Back to the Files series for the next game, The Final Scene! I admit I’m a little nervous for this one. Please, God, don’t let Nancy make out with Brady Armstrong.
Speaking of boys, actually, I just realized Ned isn’t in any of the main series books I’ve recapped so far, and he doesn’t feature in this book, either. What’s up with that? Did the Stratemeyer Syndicate develop an anti-Ned agenda in the ’90s?
Anyway. The Clue Crew is at the River Heights cinema for the premiere of the new Brady Armstrong movie, which is of particular excitement since Brady is a recent graduate of River Heights High School. Bess is all aflutter, since she’s had a crush on Brady since she was a freshman and he was a senior. Nancy says he’s “gorgeous”, but not as hot as Ned. Bess: “Ned’s cute, but Brady’s what I’d call a hunk!” Indeed.
Bess is all sad because she was under the impression that if she got here early, she’d run into Brady and he’d fall madly in love with her, but the theater is already swarmed with fans and security. Not to be deterred, the girls find a trapdoor around the back of the theater, leading to the basement. (Nancy: “You [Bess] wouldn’t break into the theater to save the price of a ticket, but you’d do it to get a look at a guy you think you love.” George: “Does that make this a crime of passion?” Hee.)
They make it into the theater and find Brady’s dressing room. By the way, Bess’s outfit for this meeting: A teal blue sweater dress with silver sequin and gold bugle bead trim. I hate that I can picture this.
Bess slips inside to find Brady. Nancy and George go into another room to wait for her, and exposit that they saw a group of protestors outside. Nancy says the leader is one Nicholas Falcone, who leads campaigns to save old buildings from demolition. This causes George to suddenly remember that “Bart Anderson” (whoever that is? Should I have read books 16 through 37?) is “going to tear down this beautiful old theater to build one of those impersonal movie complexes.” You know, just in case you didn’t know whose side you were supposed to be on. Anyway, Brady’s new movie is the last event the theater is going to have before demolition.
Their chat is interrupted by a cry for help, and they run outside to see Brady Armstrong. He tells them that someone in a ski mask jumped him when he walked into his dressing room, and there’s some blonde chick still trapped in the room with “that maniac.” Well, I’m glad you were there to help her, Brady.
(By the way, book!Brady is not a sallow ginger as he appears in the game, but instead is described as tan, dark-haired, and green-eyed. I bet he was pissed about missing out on auditioning for Harry Potter.)
In total fairness, Brady is pretty shamefaced over leaving Bess, but he was so panicked he just ran for the door. He and the remaining Clue Crew immediately run back in, but Bess and the culprit are already gone.
Upon leaving the dressing room, we meet some suspects: Deirdre McCullough, Brady’s co-star; Joseph Hughes, a longtime theater employee; and Simon Mueller, Brady’s manager, who was gender-flipped to Simone for the game and also given the amazing traits of loving reality TV and having a cat named Miss Sparkles. Book!Simon(e) has a lot to live up to.
Joseph wibbles that Bess was such a sweet girl and she used to work at the theater and oh, how bad he feels, and Nancy just cuts him off with, “I know, Joseph, but just standing here isn’t going to get back.” Heh. Nobody cares about your emotional distress, old man. Joseph tells the gang that the theater has a ton of secret passageways, and there’s one connected to Brady’s dressing room, leading to another dressing room. Naturally, though, Bess isn’t in the other room, either. The Clue Crew despairs that she could be anywhere by now.
Simon is all annoyed that the kidnapping is cutting into his important premiere. He snipes that Bess is probably just pulling a stunt to meet Brady, and she’ll turn up eventually. Nancy clutches her pearls that people in the entertainment industry are jerks. Did she not already learn that when she was running around a soap opera set? Whatever. Anyway, Simon says that Bess is probably still in the theater, as there are far too many people outside for the kidnapper to sneak past. Nancy grudgingly admits that he has a point.
Nancy calls her friend on the police force, “Detective Ryan.” RIP, Chief McGinnis, I guess letting Nancy run all over the police department when she was the prime suspect in an investigation wasn’t enough to make you her bestie. Unlike Sergeant Mac Ramsay in the game, Detective Ryan immediately believes Nancy and drops everything to drag the River Heights police over to the theater.
