Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

  Glowering, Harry snatched the papers, but to his credit—Maddison hated bullying and despite her and Chris being much more in the wrong than this guy she did not like how he was behaving—he got about half a page in before deflating.

  “Oh,” he said, scowling at the paper. “I see. I—this is—I need to go try to make a call. Bethy, if you could, er, politely get rid of these guys? And make sure they sign waivers!” he added as he wandered off in the direction of the largest of the industrial white tents, scowling at one of the papers in particular and dialing his phone one-handed.

  “I’m sorry about him,” Bethy said, turning back to Maddison and Chris and clasping her hands in a nervous gesture. Redd was staring after Harry in puzzlement and not paying attention. “He’s . . . frustrated, right now. He’s mostly talk anyway, and he’s never successfully sued anyone in his life.” She ran a hand fruitlessly over her hair in an attempt to smooth it and held out a hand to Maddison. “I’m Beth—call me Bethy, everyone does. Bethy Bradlaw. This is Robin Redd, who I’m sure you’ve already met, or at least heard of—”

  Redd swept his safari hat off dramatically. “Always ready to meet a fan!”

  “The man you, err, landed on was Perry, our chief camera operator,” Bethy continued, before Chris or Maddison could protest that neither of them would rank Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter in their top ten shows. “The guy who just stormed off was the show’s producer and my brother, Harry Bradlaw. We’re in the midst of shooting an episode of Treasure Hunter. And we’ll be very glad to, uh”—she glanced across the clearing toward Harry, who was gesturing wildly on the phone, and set her shoulders—“give you both a tour before you go on your way, if either of you want it. Although if you want to make it to the camping area before it gets dark,” she said, glancing from her watch to the sky, “we need to make it a quick tour.”

  “We do?” Redd had been fixing the band on his hat but he looked up at that. Just in time, as it happened, for Carrie to inch around a tuft of grasses, limping slightly and panting.

  “So, I had to find a way down that hill that didn’t involve throwing myself over the edge and hoping,” she said, either so irritated by the events of the day that she didn’t realize she’d walked into the middle of a television shoot, or doing a credible job of acting like she didn’t realize she had more of an audience than Maddison and Chris. “And it took longer than I thought, and I—um.” Carrie suddenly had an excellent deer-in-the-headlights look.

  Redd was staring at Carrie in alarm.

  “What . . . ” Carrie said, looking lost.

  “Carrie!” Chris said brightly and only slightly hysterically, waving a hand in the general direction of Redd. “Did you know that Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter was filming in the park this week?”

  “Noo,” Carrie said. “No, I didn’t know that, why should I know that, I don’t have any idea what’s going on right now . . . ”

  Chris grabbed her by one arm and gently tugged her over to stand next to him and Maddison before she spontaneously combusted from confusion. Television stars, it turned out, were the one weird thing Carrie couldn’t roll with.

  We had to hit her limit some time, Maddison thought. Her own absolutely-can’t-deal-with-this was clowns, and she had a feeling they weren’t going to learn Chris’s until they were in some strange and unforeseen situation.

  “Bethy!” Redd said suddenly, tearing his gaze away from Carrie with obvious effort. “We could offer them the spare tent for the night?”

  “What?” Maddison said.

  “Oh, that’d be great!” Chris said, grinning at Redd, because he was, as Maddison had very quickly realized when he spent an evening chasing ghosts with her, the sort of person who liked to poke dragons. How he liked to poke dragons despite also being the sort of person who was convinced that dragons went out at night to eat maidens she didn’t understand.

  “Whyyy?” Bethy whispered mostly to herself, turning around so she could beat her head against the nearest tree. But then she pulled herself together and said, “Redd, why don’t you show Chris, Maddison, and”—she looked at Carrie—“I don’t know who you are.”

  “Carrie,” Carrie offered.

  “And Carrie,” Bethy added, “around the set? I’ll go . . . talk it over with Harry.”

