Archive of Our Own

Frank Hardy has just seen a ghost.

Not a spooky one – not the kind that would make Joe’s eyes light up in glee, not a spectral vision of an old-timey woman in a bonnet – but the sight is scary nonetheless, enough to send a chill straight through him.

Because standing in front of him, with her hair pulled back into a no-nonsense, mystery-solving ponytail… is Nancy Drew.

This isn’t what he’d signed up for.

The last five years have been unfairly kind to her; of course they have. Every time he saw Nancy she was always prettier than the last, whether she had dirt on her face or her clothes were torn or she had her tongue between her teeth while she worked on cracking a puzzle.

She’s just as gorgeous now as she’s always been, but something about the shape of her is even more captivating than he remembers. Though she’s obviously older, her blue eyes and button nose and freckles are exactly the same, as nostalgic and painful as ever. Seeing her makes his whole body ache and finally relax at the same time.

She blinks at him like she’s surprised to see him, too, and then grins as widely as she can. “You grew a beard!”

It’s a hell of a thing to say, and if he were someone else he’d be angry with her for it. She’s the one who’d stopped returning his calls until he’d given up on trying to reach her altogether, who’d let them drift apart until he and Joe only ever heard from her through their friends. He would’ve told her about his stupid beard if she’d bothered to ask, she didn’t have to sound so amazed.

But he’s not someone else. He’s an idiot. So he nods, rubbing sheepishly at the back of his neck. “Ah, yeah, I –”

Joe swoops in to save him. In classic Joe fashion, it’s only after he’s squirmed long enough to have earned it. “Nancy! What are you doing here?”

She looks at him for a beat longer, then turns towards Joe. “Hi, Joe,” she smiles, “It’s so good to see you. I’m here to recover the museum’s stolen artifacts.”

Joe blinks at her, then shoots him an uncertain glance. Oh, no. This isn’t happening. “Are you sure?” he asks, ever the peacemaker. “Because… Mr. Faulkner hired us to find the museum’s stolen artifacts.”

Jim Faulkner, curator of the Boston Museum of American History, strides into the room before she can answer. His eyes light up at the sight of the three of them. “Excellent, you’ve all been acquainted. Welcome to the museum.”

Frank folds his arms across his chest. “It seems like there’s been a mistake.”

“There’s no mistake, Mr. Hardy,” the curator explains patiently, “I’ve hired you both to work this case.”

*

He waits until they’re down in the archives, beneath the museum, to explode – by some miracle. “This is bullshit. We’re not doing this.”

Joe glances around skittishly, as though Nancy Drew is going to pop out from behind a bust of Paul Revere at any given moment. Knowing her, she just might. “It is a little strange,” he admits, “We should just work together.”

No – that’s not the point. He’s not upset that the museum seems to think that ‘healthy competition’ will inspire them to work faster or harder, or that only one of their agencies will be getting credited and compensated for the solve, apparently – he’s upset that they’re in this situation at all. They’re trapped.

“We’re not working together,” he says dismissively, still seething as he looks at the empty glass case the artifacts had been housed in when they were stolen. “Don’t you get it?”

“Yes!” Joe insists defensively. After a moment, he relents. “No? Help me out here.”

If they go home, Nancy wins. If they try to work with her, Nancy still wins. Their only chance at beating her is to literally beat her, to find the artifacts and catch the thief before she can. 

“We have to solve this faster than she can.”

Joe is suspiciously quiet beside him. Frank turns to look at his brother and finds him with his eyebrows arched dubiously, as if to say, You know that’s never going to happen. 

And – yeah, sure. Cracking this case would move more smoothly and quickly if they were working with Nancy. But Nancy doesn’t want to work together, she’s made that much clear. She wants to be alone, and he can’t keep chasing her – not when he’s finally starting to move on.

Well… when he’s finally ready to start to try to move on. Or something.

Some of his desperation must show on his face, because Joe shrugs and says, “Well, we can try,” stepping up beside him to frown at the empty glass case, too. 

Frank’s eyes scan the front of it, doing their best to look for anything out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, his useless brain is still stuck on the thought of Nancy, puttering around upstairs in the main floor of the museum. It’s impossible to focus on anything else.

“No cracks,” Joe declares, pointedly ignoring how lost he is, “Whoever stole the artifacts had a key.”

Frank exhales, slowly, nodding his acknowledgement before he squeezes his eyes shut tight. “Okay. Right. We should see if there’s anything else down here.”

He can feel the way Joe is looking at him without even having to turn his head. They’ve already scanned the room twice. “We should probably just go upstairs and get it over with,” Joe suggests.

That’s a non-option. He’ll do whatever it takes to spend as little time with Nancy as possible while they work this case.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to say No, I don’t want to without sounding like a petulant child.

“Come on,” Joe says sympathetically, already turned back towards the stairs, “I’ll run interference.”

As they ascend back to the main floor of the museum, Frank allows himself ten seconds of vicious, awful resentment towards Nancy. His fingers flex as he gives in to his anger, letting himself feel something he’s been pushing off for years. Fuck her. Fuck her for acting like their friendship was meaningless, fuck her for not wanting to work with them anymore, fuck her for not ending it all in some dramatic fashion he could overanalyze and replay in his mind a thousand times. Fuck her for showing up here and acting like nothing ever happened, for expecting him to fall right back into their normal back-and-forth. 

Frank draws in a deep breath as they step into the well-lit atrium, forcing himself calm. Okay, tantrum over. Back to business.

Nancy’s dusting a doorframe for fingerprints in the far corner of the room. “I’ll be over there,” he mutters to Joe, moving as far away from her as humanly possible, squinting up at the board advertising the new exhibits.

“Baby,” Joe hisses back, but he leaves him alone with his thoughts, which are already racing as he pulls out his notebook and methodically copies down the exhibit names, locations and times. It’s pointless, useless busy work, but for the first time all day he actually feels sane, so he inspects the ticket booth with a thoroughness that’s not necessary while he hides on his half of the room, too, slipping behind the counter to rifle through the papers on the desk.

There’s a key on a lanyard under the computer keyboard that he pockets without thinking twice about. It’s sure to be worthless, but it’s exactly the sort of thing Nancy would pick up and stuff into her backpack, so – now it’s his.

She and Joe are both looking at him from across the room when he steps out of the booth. He draws up short as he realizes they’d been talking. Walking over is unavoidable, now.

Each step across the atrium makes his stomach sink further. If only the museum was open and there were other people around – he’d give anything for some bystanders to divert his attention to, but his life is a joke, so there’s nothing. There’s no one. Just Nancy and her stupid shiny hair and her high-waisted skirt and socks with the little ruffles on them, chatting with his baby brother like absolutely nothing has ever been wrong.

“Hey,” Nancy says, as he slows to a stop in front of her, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. If he didn’t know her any better, he’d say she sounds nervous, but he does know her better. He knows Nancy inside and out. She’s never been nervous to talk to him.

“Hey.” Frank nods at her, then turns his gaze on Joe. “Find anything?”

“Nancy found a set of muddy footprints leading out the backdoor. There’s broken glass in the alley behind the museum and tire tracks.” 

He stiffens. They don’t need her help. He doesn’t want her help. “We should go look for ourselves.”

“Joe said the archive case wasn’t broken into?” Nancy prompts, leaning into his peripheral vision. He tries valiantly not to look at her and fails near-immediately. The expression on her face is so familiar it makes him nauseous. “That’s interesting.”

Joe looks at him warily, obviously sensing that he’s on the very edge of his boiling point. Yet Frank keeps his gaze resolutely on Nancy and her earnest blue eyes. “Look,” he says firmly, “Let’s just try to stay out of each other’s way while we’re here, okay?”

Her lips turn down into a frown. “But –”

He ignores her, turning back to his brother. “We should try to talk to some people before they go home for the day. Come on.”

Joe waits until they’re out of the atrium and in the hallway that leads back towards the staff offices before whistling lowly under his breath. “Dude. That was rough.”

Frank groans, dragging a hand over his jaw. Yeah. He probably could have been nicer. “I don’t want to talk to her.”

Joe hums. After a moment, he says, “She wants to talk to you.”

Frank stills, unable to stop his curiosity from taking off and running wild. “What? She said that?”

Just as Joe opens his mouth, he thinks better of following this particular whim down the rabbit hole, holding up his hand to cut him off and shaking his head. “You know what? No. I don’t want to know. It’s been five years; she doesn’t just get to do this.”

A few hours in Nancy’s company and he already knows it’d be so frighteningly easy for him to get sucked back in again. 

Joe’s nose scrunches up. “I don’t think it was easy for her, either.”

Deep down, some secret part of him is happy to hear that, but ultimately, he knows it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. “Let’s just get these interviews done and get to the hotel,” Frank says, resolving not to think about it ever. He is not going to get sucked back in. He’s not. “Please.”

*

The interviews are fruitless. He stews over them on the T when they call it quits for the day, frustration mounting as he considers the better luck Nancy’s likely to have. She just has a way about her, a directness that, combined with the sweet look on her face, always catches people off guard. They spill their guts to her on the first question every time.

He knows it as well as anyone – he was one of them, once.

