J.M.J.

Author's note: Hi, all! Sorry for a slightly late post – I had to work this morning, which is not typical for Fridays, especially this time of year. Thank you to max2013, Candylou, DusktoDawn21, ErinJordan, sm2003495, angelicalkiss, and bkworm4life4 for your reviews! Enjoy!

Chapter II

Information

"Have you given any more thought to our Lisa problem?" Joe asked Frank the next morning at breakfast.

"Yeah," Frank replied, "but I haven't really come up with anything yet."

"What's your Lisa problem?" the boys' mother, Laura, asked.

The Hardy family was having a late breakfast together. In addition to Frank and Joe and their parents, Fenton and Laura, their dad's sister, Gertrude, was also present. Aunt Gertrude visited frequently, and by this time practically lived with the family. Not that any of them minded—although Aunt Gertrude could be sharp and critical at times, the rest of her family knew that she was really very fond of them, and they were fond of her in return.

"You know Lisa Prito, right?" Joe asked. Part of the reason he had brought it up at the breakfast table was to get some insights from his parents, especially his dad, and so he was more than glad to discuss it. "Tony and the rest of his family are pretty worried about her. She's been sneaking off to meet with some people that she doesn't want to tell them anything about and she's been getting some weird ideas—we don't have a lot of details on that except that she apparently has some idea that dancing is evil—and she's completely flipped out. She came last night and she was super rude to everybody, especially Jones and Iola. Then she stomped off, and then Tony told us that he thinks she joined a cult and wants us to help."

"That can't be, though, can it?" Frank asked. "Isn't the goal of most cults to get their members to come and live in some compound and not to have any contact with the outside world?"
"Sometimes," Fenton told him. "You don't get someone to do something that extreme all in a day, though. Those kinds of cults have to groom their members first, which could be what's happening with Lisa. One of the most telltale signs of this is that the victim is distancing themselves from their family and friends. Is that what's happening?"

"We don't know for sure," Frank replied. "We need to talk to Tony again and ask him some more questions. We didn't want to ask too many questions last night with everyone there."

"If it does look like there's a cult involved, what can we do, Dad?" Joe asked. "It's pretty tough to get someone out of a cult again."

Fenton considered this for a moment. "That's very true. If that is the case, Lisa's probably going to need professional help for her to see what happened and why it happened. I think the main thing at this point would be to try to determine whether that's what's going on or not."

"How do we do that?" Joe asked.

"In this day and age, the most likely way for Lisa to have met this group is through the Internet," Fenton explained. "There are a lot of different social media sites that these people could be using. You'll need to look through her Internet history and try to find something."

"And how are they supposed to do that?" Aunt Gertrude asked, obviously taking more of an interest in the conversation than she wanted to let on, though she seemed to have forgotten that now.

"Getting your hands on her laptop and phone, if she has one, would be a first step," Fenton said. "I know it's invading her privacy, but it might be for her own good."

Frank considered this. "Obviously, she's not going to give us her passwords. We'll need someone who can hack into her laptop anyway. I wonder what Phil is up to." Phil Cohen had helped the Hardys before in cases that required a little more technological know-how than either of them had.

"It's Saturday," Joe reminded him. "He won't be able to help until tomorrow, or at least not until sunset."

"Right," Frank agreed. "We can ask him, anyway. After breakfast, we should go over and talk to Tony."

"I hope it turns out that Tony is just overreacting," Laura commented. "Getting mixed up in a cult is a serious thing and it could have repercussions for Lisa for a long time after she gets out of it."

"If she gets out of it," Aunt Gertrude added. She shook her head. "I never have had much faith in the Internet. More trouble than it's worth, if you ask me."

"I don't know about that," Laura replied. "It's a tool, and like all tools, it can be used to build people or things up or it can be used to tear them down. There's no sense in being afraid of it, though. You just have to be careful and use it wisely."

They were just finishing breakfast when there was a knock on the door and Chet and Iola let themselves in. Chet eyed the mostly empty table with undisguised interest and no little disappointment.

After the teenagers had greeted one another, Laura asked the newcomers if they had eaten breakfast yet.

Joe grinned. "Mom, do you really think Chet would have come all the way into town without having breakfast first?"

"Well," Chet said, "it wasn't a very big breakfast. I am a little hungry now that you mention it. If you've got a banana or two left over or something…"

"I think we might have something," Laura told him with a smile. "Would you like anything, Iola?"

"N…no thank you," Iola replied, actually stammering as she glanced toward Joe.

Joe noticed and he couldn't help feeling just a little awkward. Had he said or done something last night? He couldn't think of anything.

"We came over to see if you needed any help on Tony's case, since we weren't doing anything else," Chet explained, biting into the banana.

