Wanting Sheila Dead (42 page)

“There is a car waiting for you,” Sheila was bellowing. “It's sitting right there, and I want you out of here
now.
”

Gregor looked around quickly. There was indeed a car. It was an ordinary Lincoln Town Car, not a limousine, but it had a driver, and the driver had a uniform. He was leaning against the car's hood and watching as if this was all a show.

The girl Sheila was bellowing at was Asian, and she was not crying. She was furious. She was also not budging.

“I'm not going anywhere,” she was saying. “I'm going to sue. I'm going to get on the phone and tell everybody on the planet what's been going on. You can't keep my mouth shut.”

“Do it and
I'll
sue,” Sheila said. “And I've got better lawyers.”

“God, the way these people behave,” Borstoi said.

“Just remember,” Gregor said. “The most important point, here, is what ought to be obvious. Sheila Dunham is not dead.”

“She goes on like that, she's going to be.”

Gregor waded into the crowd. He asked girls politely if they would move out of the way. They seemed surprised to see him. They had all been concentrating so hard on the scene in front of them, most of them hadn't seemed to notice that a new car had driven up. Gregor saw one of the crew with a handheld camera and another with a camera mounted on a tripod. They were filming all this. It might even have been scripted. Gregor didn't think so.

He climbed up the steps to where Sheila Dunham was standing and tapped her on the shoulder. She jerked around as if a wasp had stung her, and then relaxed a little when she saw who it was.

“Alida here is just leaving,” she said.

“Not right away,” Gregor said. “Maybe we could get all this back in the house for a minute and talk? It's starting to rain again.”

Sheila looked at the sky. It was starting to rain again. So far, there were only a few thick drops, but it could get worse very soon. Sheila looked around at the girls again. The girls had all gone quiet.

“All right,” Sheila said. “Mr. Demarkian here wants us all to go back into the house.” She turned back to him. “There's still crime-scene tape up all over everywhere. I don't know where you think we can go that's big enough to get us all into one room.”

“Try the dining room,” Gregor said. “I'm pretty sure that isn't a crime scene, and from what I remember, it's big enough for a small high school.”

Sheila considered him for a moment. Then she went to talk to Olivia Dahl. Then things began to move. Gregor stood where he was and watched girls swirl around him. Alida Akido didn't swirl but stomped, still looking furious. Coraline Mays, who looked like she'd been crying uncontrollably, was being shepherded around by Janice Ledbedder. Janice had her arm around Coraline's shoulder and was whispering in her ear.

The crew went in last, except for the guy with the handheld camera, who had hurried up the steps to stand in the entrance to get pictures of the girls coming up. Gregor wondered if this was all going to show up on television as part of this season of
America's Next Superstar.
He had no idea if a murder would be a draw or a drag on ratings.

Probably a draw, he thought. People were like that.

He nodded to Len Borstoi. “The dining room is usually accessed through the living room, and my guess is that they're going to go tromping through there, tape or no tape, but don't worry about it. You're not going to need anything there.”

“Is there another way to get to the dining room?” Len asked.

“You can go around the back hall the way the servants do,” Gregor said. “I am constantly astonished that I remember so much about this house. I was only in it a few times, and it was years ago.”

“You didn't come back here for your wedding?”

Gregor didn't begin to know where he would have to start to explain why that was never going to have happened, so he just went into
the house, looked around the large front foyer, and followed the girls into the dining room. He had been right. They'd gone right through the yellow crime-scene tape as if it weren't there. They'd gone tromping across the living room the way they'd go tromping through a field on a hike. If there ever had been valuable evidence in that room, it was either gone or contaminated now.

There had never been valuable evidence in that room. This afternoon's shooting was not particularly important. It wasn't even particularly smart. The best Gregor could say about it was that it made sense.

When he got into the dining room, the girls had seated themselves around the table. There were fourteen of them, plus Sheila Dunham and Olivia Dahl, and a few anonymous young women with clipboards. The dining room table held twenty-four even when it hadn't been expanded. It could be expanded to hold fifty.

