The Fatal Funnel Cake

by Livia J. Washburn

  “Okay, fine,” Bailey said. “We’d better get inside.” As they started into the building, she added, “And maybe it would be better if none of us said anything to Joye about what Gloria just did. I understand how she ambushed you, and I’m sure Joye would, too, but let’s not tempt fate by mentioning it.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Phyllis said. “I already feel bad about letting her take advantage of me like that. But isn’t Miss Jameson bound to find out what happened sooner or later?”

  “Yeah, but later is better. After the broadcast. Trust me, we don’t want to upset her this close to going on the air.”

  Phyllis glanced over at Carolyn, who raised her eyebrows. It sounded like Joye Jameson had a temper, which agreed with what the security guard, Chet Murdock, had told them.

  Bailey led the way across the big hall, where more cooking contests were going on again today, along with competitions for jams and jellies, pickles, canned vegetables, and nonfood items such as needlepoint, dolls, and quilts. The sight of beautiful handmade quilts on display made Phyllis think fondly of her late friend Mattie, who had been an expert quilter.

  The bleachers were empty at the moment, but people were already lining up to attend the broadcast. Phyllis saw that Chet Murdock was one of the guards keeping an eye on the audience and gave him a friendly smile and nod as Bailey took her and her friends around to the back of the set.

  Reed Hayes was waiting for them. He wasn’t wearing a headset this time, but he had one of those little Bluetooth phones tucked into his ear and was talking to someone on it, although anyone who didn’t notice the tiny gizmo might think he was just talking to himself. For a long time, Phyllis had seen people using those things and thought that they were perhaps not right in the head, before she finally figured out they were actually talking on the phone.

  Hayes’s job seemed to consist of talking to people all the time, Phyllis thought. She had never seen him when he wasn’t connected in one way or another.

  When he noticed that Bailey had arrived with Phyllis and her friends, the producer ended the conversation he was having and came over to them. “Hello, Mrs. Newsom,” he said. “I’ve got those papers for you to sign.” He held out a clipboard with several legal documents on it.

  “What am I signing?” Phyllis asked as she took the clipboard from him.

  “Standard boilerplate,” Hayes said. “Liability waiver, waiver of personal appearance fee—”

  Carolyn said, “You mean she doesn’t get paid for being on the show?”

  “Our guests generally aren’t compensated,” Bailey said. “Unless, of course, they’re members of the Screen Actors Guild or something like that and union rules require it.”

  “In other words, you only pay stars. Nobodies don’t get paid.”

  “Carolyn, it’s all right,” Phyllis said. “I never expected to be paid for being on the show. Goodness, just getting to cook with Joye Jameson is payment enough, don’t you think?”

  “Well, there is that, I suppose,” Carolyn admitted. “And it’s a pretty big deal.”

  “That’s right, ladies,” Hayes said. “Now, Mrs. Newsom, if you could just sign there where the X’s are . . .”

  A pen was attached to the clipboard. Phyllis used it to sign the three documents, although she took the time first to scan over them and make sure they were what Hayes said they were. She knew the producer was impatient, but she wasn’t going to sign anything without being certain what it was.

  When she handed the clipboard and papers back to Hayes, he said, “Great. Now Bailey can take you to makeup. Charlie will be along to see about getting you miked up, too.”

  As Hayes walked away and started talking on his phone again, Phyllis asked Bailey, “Who’s Charlie?”

  “Charlie Farrar, our director,” Bailey said.

  “The show’s director handles things like that?” Phyllis was a little surprised.

  “He’s something of a perfectionist,” Bailey explained. “Likes to check all the equipment himself.” She smiled. “Besides, we have a pretty small crew, so people double up on jobs sometimes. Our budget isn’t as big as what you might think it would be.”

  Peggy said, “I thought TV shows always cost millions of dollars to put on.”

  “Well, when you count what the talent makes . . .” Bailey stopped and shook her head. “But we don’t cut any corners. We’re just efficient; that’s all.”