"Not yet," Frank told him. "We're going to go over and talk to Tony now, but it probably would be best if we went by ourselves, no offence."

"No, I get it." Chet took another thoughtful bite of the banana. "Hey, I've got an idea. You'll probably need someone to distract Lisa while you're talking to Tony. Maybe we could do that."

"Hmm. Lisa distraction might not be such a bad idea," Frank replied, thinking about their task of getting their hands on her laptop and possibly her phone. "If you think you can do it, then sure."

"I'm sure I can think of something," Chet said.

Iola looked down at the floor. "If you guys don't mind, I think I'll bow out. I don't want a repeat of last night too bad."

"That's fine," Joe assured her. He stepped a little closer to her. "What did she say to you last night, anyway? Not just to pry; it might be important for the case."

Iola stole a glance at him and her cheeks reddened. "Nothing much, I guess. I totally overreacted."

"Something about dancing?" Joe prodded her.

Iola blushed even more. "I really don't want to talk about it. I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with the case at all. I mean, it wouldn't help. If, if you guys are going to go over to the Pritos', I think I'll head over to Callie's and see what she's up to." She hurried away without giving anyone a chance to ask her any more questions.

"That's weird," Joe said. "Do you think you could find out, Chet?"

Chet shrugged. "I doubt it. Whatever Lisa said, it really got to Iola. She's been weird ever since last night. She didn't even seem like she wanted to come over here too bad."

"Maybe Callie could tell us," Joe suggested. "She was there."

"What difference does it make?" Frank asked. "If Iola doesn't want to talk about it and it's not essential to solving the case, we should respect that."

"Yeah, but if she's really been hurt, I'd like to know about it," Joe insisted.

"Frank's right, Joe," Fenton said. "Let that one go for now. Focus on what Tony can tell you." He looked at his wristwatch. "I'd better be going now. I've got a meeting with a client in a half hour."

"On a Saturday?" Aunt Gertrude asked. "I don't see what you have against a job where you can have a day off every once in a while."

Fenton took a sip of coffee to hide his smirk as he replied, "They're boring."

Before they left, Frank called Phil and explained a little about the situation. He willingly offered to help that evening. Then Frank, Joe, and Chet left for the Prito house. They took Chet's car, an ancient jalopy that it was a wonder it still ran. It was Chet's pride and joy, though, and he sank whatever spare time and money that he didn't spend on some other hobby into keeping the Queen, as he called it, on the road.

Tony must have heard the car coming, because he met them at the curb in front of his house. "Hi, guys. Are you here about you know what?"

Frank nodded. "We have some more questions to ask and something else that we're going to need your help for if we're going to pull it off."

"Why don't you get in? We talk about it privately in here for a while," Joe suggested.

Tony climbed into the back seat, and Chet pulled away from the curb to continue to drive. He only went around the block, though, before he pulled over again and the boys began to talk in earnest.

"First things first," Joe said. "Dad wanted us to ask you exactly how Lisa's been acting differently. Has she been distancing herself from the rest of the family and from her friends?"

"Yeah," Tony replied. "That's exactly what she's been doing. Whenever we try to talk to her, she's, well, not as bad as she was last night, but along those lines. Most of the time, though, she just shuts herself up in her room and doesn't talk to anybody."

"How long has this been going on?" Frank asked.

"It's a little hard to say," Tony explained. "It started out slow. Spending more time by herself or with 'friends' that she never identified, a comment here and there that seemed off. Nobody thought anything of it at the time, though. I mean, why would we? That started last school year. We didn't realize that something was seriously wrong until about a month ago, honestly, when she started talking about these people and their ideas."

"What kind of ideas?" Frank asked next.

"Some sort of weird Puritanism, I think," Tony said. "That's the closest thing I can think of to what she's been saying. It's a lot of rules. Things like dancing is always sinful and rock 'n roll is always sinful and make-up is always sinful. Then there's the ordinary, paranoid conspiracy theory-type things, like, um, well, that a group Jews secretly rule the world and that every bad thing that happens is due to this group influence and they've taken over basically all the major governments of the world and the Church and everything and they're working overtime to stop this small group of whistleblowers who are the only ones who are going to stand firm in the coming apocalypse. That's the part that sounds cultish to me."

"Definitely cultish," Joe agreed.

"She actually thinks all that stuff?" Chet asked.

"I guess so. She's said it." Tony hesitated. "I mean, she has said all those things at one point or another, but not all at once. I don't know if…I just don't know. I don't know what we're dealing with."

"The sooner we find out, the better," Frank said. "Dad think she might have fallen in with these people online. Does she spend much time online?"

