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wasn’t I? I know I was rushing, but…
    Greta looked at me with a wan smile. “It’s all my fault. I should have had you sign that form, too—the 509. My fault. An oversight. So now it all lands back in my lap, and I’ll be lucky if all they do is fire me.”
    I blinked. How could this be? I had been having such fun playing in the world of game shows. I had found the greatest temp job on the planet. I was making a delicious amount of money and doing hardly any work. I simply looked up and fiddled with a few recipes a day. I sat in meetings and talked about food, for crying out loud. And it was good karma, too, since I was helping out a friend in need. How could it be that I was now suddenly on the verge of sending my generous buddy Greta to prison ? How had I managed to do so much damage by simply forgetting to slam shut my freaking door?
    “This is bad,” I said, looking around at the disaster area that had once been a tidy office. And another, even grimmer thought struck me. What if this vandalism turned out to have a cause that was even worse than Greta imagined? Why had someone trashed this particular office? Was it just a potential game-show cheat, catching an unauthorized early peek at an upcoming script, bad as that would be? Or was the targeting of Tim Stock’s office perhaps connected in some way to the disappearance of Food Freak ’s head writer? There were too many possibilities for me to keep everything straight.
    Greta, even under stress, never showed a feather ruffled. “There’s a show-business term you may not be familiar with,” she said, still her calm, soft-spoken self.
    I may not have had any previous show-biz experience, but just living in this town, you learn to pick up a lot of these quaint show-biz terms. “We are screwed.”
    Greta nodded.
    “Do we have to sneak out of the country?” I asked. Well, I can’t stay serious for too long or it hurts.
    Greta almost smiled and then got down to business. “Okay. We can fix this.”
    “Great.” I stared at the pile of tumbled scripts.
    “Okay,” she repeated, firmer. “Let’s not touch anything. For as long as we can keep this quiet, I’d like everyone on the staff here to stay out of it. I need to talk with Artie and he’ll tell us what we can do. You okay with that?”
    “Well, sure,” I said. I imagined myself under bright lights, a federal prosecutor peppering me with questions. I saw myself looking rather strained, but never cracking.
    “I have to make a phone call.” Greta pulled her cell phone out of her purse and began dialing. She looked up at me and stopped. “You don’t look so good, Madeline. You should go sit down.”
    “I’m fine. And I can’t sit anywhere.” The pile of papers and the green Pendaflex files with their nasty metal edges were strewn in such a way that they covered my desk chair. I was not terribly keen to try the Herculon sofa in the corner.
    “You should leave, honey. Go sit down in my office. Wait there. Let’s try to keep this contained until we know more about what really happened.” We were both staring at the enormous mess, some pages ripped while other papers were crumpled and folded. “Damn, it looks like someone didn’t care what he destroyed,” she said, her voice tight. “Damn.”
    “I’ll stay with you,” I offered, one last time.
    “No. I’m fine. I have to call Artie.”
    I opened the door and swiftly shut it behind me, glad to be away from the claustrophobic office with its worn-out furniture and its walls of bookshelves, with its yanked-open file drawers and an entire year’s worth of paperwork barfed all over the tatty carpeting.
    I walked quickly down the hall to Greta’s office and pulled open the door. Susan Anderson was standing there with the two contestant coordinators for the show. They looked up as I came barging in.
    “Oh. Hi,” I said.
    “Hi,” Susan said. Her own office connected to Greta’s and as long as the PAs were working, these offices could