In the meantime, they run into a guy with “dark, wavy chestnut hair” and “amber eyes”. Uh…
Anyway, this is the aforementioned Nicholas “Nick” Falcone, defender of historic buildings, slightly less concerned about the lives of teenage girls. (If you played the game and are thinking, “Hey, wasn’t there a tan, dark-haired guy in the game, and also a guy with chestnut hair in the game…?” — yes, for some reason, game!Nick matches book!Brady’s description, and vice versa. Or at least as well as the game engine could render them.)
Nick starts ranting about how Bart Anderson will destroy the theater, which he feels personally offended by, as Nick’s grandfather and great-grandfather were involved in building it. They did most of the “ornate plaster-work” themselves! Nancy’s like “That’s rough bro” and Nick’s like, “Thanks, sorry about your missing friend bro.” He says he’s been outside this entire time, harnessing public outrage protesting the demolition. Nevertheless, Nancy says he’s also a suspect, since he has a motive in wanting to save the theater.
Nancy asks Simon and Nick to help search for Bess. Nick agrees, but Simon makes up a shifty excuse about how he has important work to be doing, by which he means spinning Bess’s disappearance into a publicity opportunity for Brady. Nancy is suspicious that, so far, Simon is benefitting the most from this situation.
Joseph runs up and says that he got a call from the kidnapper, demanding that they stop the demolition of the “Royal Palladium.” Nancy doesn’t know what the Royal Palladium even is, until Nick says it’s what the cinema used to be called, back when it was a regular theater and not a movie house. Interesting. Joseph doesn’t have any other information about the caller; he thinks they were using a voice distorter, so it’s impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. “I just wish I’d been there when that scoundrel nabbed young Bess,” he wibbles.
The police search all evening and even bring Nancy and George dinner (Sergeant Mac would never), but they don’t find Bess. Bart Anderson shows up and throws his weight around about how Nick is clearly behind this, so they should just…ignore Bess’s disappearance? Arrest Nick? Not really clear what he’s going for here.
Nancy and George do a last-ditch search of the theater, and go through some of the rooms they already looked in. This time, they find a ski mask in one of the dressing rooms. Nancy suspects that the clue was recently planted, because obviously she would have found it if it were here the first time they looked. Heh. Ego? Nancy Drew? Never.
Then Nick busts in and says that he kind of got into a fight with Bart Anderson, so to spite him, Anderson has moved the demolition up to just three days from now. Nice going.
The next day(? *) Nancy tries to argue with Anderson again, some more, and Anderson refuses to believe that Bess is still in the theater again, some more. Nancy goes home dejected, and Hannah sighs that it’s too bad they can’t contact Bess’s parents. Nancy: “Of all the times for them to be touring Africa.” HEE! It sucks when you’re in the middle of a life-threatening crisis but your parents are too busy traveling from Burkina Faso to Kenya to come help. I mean, it’s never happened to me, but it’s a situation that apparently happens in River Heights with regularity.
* Nancy mentions that it’s now been 24 hours since Bess disappeared — which was presumably the same day that Nick and Anderson argued — then she goes home and hangs out with her family for the night, then she goes back to the theater and it’s still two days till demolition. I don’t know.
Nancy’s dad goes over to the fireplace, and the book weirdly explains that he “was feeling chilled even though it wasn’t cold in the house or outside.” That’s not how limited 3rd person POV works, ghostwriter. Anyway, Carson exposits a bit that he knows both Grandpa Falcone and Bart Anderson, and he thinks they could both be suspects but not really. That’s the kind of scintillating insight we can expect from Carson Drew!
A delivery boy comes by and drops off a wreath saying that If the Royal Palladium dies, [Bess] will be killed, too. Nancy asks who sent the wreath and the kid’s like, “Idk.”
The next day (again), Joseph gives Nancy Bess’s earring, saying he found it while he was cleaning. Nancy and George immediately call Detective Ryan, but he tells them that it’s not proof Bess is actually in the building, so he’s still going to let a wrecking ball go through it in 48 hours. The police department seems so weirdly unconcerned by this. Even if they don’t have proof Bess is in the building, it’s still the site of an active investigation, isn’t it? As in, not something you want to reduce to a pile of dust while evidence is still turning up there? The River Heights police suck, but we knew this.
Nancy sends George to the picket line to investigate Nick, which George does not like at all because she thinks fighting the power is super dreamy. Nancy’s like, “Ruling a guy out as a suspect just because he’s hot is only allowed when I’m into him.”