If he’s keeping score, there’s no doubt she’s already ahead of them. 

So he’s in a sour mood when they finally make it to the hotel the curator’s putting them up in. It’s a nice enough place, and Joe immediately flings himself onto the bed by the window as soon as their door is shut behind him, making happy noises into the soft sheets and pillows, but Frank can’t stop himself from reanalyzing the details of the conversations they’d had before they’d packed it in.

Laura, the exhibit director, had been too friendly. She was hiding something.

Adam, the security guard, had left his post for two hours on the night the artifacts were stolen.

Heather, the archive clerk, had a boyfriend who was deep in debt –

“Earth to Frank.” He snaps out of his stupor to find Joe waving at him from the far side of the room. “I’m ordering room service. What do you want?”

He opens his mouth to say he’s not hungry and then remembers that the dirtbags at the museum who’d invited them here for a competition they hadn’t consented to are footing the bill and closes it abruptly. “Let me see the menu.”

Two hours and four cheeseburgers and a shower later, Joe is out cold in bed, face mashed into the pillow and body tucked neatly under the sheets.

Frank’s having a tougher go at it. He’s been staring at the ceiling for what feels like forever.

Thoughts of the case are jumbled with thoughts of Nancy; he can’t make heads or tails of any of it. It’s too difficult to focus on any one thing, and he can’t turn off the personal shit that’s worrying him to narrow in solely on work. That’s another advantage Nancy will have over him, then. She’s always been remarkable at compartmentalizing, or, at the very least, just ignoring everything except for mysteries. 

Frank’s feet hit the floor on the side of the bed and he pulls on his pants and shoes quietly, grabbing his key on his way out the door.

He needs to clear his head.

The hotel’s rooftop deck is easy enough to find and the security keypad even easier to bypass; the four numbers that make up the access code are so visibly worn down that he guesses the right sequence on the first try, stepping out onto the patio a second later. 

The city is cool and dark around him as he strolls to the edge of the roof and sits down, legs dangling over the side of the building. Lights from the skyline twinkle back at him, and he leans back on his palms as he stares out at the windows below, mindlessly counting the rows of apartments in his eye line in an attempt to push some of the chaos out of his mind with numbers.

He’d left the door propped, and Nancy’s exceedingly good at sneaking around, so he doesn’t hear her step out onto the roof until she’s beside him, announcing her arrival with that same cautious “Hey” she’d used on him at the museum.

Frank jolts, startled. “Jesus,” he gasps, so surprised that he forgets, for a second, to be mad at her. “Make some noise, next time.”

“Sorry,” Nancy murmurs, scuffing the toes of her sneakers against the asphalt. “Mind if I sit?”

He does, actually. Is there a way to say that? To either trigger the confrontation he’s been waiting so long for or make her leave forever so he doesn’t have to deal with this? If there is, he can’t think of one. “Knock yourself out.”

Nancy drops delicately down onto the ledge beside him, and the protective instinct he never could do away with where she’s concerned flares up, his arm twitching with a desire to reach out and push her back away from the side of the building. He forces himself to stay still.

Silence stretches on between them, awkward and heavy. “Couldn’t sleep?” Nancy asks finally, breaking the spell.

Frank huffs out an unamused laugh, shaking his head. “No.”

More silence. After a moment, Nancy says, “I know you don’t want to talk about the case.”

Not just the case. Is there a way to say that? It’s not coming to him. “No.”

“So… how’ve you been?”

How has he been? Well – she certainly hasn’t lost her nerve in adulthood, he’ll give her that. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“What?” Nancy asks, sounding defensive. It takes everything he has not to look at her. He knows if he does it’ll be over for him, just like that. He’ll get sucked in again, and even the small shreds of progress he’s convinced himself he’s made over the last five years will evaporate like they were never there in the first place.

Who knew it’d be the most challenging case he’d ever had – finding a way to get over being hopelessly in love with Nancy Drew.

“What do you mean, what?” Frank demands, exhausted into a sharper tone of voice than any he’s ever taken with her before, “You ghost us for five years and we’re supposed to act like everything is cool? Maybe that works for Joe, but…” he’s not Joe. What was between them was so different from anything that ever involved Joe. “I’m not doing this with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Nancy says, shifting around beside him. He can see the pleats of her skirt move out of the corner of his eye. “I didn’t mean to… well, I guess I just didn’t know what to say.”

It’s a stupid excuse. Yet her apology softens him, because he’s an idiot. He knows that. “I must’ve called you a thousand times.”

“You did,” Nancy confirms quietly, “And I should’ve answered.”

Frank shrugs. Does any of it really matter now? “You were busy.”

“No more busy than you,” she points out fairly, “You guys were working the Wallace Ridge Heist for a year.”

He blinks. “You heard about that?” It shouldn’t be as surprising as it is; the bust was national news for months afterwards. Yet part of him assumed he’d stopped existing to Nancy entirely when she’d forgotten about him. 

Nancy scoffs, clicking her tongue. “Uh, it was everywhere. Bess only sent me about a hundred articles on it. I can’t believe you stayed undercover for so long.”

Undercover with one miraculously stupid exception: weekly calls to Nancy, from his regular-degular unencrypted cell phone. Calls he had to hide from Joe because they were reckless jeopardizations of the most important case of their career.

Calls she never bothered to pick up, anyway.

“Well… you know how much Joe loves his method acting,” he murmurs finally, eyes still fixed on the city. “Still does his cowboy voice around the apartment for kicks, sometimes.”

Nancy laughs, and he tries not to flinch as her voice rings out like wind chimes, a soothing sound he’s been aching to hear for so long his body has simply become accustomed to yearning for it. He digs his fingertips into the asphalt when she continues, “So you guys finally moved out, then?”

They’d bought a building, actually. A sprawling office space with gorgeous apartments above it, that they’d promptly moved all their friends and staff into before claiming the penthouse for themselves. He and Joe hardly ever slept there; when they were in the city they spent most of the time in their office or driving out to their parents’ place in the suburbs. “Yeah. You?”

He sees her hair move and finally turns his head to look at her, finding Nancy shaking her head no with surprise. “We set up an office space, but… I dunno, I’m hardly ever home. I guess it seemed silly to get an apartment when dad’s house is so big.”

What about Ned? He wants to ask, but won’t. It eats away at him; he knows Ned had gotten his own place in the city, he’d seen the social media posts about it. Did Nancy sleep there after working late instead of driving back out to River Heights? Why hadn’t she moved in with him?

“Sure,” is what he settles on, finally, when the silence has gone on for too long again. “Togo needs a backyard.”

“Exactly,” Nancy grins, and for a moment it feels like no time has passed between them at all. For a moment he feels like nothing is wrong, the torch he’s been carrying for the last five years ignited again. For one single moment, everything is perfect.

You are so sucked in, says a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Joe’s.

His phone rings, shattering the newly-formed peace.

Frank slips it out of his pocket, frowning down at the screen. It’s Callie, and with Nancy so close, there’s no doubt she sees the name that flashes, too. “Sorry, I have to take this.” 

He paces to the other side of the roof, out of earshot, and picks up. “Hello?”

“Hey.” Like always, she’s chewing gum loudly into the receiver, making smacking sounds in his ear. The familiarity of it makes him smile despite himself. “I just had this strange feeling like you wanted me to call you. Did you want me to call you?”

Frank thinks about all the times today he had desperately wanted an out. The last five minutes hadn’t been one of them. “You’re a little late,” he muses, “But, yeah, I guess. What’s up?”

“I ran those names you sent me.” He can hear keyboard clicking in the background, and presses his lips together to stifle a laugh. Of course she’s at the office after midnight. “They all came back clean except for one. Madison Blum.”

The tour guide? “She has a record? What for?”

He can practically hear the shit-eating grin Callie’s wearing. “Grand larceny. I emailed you and Joe all the details.”

“Fuck, great find,” he says gratefully, so relieved it makes him want to sit down. This is exactly the kind of break he needs, and, beyond that, looking at case materials always helps him get to sleep. Maybe tonight’s not completely worthless after all.

“Yeah, yeah,” Callie dismisses, presumably spinning around in her desk chair, like she always does. He can almost hear the springs creaking. “Joe told me about your other problem.”

“Oh, we don’t have to do this,” Frank says, “Really.”

“Frank. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” he insists, and then, in the heavy pause that follows, amends, “Well… I’ll be fine.” Callie stays pointedly silent on the other end of the line, and he cringes. “I want to be fine.”

“You can’t force it,” she reminds him, for what must be the tenth or twelfth time over the last few years. “It has to happen on its own.”

And – he knows that. But why can’t it be faster? What did he ever do to deserve this? “We just have to solve this case. Can you get into the traffic cameras from the light outside the museum? I want pictures of everyone who drove by during the hour the artifacts went missing. Focus on the turn from the back alley.”

“On it,” Callie says, keyboard clicking picking up rapidly again. She pauses, then says, “And Frank?”

“Yeah?”

“Try to get some sleep.”

He half expects Nancy to be gone when he wanders back over, both hoping that she will be and praying that she won’t. He isn’t sure if he’s happy or not to see her sitting exactly where he’d left her, swinging her legs over the side of the building. He sits back down again with a sigh.