  Maddison had never been particularly interested in the filmmaking process, annoying all the people who insisted that a girl who carried a video camera around abandoned buildings must have an urge to monologue into the camera. And Robin Redd had always been more of a joke for her than a halfway-decent television host, but she had to admit that he was a shockingly good tour guide. He gestured with his hat just as much off the air as he did on, turned out to know a smattering of interesting things about every part of the filming process, and was obviously friendly with everyone, from the producer to the woman in charge of catering.

  “Well, you see,” Redd said, “the smart actors know to make friends with the people in charge of the food. Hence, Flo!”

  He made dramatic-presentation hands just as dramatically off-screen as on-screen, too. The dark-haired, motherly looking woman he’d introduced as Flo swatted him with a slotted spoon but she was smiling, and she didn’t defend her pears when Redd snagged one.

  “Flo is also our nurse,” Redd added as he bowed them out of the catering tent. “So, you really have two reasons not to make her mad. You know who can really do some damage if they decide to kill people? Nurses. They know all the right places to stab.”

  He stabbed the air with a pear to demonstrate. It might have been more menacing if the pear hadn’t had a bite taken out of it, but Chris still looked back at the cheerful blue catering tent with a shiver.

  “And that,” Redd said, coming to so dramatic a halt that Carrie almost ran into him, “concludes this tour . . . of the set . . . of Treasure Hunters. Join me after dinner for a sneak peek at what we’re filming this episode!”

  “It’s Annie Six-Fingers,” Bethy said, coming up behind them. “With a special segment on the Russian spy plane that went down somewhere over Archer’s Grove in the fifties.”

  “Bethy, you ruined my reveal,” Redd sighed. “I was going to be the first to tell them.”

  “You’re going to be murdered by Karen if you don’t go let her touch up your makeup and shoot at least one take of the opening,” Bethy said, and Redd yelped and dashed in the direction of what he’d told Maddison, Chris, and Carrie was both the makeup tent and where the makeup person slept. She was also an assistant camera operator. It quickly became obvious that Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter was sadly understaffed.

  “I talked Harry around,” Bethy said to Chris, Carrie, and Maddison. “Or, well, I reminded him that if he tried to sue anyone they would sue him back for noise disturbances—he’s been yelling all day, it’s scaring the wildlife—and he simmered down and agreed that it’s only fair we offer you a bed for the night. Well, a tent. We can put up a tent for you.”

  “That would be amazing, thank you,” Carrie said. Bethy managed a smile for them.

  “Let me show you where you’ll be,” she said. “It’s a very nice clearing that’s just a bit screened from this.” She indicated the whole base of filming operations with one wide sweep of her arm. “We wanted one place to shoot Redd amongst the trees,” she said. “And then I’ll see if Todd wants to talk to you, he’s always delighted to tell someone about how cameras work.”

  Maddison had a sneaking feeling that she was never going to be able to watch Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter without a certain warm affection ever again.

  But it was also surprisingly obvious that all was not well with the crew of Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter. The camera crew were very nice but very jumpy, the producer was—well, the producer was Harry, and he quite obviously had a bunch of issues, and Bethy, who turned out to officially be the script writer, had dark circles under her eyes and the beginnings of a nervous twitch. And there was something very worrying about how small the crew of Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter (R
edd, Harry, Bethy, the camera crew, and Flo the caterer who doubled as a nurse) was. It suggested that the show was in dire straits—and that the crew knew it. This was not a film crew that needed a handful of unexpected teenagers making life more complicated, and both the crew and the teenagers knew it.

  Redd seemed not to be picking up on any of the tension, but Maddison sure was, and so was Carrie, and even Chris looked uncomfortable. But they couldn’t just get up and leave, either. The sky was almost dark already and there was still the possibility that someone was stalking them through the woods. It was a shocking bit of luck to run into a film crew, and an even bigger bit of luck to be offered a chance to spend the night surrounded by adults with cameras. It put another layer—one with access to cameras and publicity—of protection between them and whoever might be out there.

