Mumbo Gumbo Read online

  “What’s happening?” Artie asked me. “Did you faint?”

  I looked over at Greta and saw the tense little lines on her forehead and remembered my task. She had a mess on her hands and I’d agreed to help her clean it up. Until I figured out what was really going on, I was not going to make more waves for Greta by freaking out her boss. A woman working in a man’s world has it rough enough. I could relate. But, clearly, something else was going way wrong here, at the offices of Food Freak, and it was bigger than Greta Greene had imagined. No mere unscrupulous contestant had broken into Tim’s office this afternoon, of that I was now sure. The intruder had to be someone with more access to the locked-down KTLA lot, day or night, than a contestant would have.

  I sat up on Tim’s old sofa and found my head didn’t really ache as badly as I’d feared. “I must have imagined it. Maybe I just drifted off for a moment. But I thought someone stepped into this office,” I said slowly.

  “What?” Greta looked frightened.

  “While you were resting?” Holly asked.

  “That’s outrageous! No one is allowed on this floor,” Artie said. He was a shortish man, but he could make his voice boom with authority. “I’m going to have a word with security. This just cannot go on. They know we work late on Food Freak. They have orders to patrol our hallways but never, ever to enter our offices. I’ll see what they have to say.”

  Artie left to call security, muttering that he simply wouldn’t have this, and Greta remembered a question she needed to get answered and followed him out, leaving Holly and me alone once more in Tim Stock’s office.

  I looked over at Holly. “Someone was here. I just wanted to keep it quiet for now. Somebody attacked me when you were gone.”

  “What?”

  “From behind,” I said. “Hit me hard on the head.”

  “Oh my God! Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear him enter the office and I didn’t see him.”

  “Oh, man!”

  “It was a few minutes after you left. Are you positive you didn’t see anyone on the stairs or in the halls?”

  “Not a soul. Oh, Maddie. I can’t believe it. And you didn’t yell? What happened? Where were you? What were you doing?”

  “I was dusting,” I said, trying to remember. “Over there. The desk.”

  We both looked over. It was covered with a clutter of papers and folders, and one large, heavy, oversize cookbook.

  “Remember?” I said. “That desk was completely cleared off. Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t,” Holly said unhappily. “It might have been. I was too preoccupied with clearing the floor of all the books and the script pages. Damn.”

  I stood up and walked over to the desk. How long had I been knocked out? What had the mystery man done in here while I was unconscious? Was he the same guy who had broken in to search the office earlier in the day? With the job somehow incomplete, had he come back tonight to finish it? Had he been startled to find me here, working so late, and then panicked and knocked me out before I could turn around and identify him? And what the hell was so important in here that he was looking for?

  “Where were you standing?” Holly asked, bending down to pick up the feather duster from the floor in front of the desk.

  “Here,” I said, joining her. “I was standing like this, with my back to the bookcases, leaning over and dusting. Like this.”

  “Then?”

  “Then, nothing.”

  “And you fell?”

  “I must have,” I said, not remembering a thing.

  “Right down here?” Holly asked, pointing to the rug below our feet. “Or over there, ten feet away, onto that awful sofa?” Holly wrinkled her forehead.

  I looked down. I looked at the ugly sofa. Now how the hell had I gotten all the way over there?

  “He must have picked you up and carried you to the sofa,” Holly said.

  “This is really too weird. And then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Holly said, worried. “You weren’t…”

  “Absolutely not. I’m telling you, except for the bump on the head, I’m fine.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I guess he carried me to the sofa. And then he made this little mess on the desk.” I gestured to the stack of envelopes and memos and heap of paper clips. “And then the guy vanishes into thin air. You heard no one and Greta heard no one.”

  “Well, you know what I think?” Holly asked. “I think Greta is lying.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And we should get the hell out of here,” Holly suggested.

