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the door was ajar, I simply pushed it in. “I’ll just put down my files. It’ll only take—”
    I never finished the sentence. We both saw it at the same time.
    “Oh, no!” Greta said, an intense whisper escaping like steam.
    I could say absolutely nothing. A thousand tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I began to feel sick.

Chapter 4
    T im Stock’s two-story office/library, neat when I had left it two hours earlier, was now a complete disaster. The row of tan-colored filing cabinets that lined one wall had been vandalized. Drawers were overturned and hundreds of manila file folders were strewn about the room, their contents scattered wildly.
    We both just stared.
    “What…,” I stammered, “happened?” I am sure there were any number of brilliant questions that might have been posed at this point. That, however, was the best I could do. It felt like someone had struck me. It was odd because it wasn’t even really my office, or my possessions, or my papers that had been messed with, but still I felt sick. The office had been trashed. Pages in every color of the Kinko’s rainbow were simply everywhere—piled on the floor, littering the old beat-up desk, a few awkwardly straddling the computer keyboard.
    “Dear God,” Greta said, stepping into the room.
    “This is not good, Greta.” I walked around the desk, trying not to step directly on a large pile of bradbound documents, each one with a different pastelcolored cover, each about thirty pages thick. “Are these Freak ’s old scripts?”
    Greta quickly shut the door behind her and reached for the script I held out. “Oh God, Madeline. This script.” She flipped through it quickly and then rechecked the type on its pink cover. “This is today’s. All the game material we’re supposed to use in this afternoon’s taping.” She looked up at me. “It’s today’s script.”
    From her tone of voice, I got that this was a bad thing. I stood there, not knowing what to say.
    “Sorry, Madeline. You probably don’t know how serious this all is,” Greta said. “The scripts for any upcoming shows have to be kept under lock and key. We must assure the network’s Standards and Practices people that the outcome of each of our games will be strictly fair and aboveboard. It’s not just that we are Goody Two-shoes about it. It’s a federal law.”
    “A law for game shows?”
    She sighed. “Yes. Naturally, they don’t trust producers. Do you know anything about the old quiz-show scandals?”
    Of course I did. Not from the actual fifties, of course, but I did rent the movie Quiz Show to prepare myself for my new temporary career. The quiz-show scandals occurred in the early days of television. Back then, certain “creative” quiz-show producers were caught tampering with their contestants. They fed the correct answers to individual contestants in order to heighten the show’s tension and drama. Millions of viewers came back week after week to see if the same star contestants could keep up their winning streaks. When the cheating was uncovered and the shows were busted, these producers insisted that the shows were meant to be pure entertainment. That argument was frowned upon. Americans had been duped. They hadbeen led to believe they were watching a legitimate competition. Some have suggested our innocence as TV watchers was then and forever lost.
    “But, Greta, those old-time producers didn’t go to jail.”
    “Because they hadn’t actually broken any laws,” she said, smoothing her navy blue pants. “But afterward, the government fixed that. Now, the entire staff of every game show must comply with federal regulations and sign form 509. That form, Madeline,” she said, her voice as calm as ever, “promises that we’ll keep the secrets secret or they can throw us in…well…in prison.”
    Man. Jeez.
    I followed Greta’s eyes back to the door. I was sure I had pulled the self-locking door closed when I’d left the office earlier,