“Sorry. Callie had case information for me.”

Nancy’s eyebrows arch, though whether it’s because of the late hour or the fact that it’s Callie is impossible to determine, until she clarifies, “Callie’s working with you guys? How does that work?”

He shrugs. “It’s honestly not awkward at all. I thought it would be, but… we were never that serious, anyway.” 

Because – how could he be? He’s spent the better part of his life hopelessly infatuated with the woman sitting beside him. There hasn’t been room for anything else.

“Well… that’s good, I guess.” He looks down and finds that Nancy’s playing with her hands in her lap, twisting her fingers around. 

Guilt sinks in his stomach like a brick. She looks so unsure of herself. His mom would scream at him if she were here. “Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier. You didn’t deserve that.”

Nancy laughs, shrugging her shoulders. “I probably did. Worse, even.”

Part of him agrees with her, but a larger part of him is unbelievably anxious at the thought of Nancy being sad – it’s even worse if he’s the one responsible. “No, I get it. It was a weird few years.”

Her eyes lower to the street below them. “You don’t have to be so understanding.”

“I know,” Frank agrees. Just sitting next to her is rubbing his vulnerabilities raw. “But it’s hard, trying to stay mad at you. It feels good just to hear your voice again.”

Shit. He hadn’t wanted to admit that, but it’s out there, now. It’s the truth, anyway. They went from talking every day – sometimes several times a day, when either of them was working a case they needed help with – to nothing, just like that. Of course it’d been an adjustment.

Nancy is so close he can hear her breathing. She picks at the hem of her skirt and hesitantly starts, “It’s not that I didn’t want to partner with you guys.”

This is where he has to draw the line. The rest of their conversation has been taxing enough; if he starts to get into the what-ifs and could-have-beens he has no hope of ever moving on. Frank shakes his head. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“I want to, though,” she insists, “Because I hate thinking that you –”

“Honestly, Nancy, it’s better if we don’t get into it.” Frank rushes to cut her off as quickly as he can, wary that the next words out of her mouth will ruin the rest of his life. “It’s in the past, okay? It’s time for everyone to just… move on.”

He can tell by the look on her face that she wants to argue with him. Nancy’s expression always twists prettily when she’s getting ready to be stubborn. But he can’t do this – not now, not ever. This conversation is a tipping point he needs to stay away from. After this, there’ll be no going back.

“Seriously,” he adds firmly, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “We don’t need to go there.”

Nancy deflates beside him, her shoulders slumping inward. “Okay. If you say so.”

Frank nods decisively, then bumps his shoulder into hers playfully in an attempt to lighten the mood. “You should try to get some sleep,” he says, feeling his lips curve up into a smile despite himself, “You’re gonna have to get up pretty early tomorrow if you wanna beat Joe and I to the museum.”

*

Day two goes much better than day one had.

“I see we’ve reached the acceptance stage of grief,” Joe remarks, when he catches Frank smiling into his coffee on the T for no reason at all, “That hardly took half as long as I thought it would.”

“Callie got us a major lead,” he says, “We have a lot to do today.”

“So you said, when you woke me up at dawn,” Joe sighs, thunking his head back against the pole behind him. 

Despite the early hour, the staff entrance to the museum is already unlocked when he pulls out the key Mr. Faulkner had given him. “That’s weird,” Joe remarks, but – it’s not. Because he knows exactly who’s here.

Sure enough, Nancy Drew breezes through the atrium as soon as they set their jackets down, all sunny smiles and chipper attitude. “Morning, boys,” she calls, fingers waggling their way in a wave before she skips down the steps to the archive room two at a time, disappearing from sight.

And… he wants to be annoyed. He really, really does. 

But irritation just won’t come to him, so Frank shrugs at his brother and rolls up his sleeves, shifting his coffee from hand to hand. “Come on. Let’s get into Madison’s office before she gets here.”

Poking around in Madison’s office is successful for two reasons: first, Callie calls with the traffic cam photos while he’s elbows deep in the safe under her desk, and second, inside that safe are blueprints of the archive room, with the security cameras in each corner circled in red. 

“You’d think someone planning a museum heist would keep a more secure safe passcode than 1-2-3-4,” Joe muses as he turns the blueprint over in his hands before folding it up and tucking it into the pocket at the front of his sweatshirt. “it’s almost too easy.”

Frank frowns as he flips the lock on the inside of the office door, pulling it shut behind the both of them when they slip silently back out into the hallway. It was too easy. Almost purposefully so.

He realizes why when he pulls out his laptop and navigates to the traffic photos Callie’s dropped in his email. Joe’s looking at the screen with him with his chin hooked over Frank’s shoulder, and he says, “What’s Laura the exhibit lady doing speeding away from the alleyway like that?” directly into Frank’s ear.

“God damnit,” Frank swears under his breath, nudging Joe off with a shrug of his shoulder, “She’s setting Madison up. But why?”

“Let’s make sure it was her, first. What kind of car was that?”

He zooms in on the photo until the image fills the screen. “A Ford Edge.”

Joe sighs down at him where he’s sitting with his laptop. “I’ll bet you anything Nancy already analyzed those tire tracks out in the alleyway. It’d be a lot faster to just ask her than to try to do it ourselves.”

Frank shakes his head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Dude,” Joe groans, “Come on. I thought you were over this.”

“We’re not working with her,” he says, voice firm. “She doesn’t want to work with us. And we don’t need her help.”

“Dude,” Joe repeats, even more exasperated, this time, “You’re not seriously still mad about the agency thing.”

So what if he is? Why doesn’t he get to be? She didn’t even give them a chance. She never even considered them seriously, as partners or… anything else. 

“I’m not mad,” he says, “I just want to solve this on our own. Let’s go get some photos and a soil sample. We can try to get one from Laura’s car when she gets in, too.”

Joe rolls his eyes at him, but swipes a glass test tube off the counter and disappears up the stairs obligingly, leaving Frank alone in the archive office with his laptop. 

The itch to snoop is right in front of him, yet it has nothing to do with the investigation. In five years, he hasn’t looked Nancy up once, too paranoid that George would be able to trace his IP address for even looking at her agency’s website or trying to find her Facebook page.

But… he’s alone, now. 

Frank’s phone rings just as soon as he’s opened a new browser tab, the sound nearly making him jump out of his skin, as though he’s been caught doing something illegal instead of sitting innocently in front of his laptop. He stomach only sinks further when he sees who it is that’s calling.

“Hey, mom.”

“Hi, sweetie.” Well… she doesn’t sound like she knows he’s been unfairly rude to Nancy. But she knows, he’s sure of it. She always knows. “How’s Boston?”

“Oh, um. Good, I guess. The museum is interesting.”

“That’s great. Joe told me they put you both up in a hotel. Is it nice?”

Fuck. She’s already talked to Joe. “Yeah, it’s okay. I don’t think we’ll be there much longer. We have some good leads.”

“Well, as long as you’re both being safe,” she says, and then, in the answering silence that follows, “Anything else you want to talk about?”

He’s seen a lot of traps in his time: secret doors in the floor that fall out from under your feet, cave walls that close in if you step on the wrong stone. Yet this conversational landmine is one of the most noticeable he can recall. “No,” he says, well aware even as the words leave his mouth that they’re the wrong ones, “Everything’s fine.”

Predictably, his mother hums like she doesn’t believe him for a second. “How’s Nancy? It’s been so long since we’ve seen her.”

He sighs. “Mom.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t spoken to her, Frank.” He can hear his mom frowning across the line. 

“I have, but – it’s fine. She’s fine. She’s great, I guess. We’ve both been busy working.” His eyes sweep the archive office, desperately looking for an out. Now would be a great time for their thief to discover how close they are to a breakthrough and come club him over the head. 

“I know I can’t tell you what to do,” his mom starts, in a way that definitely means she’s about to tell him exactly what she thinks he should do, “But I really wish you would talk to her. It’s not good to keep the way you feel bottled up, Frank. You both owe it to yourselves to try to talk things through.”

It’s the same advice he’s heard countless times before from Callie. Just like all those other times, the thought of actually doing it makes him physically nauseous. He can admit to himself that, the longer his calls went unanswered, the less he hoped Nancy would actually pick the next one up, knowing that the more time that wormed its way between them the more difficult their conversation would be.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs, “It’s – what if that just makes things worse?”

“Frank,” his mother laughs, “Don’t tell me I have to lecture you on the importance of taking a risk.”

He hangs up as Joe comes racing back down the stairs, waving a piece of paper frantically. “We got a match!” He announces loudly, crossing the room to pass the report over. “Check it out.”

“That was fast.” He relaxes as he sees trademarks of Joe’s work all over it – not that he thought Joe would ask Nancy for her help behind his back, but, still – eyes scanning the page. “So Laura did steal the artifacts. Now we just have to figure out why.”

“And find them,” Joe sighs, “Too bad she’s in her office all day while the exhibit’s closed.”

“Then we’ll come back tonight,” he says, “After everyone’s left. We need to do some digging if we want any new leads. In the meantime, let’s do some more research on the exhibit and the items that were stolen. I’ll ask Callie to look into Laura’s connects, too – see if there’s anyone in her circle that might turn something up.”