Speaking of dreamboats, Brady is still hanging around the theater, apparently because he feels bad about Bess and wants to help. OR DOES HE? Nancy asks him about Simon, and Brady suspiciously clams up. He refuses to say a bad word about his agent, saying that without Simon, Brady would’ve never gotten famous. Nancy has to soothe his self-esteem about how he totally would’ve still gotten famous without Simon, because Brady is soooo talented and Hollywood, as we know, is a meritocracy. Guys. Can we focus on the missing girl?
Brady walks off all emo, and Nancy senses that someone was eavesdropping on them. She goes backstage to investigate, and a stage light promptly falls and nearly hits her. That’s never happened in this series before. (I do love how all of the Files books I’ve read so far keep lightly recycling elements from the books before them.) A distorted voice comes over the PA, telling her to back off. Nancy runs to the booth but the culprit manages to get away.
Nancy tries to track Simon down at his hotel, but he’s either not there or avoiding her. Nancy does manage to catch Brady’s co-star, Deirdre, though. (She’s wearing a “ginger silk blouse”, which I only mention because if Sweet Valley is to be believed, silk blouses were all the rage for teen girls in the ’80s.) Deirdre tells Nancy that Simon is always trying to push Brady into doing more publicity, which Brady hates because he’s not in it for the ~fame. (He even wanted Deirdre and Brady to pretend to date, but Deirdre is unenthused, as there’s a “hunk” back in LA she’s seeing. Good to know.) Deirdre doesn’t think Simon is behind the kidnapping, but she admits that he’ll do anything for publicity — in fact, he’s planning to call a press conference later today, to offer a reward for Bess’s return (which will conveniently also bring attention to Brady’s movie). Deirdre also mentions that Brady has a personal connection to the theater, but clams up when Nancy presses.
After her chat with Deirdre, Nancy gets a call on the hotel’s “courtesy phone”, from George. George summons her back to the theater to show her that they’ve found more proof Bess is here: Joseph found a sleeping bag and some pizza boxes; moreover, George is like, “Clearly Bess is being held against her will, because the pizza is only half-eaten, and only terrible emotional distress could hold Bess back from eating an entire pizza by herself!” Jeez, the girl is missing, can we stop harping on her eating habits for five seconds? While they’re happy to have found new clues, George says she already searched that room the other day, and there was no evidence of Bess then. Nancy and George speculate that the culprit is moving Bess around, meaning that it must be someone who knows the theater well.
Nancy calls Detective Ryan again but he’s still like, “Whatever, call me when you actually find her.” Yeah, it’s too bad they didn’t find anything that might help them track down the culprit, like maybe pizza boxes, which they could use to call the pizzeria and maybe find out who ordered them or at least when they were ordered, and see if anyone was in the theater at that time. Oh, well, guess we’re just going to have to proceed with the demolition.
The Clue Crew and the police search the theater again but fail to find Bess again. Nancy and George overhear someone suspicious, and they manage to follow the culprit through the theater, but he lures George up onto the catwalk then collapses it out from under her. Wow, and I was mostly joking when I said George has terrible luck with things just falling out from under her feet. Luckily, Nick Falcone shows up just in time to save George, with Joseph right behind him. George is all twitterpated (by Nick, not Joseph).
Nancy and George go back to Brady’s hotel, just in time for the press conference. Nancy muses that Simon’s build doesn’t match what they saw of the culprit; but he could still be using Brady as an accomplice. They also run into Brenda Carlton, who gives Nancy some info on Simon: he and Brady were both late to the press conference, and in fact, Simon has a history of staging kidnappings to bring his clients publicity (this was Nick’s MO in the game, if you recall). With that done, Brenda swans off with, “I guess it’s off to the typewriter for me.” Hee. Nancy briefly recaps that she and Brenda don’t like each other because Brenda thinks she’s a super-sleuth too and keeps stepping on Nancy’s turf, but Brenda doesn’t otherwise feature in this book.
After the press conference, Nancy and George overhear Deirdre and Brady arguing over whether or not to tell Nancy about something clearly related to Bess’s disappearance. Deirdre and Brady both act weird and suspicious and refuse to fess up when Nancy confronts them, except then Deirdre calls Nancy later so she can tell her anyway. They meet up at the theater, and Deirdre says that she thinks Simon engineered Bess’s disappearance.