  Phyllis saw proof of that during the next forty-five minutes. Everyone involved in the broadcast seemed to know exactly what they needed to do and when they needed to do it. It was a beehive of activity, bordering on chaos to her inexperienced eye, but even she could tell that it was controlled chaos.

  Charlie Farrar, the director, was a slender man with a lined, pale face and a shock of dark hair with threads of silver through it. His eyes were baggy, but whether that was from lack of sleep or just his natural appearance, Phyllis couldn’t tell. He had a tiny microphone that was attached by an almost invisible wire to a battery pack that Phyllis would wear clipped to her belt. He told her how to put it on, then handed the equipment over to her and watched as she clipped everything in position.

  Farrar wore a headset, too, and when Phyllis had the microphone on, he told her, “Count to five, Mrs. Newsom. Just use your normal voice.”

  “One, two, three, four, five,” Phyllis said.

  “How was that, Jerry?” Farrar asked, and Phyllis realized he was talking to someone over the headset. “Levels okay? Good.” He nodded to Phyllis. “Just talk naturally to Joye and we should be fine.”

  “Is it all right to talk to my friends until then, or will that mess anything up?”

  “Nah, that’s fine. Your mike’s dead right now. Jerry out in the truck killed it after we checked it. We’ll turn it on again when we’re ready for you.”

  “All right. Thank you, Mr. Farrar.”

  “Just part of the job,” he said. He turned away and started talking to Jerry over the headset again.

  Phyllis’s makeup was done already, and the girl who had put it on hadn’t really done anything except touch up what Phyllis already had in place.

  “Well, now I suppose we wait,” Phyllis said.

  “Not for long,” Sam said. “It’s only five minutes until the show starts.”

  “But I don’t know how far into it I’ll be on,” Phyllis pointed out. “No one’s said anything about that yet.”

  Bailey had disappeared earlier, going off to take care of yet another responsibility that had been given to her, but after delivering her warm-up speech to the audience in the bleachers, she came backstage and hurried up to Phyllis and the others, giving them a breathless smile.

  “Almost ready,” she said. “Mrs. Newsom, you can just wait right here, if you would. The rest of you need to come with me. I’ll show you where you’re going to be sitting.”

  Phyllis took advantage of the opportunity to ask, “Do you know when I’ll be going on?”

  “The second full segment,” Bailey said. “That’ll be about fifteen minutes in. I’ll cue you.”

  Phyllis nodded her thanks. Everyone wished her good luck, Carolyn and Eve hugged her, and Phyllis gave Carolyn her purse to hold while the show was going on. Then Bailey ushered the others away around the end of the set.

  Phyllis took a deep breath. With everything that had been going on around her, she had been somewhat distracted, but now that a lull had descended on the set, she felt that nervous anticipation inside her again. She told herself that the experience was going to be fun, but at the same time, she knew she would be very glad and relieved when it was over.

  The prerecorded theme music took her a little by surprise. She saw Joye Jameson come out of the dressing room and stride purposefully toward the door leading onto the set. She seemed distracted, and Phyllis wondered if even someone as experienced as Joye got butterflies
before a broadcast.

  Joye noticed her standing off to the side and smiled at her. Phyllis returned the smile. Joye didn’t pause or even slow down, of course. She opened the door and stepped out onto the set, waving a hand as she did so, and applause swelled up from the audience to compete with the theme music.

  Phyllis could hear every word clearly as Joye greeted the audience and told a brief anecdote about having her picture taken in front of Big Tex. The show went to a commercial, and Bailey opened the door and stuck her head through.

  “Doing all right back here?” she asked Phyllis.

  “Just fine,” Phyllis said. She thought she sounded a lot more calm and confident than she really felt.

  Bailey gave her a smile and a thumbs-up. “I’ll be setting up for the funnel cake segment off camera while Joye’s interviewing her first guest. We’ll have everything ready.”

  “You’re amazing, keeping up with everything you do.”

