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  “Maybe.”

  “Where did he go?”

  I had asked myself the same question all week. “Maybe Las Vegas, but they’ve called all the hotels and he isn’t checked in anywhere.”

  “Not under his own name,” Holly guessed.

  “No one seems to know where he is. And since I have never met the guy, I can’t even guess.”

  Holly sat back on her heels and took a break. “The fact that a guy is missing and his office has been trashed…”

  “I know. I know.” There were just too many coincidences and secrets.

  We looked at each other. Holly’s white-blond hair fell over her forehead in long straight bangs, while the rest had been caught up in the back at a jaunty angle in a sloppy topknot. “So what do you think is really going on with this missing dude?”

  “He’s not technically missing. He’s just…well…not here. He could be on a two-week cruise to Mexico or holed up drunk as a skunk in some cheap motel in the desert. That’s what all his coworkers think. The one who is most upset is Artie Herman, who is just a sweet old guy.”

  “The executive producer?”

  “Right. He seems very concerned, but in a fatherlybossly kind of way.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be doing any undercover investigating here,” Holly continued, now on her knees handing me books. “Your trouble is, you don’t seem to be able to leave any puzzles alone. You are a problem solver, Maddie. It’s your gift and your curse.”

  I bonked her on the topknot with the pamphlet on “Peas!” I was about to shelve. As we talked, I took each book she handed me and shelved it according to the simple organizational system Tim’s office library employed. All the cookbooks for any particular single subject were filed alphabetically by subject. I stuck the “Peas!” pamphlet and a thin volume offering 101 Simple Carrot Recipes onto the low “Vegetables” shelf, and the book espousing the He-Man’s All-Steak Diet up on the “Meats” shelf.

  “I’m not really getting too involved here,” I said. Denial is my friend. “I’m out of here in a week. I just want to be helpful. You know me.” After only a week in a foreign land, surrounded by aliens, I had already lost my bearings. How had I come to accept all the nonsense? Perhaps it was the pace at which everyone worked, and the intensity. It kept one dizzy enough to begin to doubt that up was up and down was down. “I’m so glad you are here,” I said, taking another book from Holly, this one about Asian cuisine. The “Foreign Food” section was against the far wall, and as I walked across the room in my stocking feet, I continued explaining the bizarre set of circumstances. “The truth is, Holly, the mess here probably has nothing to do with Tim Stock. I think it might be my fault that this room was broken into.”

  “That’s dog poop! None of this is your fault, Mad,” Holly said, sorting through the books she had collected from the debris. She held up another cookbook featuring international cuisine—this time Greek—and flung it, Frisbee style, across the room at me.

  “Holly!” I caught it, and imagined the simultaneous flinches of every blessed librarian across the country as I snatched the book out of the air as gracefully as I could.

  “Good catch,” my assistant commented, with a grin.

  Despite her unorthodox library skills, Holly was making sense. I couldn’t believe how much more grounded I felt talking with someone who came from my own world. “Anyway,” I continued, “the big secret here is how paranoid game-show people behave when it comes to their clues and answers. They have this bunker mentality and seem to worry all the time that their game material might leak out.”

  I had come back to stand next to Holly and her stack of books, the better to reduce the likelihood of any of them going airborne.

  “And that’s why someone broke in here?” Holly asked. “To cheat on the game? Who would do such a thing?”

  “The contestants on Food Freak can win half a mill,” I said.

  Holly countered slowly, “But aren’t you even the teensiest bit suspicious that something else has gone wrong here, something bigger than a cheating contestant, and you and I might just be the dumb idiots brought in to cover up someone’s dirty work?”

  “It would make me feel a lot better if I could talk to this Tim Stock. I wonder if I put my mind to it, if I could track him down.”

  “Oh, dear…” Holly held up the little yellow sticky note she’d pulled off a mass of pens and notebooks in the corner behind the desk where someone had overturned all the desk drawers. The one that said “Heidi and Monica might have to die.”

