Mystery #15: Kristy and the Vampires
A TV movie is filming in Stoneybrook (because of course it is). It’s called Little Vampires and resident TV star Derek Masters is going to be in it. Kristy gets a plum job baby-sitting Derek on the set every day. Kristy is living my dream, but she also quickly realizes that movie sets involve a lot of sitting or standing around, and tiptoeing around the various (sometimes volatile) personalities of the cast and crew. She meets the stuck-up leading man, the ragey propmaster, the publicity-hungry PR manager, and the director.
Derek is all of sudden really clumsy, tripping and slipping and falling a lot, and then one day the breakaway glass that he’s supposed to go through on a stunt turns out to be real glass. Did somebody replace it on purpose hoping to hurt Derek? It sure seems so the next day when Cheryl, the woman doing the stunt for Derek, gets injured due to a wire that was tampered with. Then, Kristy finds a threatening note in Derek’s trailer. (Which she TAKES HOME WITH HER - come on, Kristy, don’t tamper with evidence!)
The BSC is on the case (duh) and makes a list of suspects:
Carson Fraser, Derek’s costar who he upstages
Frank Bottoms, Carson’s manager
Zeke Hill, the propmaster who got fired after the breakaway glass incident
Sheila Mayberry, the PR lady who believes “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”
Kristy even attends a party thrown by Cokie in the service of keeping an eye on Derek, which backfires — everyone who goes to the party gets sick (some kind of food poisoning or maybe actual poisoning???). At one point Kristy sneaks into Carson’s trailer to poke around and almost gets caught. (Damn, security on this set is pretty lax — if it was that easy to just walk into movie stars’ trailers, I’d be doing it all the time.) Finally, Kristy zeroes in on a new suspect — an obsessed fangirl who’s been hanging around the set every day. Kristy finds out her name is Lindsey Rockaway and she trails her, uncovering what she thinks is a plot to tamper with the brakes on the limo Derek is driven around in. Lindsey’s family owns the company that delivered the wrong type of glass for the stunt, and when confronted Lindsey confesses. Turns out she’s obsessed with Carson, so she’s trying to get Derek out of the way so Carson can succeed.
Kristy gets some shout-outs in the newspaper for “saving Derek’s life,” and Derek declines to press charges against Lindsey, so instead she gets help at an institute for adolescents with emotional disturbances. Little Vampires gets good buzz and Kristy is briefly on TV! (Even Mallory got to walk on in a scene of the movie, undoing some of her California trauma.) I would truly like to visit Stoneybrook and write about the Little Vampires filming locations, but like most good things, it’s fictional. Life just isn’t fair.
