Wanting Sheila Dead (28 page)

“Sheila Dunham's prowling around in the hallways,” Alida said. “She's going to pounce on us and try to make us lose our cool. She's a joke, really. If she hadn't done this, she wouldn't have any career left at all.”

Mary-Louise did not think that Sheila Dunham was a joke. She thought about being eliminated from the last challenge and blushed.

“The spying wasn't for nothing,” she said. “I mean, we did find out a few things. We found out that the show was going to go on filming in spite of everything. And we did hear that the police hadn't found the gun. I wonder if the gun is still in the house somewhere. They searched practically the whole place. I wonder if somebody has the gun and, you know.”

“I know what?” Alida asked.

“Well,” Mary-Louise said. “You know. Maybe somebody has the gun because she wants to kill somebody else. Maybe this is all part of a plot. Or maybe it's a serial killer who's killing off contestants for
America's Next Superstar.
”

“That girl wasn't a contestant on
America's Next Superstar,
” Alida said. “Nobody knows who she was. You'd better hurry up or you'll be late, and you know what they're like when you're late. At least this time you won't have to go outside. You won't be able to fall flat in the mud again.”

Mary-Louise didn't say anything to this. She waited until Alida left the room. Then she went to the windows and looked out. Their bedroom overlooked the front drive, which was full of equipment vans and vehicles she didn't recognize. It was still raining. It seemed to do nothing but rain and rain and rain out here, and then it rained some more.

She ran her hand up and down the ruffle on her dress and then headed for the hallway herself.

Coraline was the first person downstairs this morning. She was standing all by herself in the foyer when the camera people started setting up. She sat down on the bottom step and watched them all get to work. On her left was the study. There was yellow crime-scene tape across the door, and a police guard, but the door was open. Coraline did not understand that. She would have had the door closed, just because the room would remind people of what they had seen the day before. Coraline could not make herself forget it. She had thought about it all last night, lying in bed, and when she had gone to sleep, she had dreamed of it. She didn't understand it. It had not looked real when she first saw it. When she remembered it, it had looked entirely too real.

“I don't think you're going to have to worry about it,” she'd told her
father on the phone yesterday afternoon. Olivia Dahl had insisted that all of them should call home right away, so that their families heard about it first from them and not from the television news. “I don't think I'm going to last very long.”

“I don't believe it,” her mother said. “I don't believe there's another girl there who can hold a candle to you. Unless you mean they're going to get rid of you because of your faith. I know about that kind of thing. Think about Carrie Prejean.”

It had taken Coraline more time than it should have to remember Carrie Prejean, but it had come to her. She was the woman who couldn't be Miss USA, or somebody like that, because she had come out against gay marriage. Actually, that incident was a little hazy in her mind. Coraline didn't pay as much attention to the news as her mother did, and she didn't like to watch the Fox cable news station, because everybody seemed to be yelling at everybody else most of the time.

“I don't think you should get discouraged,” her mother had said. “We're all so proud of you just making it onto the show, and we know you're going to make a difference in the lives of the girls you meet. Most of them have no idea what it's like growing up in a Christian home, or living the life of a Christian lady. It's so much better than anything they're used to. You'll see. You'll bring one of them to the Lord, and you won't even know it.”

Coraline stretched out her legs and tried to see if she could figure out what was going on in the living room. It looked like a jumble of wires and lights and cameras. In a way, her mother was right. She did think that the life she had grown up with, the home that was always clean, and where her parents were still married to each other and didn't fight; the Sundays at church, teaching Sunday school and then coming in at the end of the service with the children, to hear the sermon and to sing; the fact that she never had to think twice about whether her period was late or to cry for hours because some boy she'd thought she was in love with had ditched her for another girl—there was a lot of it, a lot of the ways her life was different from, say, Grace's life, or even Janice's. She had already figured out that she probably was the
only virgin here. She was probably even the only one who wanted to be a virgin.

She wondered who that girl was, the one who had died. Was she saved? Was she in Heaven now, or in Hell? Maybe God had a special procedure for people who were murdered, or who died very young from cancer or car accidents. Maybe there really were ghosts. Coraline looked a little to the left and saw that the blood was still there on the carpet and the far wall. There was so much of it, she could tell even from this far away.

The police officer at the door did not look at her. He never looked at anyone.

Coraline heard a door open at the back of the foyer. That would be somebody coming in from the kitchen or the utility rooms. When they were first in the house, Coraline had gone searching around with Janice, just looking at things. She had never seen a house like this before, and neither had Janice.

“It's like an English country house in a murder mystery,” Coraline had told Janice, thinking of her mother's
Masterpiece Theatre
evenings.

And now it was an English country house in a murder mystery. How odd was that?

There was no mistaking the sound of those footsteps in the hall. Nobody on Earth walked the way Sheila Dunham walked. Coraline would have been able to pick out that sound in a crowded airport. She wished she was in a crowded airport. She wished she was anywhere but here. If Sheila made her go upstairs and change, she would have a fit.

Sheila didn't seem to see her on the stairs. Coraline held her breath. When you saw Sheila up close, she was nowhere near as glamorous as she looked on television. She was old, for one thing. Coraline had heard that she'd had a million dollars' worth of plastic surgery, and she didn't have wrinkles, but she just looked wrong. Her skin didn't look like skin, and it was sort of dull, as if it weren't really alive. Her eyes were worse. Her hair looked brittle enough to snap off if somebody pulled at it.

It was hard to know what to do. Did she want to cough or do
something to make herself known, or just pretend not to be here, so she didn't startle Sheila? Coraline looked down at her dress. It was the dress she'd worn this year to the roast beef dinner, the one the church held to raise money for missions. She'd been a hostess at that dinner. The dress was the only thing she had ever bought at Anne Klein, and she still couldn't believe what it had cost.

