Mumbo Gumbo (9 page)

T
he 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 custodial 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.”

“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.

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.

“Let’s keep looking,” I said softly, replacing the mattress carefully on its frame.

“Looking where?”

“You take the carpet. I’ll check the picture.”

“You mean like I should pull up this monstrous purple plush?” Holly grinned at me. “All right!”

I kicked off my shoes and climbed up onto the bed. I tried to take the large picture down from the wall. It wouldn’t budge. “This is strange. I can’t figure out how this picture is attached.”

“Yeah? Well, this is strange, too,” Holly said. I looked down and saw her sitting back on her heels on the floor. At the corner of the room, she had managed to pull back a corner of the carpet. “It’s tacked down all along that wall,” she said, pointing, “but then I found it was loose over here. Look at this.”

I climbed down from the bed, stepped back into my clogs, and went over to look.

There, beneath the carpet, were the unmistakable seams of a trap door. Holly pulled on a ten-inch length of rope and the trap opened up, revealing an old wooden ladder, which stretched down below into another darkened space.

“Madeline?” From not far away, a voice was calling, but the sound was muffled. Holly looked at me and I put my finger to my lips. It was Greta Greene. She was in the office next door, Tim Stock’s office, and
she was calling my name. There was no reason to keep our new discoveries a secret from Greta, and yet I felt the need to find out more before I decided whom I could trust. Besides, we had found our own way out.

I pointed down the ladder and Holly’s eyes grew wide. Holly looked down at the old ladder and made an “after you” type of gesture as Greta’s voice called my name once more. I couldn’t resist giving Holly another “after you” sweep of the hands. Maybe it was the ghost of Charlie Chaplin who was goading me on. Greta’s voice was closer, now, just on the other side of the wall, so I surrendered the pantomime wars by stepping into position at the top of the ladder. Taking one rung at a time, I descended quietly into the darkened room below. Holly, always the adventurer, began her descent just above me, her bright lime-green strappy sandals almost upon my fingers, permitting me no time to second-guess my course of action.

When I reached the floor below, I jumped off the ladder. Holly was soon beside me, and together we tried to get our bearings. It had occurred to me that we had taken one step beyond exploring. We had clearly escalated our adventure into prowling around the hidden regions of the old studio building. Holly, silent in the tradition of our new prowler status, gave me a look—a look that said, “I thought we were going to be spending the night cleaning up a few dumped files, so why am I following you down some freakin’ ladder into the bowels of a darkened studio late at night like we’re two fugitives from Alcatraz instead of lucky girls who are working on the greatest hit cooking show on television?” Or at least, that’s what her look said to me. I’ve known Holly a long time so I was pretty sure I had it right.

I responded with a look that said, “Don’t get all distressed. We’re fine. We’ll talk later. Until then, let’s just look around and figure our way out of this mess.”

Holly’s return look, I’m afraid, can’t really be interpreted in polite company.

Holly mouthed the words silently: “Where are we?”

Luckily, enough light escaped through the open hatch above so we could look around in the dimness and get our bearings. We seemed to be inside some old studio-props storage room, piled high with dusty furniture and worn-out file cabinets. Open shelving along the walls revealed manual typewriters and adding machines from the forties. There was other vintage office equipment, like water coolers and old wire wastebaskets and dozens of heavy black dial-front telephones. It was hard to say if these sorts of props were likely to be used by any of the studio’s current productions, but if they were, I’d bet the call for them was minimal. Holly followed me through narrow aisles between the stacks of furniture, until we came to a door.