  Still, they were intruders and it was uncomfortable. At least it was uncomfortable to Maddison. As soon as their tour ended Chris managed to make friends with the camera crew and devote himself to learning the intricacies of halfway-decent film cameras, and Carrie politely took herself and all their bags into the promised tent to get a little peace and quiet, so Maddison was stuck, once again and by nobody’s design or intent, as the odd one out.

  MADDISON STOOD AROUND FEELING SORRY FOR herself and irritated and lost for a bit, but it wasn’t anybody’s fault she was still the newest member of their little trio and Maddison had always been good at making friends, so she charmed two sandwiches and three pears out of Flo and tracked Bethy down. The writer had parked herself at the very farthest end of the smallish clearing at the base of a largish tree and was muttering distractedly over a script, but she looked up and managed a smile when Maddison knocked on the tree trunk.

  “Oh, hi—and thanks,” she added when Maddison offered her a pear and a sandwich. “Did I miss dinner?”

  “No, but I have no idea when dinner is and you seemed kind of stressed,” Maddison said.

  Bethy sighed. “I was so hoping that you were going to miss that. I am sorry, you three seem like wonderful young people. We must all seem like raging lunatics to you.”

  “Not . . . all of you?” Maddison offered, because she didn’t want to bring up Harry’s strange behavior in front of his sister. Bethy made a face like she deeply disagreed with Maddison’s statement, and took a large bite of pear.

  “Todd drops cameras,” she said, ticking off crewmembers with the hand not holding the pear, “Liam is convinced that he’s going to make it big by getting photographic proof of Bigfoot, Perry doesn’t seem to register pain, and Robin isn’t really in touch with reality most of the time—he didn’t even think to have you sign the nondisclosure agreements I handed to him, did he?”

  “No,” Maddison said. Redd hadn’t even had papers in his hands at any point during the tour. “But I won’t mind and I don’t think Chris or Carrie will either.”

  Bethy set the pear down to scribble a note on the script in her lap. “And Harry . . . Harry is a special case,” she said. “He’s really not normally like this, but I—I don’t think I’m wrong if I guess that you’ve seen the train wreck that is Robin Redd: Treasure Hunter nowadays?”

  “It’s never been a show I expected a lot out of,” Maddison admitted. “That’s not to say I don’t enjoy watching it or anything!” she added quickly, but Bethy was laughing.

  “See, it’s funny,” she said, leaning back against the tree and setting her papers aside, the better to untwist her hair. “We finally got bumped off the ratings chart entirely by Gator Grabbers last month, did you know that?”

  “No.” Maddison had vaguely heard of Gator Grabbers but she really had no interest in a show about, well, grabbing alligators. She sat down on the ground next to Bethy; it made listening to her less awkward.

  “And, well, the main appeal of Gator Grabbers is that it’s a show that you don’t expect anything from,” Bethy said, neatly twisting her hair back into a ponytail and then into a knot at the base of her skull. “The problem with us, believe it or not, is that Robin still has some semblance of self-respect.”

  “So, you can’t compete with Gator Grabbers?”

  “So we can’t compete with Gator Grabbers,” Bethy agreed. She stabbed one of her pencils through her bun and twirled the other through her fingers. “Or any of the ghost-hunting shows. Or that cooking-in-dangerous-places show that’s been getting really great reviews,” Bethy added. “Although they actually have some self-respect, but theirs comes along with things like a decent budget and someone who knows how to advertise and a crew that isn’t slowly going off the rails. That makes it easier.”

  “You don’t seem to be doing too badly,” Maddison offered.

  Bethy groaned. “Last month we were shooting in the Florida Keys and we had to fire our safety consultant when Robin almost died of urushiol exposure.”

  “They got the poisonwood tree mixed up with the gumbo limbo tree?”

  Poisonwood trees were, as the name very nicely warned, trees that excreted a frightening amount of the same stuff (urushiol) that was in poison ivy, except in much more impressive quantities. It literally oozed from the trunks of the trees. Gumbo limbo trees were nice, safe, ordinary trees that people liked to grow, but unfortunately they looked very much like poisonwood trees, especially when they were small. Mixing them up was understandable, but disastrous. And the sort of thing you tended to rely on a safety consultant to help you avoid.

