Tunnel of Secrets (12 page)

It was Joe and Layla! They were a mess, but they were very much alive.

“Frank!” Joe shouted, looking more human by the second as the rain rinsed off the mud that covered him.

“For a second there I was sure you were a couple of zombies!” I shouted back.

“Nope, we’re very much un-undead, although I’m not sure we smell like it,” he said, cringing as he took a sniff.

“Where’s Zeke?” I asked. “Did he get away?”

“Well,
more like swept away. Kind of like a goldfish flushed down the toilet of life,” Joe said cryptically.

I was trying to figure out what that meant when Sal crept out from his hiding place behind a tombstone.

“Hey, Sal! They made it! They’re not zombies at all!” I said, happy to see him.

“Um, guys, you were going to explain what you meant before when you said he was my uncle,” Layla reminded us.

“Oh, uh, well . . .” I could tell Joe was fumbling for the right way to break it to her that she had a secret uncle her mom had neglected to tell her about.

“Maybe we should let Sal explain,” I suggested. “Would that be okay, Sal?”

Sal nodded and pulled out the fresh notepad I’d picked up at the convenience store.

We gave Layla and her newly discovered uncle a little privacy to get acquainted, while Joe filled me in on the soggy showdown with Zeke. He also told me how he’d used the key we’d found in the Admiral’s stomach to unlock a third key hidden in a secret compartment in Mrs. Bryant’s coffin.

“No wonder the Admiral thought the key we found was important enough to swallow before he died,” I said. “He and his dead wife actually had both keys! And without his key, a would-be thief wouldn’t be able to retrieve his wife’s key, so that must mean you need both keys before you can unlock the treasure.”

“All three keys, actually,” Joe said. “Because you need the
giant key from the statue to unlock the vault to even discover you need the other keys. This guy must have been really paranoid about security.”

“Well, someone did kill him over it,” I reminded Joe.

“So what’s next, another key?”

“I don’t think there is one,” I said as it began to hit me just how clever the Admiral had been. “I think the key you found in the tomb is the key to the treasure.”

“Okay, but we can’t unlock a vault we can’t find.”

“I think the Admiral gave us everything we need to solve the mystery in his letter,” I told Joe. “The Admiral wrote, ‘My treasure now resides out of the reach of treacherous hands, close to my heart, and only my beloved and I hold the keys.’ The part about the keys is literal, but the rest of it’s a riddle. He’s telling us exactly where the treasure is!”

“Um, he is?” Joe asked.

“Yup. Think about it. He said it’s out of reach and close to his heart. There’s only one place that meets both those criteria, and I have a good hunch exactly where that is.”

Joe leaned forward in anticipation.

“It’s in—” I began.

“HARDYS!” an angry voice bellowed. Sirens pierced the air as Chief Olaf came huffing toward us.

“Welcome back, Chief!” Joe said cheerfully as he slid the key back into his pocket. “Did you have a nice vacation?”

“Don’t you ‘nice vacation’ me. I leave town for a few days and the whole place falls apart. Literally!” the chief muttered. “I
should have figured you two were caught up in the middle of this. Now, do you want to tell me why I’m getting calls from a high school newspaper telling me the Hardy boys need backup at the cemetery? Because if this is some kind of prank, I’m going to toss you in jail so fast your spinning will alter the rotation of the earth’s axis.”

“Nice analogy, Chief, although your science is a little off,” I said, unable to help myself. “But it’s no prank,” I added quickly.

On the way to the cemetery, I’d used the phone at the convenience store to leave a message for Charlene, telling her to have the cops meet us at the Admiral’s Tomb.

Charlene marched up right on cue, notepad in one hand and digital recorder in the other.

“Hi, Charlene,” I said.

“You want to tell me what this is all about, Hardy?” Charlene and Chief Olaf said at the exact same time. “Well—” I began, when Charlene cut me off.

“Is that Layla? What’s she doing with the silent homeless guy?” she asked as Layla walked up with Sal.

“Hi, Chief,” Layla said.

“Layla? But—what—where—” the Chief fumbled. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks to Sal and Joe and Frank I am, anyway.”

“Sal?” the Chief asked with a dumbfounded expression. “What does he have to do with—?”

“Dad!”
Layla yelled, cutting him off as Deputy Hixson sprinted around the corner and swept her up in a huge hug.

“Baby girl, you have no idea how good it is to see you.”

Joe put his arm around my shoulder. “Nothing like family, huh, bro?”

I didn’t have to say anything. My brother already knew I was thinking the exact same thing.

“What about Daniel?” Deputy Hixson said as he pulled away from Layla. I explained that Daniel was safe and quickly described where he was in the Secret City. Deputy Hixson dispatched a crew of officers to rescue him.

“You’re in real trouble, Hardys,” the chief said from behind us. “I’d toss you in a cell right now for interfering with a police investigation if I didn’t need you to tell me what the heck is going on here first.”

