’t work!”
“Oh, it works, just not on the dungeon door,” Dennis replied. “I still have the same problem as before. If I let you out, you’ll try to catch me. That key will open your friend’s cell, though, so you can let her out. Sorry, Charlene! Putting you in there wasn’t my idea,” he called over my shoulder before continuing. “And I promise I’ll give someone a call so they can come get you as soon as we’re safely out of the castle with the treasure.”
“Dirty trickster,” Angus barked.
“Sorry, peeps, thinking on my feet, and this was the best compromise I could come up with,” Dennis said as he turned to go. “Good luck with the investigation. Can’t wait to read Charlene’s story.”
“Wait a second. If it wasn’t your idea to lock Charlene in the cell, whose was it?” I asked, my detective’s brain still churning through all the unanswered questions. “And how did you pull off the Comic Kingdom heist when you were away at the LARP campout at the same time?”
“I gotta jet, so you can guys can discuss that among yourselves,” he said. “Thanks for being my prisoners. This has been, like, the most fun ever.”
And with that, Dungeon Master Dennis was gone.
24 MORTAL COMBAT
JOE
SUBMIT OR PERISH!” THE UNMASKED knight screamed, the ax clashing against my sword, sending me stumbling backward.
“Oof,” was all I managed to reply, trying my best to keep my grip on the sword as the impact vibrated painfully through my hands.
You know how sometimes you make silly assumptions based on stereotypes about the way you think a certain type of person is supposed to look or act? Well, it’s a good way for a detective to get fooled. I’d automatically assumed the terrifying dark knight was a manly macho dude because a lot of pop culture and stuff teaches us to think that super-fierce, ax-wielding medieval knights are supposed to be manly macho dudes. Well, I’m here to tell you that pop culture and stuff is wrong. And if I didn’t figure out something fast, I wasn’t going to be around much longer to tell anybody anything else, because Xephyr had me seriously outmatched.
“The treasure is mine, Hardy,” Xephyr said, another blow from her ax clanking off my sword. “Surrender and I’ll let you walk out of here alive.” She jabbed the butt end of the ax into my chest, pushing me off-balance. “I might even share a little of it with you.”
“And if I decide to turn you in for robbing Comic Kingdom instead?” I wheezed, still trying to catch my wind from that last blow.
“Then the treasure’s hiding place becomes your tomb,” she said.
Talk about live-action role-playing! This time the ax definitely wasn’t made of foam and this definitely wasn’t a game. After the last LARP, I’d bragged about wanting all live action, no role-play. Well, I finally got it all right, and I was already ready to give it back. My opponent was still playing a role, though—even as she tried to hack me to pieces—and I wasn’t sure she knew how not to. She was
even still using one of the strange accents she’d made up for her characters.
“Noble of you to want to uphold the law, inspector, but is your honor worth dying for? You are but a mere squire in combat with a knight and badly outmatched.” She gave a flamboyant twirl of her ax to prove it.
“It doesn’t have to go down like this, Xephyr.” I tried reasoning with her. “You don’t have to play the villain. You can still do the right thing.”
She grinned. “Perhaps I’ll give some of the gold to charity. But stop before my quest is complete, I will not.”
She took another swing with the ax. I narrowly dodged out of the way and darted farther out of reach. I took up a defensive position, backing away as she stalked forward. If I could stay on defense and keep her talking, I might be able to figure a way out of this. Frank and Murph both knew where the treasure was hidden as well, and I had to hope one of them would find their way here before Xephyr did me in.
“I didn’t see you upstairs at the party,” I said, spitting out the first thing that came to mind to stall her.
“I was entertaining some guests in the dungeon,” she said nonchalantly. I wasn’t sure which word had me more alarmed, “dungeon” or “guests.”
“Um, voluntary guests?” I asked hopefully.
“It probably wasn’t their first choice of accommodations,” she said.
I gulped.
“We figured you might be involved when we saw that flamberge LARPing sword you made hanging in Robert’s shop,” I said, before tossing in a compliment to soften her up. “Amazing craftwork, by the way. It looks as good as the real thing.”
Xephyr paused her attack to soak in the praise. “I do have a knack for it, don’t I?”
“You’re a master sword-smith, to be sure,” I agreed. “Only problem is, there’s no way you could have replicated it without having been in Angus’s tower to see the real thing first.”
“You’re wrong, actually. A friend snapped a photo for me, but it was rather indiscreet of me to reproduce it. It was just so hard for me to resist such a beautiful weapon.” She gave her ax another twirl and advanced.
“I was guessing the same friend probably picked up the caltrops and sabotaged our tires?” I asked.
Xephyr grinned in confirmation and took a step closer.
“So how did you and this friend of yours manage to break into Comic Kingdom while you were away on the LARP camping trip?” I continued. If I was going to perish in combat, I might as well solve the mystery while doing it.
“And here I thought the Hardy boys were supposed to be the best detectives around,” she mused. “Although I don’t expect the school reporter will be telling anyone what she discovered.”
“So Charlene really was about to break the case?” I asked, but then the second part of what Xephyr said sank in. “Wait, what do you mean she won’t be telling anyone?”
“She came snooping around Angus’s tower after the party started, after I had picked the lock on the gate and was inside searching for the map. I was wearing my full suit of armor, but she guessed exactly who I was even with my helmet on. Turns out she’d already seen through my alibi and knew who to look for.”
“But we saw the pictures of you LARPing on the Bayport Heights camping trip at almost the exact same time the store was robbed,” I said, lunging with my sword to slow her advance while I tried to figure out what Charlene had seen that we hadn’t.