“It’s almost like this was something we could’ve done after nine o’clock,” Joe muses, turning his face into his shoulder to stifle a yawn. 

“Almost,” Frank returns cheerfully, clicking the lid of his laptop closed. “But now we have time for a coffee break.”

*

Sneaking into the museum later that night is easy enough – mostly because they have a key to the back entrance, and the alarm system has already been disabled when they arrive.

It’s eerily familiar to the way it’d felt walking in that morning, so Frank’s not surprised at all when they turn down the hallway towards the museum offices and find Nancy sitting in front of Laura’s closed door. She looks up at the both of them and smiles. “It’s jammed.”

Frank frowns, stepping forward to squint at the lock. “Locked?”

“No, I picked it,” Nancy explains, “It’s jammed. Something’s blocking the door from opening.”

He twists the doorknob and rattles it, though sure enough, it doesn’t give. Something heavy is in front of the door inside Laura’s office. Frank shoves his shoulder against the wood, pushing, but it refuses to budge. “Shit.”

“I figured you guys would be here,” Nancy says, talking mostly to Joe while Frank continues to try to shove his way through. “Any ideas on how we can get in?”

“There’s a window that opens into the alley,” Joe suggests, “We could probably sneak in that way.”

Frank sighs, giving up on the door and leaning back against it. Crawling through Laura’s office window with Nancy is just about the last thing he wants to do tonight. But she and his brother are blinking at him expectantly, waiting for his okay, and – it’s clear that he’s the obstacle. 

That’s never what he’s wanted to be for her.

So he nods. 

The three of them head outside together, creeping silently into the alley behind the museum. The broken glass has been swept up, the dirt from the tire tracks messed out of order. “Someone’s covering their tracks,” Nancy muses, as Joe hoists himself up onto the ledge in front of the window and starts fiddling with the lock. 

“She has to know we’re onto her,” Frank says, staring up at his brother instead of giving in to the urge to watch Nancy when she’s not even doing anything. A moment later, Joe slides the window open with a triumphant sound. 

“Okay,” he directs, hopping down from the ledge, “You two go. I’ll stay out here and keep watch.”

“Oh – no,” Frank says immediately, wary of being alone in a dark space with Nancy, “We should stick together.”

Joe rolls his eyes at him. “Someone has to play lookout.”

“Then I will,” he offers, “You two go.”

Nancy’s pretending not to listen to them argue, loitering by the brick wall of the museum. Joe leans in close, dropping his voice. “What if there’s a code you have to break? I’ll be staring at it for hours. You need to go with her.”

He’s right. It’s likely whatever’s in Laura’s office will play to his strengths. But that doesn’t mean he has to like it. “Fine.”

When he turns around, Nancy’s sitting on the window ledge, waiting for him. With a nod, she disappears inside, and a second later, he pulls himself up after her.

“Oh!” Nancy gasps, “Laura, I’m so sorry. We didn’t realize you were still here. When we tried the door…” her voice trails off. The office is dark around them, and Nancy takes a step forward, closer to the desk. “Laura?”

She’s sitting behind it, yes, but her eyes are glassy and vacant. Frank looks at the door with a frown; sure enough, there’s a bookshelf shoved in front of it. “Nancy, something’s –”

Laura’s body slumps forward at the desk, and they both see the knife stuck in her back at the same time. Nancy stumbles back into him in shock, and he reaches out to catch her instinctually, grip tightening on her shoulders. 

“Oh my god,” she says, loudly enough to catch Joe’s attention under the window.

“What?” He calls up, “What is it?”

“It’s Laura,” Nancy shouts back, “She’s – she’s dead.”

Joe comes up through the window, staring at the both of them owlishly. The way Frank’s holding Nancy is the first thing he sees – the dead body at the desk is the second. “Jesus,” he mutters, presumably talking about both. “Okay. Can’t say I saw that one coming.”

“Who could’ve done this?” Nancy asks, flinching as Joe crosses the room and flicks the light switch on, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe Madison figured out Laura was setting her up?” He suggests, itching to poke around now that he can see where he’s going but reluctant to pull his arms away where they’re snug around Nancy.

Joe shakes his head. “Madison doesn’t seem like a killer to me.”

“Just because you think she’s pretty doesn’t mean she isn’t capable of murder,” Frank reminds him.

“It could have been anyone,” Joe points out fairly. “Maybe an accomplice. Maybe a buyer for the artifacts.”

“She was alone in her car in the traffic photo.”

Nancy stirs where she’s standing in front of him, twisting around to look at Frank over her shoulder without stepping out of his hold. “Traffic photo?”

Something obnoxious squirms inside of him as he realizes they’d thought of something she hadn’t. It’s rare that he ever has an idea Nancy hasn’t already considered – at least it was, when they were talking regularly – and while he knows now’s not the time to feel smug about it… he kind of can’t help himself. He feels his face flush with pleasure. “The camera,” Frank explains, “At the light by the alleyway. It clocked Laura speeding southbound during the window the artifacts were stolen.”

“Smart,” Nancy murmurs, eyes distant, staring out into the empty space of the office. “And the tire tracks?”

“They were a match for Laura’s car,” Joe says, “But can we regroup somewhere else? I’m starting to get creeped out.”

Frank shakes his head. “We need to look around before they move the body. Once people start coming in and out of here, any evidence we find will be useless.”

Joe grimaces. “Fine.” He eyes their intertwined arms with the same level of trepidation he’d given the dead body at the desk. “At least help me look.”

Frank’s flush deepens as Nancy finally pulls away, crossing back over towards the window. He ignores the look Joe is giving him behind her back and focuses on what she’s saying. “Whoever did this must’ve left through the window.”

“Did you see anyone, when you got here?”

“No,” Nancy says, “All the doors were locked, and the alarm system was on.”

He turns around to find Joe poking delicately at the papers on Laura’s desk, trying not to sneak glances at her body. “I just want to let it be known that I hate this.”

“We know,” Frank assures him. “Got anything?”

“Either this woman was a disorganized disaster, or whoever offed her was looking for something.” There’s papers all over her desk, and Frank delicately lifts one of her arms out of the way so Joe can rifle through the receipts and reports strewn across its top. “Bingo,” he declares finally, pinching a piece of paper between two fingers and holding it out in front of Frank’s face.

It’s a typewritten note. The paper it’s on is old. “People still own typewriters?” Joe asks. Frank shrugs at him. “Whatever. It says – Nancy, I’m doing a dramatic reading – ‘You owe us. If we don’t see the money by Tuesday, we’ll be coming to collect. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ Ooh, spooky.”

“‘Us’?” Nancy repeats, folding her arms with a frown. “That’s strange.” 

“Can you get us into this drawer?” Joe asks her, jiggling the handle on the desk, “It’s locked.”

Nancy crosses over behind him to peer at the drawer in question. “You need a key. Maybe it’s around here somewhere.”

Frank blinks. A lightbulb ignites in the back of his brain. “Let me see it.”

It’s a long shot, but… 

He pulls the key he’d taken from the ticket booth out of his pocket and tries it. It’s a perfect fit. The drawer clicks open and slides out slowly.

When he looks up, Nancy and Joe are both staring at him as though he’s gone insane. “Where did you find that?” Joe asks, eyes wide.

He can feel his face growing hot again. His ears and the back of his neck are burning. “In the ticket booth,” Frank says, defensive for no reason, “I don’t know. I had a hunch.”

“Maybe that’s what the murderer was looking for,” Nancy guesses, lifting a locked diary out of the now-open drawer. She holds it close to her face, squinting at the dial. After a moment, her thumb slides the numbers into place and it clicks open. She flips through the pages quickly.

“It’s blank,” Joe groans from Nancy’s other side, though as soon as he’s said as much, a piece of paper slips out of the ledger and flutters down to the desk.

Frank picks it up, gaping.

“What?” Nancy asks, “What is it?”

He’s only ever seen this many zeroes a few other times in his life. “Uh, it’s a check for ten million dollars.”

“What?” Joe demands, leaning over and snatching the check out of his hands, “From who?”

“It’s blank,” he explains, looking at the back where Joe’s now holding it up and noticing it’s not signed, either. “Looks like she didn’t plan on cashing it.”

“Check this out,” Nancy interjects, setting the ledger down onto the desk, “It was in the back pocket. It’s a photo of the vault downstairs.” 

Frank takes the photo and turns it over in his hands. His eyes light up when he sees what’s been drawn on the back. “It’s a Vignère cipher!”

Nancy arches her eyebrows at him. “What’s a Vignère cipher?”

“Don’t,” Joe groans, “You’ll trigger his monologue.”

“A Vignère cipher,” Frank explains excitedly, pointedly ignoring his brother, “Is a polyalphabetic method of encryption. There’s a few ways you can solve it – substitution, or autokey, or even algebraically.”

“It’s basically a jumble of garbage some old French guy made up to torture people with, like, 200 alphabetic letters,” Joe summarizes, finally taking a step away from the desk to lean back against the cabinet on the other side of the body. “Can you decrypt it?”

