Action! (6 page)

Once Mary gave us the go-ahead, Morris called, “Action!”

I stood rooted to the ground in horror. I had expected a rehearsal first—that’s the way Morris usually did it. He was probably in a real rush to finish. But I wasn’t prepared. Ever since I’d gotten back from the
fire at Jeffrey Allman’s house, everything had happened so quickly. I hadn’t even had time to go over my lines for the scene. In fact, I could barely remember whether I
had
lines in this scene!

Luckily Ben and Luke Alvarez knew just what they were doing. They prowled around the office, looking in every cabinet. They were acting as Ross and John Rackham, looking for the office safe. I just stood there, watching them in confusion until I remembered what I was supposed to do.

“Mr. Mahoney will be here any minute,” I said, frowning as I tried to remember my lines. “You two had best stop your nosing around.”

Ben, as Ross Rackham, laughed. “Calm down, Sissy,” he said. “We’re just curious.” He came over and helped me into one of the office chairs. While he distracted me, Luke, as John Rackham, pulled aside a painting of a sunset to reveal an old-fashioned safe.

“And … cut!” Morris called.

I heard applause and cheers from my friends, but my head was still spinning. Morris came onto the set to talk to us while the production assistants moved the painting back over the safe. “Ben, I’d like you to sound a bit more guilty when you talk to Esther,” Morris said. “You’re lying to your little sister, after all.”

Ben nodded.

Then Morris turned to me. “Nancy, you were
perfect,” he gushed. “The confusion on your face was completely real.”

No wonder why! Lucky for me, my stage fright worked in my favor—Esther is
supposed
to be confused in this scene. She has no idea why her brothers are snooping around the office, and she’s baffled by their behavior.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm my nerves. I had gotten through that take, but it wasn’t because I did a good acting job. I happened to be feeling the way my character was feeling. But in the next take, I was going to have to
act.
I didn’t think I could do it.

“Action!” Morris called.

Somehow I managed to stumble through two more takes. Morris didn’t give me any more compliments—he focused mainly on the Alvarez brothers, since they were the real stars of the movie.

By the time I had changed back into my regular clothes to go home, my heartbeat had slowed a tiny bit. The nervousness had been replaced by embarrassment. Morris and the Alvarez boys had told me that I did a good job, but I couldn’t help wondering if they were only saying that to be polite. I was convinced that I had made a fool of myself.

When I went down to the dining room for dinner that night, my dad greeted me with a big smile. “There’s my favorite actress,” he teased.

I knew what
that
meant. He was going to ask me all about my day on the set, but that was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Time to change the subject.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. I sat down at my place across from him. “How did your meeting with Peter Wyszinski go?”

It worked like a charm. Dad’s face grew serious, and I could see that my adventures in acting were forgotten. “It was pretty disturbing, actually,” he said. “Peter hasn’t even been the CFO of Rackham Industries for a month, and already he’s running into major trouble.”

I frowned. “What sort of trouble?” Usually I wouldn’t give much thought to the worries of corporate bigwigs, but Rackham Industries is the biggest company in River Heights. They employ more people and create more city revenue than anyone else. If Rackham Industries was in trouble, it meant that all of River Heights was in trouble.

“Accounting problems,” Dad said.

I wrinkled my nose. That sounded boring. “You mean their accountants messed up?”

Dad shook his head. “No, I mean someone has been cooking their books,” he said grimly.

I gasped. “Mr. Wyszinski thinks the accounts have been purposely falsified? Who would do something like that?”

Dad shrugged. “Any number of people could have done it. The big problem is that there’s no proof. All of this happened before Peter took over as CEO. He doesn’t even know if the books have been altered to hide some kind of overspending by the company, or if it’s a simple case of embezzling.”

“Then how does he know there’s a problem?” I asked.

“The numbers just don’t make sense,” Dad told me. “He’s got a new team of accountants looking into it. But that’s still not going to give him any hard evidence.”

I smelled a rat. “And if there was hard evidence, I bet it all went up in smoke just today,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“That big three-alarm fire was at the home of Jeffrey Allman,” I told my father. “Didn’t you say he just retired from being the CFO at Rackham?”

Dad nodded, his eyebrows knit together in concern. “I heard the sirens, but I had no idea the fire was at Jeffrey’s house.”

I filled him in on my visit to the Allman house that afternoon. “And I drove by again on my way home from the set,” I added. “There was just a pile of ashes left. I’ll bet the only thing that survived was the armoire I saw.”

“Was it still there?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “They must have hauled it away.
What a shame that the only thing they managed to save didn’t even have any value.”

Dad was still frowning. “I’ve known Jeffrey for years,” he murmured. “I didn’t know he collected antique furniture.”

“I didn’t know you were friends with him,” I said.

“Oh, we’re just very casual acquaintances,” Dad replied. “We’d see each other at the occasional town council meeting.”

The doorbell rang, interrupting our conversation. Hannah answered it, and a moment later she showed Bess and George into the dining room.

Bess’s hand flew to her mouth when she saw us at the table. “Oh, sorry!” she cried. “We thought you’d be finished with dinner by now.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dad said. “We’re eating late because Nancy had a long day on the set.”

“Why don’t you girls sit down and have some dessert?” Hannah asked, bustling in with two extra plates. “I made my famous caramel cheesecake.”

George sat down immediately. “No need to ask me twice,” she joked.

Bess took a seat next to her. “Did you hear all about Nancy’s triumph?” she asked my father.

My heart sank. I’d been hoping to avoid talking about my acting. In fact, I’d been hoping to avoid even
thinking
about it tonight.

“No, I didn’t,” Dad said. “How was she?”

