The On-Location Mystery, Chapter 1

The Snowden Junior Snoops and the On-Location Mystery
By Mister Mistoffelees

1 Many Will Enter

    She was a girl of about ten years, with long silky blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes lighting a charming girl-next-door face. The big blue orbs particularly lit her troubled face at the moment, for she sat against a thick steel-tube post in a dank, dark basement, her slender arms pulled tightly behind the post and bound at the wrists, her mouth covered with a wide strip of cloth tied over it, accentuating her desperately flashing eyes. The school uniform she wore—the dark-burgundy jacket and white blouse with striped burgundy-and-yellow Oakcrest School necktie, burgundy-and yellow plaid pleated skirt, white knee socks and low-heeled loafers—was mildly disheveled from her struggles against the rope which bound her hands behind her and her feet stretched out before her on the dirt floor of the old basement in which she was being held captive. As she struggled to free herself, whimpering and mewling against her gag from her increasingly feverish efforts, the needle on a pressure gauge on the old boiler with which the frightened girl shared her basement prison was rising rapidly, past the green “safe” area and through the yellow “caution” zone, inexorably rising toward the red region marked “DANGER” in bold letters. In her struggles, the girl discovered a nail on the floor beneath her bound hands—she gathers it up, begins sawing fiercely at her bonds while the needle rises close to the top of the gauge’s scale and the boiler wheezes ominously—her eyes round with rising horror—

    “Brrrratz!” jangles suddenly through the speaker, and the struggling girl’s gagged face is replaced by a gaggle of big-headed dolls with small slender bodies and beestung-huge lips cavorting on the TV screen. Commercial break…

    “And after rolling around tied up on that basement floor for an hour,” Trish Dwight said with a sardonic giggle from her seat at the Abby-Abbie Abbey kitchen table, enjoying a burst of mid-September late-afternoon sunshine through the kitchen window, “anyone want to bet her clothes are perfectly clean when she finally escapes?”

    “Well Trish,” said Krysten in sarcastic agreement from her comfortable perch on Abby’s overstuffed recliner, “you know an Oakcrest girl never gets dirty, even when she’s captured by the villain!” Tricia and Krysten chortled wryly—

    “Are you about finished?” said Abbie with heat in her still-small ragged voice, grimacing at her sitters’ laughter. “We don’t make fun of your shows, do we?”

    Serenity Mabrey, sitting crisscross-applesauce on the floor beside her friend, humphed with her own sardonic tone. “Their shows are so stupid you don’t have to make fun of them—they make fun of themselves!”

    Trish rolled her eyes. “I’m just saying that the director isn’t being realistic. We all know that your clothes don’t stay all clean and neat when you’ve been captured and tied up by bad guys!” All present and accounted for knew that first hand, of course.

    “You don’t have to watch with us, then,” said Abbie primly, smoothing her knee-length blue-checked skirt as she flounced up and into the kitchenette to fetch a drink. The bus ran late enough that Friday afternoon that she hadn’t had time to change out of her school outfit before her favorite show started at its regularly scheduled time on KidWorld Network. She was hardly alone in her affection for the show; The Secret Life of Bettina Bright, Girl Detective was the favorite show in the entire age 10-14 girl demographic, and raking in not only big ratings, but big bucks in merchandising, as the two currently-unattended Bettina Bright book bags sitting on the kitchen table attested, not to mention the Bettina Bright sweatshirt Serenity was wearing. Or the Bettina Bright Halloween costume Abbie had already picked out, or… “Go flirt with Bobby Martin on the phone,” said Abbie with a haughty sniff. She knew perfectly well her elder stepsister’s buttons, and how to push them. But Trish, now a high-schooler closing in on her fifteenth birthday in a few more months, resolutely determined to not rise to Abbie’s bait, contenting herself with commenting haughtily in turn that Bettina Bright was all right for a kids’ show, which went far toward pushing a few of Abbie’s buttons by return of post. After a few more minutes of backchat about the sitters’ and the sittees’ taste in television programming, the show returned from commercial break, stopping Abbie and Serenity in their persnickety tracks.