  That wasn’t a bad suggestion. I was thinking we had done enough for one night. I was thinking I might call my friend Honnett. He was the guy you could most accurately say I’ve been dating. Except for the fact that we don’t actually go out on dates. And the fact that he hadn’t called me in over three weeks. The truth was, our relationship was sort of on uncharted seas, and if this had been any old regular night, I would have kept to my resolve to let him make the next move.

  Chuck Honnett had long-standing reservations about starting up with me, had some weird notions of our age difference being an issue. He’s over forty, had been married twice. There were maybe fifteen years between us, but I have never been a stickler for numbers. Still, the guy comes from a different sort of culture. He is a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and I descend from a long line of antiauthority types. On paper, we don’t work at all. However, recently, we’d moved off paper and into bed. I know how complicated that move always made things between friends. I knew it a couple of months ago, too. And, yet, it’s what I had wanted and so I did it anyway. I guess you could say “impulse control” is not my strong suit.

  “I’m going to call Honnett,” I said, looking up at Holly.

  “I thought you were giving him time,” she said, concerned once more. I hate it when my younger associate with the freaky hair and teenage fashion sense sounds like my mother.

  “You’re right. What was I thinking?”

  “That you don’t want to go home all alone tonight?”

  “Ah, yes. Thanks. That.” I gave Holly a cockeyed smile and then noticed something odd, right behind her left ear.

  “What?” Holly saw me shift my gaze and turned around to look behind her.

  “That bookcase, Holly.” On the wall behind Holly, the floor-to-ceiling bookcase, its shelves crammed with old books, seemed wrong. Slightly off-kilter.

  “Hey,” she said, checking it out. “It’s askew.”

  “It is.” I walked over and tried to see what was up. It seemed like the wall was made up of a solid row of built-in bookcases, but this one case, four feet wide and ceiling tall, was now pulled out on one side about half an inch. “I didn’t realize it wasn’t attached to the wall. Maybe…” As I spoke, I pushed against the side of the bookcase and it easily clicked back in place, flush against the wall, fitting seamlessly into the long line of bookcases. Then I tried pulling the bookcase forward. The heavy case, its shelves full of cookbooks, swung on invisible hinges toward me.

  “Oh my gosh.” Holly stood transfixed. The bookcase opened out smoothly, like a gate. We stared at the section of wall that was now revealed. The mystery of my secret attacker was instantly solved.

  Chapter 10

  A door.” Holly’s shock had reduced her to just a smidge above speechless. I had pulled the swinging bookcase completely open and we found ourselves staring at what was simply, plainly, and unarguably a small white door set flush into the wall.

  “A secret door,” I elaborated. “Holly, have you noticed that this whole scene is getting very…very…”

  “Scooby-Doo?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I know.” Holly scratched her head, which caused her blond topknot to wiggle from side to side. “First some ghost hits you over the head in a creepy old office building and now this mysterious door. I mean, what next? What’s on the other side of
this wall?”

  A good question. In my short tenure on Food Freak, I hadn’t studied the office layout in great detail. I couldn’t be sure if this hidden door would connect to the next office over, the one occupied by Jennifer Klein, down the corridor to the right. I had visited her several times over the past week, receiving game-show writing tips and sympathy. I couldn’t recall seeing any interior office door on her side that would align with this one, but then again, such a door could have been covered up in some long-ago remodel. Perhaps, in some prior life, this section of the old studio had once been configured as a suite of offices and this blocked door was a vestige of that past arrangement.

  “It’s probably something completely mundane,” I said. “Like from some long-forgotten production office. And the door probably just leads into Jennifer’s room next door.”

  “Did that bump on the head knock the freakin’ romance completely out of you?” Holly asked, still whispering. “Come on. Aren’t you going to try the handle?”

  “I’m sure it’s locked…” I took a step closer to the door, reached for the small brass knob, and twisted. To my surprise, it turned easily. “Or not.”

  “Let’s check it out.” Holly was always eager to plunge ahead. “C’mon. I’ll cover your back.”