“She’s a star,” George said. “She and Harold were both great!”

“Well,
Harold
was great,” I agreed. “I only had one tiny scene to do today, and I managed to mess it up. I couldn’t remember my line.”

“Don’t believe her, Mr. Drew,” Bess said. “She was terrific. The director said she looked completely natural.”

“That’s just because I got lucky—”

George cut me off with a snort. “Here comes the famous Nancy Drew modesty,” she teased. My father and Bess both laughed.

“Nancy is the talk of the set,” Bess reported. “The carpenters on my team were saying that she’s going to have to give up solving mysteries and focus on her acting full-time.”

I looked at my friends’ smiling faces. I’d been hoping to confide in them about my jitters, but now it was clear to me that they would never understand. Even when I admitted that I had done a bad job, they thought I was just being modest. How could I get them to believe that I had serious doubts about my acting abilities? I sighed. I’d have to deal with the stage fright on my own.

“So did you ever get to that fire, Nance?” George asked.

I nodded, relieved by the change of subject. “I was just telling Dad about it. The place belonged to Jeffrey Allman, the former CFO of Rackham Industries.”

“And if you ask me, the fire seems a little suspicious,” Dad put in. “Whoever was monkeying with the accounts at Rackham Industries would have a motive for getting rid of evidence. And there might be evidence at the home of the old CFO.”

“So you think it might have been arson?” Bess asked.

I shrugged. “Mr. Allman certainly seemed devastated. He claimed that he’d be ruined if the house burned down because all his money had been invested in his antique furniture collection.”

George whistled. “Did they manage to save any of it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Well, except for an armoire from O’Reilly Brothers.”

“That’s weird,” George said bluntly. “Why would he have cheap furniture from a place like that mixed in with his antiques?”

“Maybe he really needed an armoire, but he’d spent all his money on antiques,” Bess said.

“That’s possible,” I agreed. “He acted as if it was a valuable piece, though. I guess it could have had sentimental value.”

“And that’s the only thing they could save from the whole house?” George asked.

“They only had a few minutes inside before the last room caught fire,” I said. “One of the firefighters rescued a laptop computer, but Mr. Allman was so agitated and angry that he threw it back into the fire.”

All the blood left George’s face. “He threw his computer into the fire?” she cried.

Even though the subject was so serious, I couldn’t help smiling at George’s reaction. To a computer lover like her, purposely harming a laptop probably seemed like the worst possible crime.

“He was so upset,” I explained. “I think he threw the computer because he was frustrated.”

“But he could have salvaged some of the information on it,” George said. “I mean, furniture can be replaced, but who
knows
if he’ll be able to recover any files from his hard drive. That laptop may have been his only chance!”

Bess rolled her eyes. “He wasn’t worried about the computer, George,” she pointed out. “You may
think
the furniture can be replaced, but he obviously didn’t.”

Still, George did have a point. Since everything else in the house was gone, it was unlikely that any of Jeffrey Allman’s files had survived. The computer probably contained at least a few valuable documents.

“Did he throw it all the way into the fire?” George asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He threw it toward the fire, but it can’t have gone all the way back into the house. I think it probably just landed on the lawn.”

George pushed back her chair. “Let’s go look.”

Bess pulled her car to a stop in front of the remains of the Allman house. She gave a low whistle. “This must have been one expensive house,” she said.

“It was,” I agreed. “A big Georgian-style place. It was almost a mansion.”

George opened the back door and climbed out. “Hard to believe the whole thing is gone,” she said as Bess and I joined her on the sidewalk.

“There’s police tape,” Bess pointed out. The yellow tape was strung around what was left of the lawn.

“I’m sure the fire department considers this a possible crime scene,” I said. “If Dad and I both found the fire suspicious, it’s a good guess that Chief Cody did too.”

George squinted into the darkness. The dark shadow that had been the house was lit only by the nearby streetlamps. I pulled out the little flashlight I always keep in my purse and trained the thin beam of light onto the wreckage. I could pick out the brick
chimneys of three fireplaces standing up from the ashes like lonely sentinels. The rest of the house was nothing but rubble.

Suddenly George gasped. She grabbed my hand and pointed the flashlight at a spot on the blackened grass. “There’s the laptop!” she exclaimed.

Before I knew it, she had ducked under the police tape and was heading for the computer.

“George!” Bess cried. “Get back here!”

But George ignored her. She crunched across the burned grass and picked up the laptop.

“This is a possible crime scene,” I called, trying to keep my voice low. “You can’t take that!”

George gave me a defiant look. “It’s not like the computer is worth anything,” she said. “And we know it had nothing to do with starting the blaze. You said yourself that they got the laptop from the room that was last to catch fire.”

I bit my lip. She had a point. But I wasn’t comfortable removing evidence—any evidence. “We’re still not allowed to take it,” I protested weakly.

George tucked the burned-out computer under her arm and marched back over to us. “Not many people would be able to salvage anything from this computer,” she said. “But I might be able to find something left on the hard drive. Don’t you think that would comfort Mr. Allman?”

I exchanged a look with Bess. “I guess it might make him feel a tiny bit better,” Bess said.

I sighed. “Oh, all right,” I mumbled.

With a triumphant grin George led the way back to the car.

I shook my head and followed her. I had to admit, a part of me felt better knowing that she’d be looking into the computer. I didn’t know what I expected her to find, but it was a good thing that someone was digging for details about Jeffrey Allman’s house.

Because honestly, something about that fire just didn’t sit right with me. I had a hunch that it was more than an accidental blaze. And I’m a girl who’s used to believing in her hunches.

The Long, Bad Day