Can he decrypt it! Can he ever. “Yeah,” Frank says with a nod, “We just need to find the keyword.”

“The keyword?”

“So – see this table?” He asks, shifting closer to Nancy so she can see the square copied onto the back of the photo.

Nancy frowns. “It just looks like the alphabet.”

“It is the alphabet,” Frank grins, “Twenty-six times, shifted to correspond to a series of individual ciphers.”

“It’s a little sick how excited you are about this,” Joe muses. “Do I need to find somewhere else to sleep tonight?”

“Dude,” Frank laughs, “Come on. It’s been forever since we saw one of these. Even you have to admit this is cool.”

“The haunted house we toured in Wyoming was cool,” Joe counters, “This is work. And… math. But – fine, continue.”

“So at different points in the encryption, the cipher uses each of these different alphabets. It’s all dependent on the keyword, which repeats until it matches the length of the message. If we want to get into the vault, we’ll need the keyword.” 

Otherwise the grid really is just a jumble of garbage, but he won’t give Joe the satisfaction of saying so. 

“It seems complicated,” Nancy says warily, eyeing the photo in his hands. “You’re sure you can crack it?”

“Positive,” he confirms. It probably won’t even take him that long, but… he doesn’t want to brag.

Nancy lowers her eyes to the ground, then sneaks a glance at Joe and, finally, him. “Is it alright if we work together on this?”

God. He is such an asshole. Frank frowns at her. “Of course it’s alright,” he says. “Look – I’m sorry I was such a jerk about it before. But… we need to solve this case as soon as possible. There’s a murderer out there; it’s not safe.”

“I agree,” Nancy says, sending a soft smile that makes his heart pound his way, “The faster we get to the bottom of this, the better.”

“As touching as this is,” Joe interjects, though neither of them move from where they’re staring at each other, “I think it’s probably time we call someone about the dead body, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Nancy grins, “I really want to get a better look at that knife, and I can’t do that with it still lodged in her back.”

 *

They leave the crime scene to Faulkner and the local cops and find a 24-hour diner to debrief. Nancy slides into the booth across from him, which is relieving until Frank’s knee bumps hers under the table and it instantly makes him blush; from then on he’s hyperaware of his every movement, feeling awkwardly large in the cramped space of the booth beside Joe.

“So, here’s what I have,” Nancy says, eagerly pulling out her notebook and flipping through pages and pages of writing. Frank balks as he watches her pass through photos, passcodes and details from interviews; he’d expected her to be ahead of them, sure, but he hadn’t expected her to be this far ahead of them.

“Jeez, you’ve been busy,” Joe says, the absurdly large, plastic menu from the diner open in his hands and poking Frank in the shoulder. “You’ve gotten way more info out of the staff than we have.”

“I guess I’m just more charming than you,” Nancy grins, turning back to her notebook and pausing on a certain page before spinning it around to face Frank. Her pointer finger taps the left page twice. “There. Heather, the archive clerk. She mentioned a preservation room down in the archives that’s not on any of the blueprints I found.”

“Huh.” They’d pored over every last inch of the archive floor and hadn’t turned up anything in particular. “bet that’d be a great place to hide something.”

“What if it’s through the vault?” Nancy asks, leaning in over the tabletop with her eyes bright. “That would explain why we haven’t found it. We have to find that keyword first thing tomorrow.”

“We should really go through the evidence from tonight first,” Joe interjects, and, despite Nancy’s boundless enthusiasm and his own desire to get his hands on the Vignère cipher as soon as possible, Frank’s inclined to agree with him. “It’ll all be bagged by the morning. Let’s check it out first, sweep Laura’s office again, and maybe do another round of interviews, too. See if anyone knows anything about the threatening note or the big check.”

“But –” Nancy cuts herself off as their waitress finally wanders over, and she and Frank sit in silence while Joe rattles off a dozen or so menu items before the waitress turns towards a visibly caught off guard Nancy with an expectant look and she squeaks out, “Um, pancakes?”

It’s sickeningly cute. His stomach twists as he considers how not-over her he is – how not-over her he’ll always be. Was it possible to be sucked in again if he’d never left in the first place?

“Look,” Frank says, once waitress has walked away and they’re alone, “Joe’s right. Something important could come up. If we go into the vault first we won’t even know what we’re looking for. We might only have one chance at this.”

“I hate when you guys act rationally,” Nancy sighs, very nearly pouting. Nostalgia blankets his shoulders and squeezes tight; it’s exactly like old times and precisely like things could’ve been if she hadn’t left, if she’d taken their proposal seriously.

But she hadn’t. And the camaraderie between them now is only temporary, he knows that. He needs to know it. 

Frank’s smile fades. He clears his throat and looks away. Fortunately, Joe swoops in to save him again. “Nancy, were you able to get anything out of the security guard? Hand to god, when Frank and I tried to question him, he stared at us in silence the entire time.”

He can feel Nancy’s eyes on him even as he stares resolutely at the sticky tabletop and paper placemat in front of his face. He doesn’t look up, and after a moment, Nancy says, “Yeah.” 

Only once he hears pages turning does he lift his gaze again; Nancy’s nose is buried in her notebook, now, so it’s safe to look around.

Well – as safe as it can be, given his level of hopeless adoration and how gorgeous she is when she works, how wonderfully engrossed she is in her notes and how much he fucking wants her.

So. Not that safe.

Because Joe is Joe, and he stuffs a Belgian waffle, chocolate milkshake, slice of pie and ice cream down his throat at the diner, he falls asleep as soon as they settle in on the T, the lurch away from the station not enough to rouse him even as Frank and Nancy wobble on their feet.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get to sleep tonight,” Nancy confesses, “It feels like we’ve reached a real break in the case. It’s so exciting.”

“There’s still a lot of pieces we have to put together,” he says pragmatically, though Nancy’s bright eyes are captivating, her eagerness infectious. “But I know what you mean. Getting into the vault tomorrow will be critical.”

“It’s… really great to work with you again,” Nancy says quietly. He blinks at her, and she sneaks a glance at Joe, clearing her throat. “Both of you, I mean. I’ve really missed it.”

“Um,” Frank starts slowly, thrown off kilter by her sudden declaration, “Ah, me too. But… I’m sure you’ve been doing well. In Chicago.”

Nancy’s smile wavers. “Sure,” she says, “It’s not the same, though. I had some really crazy adventures with you and Joe.”

They didn’t have to stop, he thinks unfairly, trying not to narrow his eyes at her. You’re the one who ended them. He’d driven himself out of his mind trying to set them all up for future success – trying to build something that would allow him to keep Nancy in his life forever, as a friend and colleague because he couldn’t have anything more. He’d forced Joe through business school, at night while they were still working cases, and worked his ass off, too, all in the interest of starting something real that’d impress her into signing on. 

He’d been so excited to pitch her the idea. As they got further and further along, and he’d agonized over showing her what they were working on, Joe had reassured him so many times. Nancy is going to love this, trust me.

All that work just to be rejected as soon as they’d asked her. She hadn’t even pretended to think about it.

So it’s a little hard to believe her sincerity now. If she’d really enjoyed working cases with the both of them so much, The Hardys and Drew Detective Agency would’ve taken off, wouldn’t it?

“Well, that was a long time ago,” Frank says finally, shoving his hands back into his pockets. Why is she doing this to him? Doesn’t she know every word out of her mouth is torture?

Nancy’s eyes study his face. After a moment, she murmurs, “Yeah,” fiddling with the strap of her bag, laying across her chest.

She looks so disappointed. He suddenly feels like an irredeemable asshole again. “But, hey, I know with you on the case, we’ll have this solved in no time. Joe and I were starting to get pretty lost.”

“Please,” Nancy laughs, “You don’t have to flatter me. You guys were doing great.”

“We’re just good at digging up proof,” he shrugs, “You’re the one with a real talent for talking to people. It doesn’t surprise me you were able to get so much information out of everyone.”

“I don’t think anyone would describe me as having a talent for talking to people,” Nancy says, voice just the right balance of humble and self-depreciating. “Or at least… not to people that matter to me.”

His heart lurches up into his chest. 

Wait – that’s the T, which has just ground to a halt at their stop. Joe stirs suddenly in his seat, jaw stretched wide with a yawn. “Is this us?”

“Uh huh,” Frank answers, as casually as he can. He looks down at his feet and forces himself off the train and onto the platform, one step at a time. 

He doesn’t look up until he and Joe are alone in their room. 

His brother flops down tiredly onto his bed, shooting an incredulous look at Frank from across the room. “Dude.”

“I know, okay?” Frank groans, “I’m trying.”

“It’s your funeral,” Joe shrugs, falling asleep again near-immediately.

The quip hits uncomfortably close to home; if things continue down this road, he knows he won’t be surviving the rest of this case.

*

In the morning, he feels ready for the day, determination renewed for all of twenty minutes, until they meet up with Nancy in the hotel lobby and he sees her heartbreakingly familiar high-waisted jeans and brightly colored t-shirt. 

His resolve crumples immediately. He tries not to stare at her on their commute to the museum.

“Where should we start?” She asks sunnily as soon as they’re settled, standing unnecessarily close to him in the atrium.