Sheila Dunham took the foot of the table, sitting down and stretching out a little as if she were about to interview a not-very-promising aspirant for the next season. Gregor took the head of the table because it had been left free for him. Len Borstoi, his silent partner, and the two uniformed officers took up places against the walls, near the exits.

Gregor looked up and down the table. Alida Akido was right up next to him, looking triumphant. Grace Alsop was sitting on his other side. Ivy Demari, the one with the streak in her hair and the tattoo, was midway down the right side, on one side of Coraline. Janice Ledbedder was on the other side, still with her arm around Coraline's shoulder. Coraline had not stopped sobbing.

Alida had her arms folded across her chest. “I only said what everybody else was thinking,” she said. “They found something in Coraline's room. In Coraline's bed. And Coraline was the only one of us who was here the day that girl was murdered. She was the only one of us who could have murdered her. And then they found something. So Coraline must have done it. And I don't want to go to sleep on the same floor as a murderer. You don't know what she's going to do next. You don't know why she killed that girl. She could kill me, too.”

“You're an asshole, Alida,” Ivy said. “Did you know that?”

“They found something in her room,” Alida said again.

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, let me clear that up. What they found in Coraline's room—” He looked around at the officers. “Was it in her things? Or just in the room?”

One of the uniformed officers stepped slightly forward. “It was in her bed. Sort of shoved up under a comforter thing that was on the bed instead of a bedspread.”

“All right,” Gregor said. He looked up and down at the girls again. “What they found in Coraline's bed was a beige net glove, made out of stretchy nylon mesh with things appliquéd to it. Butterflies, I think we were told. The glove was used to make sure there were no fingerprints on the gun used to shoot at Sheila Dunham today. Mesh like that has several advantages over a latex glove. For one thing, it's closer to the color of the human hand, so it's less noticeable than the white of a latex glove. For another thing, latex gloves sometimes retain fingerprints on the inside of the finger sheaths.”

“Oh,” Janice said. “I heard about that. That was on
Forensic Files.
”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “That was on
Forensic Files.
”

“So,” Alida said, “I was right. Coraline shot at Sheila Dunham and then she hid the glove in her bed. She wanted to kill Sheila Dunham. Of course she did. She was absolutely humiliated the day of the first challenge. Sheila grabbed Coraline's T-shirt and ripped it right off, in front of everybody.”

“So that makes sense?” Ivy said. “First, this other girl shoots at Sheila Dunham, then the girl shows up at our house and Coraline kills her for no reason at all, then Coraline tries to kill Sheila Dunham. I mean, for God's sake. Try to indulge in a little linear thought.”

“The girl calling herself Emily Watson did not shoot at Sheila Dunham,” Gregor said. “The gun she was holding at the Milky Way Ballroom had no bullets in it. It didn't even have blanks in it. Emily Watson was not trying to kill Sheila Dunham. And her name was not Emily Watson.”

“Somebody shot at Sheila Dunham at the ballroom,” Grace Alsop
said. “There were real shots. I heard them. And there were real bullets. The police found them, in the wall. I saw that on the news.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “There were real shots fired in the ballroom. They were fired from the same gun used to kill the girl calling herself Emily Watson, and the same gun that fired at Sheila Dunham today. Maybe I should say, sort of at Sheila Dunham. If they'd been fired directly at Sheila Dunham, she'd be dead.”

“You mean whoever it was, wasn't actually trying to kill me?” Sheila said. “That's a relief. And a disappointment, if you catch my drift.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “well. You can take that up with your psychiatrist.”

“It's not her psychiatrist who's going to be interested,” Olivia Dahl said. “It's the publicity people. You have no idea how excited they were about going to work on a story about somebody actually trying to kill her.”