  “Tell that to my boss.”

  Phyllis didn’t know if Bailey meant Joye or Reed Hayes or both, and there was no time to ask because the young woman was gone again.

  Joye’s first guest was a local politician who talked about how much money the state fair pumped into the economy and then ate some cotton candy, getting the sticky stuff all over his face and prompting quite a bit of laughter from the audience. They sounded like they were in a good mood, Phyllis thought, and that was promising. She hoped they would be equally receptive of her.

  The first full segment was over before Phyllis knew it, seeming to fly by. During the commercial, Bailey came backstage and closed the door. She motioned Phyllis closer.

  “When we come back, Joye will talk a little about the funnel cake contest and then introduce you,” Bailey said. “When I point at you, you just open the door and go on out. You can smile and wave at the audience, but after you’ve done that, try not to pay much attention to them. Just talk directly to Joye like you would if you were in a friend’s kitchen. That’s the feeling we want to get across. If you can, just forget all about the fact that you’re on TV.”

  “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.”

  “You’ll be surprised how quickly you relax and get into it. Just have fun, Phyllis. That’s what we’re all here for.”

  Phyllis nodded, swallowed, and then took a deep breath. It helped a little, but not much.

  Then Joye was talking again, saying something about the funnel cake competition and how it was different this year. The words sort of ran together in Phyllis’s ears.

  But she heard it quite plainly when Joye said, “And now here’s the winner of this year’s contest! Let’s all give a big state fair welcome to Phyllis Newsom!”

  Bailey pointed at her. Phyllis grasped the doorknob, turned it, and stepped out onto the set. The lights around it seemed so much brighter than they had earlier, and they made her pause for a split second before she was able to force her muscles to keep moving.

  There was no getting out of it now. She was on.

  Chapter 13

  Phyllis was surprised by the applause. Of course, the audience was clapping only because Joye Jameson had told them to and because the applause signs were flashing at the sides of the stage, out of view of the cameras, but still, this was the first time in her life that such a crowd of people—and strangers, at that—had greeted her with such enthusiasm.

  Her eyes adjusted to the lights as she crossed the stage toward Joye, who held out a hand to her. Phyllis clasped it, but instead of shaking hands with her, Joye hugged her and said with a dazzling smile, “Thank you for being here.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” Phyllis said, although pleasure wasn’t exactly the way she would have described any of the emotions going through her at this moment. Being here did have a certain exhilaration to it, though. She remembered what Bailey had told her about smiling and waving to the audience, so she did that quickly before returning her attention to Joye.

  “So you’re here to tell us all about your blue ribbon–winning funnel cakes,” Joye said. “First of all, what made you decide to enter the contest? Did you know you’d be going up against some world-class competition in those professional funnel cake concessionaires?”

  “Well, not really,” Phyllis said. “I didn’t think about the competition, and I certainly didn’t expect that I would win. I just thought it sounded like it would be something fun to try.”

  “Well, that’s a great attitude, I must say! This wasn’t the first cooking contest you’ve been in, though, was it, Phyllis?”

  “No, not at all. My good friend Carolyn Wilbarger and I have entered dozens of them over the years, since we’ve been retired from teaching, and we’ve won or placed high in quite a few of them, especially Carolyn.”

  Phyllis had spotted Carolyn, Sam, Eve, and Peggy sitting in front of the bleachers in folding chairs, and she saw the way Carolyn smiled at the mention of her name. Now people around the world had heard of Carolyn and her cooking skills.

  “We’re here to talk about you and your funnel cakes,” Joye said, and even though her tone and smile were as bright as ever, Phyllis sensed that she was being scolded slightly for straying off script, so to speak. “Tell us what it is about them that makes them so special.”

  Before Phyllis could say anything, a man in the audience stood up and yelled, “They’re not special! She’s a thief! That blue ribbon should belong to me!”

  People sitting around the man gasped and turned to look at him. Phyllis couldn’t see him all that well because of the lights in her face, but she recognized Ramón Silva’s voice.