“Did you?” she asked as she knocked my blade away with her ax.
I thought I had, but we’d had no reason to be suspicious when we first saw the pictures. We’d taken it for granted that the photos were what they appeared to be and hadn’t examined them closely. Another bad assumption that had come back to haunt us, apparently. I recalled the photographs people had posted around the time of the crime. You could see Xephyr’s face when her werebear mask was off in some of the earlier shots, but she’d been wearing it in all the midnight ones, so it technically could have been someone else in disguise—but that meant another LARPer must have been in on the ruse to put on her costume after Xephyr had already snuck away to drive back to Bayport and commit the crime. Which also meant it couldn’t have been someone who appeared in any of the same late-night pictures at the same time.
“DM Dennis!” I blurted. Her scowl told me that I’d gotten it right. “How did Charlene tell it was really him in the pictures and not you?”
Xephyr took a wild swing for my head, leaving her off-balance. I swatted the ax away with my sword and took a swipe of my own to create more space between us as I backed away.
“It should have worked,” she grumbled. “I made sure the costume covered every inch of us from head to toe. Dennis even wore lifts in his shoes so we were the same height and just growled to stay in character when anyone tried talking to him. But he’d been wearing a leather pouch full of dice on his hip for his archer costume, and he put my costume on over it without taking the pouch off first. She saw the lump on his hip in the same place and made the connection. Once she started going back through all the Internet posts and interviewing people from the camping trip, she realized no one had seen or photographed the two of us together for over an hour.”
“Huh, I guess Dennis was right. The die don’t lie.”
Xephyr smiled. “I’ll have to tell him that after I take you out and escape with the treasure.”
I slashed at the air between us to keep her at bay.
“Makes sense that you were the one to commit the crime, since you knew your way around the shop better than anyone. Well, except Robert,” I observed. “And your fingerprints were already all over the place, so the police wouldn’t have been suspicious when they dusted the place.”
“Dennis devises the plot, I execute the action,” she boasted, knocking my sword away with her ax and slicing my Keystone Cop jacket sleeve in the process.
“Has anybody ever told you two that you take role-playing a little too seriously?” I asked.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the women and men merely players,” she replied with a smile. “I knew the alarm system was just for show, and I could have used my key to walk right in if I wanted. Tampering with the back lock so I could bust in quickly and making it look like a forced entry was Dennis’s touch.”
“So if you were nosing around in the tower when Charlene ID’d you, where was Angus?” I asked. I knew Mr. McBlunderbuss wasn’t about to let anybody near his tower if he could help it.
“He’s been a little tied up today,” she said with another devious grin. “Charlene cut my search for the map short, but I should probably thank her. I’d already left Dennis at the party to spy and was busy making Charlene at home in the dungeon when I heard Lucky barking. It led me straight to you, Frank, and Murph. And the map, of course.”
“And you’d already studied the castle’s layout—” I started to speculate about the floor plan I’d found lying on the ground, but a swipe from Xephyr’s ax cut the thought short.
“Astute, inspector,” she said as I just barely dodged out of the way. “I found a drawing of it among Angus’s keepsakes. Once you figured out that the treasure was under the tower, I knew just where to go. I was expecting a little more time to myself, though.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Xeph,” I said, parrying another swipe of her ax and forcing her back with my sword.
We’d fought our way back over toward the shallow pool covering the wood planks Xephyr had been hacking to pieces. I didn’t have to pace it off to guess this was exactly sixty-six feet from the well shaft outside the tower. From the looks of the chopped-up floor, Xephyr had been about to break all the way through when I showed up. I could see old crates sitting just below the surface through the cracks.
“Whoa, there’s really something there,” I told her. I mean, all the clues added up, and I’d known there was a good chance there might be, but to actually realize you were on the verge of uncovering a three-centuries-old treasure kind of took your breath away. It was also
really distracting.
When I looked back up, Xephyr’s ax was slicing through the air above my head. There’s nothing like an ax about to cleave you in two to snap you back to reality. I raised my sword just in time to deflect the blow, but the sheer force of it sent my weapon flying from my hands and skittering across the floor. Xephyr raised the ax again, a fierce scream bellowing from her throat. I dove out of the way just as the ax sliced past me and smashed into the battered plank floor, splintering it into pieces.
I tumbled to the ground and found myself looking straight down at the place where her ax head had landed. Shimmering beneath the water’s surface on top of one of the crates were the same three Gaelic letters that appeared by the windmill on the map.
“Gold,” I whispered. It didn’t look like I’d ever get to see it, though.
Xephyr held her ax straight out in front of her with both arms so it was pointed at my head.
“Bend the knee and bow before me as my loyal subject, and I shall share with you my plunder.” Her voice echoed menacingly around the chamber. If she’d been a real knight, Lady Xephyr really would have made a fantastic medieval conqueror. It wasn’t the Middle Ages, though, and Hardy boys never bow to crime.
“Sorry, Xephyr, the only lady I serve is justice.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to leave you here buried in the treasure’s place,” she said. And then she raised her ax.
25 FINAL ENCOUNTER
FRANK
TOLD YOU I’D GET THE scoop on the burglary first,” was the first thing that came out of Charlene’s mouth as soon as I unlocked the door and pulled off the tape.
I laughed. “I know, you were totally ahead of us.”
“You did solve a famous cold case and possibly locate a real treasure, though,” she said as I untied her from the chair. “I guess we could’ve shared information. Next time we can team up, but I still get the exclusive.”
Dungeons & Detectives Page 13