“I don't see why any of this matters,” Alida said. “We're still back to where we started. Coraline was the only person in this house when that girl was killed. The only one. The rest of us were all out at the challenge. The glove was found in her bed. Obviously, she must have known this girl somewhere. There's got to be a reason. But she's still the only one who could have murdered her. And that's that.”

“You're assuming the murder was done while you were all away on the, ah, challenge,” Gregor said. “In fact, it was done much earlier in the day, before you all left, while you were all getting ready. And it wasn't done in the study. It was done in the servants' access corridor that runs behind all the rooms in that wing and this one. It was done there. Then the body was dragged out into the study and placed in a way that made it echo another crime that had once taken place in this house. Then the study door was closed. It didn't take five minutes, if it took that. Of course, the position of the wall mirror was also altered, but I think that was probably done the night before, when the security camera in there was disabled. It was a silly thing to do. I think it was supposed to make the scene look like one that had happened here before, that I had been involved in, and to get me rattled, or to distract
me. It didn't. It just made it all the more obvious what was happening here.”

“Which was what?”

“Oh,” Gregor said, “it was getting done what the murderer came here—to Philadelphia now, not to this house—to get done. It was so that Janice Ledbedder could kill a girl named Emma Ware, who was once her best friend in Marshall, South Dakota.”

Everybody turned to look, but Janice was just sitting there, smiling.

Revenge is not a reason. It's a way of life.

—Orania Papazoglou

On a bright day at the beginning of May, Sheila Dunham got arrested in Leonardo da Vinci Airport for hitting a skycap on the arm with her purse and then stepping on his foot with her very sharp stiletto high heel. She was in the airport with the last six girls in the competition, on the way to the European house that served as the setting for the last third of the show. She was hot, and tired, and frazzled, and feeling invincible. She thought it made sense to feel invincible. After all, she had stared down a murderer, given a hundred interviews to all those news shows who had been refusing to hire her for years, talked the network into a contract for four more seasons at twice the money, and seen her own face on the cover of
Time
magazine. It couldn't have worked out better if she'd planned it, and she hadn't planned it. People called her crazy, but she wasn't half as crazy as the real crazy people were. You could tell this by the look on Janice Ledbedder's face in those perp walks they kept showing on the evening news.

Bennis Hannaford saw the story about Sheila Dunham's arrest sitting at the table in her own kitchen on Cavanaugh Street, drinking coffee she had made herself and pretending that she hadn't thrown out
the coffee Gregor had made earlier. The picture on the front page of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
was fascinating. There was Sheila, whom Bennis had seen a dozen times in a dozen different situations, and there was a line of girls backed up against a wall, looking panicked beyond belief. The caption didn't give their names. The story did, but without faces to put to them, Bennis didn't know who was who.

Andra Gayle. Coraline Mays. Ivy Demari. Mary-Louise Verdt. Faith Stackdopole. Marcia Lee Baldwin.

Bennis looked back at the picture and tried to figure out who was who. It wasn't possible. There was Sheila Dunham, though, her foot half in the air, her heel headed down to that poor young man's shoe—somebody must have caught it on a camera phone.

Gregor came into the kitchen looking as if he'd been up and running the country for at least the last several hours. Bennis liked this better than the way he looked when he was having trouble getting to sleep, but it still disoriented her a little. Most people had a morning look when they'd first gotten out of bed. Gregor just looked like himself.

He stopped at the coffeepot to check it out. Bennis could practically see him deciding not to say anything. She didn't believe he actually minded. Even Gregor knew what Gregor's coffee tasted like. Gregor poured himself some coffee and came to the table. He looked at the newspaper spread out in front of Bennis. She'd turned to the interior page, and there were more pictures—pictures of Sheila, pictures of the Italian police, pictures of an old woman advancing with her own pocketbook, looking like something out of Greek myth.

Gregor sat down. “It's not going to tell you who won,” he said mildly. “I don't think even they know who won. I don't think they're done filming yet.”