  “Wow,” Maddison said.

  “Yeah,” Bethy sighed. “And then Harry threatened to shoot the safety consultant for ruining a week of shooting, so now I’m in charge of making sure the facts are checked, which is not in my job description.”

  “Actually, what is your job description?” Maddison asked. “Because being ‘the only sane person’ can’t be in your contract.”

  “Redd introduced me as a writer and the show is supposed to be a documentary,” Bethy said. “So that’s a good question. I do the research and come up with a general idea of what Robin needs to talk about, because he’s quite smart but his heart hasn’t been in this show since about the point we realized nobody took us seriously. And letting him go off on tangents would be a disaster.” She paused. “Or, you know, it might be so weird we’d get more viewers, who knows anymore. But basically I plot out a couple side bits that relate to the treasure he’s looking for or the area we’re in, research interesting things for him to stand next to, that sort of thing. Right now, I’m trying to come up with a five-minute bit on the ghost who’s supposed to haunt these woods.”

  “So,” Maddison asked slowly, “you guys are behind the fake bloody handprint we saw at the picnic area today?” She almost didn’t want to know. The principle of Occam’s razor said that the simplest solution was the most probable, and the simplest solution was that a film crew had added the “bloody” handprints for “atmosphere.”

  “What?” Bethy said, and Maddison felt the relief evaporate. If the film crew hadn’t placed the fake handprint, then there was somebody out here who was—

  “Todd!” Bethy roared, leaping to her feet and causing a cluster of cameramen (and Chris) to jump and then scatter as she stalked toward them, scripts and dinner both forgotten. “Did you scatter props in a protected environment again?”

  Oh. Well that was actually good news for a change. Maybe Maddison should fall down hills more often.

  “So, Maddison turns out to have been right about the handprints,” Chris said later that evening, trying and failing to inch his way gracefully into his sleeping bag. The sun had set and the mosquitos had come out in full force, chasing everyone into tents and putting an end to the magnificent whispered argument that had been raging between Bethy and Harry from the beginning of dinner and through three excellent ghost stories from Redd. They were having a difference of opinion about the fake bloody handprints. Harry had been of the opinion that a little manufactured ghost scare might be good for the ratings; Bethy had called him a number of creatively unflattering names. Redd had said som
ething about the difficulty of getting red food coloring out of clothes and tree bark that both Bethy and Harry had ignored. The camera crew had sat around looking glum and chastised.

  It had been a very uncomfortable evening—a lot like being invited to a friend’s house for dinner, only to have the friend’s parents fight about private family matters all through the meal. For once in her life Maddison was grateful for mosquitos—and tents. The three teenagers were now having a conference in the safety of a tent with mosquito netting, and the first order of business had been the elephant, or rather the ghost, in the room: the heavily debated topic of Annie Six-Fingers. And if there was someone stalking them who was pretending to be Annie. And if they had any idea who the mysterious stalker was. The general consensus, Maddison was sad to see, was “we still don’t know” and “no.”

  “But you still think someone might be following us?” Carrie asked from inside her own sleeping bag. They’d been put up in the smallest spare tent, which Maddison suspected from the number of patches it had was really the backup tent that let in rain so nobody wanted to use it. They were lucky enough that it was keeping the mosquitos out. Come to think of it, they were lucky it hadn’t started raining; the air felt about right for it.

  “Well, does this film crew give you the same type of willies we were getting from whoever was stalking us?” Chris asked.

  “No,” Maddison said. Chris and Carrie both jumped and Maddison grudgingly yanked her sleeping bag open and poked her head all the way out. She was very fond of the fact that her sleeping bag had a drawstring, because it meant she could pull it closed and become completely cocooned for privacy. The only drawback was that it tended to make people forget she was still there. “Sorry. But there was something creepy in the woods, and if it wasn’t the ghost and it wasn’t the film crew then it has to be somebody else.”