Derek shrugged in resignation. “Let’s go find her.”
I glanced around but didn’t see her onstage, so I grabbed Angie as she walked by. “Have you seen Tish?”
“She went to the store, remember?”
“That was almost two hours ago.”
“Oh yeah.” She glanced around. “I haven’t seen her in a while and I’m getting hungry, now that you mention it. She probably snuck off to the prop room to visit Kenny.”
“I’ll go check.” I led Derek back around the scrim and we crossed to the adjoining studio where the prop room was located.
I knocked on the half-open door and saw Bruce, the head prop guy, look up. “Hey, girlie. What do you need?”
Bruce was a tall, good-looking, whip-thin black man. His speech was a colorful combination of fifties cool cat and eighties cool dude. He called most women girlie while all the men were bro.
I walked inside to ask about Tish and stopped suddenly. “Oh, my God.”
Huge papier-maché puppets were hanging from the ceiling and stacked together along the back wall of the two-story-high prop room. There were at least twenty of them and they were gigantic, nearly fifteen feet tall. Grotesque and misshapen creatures with human bodies and oversized animal heads, all grinning madly.
“Cat got your tongue, girlie?” Bruce asked, shaking me out of my transfixed state.
I pointed at the puppets. “What are those?”
“My in-laws,” he said, and cackled. “Nah, they’re puppets. You like? We used them for a Mardi Gras special a few years back and I couldn’t let them go. They’re cool, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Can I touch them?”
“Sure, sweet cheeks. They’re a little fragile, so be careful, but help yourself.”
“Brooklyn?”
I whipped around and saw Derek standing in the doorway. I’d completely forgotten what I was doing there.
“Puppets,” I said, pointing, before I realized how idiotic that sounded. I smiled at Bruce. “Sorry. I’ll come back another time to check out the puppets. Right now, we’re looking for Tish.”
He sat back in his big chair and crossed one leg over the other. “Tishy girl’s in here all the time, flirting with Kenny, but I haven’t seen her for a few hours. Did you check the control booth? She might be up there with the lighting director.”
Since Tish was the gaffer’s assistant, she worked closely with the lighting director and often took notes during the tapings.
“I’ll check. Thanks.” We ran upstairs to the control booth. It was a large room with a massive plate-glass window that looked out over the stage. Jane, the director, sat at a long console, surrounded by the tech crew that worked with her. She and the script supervisor, associate director, technical director, and lighting director all stared at a wall of monitors that showed every camera’s view, along with whatever graphic was about to come up.
Jane was on headset to the camera operators, the stage manager, and everyone in the booth. She told the cameras which shots to take and she cued the technical director to cut between the shots, blending it all together with lighting and sound.
The audio man had his own soundproof booth behind them. There were a few tall stools along the back wall for the producers and guests to sit and watch the action.
Tish wasn’t up there.
I turned to Derek. “I guess we could leave, but I really don’t want to go without making sure she got back safely.”
“Let’s check downstairs again,” Derek said. “We’ll take one last turn around the stage. Maybe she’s back by now.” We walked down the stairs and took the shortcut behind the scrim until we got to the curtain break. The cameras and crew were gathered down at the opposite end of the studio, still taping the last segment on the kitchen set.
I glanced around and easily spied tall, good-looking Kenny, Tish’s boyfriend, standing back behind the kitchen set. Not wanting to disrupt the taping, Derek and I stood where we were for another three minutes until Angie called out, “We’re clear, people. That’s a wrap for this shoot, but anyone working on the Studio Two load-in, take a fifteen-minute break and then meet on the stage next door.”
“Let’s go talk to Kenny,” Derek said, and reached for my hand. We started across the stage when all of a sudden, a thunderous boom rang out.
The stage door had been flung open and had crashed against the wall, causing the loud noise.
Garth, the nice old janitor who had tried to help me lift the stage flats, stumbled through the open doorway in a daze, dripping wet. He flailed his arms and cried out at the top of his lungs, “She’s dead! She’s dead! Call the police!”