Frank’s hands grip his coffee like a lifeline. “Let’s see if they have the evidence ready for us to look at.”

They file into Laura’s office one-by-one, the absence of her body at the desk and the daylight filtering in from the window making it seem like absolutely nothing untoward ever happened. The bookshelf that had been blocking the door just last night is even shifted back into place. 

“Here’s the knife, Nancy,” Joe says, an evidence bag dangling from between his thumb and pointer finger in the same way someone might hold up a dead fish.

“Excellent,” Nancy grins, crossing the room to snatch it from his hands eagerly. She holds the plastic bag with the knife inside the way someone else might hold a baby.

Frank shakes his head, smiling to himself. He moves to sit at the desk before Joe stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Dude,” he says, “There was a dead lady there, like, twelve hours ago.”

Frank eyes the desk chair, then kicks it out of the way. “Good point. Okay – let’s see. No prints on the note from the typewriter,” he notes, eyes scanning over the report left behind by the police, “Handwriting analysis on the check came back empty, too. They crossed it against the rest of the staff.”

“Damn,” Nancy sighs, though she’s still turning the knife over in her hands, very obviously only half-listening to him.

“Anything else?” Joe asks, leaning in to look over the report, too. “Says they recovered a lock picking set in her desk, and that a framed photo of her family was smashed.”

“Could’ve happened in the struggle,” Frank suggests, frowning down at the desk. His brain’s working overtime trying to put the pieces together without all the information, straining to make what they do know fit somehow. 

“Frank, come here,” Nancy says suddenly, “I want to try something.”

He eyes the knife in her hands cautiously. “Uh… try what?”

Nancy looks up to meet his gaze. “What? No, nothing like that. Come here.”

When he stops in front of her, he sees that Nancy’s holding the knife with her hand curled around it over the bag, probably like the killer would have. The blade looks huge and awkward in her dainty hands. “Try this.”

He takes the bag and holds it in his own larger, bulkier grip. It’s a much better fit – he isn’t sure how someone Nancy’s size would be able to get purchase on the handle to deliver an accurate, killing blow, and Laura had been murdered with only one wound. “Hmmm.”

“Madison’s about my size, isn’t she?” Nancy asks, eyebrows arching. “I’d imagine she’d have some trouble with a knife this big.”

“I told you guys she wasn’t a killer,” Joe pipes up from the desk. “We should talk to the security guard again.”

“But why would Adam want to kill Laura?” Nancy asks, “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Obviously she owed someone money,” Frank muses. “Just because Madison didn’t kill her doesn’t mean she’s not still involved. The note referenced two people.”

“Maybe Laura wasn’t setting Madison up,” Nancy says suddenly, eyes staring past him as she thinks, “Maybe Madison was in on it.”

“We need to get some more information out of her,” Frank says, “But if she knows we’re onto her, it’s not going to be easy. Any ideas?”

“I have one,” pipes up Joe from where he’s sitting on the edge of Laura’s desk. Frank turns and sees him grinning broadly, a sure sign of disaster to come. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Okay, does anyone else have any ideas?” Frank asks, turning back towards Nancy. “Maybe you could try talking to her?”

“She was sort of cold the last time I tried,” Nancy says. “What’s your idea, Joe?”

“Frank should flirt with her,” he suggests, mile-wide grin still fixed on his face.

“What?” Nancy asks, at the same time Frank demands, “Me?”

They both turn to look at each other curiously, then round on Joe again in tandem. “Why can’t you do it?” Frank asks him.

Nancy’s pointed silence seems to echo the question; Yeah, why can’t you?

“She won’t take me seriously,” Joe says, which is a fair point. Frank had to stop him from packing his light-up sneakers for this trip. His haircut is ridiculous and he bounces when he talks. “You’re way more likely to pull something meaningful out of her.”

“Can’t we try something else?” Frank asks desperately, feeling himself flush despite his best efforts not to, “You know I’m… not good at that.”

“Come on, you’ve flirted with plenty of girls,” Joe needles. It’s not as helpful as he thinks it is. It takes everything he has to keep looking at Joe instead of Nancy. “We just need to figure out how involved she is, and who else she was working with. Easy peasy.”

“But…” yet again he’s left with no excuse except for a petulant I don’t want to. “Fine.”

Frank looks around the office, eyes sweeping the surface one more time. There has to be some detail they’re missing – some proof – something. And he’ll do better without an audience snickering at him, anyway. “Will you two stay here and give everything another look?”

“Yes,” Nancy says, while Joe groans in the background. He pokes miserably at a pile of knickknacks on Laura’s desk, pulling a face. There’s kindness and something almost like worry in Nancy’s eyes, though it’s gone in a blink. “Good luck.”

*

Flirting with Madison almost… kind of works. 

Okay, it does work. It works surprisingly well. 

She seems oddly charmed by the fact that his face burns red the entire time he talks to her, smitten by the aw, shucks shyness Frank plays up while he fishes, hands in his pockets and toes scuffing the tile in her office. 

He walks out of their conversation with two new leads he’s excited to share with Nancy and Joe: Adam, the security guard, had been following her around the museum and to her car at night, and she’d seen him and Laura having quiet conversation that looked tense on more than one occasion. Every time she caught them arguing, Laura had a red book in her hands.

A red book that he was pretty sure hadn’t turned up in her office. Which meant there was only one place it could be.

Nancy steps into the archive office first, Joe stumbling down the stairs behind her. “So? How’d it go?”

Her question’s a little difficult to focus on, as his brother is frantically waving his arms at him from behind Nancy’s back, his eyes wide. “Uh…”

Frank’s brow furrows as he watches Joe point at Nancy and then form a heart with his hands, yanking the two sides apart. He stares at Joe in confusion until he rolls his eyes and forcefully mouths They. Broke. Up!

He blinks. Around him, the world stops spinning. No way. Nancy… and Ned? Broke up. They broke up. They broke up. 

Nancy’s looking at him like he’s suddenly sprouted a second head. She turns to glance at Joe over her shoulder and he slams his arms down to his sides with a winning smile, shrugging innocently at her.

Frank clears his throat, doing his best to pretend like he’s not in the middle of an earth-shattering crisis. They broke up. A thousand questions claw desperately at his mind, but he forces himself to answer Nancy instead. “Pretty well, actually. You guys didn’t happen to find a red book in Laura’s office, did you?”

Joe scoffs, crossing over to the desk he’s sitting at. “No. We found way more mementos from college than any other forty-year-old lady should have at work and about a metric fuckton of dust. I’ve never seen someone so proud of having gone to Syracuse.”

He fills them both in on his conversation with Madison, leaving out the part where her manicured fingers had slipped her business card into the front pocket of his jeans. Despite how matter-of-fact he’s trying to make the conversation seem, Frank can feel his ears and the back of his neck go hot again.

“Hmmm,” Nancy hums, with so much distaste injected into one small syllable it’s actually impressive, “So that’s what we’re looking for in the vault, then. Any luck on the keyword?”

Frank shakes his head, then stops abruptly. “Wait,” he says, eyes widening as it clicks into place, “Yes. Come on.”

They rush over to the vault in the corner of the archive room, the waiting screen and keyboard dark. “Can you bypass the logon screen?”

Nancy doesn’t even answer him, just opens the panel at the side of the computer and starts poking around with the circuit board. In under a minute, Frank watches as every light on it turns green. The screen in front of his face blinks to life. Welcome, Laura Anderson. Input password.

Tongue between his teeth, he slowly types his guess into the blank squares. O-r-a-n-g-e.

“Duh,” Joe says, as soon as the computer beeps affirmatively at him, “Of course.”

The cipher sprawls out across the screen. Frank pulls the photo from the ledger out of his pocket and flips it over, propping it up on the keyboard. He grins at the repeating keyword and the jumble of letters beneath it.

“You don’t have to look so excited,” Joe laughs from behind him.

“Hey, I’ve been waiting all day for this,” Frank defends, “Nancy got to play with the murder weapon – this is how I get my kicks.”

“I was not playing with the murder weapon,” Nancy huffs, “I was investigating!” 

“Same difference,” Joe says dismissively, though Frank tunes them both out in favor of working on the cipher, his eyes flicking from the photo to the screen and back again. One by one, the decrypted letters fill in the blanks, until they’re staring at the completed message.

“‘The proof is under the ticket booth. The notes unravel the lies,’” Nancy reads aloud.

“Cryptic,” Joe says, “of course. Why can’t they ever just say, ‘If I was murdered, it was probably this guy.’”

Frank laughs, slamming the ‘enter’ button on the keyboard. The locks in the vault click open, one by one.

“You sure made that look easy,” Nancy remarks as Joe turns the wheel and swings the door open wide. 

“Oh,” he shrugs, rubbing the back of his neck, “It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” Nancy insists, “It was amazing.” Joe walks on ahead of them, doing an excellent impression of someone pretending not to listen to their conversation. Lights flick on automatically as they wind deeper down the hallway, searching for the preservation room. “But I guess you’ve always been impressive with codes.”