  Silva began forcing his way through the crowd as he descended toward the floor. He kept shouting about how his funnel cakes should have won the contest.

  Other people were yelling now, too. Not everybody knew exactly what was going on, and in this violent day and age, any sort of unexpected public disturbance could provoke a panic. No one knew when some sort of lunatic might pull out a gun and start shooting or try to set off a bomb.

  That wasn’t Ramón Silva’s intention, of course. He was just upset because he’d been defeated by what he considered an amateur, Phyllis knew. But he had the crowd worked up and there was no telling what was going to happen.

  Reed Hayes ran out from behind the set, calling, “Security! Security!”

  Chet Murdock and the other guard were already in motion. They reached the front of the bleachers at the same time Ramón Silva did. Silva shouted, “My blue ribbon! Mine!” and swung a punch at Chet, who ducked under it and tackled him. Chet probably outweighed the short, slender concessionaire by at least fifty pounds. Silva went down under the impact and crashed onto the first couple of rows of seats with the security guard on top of him.

  “That’s it for you, buddy!” Chet yelled. “This time you’re goin’ to jail!”

  Silva wasn’t fighting anymore. Instead he just lay there and groaned, possibly injured because of the way he had fallen with Chet on top of him. Chet stood up, and he and the other guard hauled Silva to his feet. The members of the audience had all drawn back to give them plenty of room.

  Joye left Phyllis standing there beside the counter where the ingredients for the prizewinning funnel cakes were set out and hurried over to Reed Hayes. “Did we get to commercial in time to miss all that?” she asked the producer.

  “Let me check with Charlie.” Hayes spoke into his headset, then nodded to Joye. “Yeah, he cut the feed as soon as the guy stood up and started to yell. The viewers probably knew something was going on, but the whole ugly scene didn’t go out over the air.”

  “Good,” Joye said. “Who let that damned crazy bastard in here, anyway?”

  To Phyllis, the ugly words sounded strange coming from Joye Jameson’s mouth. She didn’t think she had ever heard Joye say anything stronger than heck or darn on TV. She couldn’t blame her for being upset, though. Silv
a’s outburst had almost ruined the entire show.

  “I swear, somebody’s going to lose their job over this,” Joye went on, sounding furious now. “I can’t be expected to put on a show when I’m surrounded by maniacs and incompetents! I don’t get paid enough for that!”

  “You don’t think you get paid enough, period,” Hayes muttered.

  “What was that?” Joye grabbed the lapel of his coat. “What did you say to me, Hayes?”

  Phyllis tried not to stare. The unflappable facade of the beautiful TV host was definitely showing some cracks right now.

  Bailey came up beside Joye and Hayes and said quietly, “The cameras may be off, but you still have an audience full of people out there, Joye.”

  That appeared to get through to Joye instantly. She let go of Reed Hayes’s coat and took a deep breath. Her expression became serene again, even though she wasn’t smiling just yet.

  “You’re right, of course,” she told Bailey. She turned to face the audience. The people who had come to watch the broadcast were all still on their feet, buzzing with confusion and apprehension, even though Chet Murdock and the other guard had taken Ramón Silva away. Phyllis didn’t see them anywhere.

  Bailey stepped to the edge of the stage and lifted her voice to say, “Everyone please take your seats! Sit down, please, so we can start the show again!”

  Phyllis was a little surprised they were going to continue after Silva’s disruption, but she realized she shouldn’t have been. After all, the old saying was that the show must go on.

  Phyllis hadn’t budged from her position during the incident. Joye came back over to her. Even though Joye was smiling again, Phyllis could tell that she was furious. Joye kept her outrage under firm control, however. She lifted her chin a little and said, “Close-up on me, Hank.”

  Normally it would be the director who issued orders like that, but Phyllis supposed Joye had the power to override Charlie Farrar if she really wanted to. In any case, the burly Hank pointed his camera right at Joye, who added, “Give me a countdown.”