  “Jinkies, Holly,” I said calmly. “Hold your horses.” And with that I pushed on the plain white door and watched it swing silently inward into pitch blackness. Holly and I stepped inside, and just as we moved forward, the plain white door shut tight behind us, pulled by a lever, locking us in and cutting off all light from Tim’s office. There were shrieks in the darkness. Ours.

  “We need a key from this side,” Holly said, jiggling the doorknob.

  “Great,” I said helpfully.

  But we shut right up as we soon bumped into an obstruction—just three feet in front of us we could feel a wall, and feeling around it, we realized it was only about four feet wide and so acted as a screen across the entrance to the new room. Feeling our way, we moved a few feet around it and into the room itself.

  “Lights,” Holly’s voice called out testily. We both patted down the walls just inside the door and around the vestibule wall, searching for a switch. All I felt was the cool, rough-textured walls. Holly’s escalating curses indicated that she hadn’t found any light switch either. It was extremely dark in that room. Excessively dark. Oppressively dark.

  “Cell phone?” Holly whispered, hoping I had mine with me.

  “In my purse. Back in the other room.”

  “Permission to scream?” Holly asked, her voice edging up to the higher octaves.

  “Soon,” I said. “I think I can almost see something.” After several seconds of feeling around blindly, our eyes were gradually becoming accustomed to the pitch dark. I was beginning to get a sense of what this room might be. Faint, faint light was seeping in from Tim’s office next door, along the cracks between the bookcase, filtering into the gloom. Slowly, the space began to form itself into shapes. My eyes strained, searching for something familiar, as objects began to emerge in darkest relief, charcoal gray against the inky blackness.

  “I am not scared,” Holly’s voice said from somewhere in the darkness.

  “I’m proud of you,” I whispered.

  A large, low object took shape ahead of us, on the north side of the room. My brain loves a puzzle and this object struck me as being about the right height and size for a sofa. But, wait. That would be all wrong. The sofa in Jennifer Klein’s office is set against her west wall. Unless I was somehow turned around.

  “What’s that odor?” Holly asked, her voice sounding like she had stopped breathing through her nose.

  “I’m not sure. It’s musty in here,” I replied. “We have to find the light switch.” I took another tentative step forward and confronted another familiarly shaped object. A small wooden table seemed to jump up and knock into my shin. “Heck!”

  “What is it?” Holly asked. Her voice was nervous and jumped out at me from back near the wall that masked the door. “Mad, I can’t find any light switches.”

  “Why don’t you try the door again?” I suggested softly. “I can manage here. Feel your way around that little wall and then try feeling around the door for a dead bolt…”

  “No,” Holly called out stoically. “I’m having fun.”

  Holly always knew how to make me laugh. “I’ll bet,” I said, smiling in the dark.

  “Do you think there’s a lamp on a desk or something?”

  I took another step forward and froze. Something cold and snaky brushed against my cheek. “Schnitzel!”

  “What? What is it?” Holly’s voice hissed at me with some urgency.

  My hand, out of reflex, rose up to my face to slap away whatever it was that had touched me, that slither of something thin and cold and evil which had shocked me in the dark and caused the hair on my scalp to go tingly. Blindly, I slapped at the air. And there it was again, swinging away and whipping back to strike me. I had swatted something, something dangling from above, some unimaginable trap set to spring at me in the dark.

  “Mad Bean, tell me what is going on with you or I’ll go insane,” Holly’s voice rang out from somewhere close behind me.

  “Wait. Stay where you are.” As I thrashed in the air above my head, I found it swinging away from me again. What was it? The thin, metallic coldness reminded me of something. Like a chain, or a necklace, or…I realized with a certainty what was taunting me in the dark. I had been engaged in battle with an old-fashioned, hanging metal-chain pull cord, the kind that looks like a long row of BBs, the kind that was often attached to ceiling fans. Or antique light fixtures.