"Oh, yeah," Tony replied. "That's all she does when she holes herself up in her room."

"Okay." Frank nodded. "We've got Phil on stand-by to help us get into her Internet history. We'll probably need to actually get our hands on her laptop and phone, though."

"We don't need to bother with the phone," Tony said. "It doesn't have Internet capabilities. She could be texting these people, though."

"We won't worry about it for now, then," Frank replied. "We'll focus on how she met these people. What do you think the chances of getting her laptop away from her are? If nothing else, we could ask your parents to make her turn it over to us, but it would probably be better if she didn't know what we were up to."

"Right," Tony agreed. "It's not going to be easy. We'll have to think this one through carefully."

HBHBHBHBHB

Iola didn't cry while she walked to Callie's house. She had stayed up crying most of the night, but she was done with that now. She just wanted to think about something else or do something else. Going to the Hardys' had been the last thing she wanted to do. After what Lisa had said…

Fortunately, the Shaw house wasn't far from the Hardy house, and so it wasn't long before Iola bounded up the stairs and burst in without knocking. She met Callie herself in the foyer just past the front door, vacuuming with her earbuds in to drown out the noise with music. She switched off the vacuum and yanked out her earbuds as soon as she saw Iola.

"Hi. You okay?" she asked.

"Not really," Iola admitted. "I don't want to talk about it, though. I just want to think about something else. But if you're busy…"

"Not that busy," Callie assured her. "Mom won't mind if I take a break. I'll go tell her and then we can go for a walk or something."

"Okay."

Iola waited while Callie went to ask her mother for a leave of absence from the household chores. She came back still trying to slip on her shoes as she walked. Then she bustled Iola out the door.

"So, what do you want to talk about?" Callie asked as they started walking.

"Anything that won't remind me of last night," Iola replied.

Callie thought for a minute. The events of the previous night were still uppermost in her mind, and so it wasn't easy to think of a different topic. "Did you hear that they're talking about putting in an airport in town? Just think of that. We'll be able to fly straight out from little, ol' Bayport without having to drive to a bigger city."

"That'll be nice," Iola murmured.

"I wonder if they're going to have some big, inaugural first flight out thing," Callie went on. "If they do, we should find out what it would take to get tickets to be passengers. It's not everybody who can say they were on the first flight out of an airport."

"Yeah, that would be really fun," Iola replied. She obviously wasn't paying much attention, though, because she burst out, "I can't believe she would say something like that. I never…I mean…Ugh."

"I thought we weren't going to talk about it," Callie reminded her gently. Then she added, "Don't worry about it, Iola. No one else thinks of you like that. I don't know Lisa very well, so I can't even begin to guess what makes her tick, but she's got some issue going on, so just take anything she says with a grain of salt. Maybe she's even just jealous of you. After all, you've got tons of real friends, and all she's got are a bunch of cult…people, whatever you'd call them." As she was talking, another thought occurred to her, and she pursed her lips in consternation. It added up with Lisa's vicious words toward Iola, but if it was true, it would mean nothing but trouble. There was no point in mentioning it to Iola—that would only rub salt in the wound—but she made up her mind that she'd look into it herself. "Hey, how about we go to a movie? I know it's the last Saturday of vacation, but I think we both need something that will get our minds off this."

"Yeah," Iola agreed. "Okay. Sounds good to me."

HBHBHBHBHB

Fenton was just putting his papers away after his meeting with the client when his partner, Sam Radley, poked his head into his office.

"Hey, if you don't need anything more, I'm going to head for home. I promised the kids I'd take them to the beach this afternoon."

"Go ahead," Fenton replied. "I've just got to finish filing these papers and then there's nothing more we can do on this case today."

"Right," Sam agreed. "See you Monday."

He breezed out of the office, and Fenton was looking forward to following. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang and he glanced at the screen. He paused when he saw where the call was coming from: the NYPD precinct he used to work out of.

"Hello. Fenton Hardy speaking."

The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and professional, but Fenton thought he detected some agitation in it. "Lieutenant Hardy, this is Sergeant Nicholson from the NYPD. I'm not sure if you remember me. I was a rookie when you left the force."

"I do remember you, actually," Fenton said. "Congratulations on the promotion. When did that happen?"

"Two years ago," Sgt. Nicholson replied. "Lieutenant Hardy…Mr. Hardy, I mean. I'm sorry. It's force of habit."

"That's okay. I'm getting the idea that this isn't a social call, though."

"You're right. I know you left the force, but I need some help on a case. I think you might be the only one who can help."

"What case is this?"

"One I never wanted to have to work on." Sgt. Nicholson paused for a moment. "Sometime late last night or early this morning, Lieutenant Mitchell Johnson was murdered."