    Bettina Bright was still bound tightly to the post, twisting her bound wrists desperately against the nail she had discovered on the floor while the boiler whistled and the pressure gauge swung inexorably toward the red danger zone. Finally, with a sudden snap, the ropes gave way; Bettina frantically untied her feet and ran to the heavy basement door, only to find it immovably barred by the villainous innkeeper who had imprisoned her in his inn’s basement. She despaired, whimpered, then spotted a pile of lumber and plywood stacked beside a wall. With the noise of the boiler screaming in her ears, she lifted a plywood sheet with a frantic effort and curled beneath it—the pressure gauge blew off of the boiler—

    The scene quickly cut to a knoll near the deserted lodge, where yet another Oakcrest-uniformed girl stood dithering. Every good sleuth needs a sidekick, and any Bettina Bright fan worth her Bettina Bright backpack and notebook binder immediately recognized the mousy, bespectacled curly-brunette girl in the picture as Bettina Bright’s bookwormish classmate, friend, and sleuthing sidekick Marybeth Harvey. Even as Marybeth dithered theatrically, the old lodge erupted into a rising ball of flame, with accompanying screams by Marybeth, who began running toward the burning ruin of the lodge.

    Krysten snickered sardonically. “I bet Bettina’s hair isn’t even mussed! A whole lodge blows up around her and she’ll look like she’s ready for her yearbook picture!” Tricia agreed with a snigger; Abbie and Serenity merely glared at their sitters. Meanwhile, Marybeth, still screaming Bettina’s name, picked her way into the now-open and miraculously not-burning basement—she started and squealed as a charred piece of plywood slowly rose from the floor—

    “I was right,” a slightly disheveled Bettina announced as she emerged from a hidden compartment beneath the basement floor, a shaken, frightened little girl of maybe eight years emerging shakily with her. “They weren’t really building anything with that lumber; they just used it to hide a trap door to where they were hiding little Melanie!” Trish snickered again; my hair looks worse getting out of bed in the morning!

    “But why?” asked young Marybeth sheepishly, fulfilling her purpose as Bettina’s means of explaining the solution to the mystery.

    “They knew they could blow up the lodge and kill me without hurting Melanie and throw off the search. After all, why would they blow up the place they were keeping their hostage? And the ransom would more than pay to rebuild the lodge, and everyone would think their insurance paid for it! It was an almost perfect plan! Now all we have to do is wait for Mr. Weener to come back to get Melanie, and we’ve got him!” she explained to her less-enlightened friend as she dialed her cell phone—also undamaged—to call in the police.

    “Bettina Bright saves the day again,” said Krysten deadpan. “In twenty-six minutes, and look—her school uniform’s still clean!”

    “You just go ahead and laugh,” Serenity replied haughtily while Abbie turned on the stereo in the corner of the living room to the right station. “It just shows how immature you are!”

    “Immature is expecting you’ll actually win that stupid contest,” said Tricia toward Abbie. “I heard they had about five thousand entries sent in to the radio station! Why do you think you’ll win?”

    The contest of which Trish spoke so derisively had been run by a local radio station in conjunction with the Bettina Bright production company. The winner plus a friend would get to spend a day as the guest-helpers of young Alexandra Blessington, the girl who played Bettina Bright herself, on the upcoming on-location shoot up on Zed’s Mountain near Snowden, and every single local Bettina Bright fan, it seemed, had sent in their postcards to WCCY down in Center City in hope of being Bettina’s helper-for-a-day. This was the day of the drawing, the winner being chosen right after the show, which explained Abbie’s haste to tune in WCCY. She found the right frequency—

    “…and this is Alyssa O’Rourke on The Big Drive Home here on WCCY-FM,” the voice on the radio pattered brightly over the last notes of an Alan Jackson song, “and it’s the big moment for all those Bettina Bright fans out there, when we pick the winner of the Bettina’s Buddy contest! Hey, guys, if I was allowed, I would have entered the contest myself! I never miss an episode, thanks to Craig and my TiVo, and let me tell you, I’m Bettina’s biggest fan! Well,” she said with a theatrical chortle, “at least her oldest fan! Anyhow, I’ve got the production manager of Bettina Bright here with me right now, Don Kurtzman, reaching down into the barrel for that winning postcard! Tell us again, Don, about the big prize!” Abbie and Serenity were fairly bouncing in place with fingers crossed—

    “Well, the winner and her friend gets to help out our star, Alex Blessington, for a whole day at our shoot next week up on Zed’s Mountain,” said he, “with snacks and pictures and gifts and all sorts of fun stuff! And you get to see just how our star lives out on the road when we go on location!”

    “Looks like you have the winner there, so just let me see that ol’ thing! The winner is—give me a drum roll!—the winner is…” She read off the name of the winner—

    Weak as her voice was, Abbie’s shriek of joy could be heard all the way down Rudolph Street. Serenity’s was pretty loud too…