  I gave my assistant a stern look, which, thanks to several long years of practice, she quite easily ignored. “Oh my God, Maddie. Oh my God. Who are Heidi and Monica? Do they kill the contestants around here?”

  “I don’t know who they are. That note could mean anything,” I said. “Don’t go overboard, okay? Tim Stock is a writer. This could be the premise of a new script idea. Everyone here is extremely dramatic.”

  “Really?”

  “I think that’s most likely a story idea, a little Post-it creativity.”

  “Right,” Holly said, “I get it.”

  “Wait.” I said. She was just about to discard the Post-it note. “Let’s keep this…just in case.”

  “Just in case, huh?” Holly said, warming back up. “What do you really think? Is anyone around here acting weird?”

  “Everyone acts weird here,” I said, sighing.

  “List all the suspects,” Holly requested, getting comfortable.

  “There’s this writer—Quentin Shore—and he’s the most aggravating, frustrated, silly person you’ve ever seen. But he’s not evil. He’s more like afraid of his own shadow. I used one classic four-letter word, and he just ran away.”

  “Mad,” Holly said, looking up from straightening a loose-leaf folder of notes and clipped recipes labeled “How to Gumbo,” “you have already cussed at your new job?”

  “I’m ashamed. They made me do it.”

  “Man! I would have loved to hear that! You swore at some writer?”

  I nodded sheepishly.

  “Just once?”

  “Okay. Twice.”

  Holly hooted.

  “But, honestly, he had it coming, Hol.”

  “Don’t tell me. I know it. They all have it coming.”

  “And Quentin is not the only Froot Loop out of the box. You would not believe Chef Howie.”

  Holly looked upset, “Aw, schnitzel. Don’t tell me Howie Finkelberg’s a jerk. He’s so hot.”

  “He’s okay, Holly. But he’s got this very strange wife. She’s completely nuts.”

  “Really?”

  “Her name is Fate. Fate Finkelberg.”

  We just looked at each other. “Maybe,” Holly suggested, “that name alone pushed her over the edge.”

  “And I have to admit…” I lowered my voice. “Even my old pal Greta has me worried at times.” Although the office door was closed, we were both aware that Greta was working late in her own office down the hall.

  “Take my advice,” Holly said. “Trust no one.”

  “Amen.”

  Around us, patches of floor were now clear. We’d been at work for almost three hours, and the place was looking much better. Reams of disheveled papers had been picked up and placed in two industrial-size trash barrels. We had spent the first hour reading through most of the papers as we chucked stuff. The bulk of it was pages and pages of past scripts, which had come undone, the metal brads now scattered here and there. Many sheets were folded. Pages from different past shows were mismatched and mixed up together. Greta had told me earlier that these extra copies of old, used scripts were not important to the show anymore. One set of back-up copies was kept by Susan Anderson, another set by Greta. Holly and I had neatly stacked the hundreds of stray pages in the trash bin. Often, we’d find a page with handwritten notes scribbled on it. I became accustomed to deciphering Tim Stock’s scrawl. On one page that featured a recipe, he’d written: “Tell H to make the
garlic sexy.” On another, he’d written: “H can flirt with the eggplant.” Each show featured tidbits of information right before the first commercial. Often, Tim would write in corrections in his flowing peacock-blue fountain-pen ink, like, “Fix this! Should be 1, not 8 teaspoons!”

  “Do you think anyone would mind if I took these?” Holly asked, her blue eyes lighting on the old mix-and-match script pages.

  “Well…” I looked at the trash can, neatly stacked to the top with a season’s worth of jumbled show scripts. “Why not?” Greta said they were all worthless. They were scripts for shows that had already aired.

  “Bonus!” Holly whispered, cheering to herself.

  “But what will you do with them?”

  “Sell them on eBay.” Holly had decided to support herself through our tough financial times by becoming an Internet entrepreneur, putting all sorts of odd items up for auction on-line. In this way, she off-loaded a thirty-seven-inch mirrored disco ball, a vintage Bakelite mah-jongg-tile bracelet, and two acrylic paintings she had created back in art school during an experimental asparagus-stalks-as-paintbrushes period, and made over $300 in her first week as an eBay auctioneer.