Frank’s lips twitch as he remembers the encrypted notes they used to leave for each other in books they would trade, with keys they’d made up alongside them to decode their messages. Nancy was always so put out when he managed to read hers. She’d been determined to stump him for so long – but eventually they grew out of that habit, too, like so many others. “Well… thanks. It’s not every day you get to impress the Nancy Drew.”

Nancy shrugs at him. “It is for you.”

His throat tightens as he searches desperately for something to say. Everything he can think of is weird and uncomfortably honest. Ultimately, Frank comes up empty-handed, but it’s just as well; Joe’s drawn to a stop in front of a heavy door with a keypad. Frank catches a glimpse of nine buttons over his shoulder.

“This one’s all you, Nance,” Joe says, stepping out of the way, “Tell me Heather gave you the code.”

“No,” Nancy murmurs, pulling out her notebook and flipping through the pages, “But I think I found something in her office that’ll help me figure it out.”

He watches Nancy work, enthralled. It’s hard not to wonder if this is how she’d felt while he was untangling the cipher – if she even cared half as much as he does now, completely amazed by the brilliant, resourceful woman in front of him.

The keypad beeps. Nancy turns the handle and swings the door open.

The room revealed to them is pitch black. Frank frowns, flicking the flashlight on his cellphone on. “What is it?”

Nancy leans in closer. “It looks like a tunnel.”

It is – and a small one, at that. The opening is far too narrow for him to shove his shoulders through. It’s doubtful even Joe would be able to wriggle his way in.

There’s only one person with them tiny enough to fit through the opening. The three of them seem to come to the conclusion at the same time.

“Well,” Nancy grins, without a hint of nerves on her face, “I guess I’ll meet you guys back out there.”

“Hopefully,” Joe says, ignoring the glare Frank sends his way.

“I don’t like this,” Frank interjects, “You shouldn’t go by yourself. It could be dangerous.”

“We can’t turn back now,” Nancy points out fairly, “I’ll be fine.”

Joe turns around to inspect the hallway they’d come through. Nancy leans down, and Frank can feel a desperate, familiar sort of panic creep up inside of him. He grabs her arm to stop her.

“Nancy,” he says, “Please be careful. I –”

The words lodge in his throat. She freezes, still as a statue, at the same time he does. He knows they’re both remembering the last time he said those words.

They stare at each other in stifling silence. His hand falls numbly back to his side, letting her go. “I’ll see you both in a few minutes,” Nancy murmurs, just before she drops to the floor and crawls into the tunnel, disappearing out of sight. 

He watches her go, blinking after her in disbelief. Joe practically has to drag him back to the vault’s entrance, and Frank follows him as if on autopilot, sinking back down into his chair in the archive office and dropping his head into his hands.

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Joe murmurs comfortingly, fidgeting anxiously himself. “Are you okay?”

No. He’s an idiot, and an embarrassing one, at that. There’s no way she doesn’t know, and when she gets back, she’s going to look at him in that pitying way everyone else does – there’s absolutely no chance their friendship will survive this. He’s the creepy moron still in love with a girl who’s been ignoring him for the last five years, and she’s…

Single. In all the excitement, he’d nearly forgotten.

Frank peeks up at his brother from between his hands. “They really broke up?”

Joe grins at him. His nervous bouncing takes on a more excited step. “Uh huh. I didn’t even have to pry. I just said ‘How’s Ned?’ and she said ‘we broke up.’ And I said ‘When?!’ And she said ‘Two years ago.’ Can you believe that? Two years!”

He’s stunned. It seems like such a large piece of news. Then again, he hasn’t been privy to any of Nancy’s news, lately, big or small. 

An uncomfortable mix of emotions rises up within him. He can’t even begin to try to ascertain how he’s feeling; all he knows is that this is too much excitement for one day. Frank sighs heavily, fiddling with his phone. “I hope she’s out of there soon.”

“Me, too. Hey – do you wanna go poke around in the ticket booth? See if we can find what the cipher was referencing. It’ll at least keep you busy.”

He wavers. Part of him wants to wait right here, just in case Nancy needs anything, but the rational majority of him knows she won’t. And it would be nice to stay occupied, to keep himself from worrying.

“Good idea,” he says, clapping Joe on the shoulder gratefully. 

On their way up the stairs, he pulls out his phone to text Callie. I need you to do me a favor.

Her reply comes instantaneously. Sure, what’s up?

There’s a hammer in my office under my desk

Okay? she writes back, confusion clear.

Get it. Then go to Penn Station. Get on the train and come to Boston. Then hit me in the head with it as hard as you can

Oh my GOD, Callie says, you are so dramatic. I don’t even want to know how badly you’re embarrassing yourself.

Yeah. He wishes he could forget about it, too. 

In the atrium, the ticket booth is closed. There’s a little sign that says Come Back Tomorrow! in the window, the shades drawn behind it. He and Joe slip around to the side and try the door handle; it opens immediately.

“Sweet,” Joe grins, “but how do we get underneath it?”

Frank toes at the floorboards curiously, trying to remember if he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary when he’d methodically examined the space two days ago, hiding from Nancy. One particular spot under the desk feels soft beneath his feet. 

He drops to the floor, feeling along the space. His thumb catches on a raised nail and he pulls his hand back with a hiss, seeing blood. “Fuck.”

“Let me see,” Joe offers, elbowing in beside him. He pokes at the boards more carefully, then fits his fingers around the nail and tugs.

The latch gives way, sliding off the floor. They stare dumbfounded into the hole revealed beneath the board.

“It’s the artifacts,” Joe says unnecessarily. Sure enough – they’re all there, sitting innocently side-by-side. “What are they doing here?”

Just as Frank reaches in to lift out an old vase, there’s the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking behind them. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

He turns around to find a handgun an inch away from his nose. “Holyshit,” Joe says, and they both lift their eyes slowly from the manicured nails holding it to Madison Blum’s face, schooled into cold impassivity. “I wish I had a dollar for every time one of us accidentally hit on a museum thief.”

“You’d only have, like, three dollars,” Frank says, doing his very best to stay as calm as possible. It’s far from the first time he’s been held at gunpoint, but does anyone ever really get used to it? He hasn’t.

“Still,” Joe muses, “It’s weird that it’s happened three times.”

“Shut up,” Madison says from above them, “Or I’ll kill you both right here.”

She’s probably going to do that anyway. She’s standing in front of the only door in or out of the ticket booth; there isn’t exactly anywhere they can go. “You don’t have to do this,” he tries, because the longer she’s talking the longer she’s not actually shooting them, “We know you didn’t kill Laura.”

“No,” she snorts, “That was that oaf in security. But you know what they say.” She looks straight at Frank, painted lips curving up into a smirk. “Love makes you do crazy things.”

His mind races, rewinding back to their conversation just a few hours ago. She’d been acting, then, of course, but she’d done an amazing job convincing him that Adam was following her around on his own for some creepy reason she didn’t understand. She’d played him perfectly and let him think that he’d won.

“So,” Madison says, seemingly delighted by the dumbfounded look on Frank’s face, “Where’s your friend?”

“What friend?” Joe rushes to ask, “We’re a party of two. ‘The Hardy Boys,’ they call us, not ‘The Hardy Boys and Friend’ –”

“The girl,” she grits out, leveling her gun on Joe, “Where is she? Spit it out, or die.”

“You’re gonna have to kill us, then,” Frank hears himself say, as though his voice is not his own. His mom is going to be so pissed at him if she ever finds out about this. “Because we don’t know where she went.”

“You’re lying,” Madison says, then tilts her head to the side and shrugs. “But it’s all the same to me. I’ll find her eventually.”

Her finger hovers over the trigger. Nerves twist in Frank’s stomach; he only has one chance to tackle her, so he’d better do it right.

Time suspends as he thinks about the last moment he saw Nancy before she disappeared into the tunnel and the desperation he’d felt. It’s easy to be strong when he considers how they’d left things; he has to do this and get he and Joe out of there so they can go back to their lives – so they can have the do-over they deserve. 

But just as he prepares to stand up, a shadow falls over Madison, and a vase whacks her over the head, shattering into pieces. “What the fuck --” she says angrily, stumbling to the side. Her arm swings out wildly; the gun falls to the floor.

Frank scrambles to pick it up as Madison wheels around and comes face-to-face with Nancy, who’s covered in dirt from head-to-toe. It’s in her hair, on her cheeks and caked onto her jeans and shoes, but even with the glare set on her face, she’s never looked so beautiful.

“Awesome,” Joe breathes from beside him as they both stand, Frank leveling the gun on Madison while Nancy wrenches her arms behind her back.

“You know that check we found?” Nancy asks, while Madison struggles in her grip, “Handwriting analysis didn’t turn anything up because they compared it to the rest of the staff, excluding Laura. She wrote the check for Madison. It’s all in her journal.”

“You found it?” Joe asks, “What else did it say?”

“Madison and Adam were threatening her family,” Nancy explains, “Madison wanted her to replace the artifacts with copies and sell the originals, but Laura was only stringing her along. She never had a buyer secured; the real artifacts have been down in the tunnel the entire time.”

“So these are the copies,” Frank concludes, nodding at the still-open latch in the floor. “Where’d the tunnel spit you out?”

“Break room,” Nancy explains, “It was not pretty.”