  “Maddie, I’m freaking out. What’s going on?”

  “Wait.” I waved my hand above my head in the darkness and found the cord, dangling innocently. One sharp tug and the darkness was instantly replaced with a well-lit, windowless room.

  Holly and I had to squint in the sudden brightness, but we could clearly see that we weren’t in any writer’s office. Come to think of it, the door to Jennifer Klein’s office was at least twenty feet down the corridor from mine. Between them, I now realized, was some unaccounted-for space. This room.

  The secret door behind Tim Stock’s cookbook library shelves had led us to a small and neat little bedroom—a bedroom out of another era. The hulking low shape against the north wall was a twin-size bed, not some office sofa. And on the bed was a fawncolored chenille bedspread with blue flowers.

  “Wow,” Holly muttered. “This looks just like a movie set. Like from the fifties.”

  “More like the thirties.” The floor was carpeted wall-to-wall in an eggplant-purple rug that featured a swirly sculpted design. There was a roll-armed club chair in gold-colored velvet with a matching ottoman, and a small Chinese-style writing desk in black lacquer with gold trim.

  “This place is cool,” Holly said.

  “In a Twilight Zone kind of way.” The space was narrow, but ran the entire length of Tim’s office next door. However, its size and its furnishings were not as remarkable as what the room didn’t have. There was no door out to the main hallway. There were no windows.

  “What should we do?” Holly asked, still standing back.

  “Since we don’t have the option of leaving right at this moment, anyway, let’s give ourselves a minute or two to check this place out.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Well, either Tim Stock’s disappearance is suspicious or it isn’t. Either somebody wants to sabotage Food Freak or they don’t. But whatever is going on, I’m not about to stand around getting bonked on the head again. I need to know what is happening. Look underneath everything and in every drawer.”

  “You always know what to do, Maddie,” my loyal assistant said, always eager to give me props for leadership.

  “Now that we’ve got light, go back and check that door, will you? See if there’s a way to unbolt it from this side. Report anything you find.”

 
; Holly disappeared behind the vestibule wall and then reappeared. “This little wall blocks all the light from that other room. Isn’t that odd?”

  “Or perhaps it was designed to keep all the light from this room from being observed from Tim’s office?”

  “That’s true.” Holly, like me, seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Any way out?” I asked.

  Holly shook her head.

  Since we were sealed into our newfound room, I didn’t plan to waste any more time. “You take the desk,” I said. “I’ll check the bed.”

  Holly nodded and went over to the Chinese lacquer desk, sitting down on the small gilt chair. She pulled out the center drawer and looked up at me. “Nothing.”

  I’m not sure what we were hoping to find, but this discovery was a letdown all the same.

  Holly began opening up the side drawers of the desk as I turned to the twin bed. It was neatly made up, with its bedspread folded around one plump pillow. I pulled back the spread and saw nothing but a dark gray blanket tucked under crisp white sheets. I smoothed my hand underneath the blanket and pillow, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to be found there.

  “These drawers are all completely empty,” Holly said, disappointment in her voice. She closed them one by one.

  “Nothing in the bed, either.”

  I surveyed the small space. There were few other objects to search in the sparsely furnished room. No closet. No other furniture with drawers. Just one framed picture on the wall over the bed, an old faded engraving of a girl sitting on a porch swing, circa 1932, the kind of cheap decoration that might have been found in a hotel of the period.

  Holly stood up. “It’s surreal. Like maybe this place was set up seventy years ago and no one has been in here since then. That’s why it has that musty, dusty smell.”

  Perhaps. But I had another idea. I’d been hit over the head twenty minutes earlier by some intruder, and whoever did it was neither seen nor heard anywhere near the outer hallway. What were the chances my attacker might have been lying in wait in this room? I pulled the mattress back off the bed frame with a strong heave and there, lying between the old bed boards, was a copy of a magazine. Gourmet. Last month’s issue.