Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “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.

  3

  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?”

  “If you’re asking if I’m a lesbian,” Grace said, “the answer is no.”

  “You’re the one who went to Wellesley, aren’t you? That’s still all women. I thought all those places were full of dykes.”

  Olivia was looking at her clipboard. “You’ve got the notes there,” she said to the small blond woman. “She’s going under the name Grace Alsop—”

  “Her real name’s Harrigan,” Sheila said. “Her father does entertainment news for Fox. He’s a right royal prick, too.”

  Since Grace actually agreed with this, she let it go. Olivia hurried away, and somebody said “Action.”

  The small blond woman turned to the camera and smiled. “Good evening! This is Deirdre Damien with Entertainment News Tonight, and I’m here with the latest winner of the phenomenally popular reality show, America’s Next Superstar! Our guest beat out literally hundreds of other girls just to make it on air, and then she beat out another thirteen to take home the top prize. Here’s Grace Alsop, and I’m very excited to have her!”

  Deirdre Damien, Grace thought. What a name. She turned to the camera herself. It was very important not to leave dead air. Not ever.

  “Good evening, Deirdre,” she said. She smiled.

  “Well,” Deirdre said. “Let’s start at the beginning. Your name isn’t really Grace Alsop, is it? That’s your stage name.”

  “That’s right,” Grace said. “My original name is Grace Harrigan.”

  “Well, now,” Deirdre said. “There are some people, quite a lot of them really, who say you changed your name so that people wouldn’t know that you’re your father’s daughter. Your father is the entertainment news director for Fox, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” Grace said. “But I don’t think I was hoping nobody would know. It isn’t a hard thing to find out. I was just hoping to be judged on my own merits and not because my father is important in the industry.”

  “Was it his importance in the industry that bothered you,” Deirdre said, “or the fact that Fox is known to hire only very bigoted people to work for it? Is your father a homophobe?”

  “What?” Grace said.

  “Or maybe it’s race,” Deirdre said. “I know a lot of people at Fox are supposed to favor a return to segregation. Didn’t your father once say that President Obama looked like a monkey with a Harvard accent?”

  “Not in front of me, he didn’t,” Grace said. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was trying desperately to think. She had expected to be accused of being a spy. She hadn’t expected this. She had no idea where this was going to go.

  “A lot of people are concerned that America’s most popular reality show has thrown up a winner who may not be open to the aspirations of all Americans,” Deirdre said. “I’d like to know what you’re going to do to make sure that people know you aren’t really like that. Do you intend to do some outreach? Some community service? Maybe you’d be interested in dating an African American man.”

  Grace had been watching entertainment news all her life. She knew that it never threw up interviews like this one. It didn’t even come close.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve got something else I’m working on at the moment. I don’t know if you know it, but there was a murder during our filming for this show.”

  Deirdre looked confused. Grace shot a look at Sheila Dunham. Sheila was sitting far forward on her chair. Her hands were knotted together. They looked like claws.

  “I’m committed,” Grace said, “to proving that the police and the public are wrong. I’ve started a crusade to prove that Sheila Dunham did not murder that girl, and that she’d never kept her in a house in Malibu as a slave.”

  SEVEN

  1

  It was the lack of sleep, Gregor thought, that was making him behave so . . . erratically. It didn’t sound to him like the right word. He emerged onto City Ave like a night flying bat suddenly thrust into daylight. Everything looked too bright, even though it wasn’t bright at all. It wasn’t raining, but there were clouds covering the sky, black ones, promising even more rain. He didn’t used to be subject to insomnia. Even during his earliest days at the Bureau, he had been able to sleep at night. There were people who thought he was a little odd that way. How could you sleep after you’d pulled the body of a kidnapped twelve-year-old out of a back-road ditch at four o’clock in the morning? How could you sleep when you knew there were children missing, girls dead in basements, piles of paper supposed to be full of leads piling up on your desk and falling off it in the night?