But it would make a trail of muddy footprints out into the alleyway behind the museum a sure thing. 

“You bitch,” Madison spits, “Let me go. You can’t prove any of that!”

“The cameras can,” Nancy returns nastily, “And once Adam sees how much time you’re both looking at, I’m sure he will, too.”

God, she’s wonderful. Frank knows he’s staring, but he just can’t stop himself. 

“Dude,” Joe mutters disgustedly from beside him, “At least wait until you put the gun down before you look at her like that.”

*

They split the fee and credit, 50/50. The plaque the museum puts up in the newly reinstated exhibit bears all three of their names, and in the newspaper interviews they do afterwards Frank makes sure to emphasize Nancy’s fantastic work and literally life-saving measures. 

Joe takes care of most of the press, though, wrapping up the rest of the logistics so he can be free to take Nancy to lunch, which he offers to do after only a minimal amount of shoving and menacing glares from his brother.

Truth be told, he still isn’t exactly looking forward to being alone with Nancy. She’s probably been biding her time until she has to let him down gently and disappear gracefully from his life again, and he’s… reluctant to let that happen, to say the least. The last few days have been torture, sure, but in the most wonderful way possible.

He isn’t ready to let go yet.

Still, he has to face the music sooner or later, right? Frank figures he might as well do it over a lobster roll.

They find a restaurant by the harbor, overlooking the water. It’s mostly empty, because they’re early, for lunch, but it’s nice to have some time to themselves – less awkward than he’d expected it to be.

Nancy’s all cleaned up and looking as beautiful as ever, unfortunately. It’s a little hard to concentrate when the water behind her makes her eyes look even bluer, her pretty hair shining in the sun.

“When are you guys flying back?” she asks, once they’ve placed their orders and are left alone with their ice water. 

“Tonight. Should have a week or so to hang out before our next case upstate.” Frank pulls a face at her. “Another haunted school or something. What about you?”

“Oh, me, too,” Nancy says, “But I don’t know where my next case is. Or when. I’ll have to check with George once I get home.”

He nods. Rather than say literally anything appropriate, spanning a number of approved, platonic topics, Frank hears his stupid mouth blurt out, “So, you and Ned broke up?”

Nancy shrugs, chagrined. “Joe told you? Yeah. A while ago, actually. It was for the best.”

It seems like a dismissal, but Frank only stares at her, unwilling to just let it go. “What happened?”

Nancy considers her answer, looking at her glass. “We just grew apart, I guess. We’d been together for so long neither of us realized it just wasn’t working. Ned wants someone who’s… around more. And I was never around, even when I was, you know? Always thinking about…” her voice trails off. She swings her eyes back onto his. “Something else.”

It is unbelievably stupid for him to get his hopes up – he knows that. But he does anyway, his heart pounding as he watches her from across the table. “What happened between us, Nancy? Why’d you stop taking my calls?”

She purses her lips. “I know it sounds stupid, but I never knew what to say. I know you were disappointed about the agency. And I was never sure if I made the right decision. And the longer it’d been – the more out of control things got. Eventually I figured you… probably didn’t even want to hear from me, anymore.”

“I was disappointed,” he admits, “But… you had every right to say ‘no.’ not working together was never going to be the end of our friendship.”

“I realized that eventually,” she says, lowering her eyes to the table. He watches her fingertip draw patterns through the condensation left behind by her glass. “And I know I should have called you. But I was afraid. I thought – I mean, I couldn’t handle having you look at me differently, not after everything. The truth is… I was scared. I know it sounds crazy, but – you and Joe were always more important to me than any old case. If I went all in with you guys and let you down –”

“You couldn’t have let us down,” Frank says, cutting her off with a shake of her head, “We love you.” 

For so long, he’d convinced himself he was waiting for the perfect moment to talk to Nancy about the way he felt. He’d tell her when the timing was right – that was what he’d always promised himself. It was easy to put off, that way; while she was with Ned, the timing was never right. When their lives were in danger, he cared less about waiting, and had gotten uncomfortably close to the truth in his worry for her on more than one occasion.

Now is his opportunity to be brave, he can see it as clear as day. If there was ever a perfect moment, it seems obvious that they’re sitting in it.

Frank shakes his head. “I love you,” he amends, “I always have.”

Nancy stares back at him in shock. “What?”

“Uh, what do you mean, what?” He asks, startled himself, “I thought you knew.”

“Knew…” the word fades as her eyes fixate on the horizon, squinting out into the sun. Nancy’s quiet for a moment, then she gasps dramatically. He can see the second it all makes sense reflected in real time on her face. “Oh my god.”

Frank feels himself rapidly losing control of the situation. He isn’t sure he’s ever experienced such a lethal combination of panic, hope and desperation before. “You really didn’t know?”

She’s a detective, for Chrissakes. He was so sure everyone knew. Even Bess and George had started giving him looks, before Nancy had stopped inviting him and Joe around. “No,” Nancy groans, dropping her head into her hands. “How can you even stand to look at me? I can’t believe I – gosh, I’m so sorry, Frank.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” he assures her, “It’s okay. You were with Ned. I’d’ve never wanted to come between you.”

Nancy shakes her head. “You were already there,” she says, which is just about the last thing he’d ever expected to hear. It’s entirely possible his heart gives up and stops beating.

Their waitress walks over and sets their plates down. Neither of them acknowledge her or their food, their eyes locked on each other. A little grin is worming its way onto Nancy’s lips, and he can’t stop staring at it.

Frank’s at a complete loss for words. Finally, Nancy leans over and snatches a french fry off his plate, breaking the tension. 

Even chewing, she’s unfairly radiant. Butterflies swarm him and beat a frantic tornado in his stomach as he watches her. “So, that week break you both have,” she starts, bumping her foot gently into his under the table, “Any chance you’d want to spend it in Chicago?”

Frank grins back at her, already nodding before she’s even finished extending the invitation. Yeah – he thinks there’s probably a chance they’ll want to do that. A pretty big one, actually.

After lunch, they take a walk down the pier together. When Nancy bumps her hand against his four or so times, he slips his palm into hers and laces their fingers together, turning his head just in time to catch the way her cheeks go pink before she looks out over the water, too.

This can’t be happening. Surely he’s dreaming, and he’s going to wake up in five minutes to find that he’s in the hotel room with Joe, or knocked out cold from Madison’s gun. 

Things like this don’t happen to him. He’s become so accustomed to wanting that he’d never stopped to consider how it might feel to actually get the thing he’s been yearning for. He feels like he’s going to fall over.

“All this time,” Nancy says suddenly, as they reach the end of the path, by the docked boats, “I really missed you. Both of you, yeah, but… especially you, Frank. There’s so much I have to tell you.”

He lifts a shoulder at her in a half-shrug, unreasonably giddy. “We’ve got nothing but time, now.” He’ll be damned if he ever lets them go a day without taking again. He’ll fly to Chicago a hundred times if he has to. 

“I know,” Nancy laughs, “It’s kind of crazy to think about. But… I’m really excited. I can’t wait to show you around my office.”

“Me, too.” He’s dreamed about having her in New York plenty. It’s going to be surreal to finally get the chance to show her what he’s been working on. “Are you… sure you really want –” 

Frank cuts himself off, uncertain. This? Me? He’s pretty positive he could never endure removing Nancy from his life for the second time. Once was painful enough, twice will probably kill him. 

Surely his face displays some of the turmoil he’s feeling. Nancy’s own curious expression softens. There’s only the briefest flash of her sweet smile before she pushes up onto her tip-toes and kisses him, lips soft and gentle against his.

Frank’s brain short circuits, struggling to process what’s happening. 

Nancy Drew is kissing him.

He’s going to have a stroke. 

His arms move on their own and wrap around her back to pull her closer, thankfully, while his thoughts are still offline; Frank’s hands fit perfectly around the waistband of her jeans. Nancy’s own arms slip easily around his neck, and she clings while he kisses her harder, mouth moving more deliberately against hers. 

Frank leans over her, finding he’s unable to temper his own enthusiasm. He’s wanted this for so long it seems unbelievable that the moment he’s been building up in his mind for years is even better than he always thought it would be, more special than he could ever imagine.

The kiss makes it hard for him to have a doubt in his mind. Thousands of tiny fireworks explode behind his eyes, in his stomach, in his fingertips, in his heart. It’s like flying and falling all at once, his lips tingling with something that could only be magic when he swallows the soft sound Nancy makes into his mouth. If it’s at all possible, he wants Nancy to feel the same way he does. He wants her to feel as content, as at peace – he needs it.

When was the last time either of them got to feel something so perfect? He’s not sure he can remember.

But like he said – they have nothing but time, now. Frank stops to kiss her softly – once, twice, three times – before finally letting her up for air. 

“I’m sure,” Nancy whispers when they break apart, when all his brain can do is think wow, wow, wow, wow while he stares down at her and her swollen lips. “I want every last piece.”

“It’s yours,” he murmurs back immediately, voice rough. It always has been. It always will be. He’ll give her absolutely anything she wants.

Nancy’s thumb brushes his cheek, her eyes fond and adoring as they sweep the line of his jaw, lingering on the stubble coating his face. 

She smiles.