“Excuse me, Chief,” Deputy Hixson said, walking over to us with Layla and Sal on either side. “You’re right, the boys have some explaining to do, but the important thing is that everyone is safe.” The deputy pulled Layla close to him. “These three have been through a lot today. I think we can let Joe and Frank off the hook just this once. I have a feeling we’ll have plenty of other chances to yell at them in the future,” he said with a wink in our direction. “What do you say, Chief?”

“I think I need another vacation, is what I say,” the chief said, getting a laugh out of everyone whether he meant to or not. “Fine, Deputy. I left you in charge, so it’s your call.”

“Yes!” Joe
and I said at the same time, throwing each other a high five.

“But!” the chief barked, interrupting our celebration. “I want a full debriefing right this instant.”

I was probably pressing my luck with the chief, but with the deputy on our side, I took my chances. I said we’d tell him everything . . . just as long as Charlene could sit in on it too.

Charlene eagerly agreed and jotted something down on her notepad, which she casually tilted in my direction so only I could see it.

Hardy—Ur the best.

Just then, I felt like it too.

Joe, Layla, and I brought everyone up to speed on everything: from Sal’s discovery of the Secret City, to our discovery of Zeke’s discovery of Sal’s discovery, to Zeke’s resurrection of the Admiral’s secret society and the empty vault, to Zeke washing away in the tunnel beneath the Admiral’s Tomb.

Okay, so there may have been a detail or two we “forgot” to mention.

Like the fact that the treasure wasn’t just lost to history. And that we had a pretty good idea where it was.

T
HE ONLY THING FRANK AND
I had left to figure out was, what about the treasure?

“The detective in me wants to at least see if it’s there,” I said to my brother from across the booth. We had decided to reward ourselves with a post-case dinner at the Meet Locker, where we were wolfing down fries and milk shakes. My brother had just finished explaining his theory as to where the treasure was hidden.

“I’m with you,” Frank agreed.

“But I can’t help thinking about the Admiral’s curse. I know, I know . . . ,” I said before he could interject. “There’s no scientific basis for the existence of curses,
but so far everyone who’s gone looking for the treasure has ended up dead, mute, crazy, or washed down a giant drain.”

“The whole curse thing is superstitious nonsense, but . . .” Frank let his sentence trail off.

“But . . . ,” I encouraged him.

“Well, after all the weird stuff that’s happened, maybe we shouldn’t take the chance, you know, just in case there’s some stuff science hasn’t quite figured out yet.”

“Sounds good to me, dude. If someone is going to steal the Admiral’s treasure, it isn’t going to be the Hardy boys,” I said.

“So it’s settled,” Frank declared, dipping a fry into his shake. “We’ll sneak back to the Admiral’s Tomb and return the keys so they can be buried with him and his wife like he originally wanted.”

It was a good plan. Only . . .

“It would be a shame, though, not to at least take a peek first. I mean, just to see if your theory about where he stashed the treasure is right,” I hedged.

Frank thought about it. “We wouldn’t actually be trying to steal it as long as we didn’t take anything, so technically the curse . . .”

“Which you don’t believe in anyway,” I reminded him.

“Right. The curse that doesn’t exist anyway wouldn’t apply to us. Our intent wouldn’t be impure at all,” Frank said, warming up to the idea of just a little bit more investigative
mischief. “In a way, we’d kind of be honoring the Admiral, really.”

“To the Admiral!” I said, raising my shake in tribute.

•  •  •

We waited until everyone was asleep to sneak out of our house and put Frank’s theory to the test.

A bolt of excitement shot through me when Frank told me where he thought the treasure was hidden. We were headed back to the place where the whole adventure started.

The sinkhole.

Using headlamps and climbing ropes I’d borrowed from the Urbex group, we rappelled down into the pit that held the Admiral’s sunken statue.

“Let’s do it, dude,” I said, grabbing hold of a notch in the Admiral’s bronze sleeve and pulling myself up the statue’s side. It’s a good thing it had landed on its back, otherwise our destination would have been totally out of reach.

The giant book clutched to the Admiral’s chest was even bigger up close and personal. Looking up at it from the ground, you never would have noticed the tiny keyhole hidden on its clasp.

And just as Frank had suspected, the key I’d found in Mrs. Bryant’s coffin fit into it perfectly. The Admiral’s letter had said the treasure was close to his heart, after all.

I made eye contact with Frank before turning the key. The book’s cover popped open. Golden light reflected onto
our faces from the hidden chamber within as we stared in silence before turning to each other with big grins.

Then we closed the book’s cover, locked it tight, and crept back to the cemetery to return the key.

Admiral James T. Bryant really did have a heart of gold.

FRANKLIN W. DIXON
is the ever-popular author of the Hardy Boys series of books.

SimonandSchuster.com/kids

ALADDIN

SIMON & SCHUSTER, NEW YORK

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READ ALL THE MYSTERIES IN THE

HARDY BOYS ADVENTURES:

#1 Secret of the Red Arrow

#2 Mystery of the Phantom Heist

#3 The Vanishing Game

#4 Into Thin Air

#5 Peril at Granite Peak

#6 The Battle of Bayport

#7 Shadows at Predator Reef

#8 Deception on the Set

#9 The Curse of the Ancient Emerald

COMING SOON:

#11 Showdown at Widow Creek

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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