Sheila stopped in the doorway to the living room. Then she turned and looked Coraline right in the face. Coraline let herself breathe again. She'd done the right thing. Sheila must have known she was there all along.

“Where are the rest of them?” Sheila asked.

“I don't know,” Coraline said. “They were still getting ready when I came down. Maybe they're still getting ready.”

“I'm not letting anyone into the challenge who's late,” Sheila said. “I don't care how many of them I have to disqualify. You're the Christian one, aren't you?”

“I'm a Christian,” Coraline said. She didn't want to say she was the only one. That wouldn't be right. There might be another Christian girl here. Maybe she was trying to hide it, because she was afraid that it would end up getting her eliminated. Coraline did not think that would be right, but she knew people who did that kind of thing.

Sheila was looking her up and down. “How old are you?” she asked.

“I'm eighteen.”

“You didn't lie about that to get on the show? You aren't really sixteen?”

“No,” Coraline said. “Why would I lie about that?”

“People lie about their ages all the time. God, you're insipid looking. And you're young. Not that that ever hurt anybody. How long do you think it's going to take you to grow out of it?”

“To grow out of what?”

“The religion thing,” Sheila said. “People grow out of it. I grew out of it. It gets to the point where you just can't stand the stupid anymore. Then you wake up one day, and you can't believe you ever took any of it seriously. Which is a good thing, if you don't mind my saying
so, because that way you aren't making yourself crazy about going to Hell all the time. Do you expect to go to Hell?”

“Nobody goes to Hell if they're saved,” Coraline said.

“Right,” Sheila said. “And once you're saved, you can slaughter babies in the middle of church on Sunday and you still can't go to Hell. I love religion. It's not just stupid, it's disgusting.”

“It's not the Christians who are slaughtering babies,” Coraline said. Her neck had begun to feel stiff. Her arms had begun to ache.

“Oh, I know what we're going to ask you about,” Sheila said. “Let's see how that looks on an interview tape, why don't we? Slaughtering babies and murdering queers.”

“I'd never use a word like—”

“Oh, of course you would,” Sheila said. “You just wouldn't use a word like that in front of somebody you know doesn't agree with you. And don't tell me a Christian would never murder anybody. Think about Matthew Shepard.”

“The men who killed him weren't Christians,” Coraline said. She was finding it hard to breathe. She was finding it hard to talk.

“Nobody's a Christian if you don't like what they do. I know how that works,” Sheila said. Then: “Those camera people in that room have got less than three minutes. Then I'm going to start pulling the plug.”

She leaned over Coraline until Coraline could smell the mint on her breath. “I really hate you people, do you know that? You can't mind your own business. And you're idiots.”

Then she straightened up and went away. Coraline did not notice where.

The foyer felt very hot, and she wanted to cry.

Grace Alsop noticed Coraline crying on the stairs, but she didn't stop to ask what it was all about. Coraline's makeup was running. She'd either have to run back upstairs to fix it, or allow herself to be filmed as a mess. Grace had already put Coraline down as somebody who
was going to be leaving early. There had been the incident with the T-shirt yesterday, and now there was today, and the tears.

Janice was hopping around, trying to calm her nerves by chattering nonstop. Grace thought Janice might always chatter nonstop.

“I heard Alida say that it could have been on purpose,” Janice said. “You know, that thing with the T-shirt. Coraline could have worn that T-shirt on purpose because she knew she'd be disqualified from the challenge and get to stay here while we were all out, and that would mean she could meet that girl and kill her.”

“She couldn't know she would be barred from the challenge,” Grace said. “And she couldn't have known that about the T-shirt, either. I don't remember Sheila Dunham ever caring about logos before.”

“Ivy says it's a legal thing,” Janice said. “You can't use other people's logos on your show without their permission. It's a—it's a trademark thing.”

Grace was fairly sure Janice had no idea what a trademark was.

“Anyway, that's what Alida said,” Janice said. “I've got to admit, I don't much like Alida. She's angry all the time, and she really thinks she's special. I'm glad I don't have to room with her like Mary-Louise.”

“Mmm,” Grace said.

Suzanne was just coming out of the living room, looking flushed. If Janice hadn't been talking so much, Grace would have been able to hear how the interview was going.

“I wonder what they're going to ask us about in there,” Janice said.

Grace was about to tell her that they would ask her anything they thought she wouldn't want to answer, but she didn't have a chance. Olivia Dahl had come out into the foyer and called her name. Grace got up and smoothed down the sides of her skirt. She was wearing a suit, the kind of suit she had worn to her serious job interviews. It did not matter that she hadn't gotten a job.

The living room was a complete mess of wires and lights and cameras. Grace threaded her way through them to the middle of the room. The furniture had been rearranged a little to place two wingback chairs in front of the fireplace. There was a fire lit there, too, although it did
not seem to be putting out any heat. There was a fireplace in almost every room of this house.

One of the wingback chairs was occupied by a small blond woman Grace vaguely recognized from one of those
E!
“news” shows. She ran the possibilities through her head, but couldn't come up with a name. Sheila Dunham was sitting just past the cameras on the couch. None of the other judges were there. Grace was beginning to realize that the other judges were almost never there. Deedee Plant seemed to be kept on ice somewhere to be brought out only for elimination panels and group powwows like the one last night. Now there was somebody who couldn't have killed that girl last night: Deedee Plant was so plastered so much of the time that she couldn't aim the liquor into a glass, never mind a gun at anybody.

Olivia Dahl was back. She shooed Grace into the empty chair before the fire. The fire really was not emitting any heat. It had to be a gas fire, or something else artificial. Sheila was leaning far forward on her chair.

“My God, you look like a dyke,” she said. “Are you a dyke? Is that what we haven't figured out yet?”