  The FBI handles more than one kind of crime, and when Gregor had first joined it he had signed on to work on the financial stuff. That made sense, because in those days special agents were expected to be either lawyers or accountants, and Gregor had been an accountant. It would be better to say he had trained as an accountant, at the Harvard Business School. He’d never actually worked as one. Still, given his background, he had expected to be put to work on organized crime and fraud investigations. Instead, he had found himself working on kidnappings. He could still remember going home on the night he had received his first assignment—going home to his first wife, Elizabeth, and being completely astonished at what he was expected to do.

  “I think it sounds better than bank fraud,” Elizabeth had said at the time. “At least there’s a human element to it. It isn’t all numbers.”

  Elizabeth was buried in an Armenian cemetery in Philadelphia. Gregor went there once or twice a year, even now. He had, however, stopped doing that thing he had been so addicted to just after she had died. He didn’t talk to her anymore, aloud or otherwise. He couldn’t remember when he had stopped doing that. It was before he had started seeing Bennis with any seriousness, he was sure of that, but it might have been quite a bit before. Bennis seemed to know that they had been seeing each other long before he had become aware of it.

  He was really very tired. Too tired to be where he was, walking along a street, in the middle of the morning rush, with traffic everywhere. He was getting too old for this. There had been a time in his life when he had been able to stay awake for a couple of days at a time and still function. He could get by for a couple of days more with just a few half-hour catnaps here and there. Now he had to sleep for eight hours and roll carefully into the day just to be coherent, and he hadn’t done anything like that this time. He’d even woken Bennis from a sound sleep. She’d probably gone back to bed after he’d left, after first going to Donna Moradanyan Donahue’s house and complaining about the entire night.

  He was in a neighborhood he did not recognize. It was not a bad one. There were stores, and none of the storefronts were boarded up. There were places to eat, mostly pizza and Chinese food. Gregor remembered growing up in Philadelphia. There had been pizza and Chinese food even then, but there had been more little hole-in-the-wall diners that served always exactly the same kind of food: hamburgers; cheeseburgers; diet plates. The “diet plates” were always the same, too. They consisted of a single hamburger patty without the bun, a little collection of lettuce and tomato, and a big round scoop of macaroni salad thick with mayonnaise. Some diners had a variation that included the macaroni salad and the lettuce and tomato, but that substituted a big round scoop of tuna salad—also full of mayonnaise—for the hamburger patty. The tuna salad had had as much mayonnaise in it as the macaroni salad. Had anybody ever really thought she could lose weight by eating that kind of thing? Gregor’s mother hadn’t been the kind of woman who had tried to lose weight. It was the girls he grew up with who were worried about that, and he’d never seen any of them eating in a diner.

  He came to a little open area in front of a small collection of stores that had been set just a lit
tle back from the sidewalk. He really had no idea at all where he was. He couldn’t even remember why he’d wanted to walk instead of take a cab. The little open area had two stone benches in it. One of the benches was taken up by an old woman with six or seven layers of clothing and the rest of her things in black plastic garbage bags piled in a shopping cart. Gregor sat down on the other bench and wondered where all the bag ladies got their shopping carts. The shopping carts were always in good repair. He couldn’t imagine that they were sold down at the Goodwill store. The bag ladies had to take them from supermarket parking lots, and they had to be good at it, because these days the supermarkets locked them up in chain guards that cost twenty-five cents to open. On the other hand, it was only twenty-five cents. Even a bag lady could come up with that much at least some of the time.

  He got his cell phone and his notebook out of his jacket pocket. He looked up to see a woman standing behind the plate-glass front window of one of the stores, staring at the bag lady and looking furious. It had to be difficult for shopowners. It was a public space, after all. They couldn’t just ban parts of the public because they didn’t like them. Gregor wondered what they did do, and then what the bag ladies did when they were finally told to move along.

  He looked through his notebook until he found the number he wanted. He tapped it into his phone and put the phone to his ear to hear it ringing. He missed the sound of phones ringing. These days people had ring tones, which weren’t tones at all, but entire musical performances, often annoying.

  I’m getting to be an old fart, Gregor thought. Then somebody picked up on the other end of the line and said, “Ormonds.”

  Gregor got a picture of Billie Ormonds in his mind and almost smiled. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I just talked to David Mortimer. I thought I’d better call you.”

  “Why?” Billie said. “Is the office of the mayor about to try to get me fired?”