Nancy stood on tiptoe and craned her neck to see inside Rick’s dressing room. The first thing that caught her eye was the wide mirror over the makeup table. It had been shattered into a thousand pieces!
An emergency medical team had arrived, and they were on their way up the hall now, pushing aside the crowd of onlookers. “Make room!” Nancy called, flattening herself against the wall.
“Rick! Oh, where is he?” Bess cried frantically. She bit the back of her hand as she strained to get a good look. Just then, Rick appeared in the doorway. He had a stunned look on his face. His blond hair had been blown every which way, and the white towel around his shoulders was stained bright red. Looking down, Nancy gasped—Rick’s hands were bleeding!
As soon as the paramedics saw him, they broke into a run. Gathering around him, they picked him up and laid him on a stretcher. They began pulling slivers of glass out of his hands as Rick winced in pain.
“Back off, everybody!” one of the paramedics shouted as the crowd began to press in on them again. In what seemed like just a few seconds, they had finished their immediate task and lifted the stretcher. They carried the wounded star down the hall, out of the building, and into a waiting ambulance.
Once Rick was gone, the bystanders milled around, not knowing what to do. The police arrived and began inspecting the scene, interviewing people, and collecting evidence.
Nancy walked over to Kay, who was now sitting on the floor in a corner of the hall. She still looked pale as a ghost.
“What happened, Kay?” Nancy asked gently, crouching down beside her.
“He was w-wiping off h-his cold cream—” Kay stammered, staring off into space. “And the mirror just exploded! Thank God he had that towel over his face. He’d be blind—worse, maybe. And I was just on my way in there—it could have been me, too!”
A few minutes later, while police combed the area for clues, Pappas assembled the cast and crew.
“Listen up! I have a report from the hospital about Rick.” The excited buzzing died down as the producer’s voice boomed out into the vast studio.
“He’s going to be okay. They said it looked a lot worse than it really was, and that they’re going to release him tonight. His hands will be bandaged for a while, of course, but we can work around that. I’ve already contacted our writers to come up with some material that’ll explain his bandaged hands. If we can’t work this into the story line somehow, Luther will just stick to closeups. In any case, we’re not going to let this shut us down. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all still under contract, and that includes Rick. I want everybody back here tomorrow at seven sharp!”
Just then the police officer who had been examining Rick’s dressing room let out a long low whistle. “Hey, chief! Look what we found!”
The policeman held up a small metal object. “It’s a twenty-four-hour timer. Whoever set this up must have done it yesterday.”
Pappas, standing a few feet away, nearly choked. “That’s impossible! This set is closed down tight on Sunday. I even hired extra security. My own mother couldn’t have gotten in here!”
“Which means,” said the chief, “that it was probably an inside job.”
Now Nancy finally had a definite lead. She could rule out Dwayne Casper. He couldn’t have gotten onto the set to plant the bomb.
But that left her with only two other suspects—Pappas and Lillian. Their faces floated in front of her tightly shut eyes as she leaned against the wall, trying to concentrate amid the confusion.
Nancy shook her head and opened her eyes. She was back at square one with a dangerous killer still on the loose right under her nose! I’ve got to get put of here, she suddenly realized.
Quickly, Nancy sprang up and elbowed her way through a group of technicians hovering by the studio door. “Come on,” she shouted to Bess. “We’ve got to go!”
Pulling her friend by the arm, Nancy made straight for the front exit. But she stopped short when she saw Lillian standing directly in front of her, a smug smile on her face. “I’m way ahead of you, Miss Teen Detective,” she said, smirking. “Way ahead.”