  “Be back in a jiffy,” she said. Holly put the last of the hardcover books into a pile on her left and sprang up from the floor. I’ve never felt short at five foot five, but when Holly stood, I had to look upward about five inches to make eye contact. And that was when she was barefoot.

  “Where are you off to?” I asked.

  “I’ll just take this junk out to my car.” She backed up, pulling the gray plastic trash barrel on its heavy-duty wheels, and carefully maneuvered it to the door between the tall piles of cookbooks.

  “Okay. Come back soon,” I called. “Greta said she’d stop in and help us if she could.”

  “Gotcha.” Holly pulled open the office door and was quickly through it and down the darkened hallway.

  “You want me to go with you?” I called after her.

  “Hell, no. I’m illegally parked in an executive’s parking space right near the door downstairs,” she called back. Her voice faded so that I almost didn’t catch her last line. “Who’s gonna bother me on a security-patrolled lot?”

  Who indeed? Perhaps that was the most worrisome issue in today’s office break-in. Who had been able to penetrate studio security to get into this office during the middle of a busy workday? Of course, anyone who was already authorized to be on the lot could have done it. Anyone on the Food Freak staff or crew. And anyone who had been given a day pass, like the contestants who had been waiting to be taped before they were sent home.

  I turned to dust off the top of Tim’s desk. There was one last paper, a Xerox copy, to be dealt with. I picked it up and wondered where it should go. The trash? A file drawer? Tim had made a copy of a small packet of one of those old-fashioned berry-flavored drink mixes that kids used to like. Perhaps an errant piece of Food Freak reference material? I pulled open the now organized center desk drawer and placed it there. I’d figure it out later.

  It was nice to see the desk so spotless, all the debris and papers finally cleared off. I had a feather duster and gave the old oak surface a quick brushing. But why, I wondered, would any contestant risk being caught in the head writer’s office? It would mean immediate disqualification from the game. And how would they know the office wasn’t occupied? It made no—

  And that was the very last thought I had before the shocking flash and the vivid pain and the room tumbled inward suddenly and melted into black velvet.

  Chapter 9

  The faint, high-pitched drone of a tiny siren seemed to move farther and farther away, becoming softer and more familiar, and exactly like the sound of Holly’s breathy voice. A murmur. As the words came into focus I noticed that the voice held a terribly concerned tone. “Maddie? Maddie, are you all right?”

  I wasn’t sure I really felt like opening my eyes. Nicer to snooze a while longer.

  “I’m going to tell Artie.” That voice seemed to come from a different direction. I realized it was a different voice. I was so pleased with that discovery, I smiled. “Something is wrong,” said the voice. Why, it was Greta Greene’s voice. What was she doing in my bedroom? I’d have to wake up to find out and I wasn’t really in the mood.

  “I’ll stay with Maddie,” Holly’s voice whispered from somewhere.

  “No, that’s okay,” I mumbled. “I’m waking up. I’m—”

  I opened my eyes then, and instead of my small cheerful bedroom with its maize-colored walls and white lace curtains, I saw a two-story-high wall of bookcases, a big oak desk, and mottled gray industrial carpeting.

  “Madeline?” Holly said softly. “Were you napping?”

  “I’m…” I reached down to touch my soft, vintage quilt and was startled to feel my fingers brush against the stiff Herculon fibers of Tim Stock’s office sofa. I looked down and saw tweed, mixed fibers of burnt orange and brown.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I got back and here you are,” Holly said, talking low, “asleep. Then Greta came down the corridor and we couldn’t seem to get you to wake up.”

  “Ow.” I reached back and felt my head. A tender, egg-shaped lump was taking shape. “Did you happen to see anyone, Holly? Some guy, maybe, running down the hall or down the stairs or out in the parking lot?”