Nancy’s like, “Cool, thanks for hauling ass all the way over here to tell me that.” Then, after Deirdre leaves, the culprit drops a movie screen on Nancy, knocking her out. Luckily for Nancy, Deirdre hears the crash and calls an ambulance, and Nancy wakes up in the hospital with no real cranial damage. I was about to say “Just like the games!” but then I remembered Nancy usually just walks off head injuries without going to the hospital at all. (Although actually, I don’t believe she gets knocked out in the game at all — the falling light scare is kept in, but Nancy doesn’t actually get any kind of physical injury.)
Anyway, George and Carson Drew are at Nancy’s bedside, and Nancy recaps her latest discovery to them. George is twitterpated again, some more, over Brady/Simon being the culprit instead of Nick. Nancy says that Nick is still a suspect, just as he walks in “with a box of chocolates.” I don’t know why but that mental image is hilarious to me. He’s not at all pleased and storms out. (“I bought a fucking gateau!” he doesn’t say.)
Nancy goes home and gets an anonymous call, telling her that she hasn’t considered everyone with a vested interest in the theater. She tells George to use Carson’s study phone to trace it (somehow?) and they find the call is coming from inside the theater. Suspense!
Let’s not go to the theater, though. Instead, getting conked on the head gave Nancy a brainwave, and it occurs to her to look for blueprints of the theater so they can find any secret rooms or passageways. When they go to city hall, though, they found that some old guy walked out with the blueprints a while ago, not that the receptionist remembers anything else about him. Nancy’s like, “Oooh, you know who’s an old guy who cares a lot about the theater and has been there forever and has also been suspiciously popping up a lot? Nick’s grandpa!”
So they go visit Grandpa Falcone, who’s like, “Idk what you’re talking about.” He denies kidnapping Bess, although Nancy thinks he’s still clearly salty about the theater being demolished. She also notices a photo of Grandpa Falcone with Joseph, and Grandpa Falcone tells them that Joseph is also really attached to the theater.
It’s now something like three hours to demolition, and Nancy’s like, “Welp, time to visit Nick!” NANCY, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. When they go to Nick’s apartment, though, it’s been ransacked and then the book goes completely off the rails because then Joseph shows up and has a mental breakdown over how this is his fault, then he runs away and jumps off the fire escape, twigging Nancy and George to his resemblance to the culprit on the catwalk. Then it turns out that Bart Anderson has kidnapped Nick and is torturing him in some sketchy trailer on the edge of town because he thinks Nick kidnapped Bess to stall the demolition, so then Nancy and George save Nick but Bart Anderson gets on his “car phone” to move the demolition up to the next fifteen minutes out of spite again, some more.
Nancy tells Anderson that Joseph is the culprit and Bess is still in the theater, and weirdly he decides to believe her this time. (On explaining who Joseph is: “He’s a lot more than the custodian. Joseph is the soul of that theater,” Nancy said. Nancy, he’s about to let your friend get hit by a wrecking ball, maybe save the compliments.)
So they race to the theater and Anderson stops the demolition, giving Nancy time to find Joseph. When she does, he explains all: he meant to grab Brady but grabbed Bess by mistake, then tried to drop clues that she was still in the theater so they would put off the demolition; he was the one who took the blueprints from city hall; he was also threatening Nancy because “[he] just thought that if things kept happening at the theater, you’d known not to stop looking there.” Sure. Why not.
Anyway, Nick and George show up and Joseph leads them to Bess. The police arrest him and Bess derps, “Even though he put me through one of the worst experiences of my life, I feel sorry for him. Maybe my testimony will help him in court.” Jesus, Bess, love yourself. Oh, and Bart Anderson has also been arrested for kidnapping Nick.
Bess and Nancy have to go back to the hospital, where the rest of the cast convenes for the final scene (ha ha, get it? I’m almost as clever as a Nancy Drew ghostwriter). Bess tells them that Joseph kept ordering pizza because he didn’t want to leave the theater to get groceries (the pizza boxes also feature in the game, so this is kind of an interesting explanation for that, too); she groans that she never wants to eat pizza again. Nancy and George are like, “Haha, you not eating pizza is impossible because you’re fat!” Is now really the time, guys? Then Brady shows up and kisses Bess on the cheek and Bess is like, “That was almost worth getting kidnapped for!” Hijinks! I’m glad none of us are traumatized or anything!
Leave a Reply