  “No, nobody. What’s going on, Mad? Was somebody here?” Holly asked, her voice unsure.

  “See,” Greta called from the open doorway. She had returned, accompanied by Artie Herman, who pushed her aside to see me for himself. He had apparently been working late, too, staying past nine P.M., up in his executive office on the third floor. Artie wore his gray hair longish, and his curls were slightly disheveled. For a seventy-year-old man working late, he seemed surprisingly youthful in his typical uniform of khaki pants and work shirt, the sleeves rolled up. The faded blue denim shirt was loose everywhere except where it stretched to cover his small paunch of a stomach. Artie put his hands in his pockets and sighed through his nose a few times, like he was thinking things over.

  “Are you all right, Madeline?” Artie asked, pronouncing the end of my name “lyn” instead of “line,” with a long i. “You look—you should excuse the expression—like crapola, darling. What the hell happened?”

  “I’m just resting,” I said, unable to actually get my mind around the answer to Artie’s question. Had I fainted? Or had I been struck from behind? I looked around and noticed a large, glossy, coffee-table-size cookbook on top of the desk. That desk surface had been cleared off the last I could remember. “I’m fine,” I repeated. “Who else is working late here tonight?”

  The production offices for Food Freak occupy three floors of the west wing of building 12 on the KTLA studio lot. On the ground level is the public area of Food Freak’s domain, including the main entrance and a large reception area, along with the contestant department. Stella and Nellie and their assistants have offices on the first floor, next to two large contestant audition rooms and another game run-through room. There are stairways on both sides of this wing that lead to the floors above.

  Freak’s offices are mostly on the second floor, including the large head writer’s office and research library, normally occupied by Tim Stock, where we were presently assembled. Also on this floor, Jennifer Klein and Quentin Shore each had an office. Greta Greene’s large corner office was down the hall. Her outer office held the three desks used by her production assistants, Susan, Kenny, and Jackson.

  Upstairs, the top floor contains Artie’s large office and the second story of Tim’s office/library rises to that third level, too. But in such an old building, with all the remodeling and reconfigurations done over eighty years to accommodate hundreds of productions and their varying space needs, there were more than a few oddly shaped rooms without windows that were used as supply rooms and storage space. Several offices on each floor had been locked and were apparently not in use, or were used only occasionally by the cus
todial staff.

  “So you’re fine?” Greta asked, not sure if she should press me further.

  “Fine,” I said. More or less. Someone had hit me over the head, of course. Some unknown someone had crept up behind me, and, as the other great TV chef Emeril Lagasse might say: “BAM!”

  “Anyone else working tonight?” I asked casually, feeling more like myself every minute.

  Artie looked at me as if I was nuts. “You mean anyone crazy like you and your friend here, working way too late? I know you are new here, young lady, but you don’t have to work so hard.”

  “Okay,” I agreed affably. Greta was trying to keep all the problems associated with Tim Stock’s office below Artie’s radar so I didn’t try to deny that Holly and I were just a couple of crazy show-biz workaholics with ambition.

  “There is no one else here,” Greta answered, looking over at Artie and back to me. “Just Artie, who has been upstairs in his office, and me down the hall in mine. Why?” Greta sounded worried. Any moment Artie might discover things were starting to go very wrong. What if he suspected that his production offices were not as secure as they should be? That his shows’ scripts had been messed with? That his head writer was gone and the writer’s replacement was found out cold in her office? Would he blame his producer for all these random acts of strangeness? Of course he would. “Did you hear something, Maddie?” Greta asked.

  I began to doubt myself. Had I heard anything? “No. I didn’t.” Had I really been attacked? It sounded far-fetched to me, sitting there, and I was the one with the sore noggin and about ten missing minutes. I wasn’t so sure that telling my weird tale and showing them the lump on my skull was my best option.

  “I’ve had my office door open all evening, Maddie. I haven’t heard a thing on this floor for over an hour. Except for Holly. I heard Holly coming and going ten minutes ago and looked out to see who it was.”