Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “You don’t think it’s possible for the crew to have wanted to kill Sheila Dunham?” Borstoi asked. “From what I hear, everybody on the planet wants to kill Sheila Dunham.”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said, “but the crew wasn’t here yesterday when that girl was found dead. At all. They were at some restaurant in downtown Bryn Mawr. I suppose one of them could have remained behind, but my guess is that he’d have been noticed. If you’ve listened to the girls, you know that one of them was left behind, but she supposedly went upstairs where she couldn’t hear anything. So she could have committed the murder, or one of the girls in the cast could have committed the murder at the last minute, by running in when they were about to take off—”

  “Did anyone do that?” Borstoi asked.

  “At least three of them did,” Gregor said. “The Asian girl called Alida came back for her umbrella. The one called Suzanne came back for her purse. Janice came back to go to the bathroom. And then there’s when they came back.”

  “Do you think that’s likely? First in the house?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Well, maybe. It’s hard to get the timing straight. But there were no judges here today, so that leaves the judges out. Did you ever get that Emily girl to talk to you?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Borstoi reminded him. “I have talked to the Merion police. They brought her in. She gave her name as Emily Watson, got an attorney appointed, and just shut up. Then when it turned out that she hadn’t actually fired any bullets, and her gun wasn’t the one that did, well—”

  “There was nothing to hold her on.”

  “Something like that,” Borstoi said.

  Gregor walked over to where the bullets were and knelt down. He was not a lab technician, or a forensics expert, but he didn’t need to be one for this. The bullets were buried deep in the wood. It wasn’t that somebody had fired at Sheila Dunham and missed. It was that somebody had fired at the floor. He stood up and backed off.

  “Well,” he said.

  “I know,” Borstoi said. “And I know there are cameras in this room, security cameras, and there were cameras filming what was going on here. But I get the feeling we’re going to be in the same shape with this as we were with the murder yesterday.”

  “The security camera didn’t do any good?”

  “It had been turned off,” Borstoi said. “Or, to be specific, it had had its wires ripped out at the wall.”

  “There were live cameras in here today as well,” Gregor said.

  “Yes, there were,” Borstoi said, “but I don’t think they’re going to be any more help than the stationary ones, and you don’t think so, either. Do you walk on water? Do you have any idea of what’s going on here?”

  “Well,” Gregor said. “There is one thing. And I’m not trying to sound conceited. There’s the mirror in the study, the one on the wall above the fireplace there.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s been moved. Specifically, it’s been allowed to lean very slightly forward. I’ve been in this house before, you know. My wife grew up here, and when I was first back in Philadelphia—”

  “Oh, the Hannaford thing. I remember. I was still in a uniform then.”

  “I went and looked at some of the pictures of that. The mirror always hung flat against the wall. When you looked into it, from whatever part of the room, you could see a lot of things, but you couldn’t see what was right under it on the hearth. But yesterday, the first thing I noticed was that you could see the body on the hearth in that mirror, at least if you looked at it through the doorway. And the body had been—how should I put this? It was as if it had been arranged.”

  Len Borstoi looked impressed. “That’s very good. It had been moved. How did you know that? Or was it one of your sources of information?”

  “No, it was a guess,” Gregor said. “I just assumed that it was highly unlikely that the second murder I should see in this house would end up damned near replicating the first one.”

  “You mean, you think somebody arranged the body so that it was in the same position as the body of old Mr. Hannaford?”

  “Well, it’s like I said. That, or a really incredible coincidence.”

  “And the mirror?”

  “So that I couldn’t mistake what I saw. So that from far off, as soon as I looked at the scene, the first thing I’d notice was the resemblance.”

  “All right,” Borstoi said. He looked half amazed and half amused. “Was there a point in doing that kind of thing? Why would anybody want to go through all that trouble?”

  Gregor looked at the wall, and the floor, and the ceiling. He looked at the bullets embedded in the hardwood.

  “I think,” he said, “the idea was to take my mind off whatever was actually going on there. To distract me from the obvious.”

  “And what’s the obvious?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “the most obvious thing is that Sheila Dunham is not dead.”

  TWO

  1

  The other girls were avoiding her. They had been avoiding her since yesterday. Coraline had taken a long time to come to that conclusion, but now she found it inescapable. Only Janice was being nice to her, she felt, and that was probably because Janice was nice to everybody. She couldn’t help it.

  The yellow tape was coming down from across the door of the study. Police were walking in and out of the foyer. People in lab coats had gone into the study again and then come out, and now people in lab coats were in the living room. That Gregor Demarkian person had left, fetched by a girl who looked young enough to be his daughter and who drove the kind of car Coraline had only heard about. It was a tangerine orange two-seater convertible Mercedes-Benz.

  Janice had explained it. “That’s not the woman it belongs to,” she’d said. “I’ve seen a picture of the woman it belongs to in magazines. She’s some kind of writer, I don’t know. I never could read much, you know what I mean? Anyway, she’s his wife now, and she’s a lot older than that. She must have loaned the car to whoever that is.”

  Coraline didn’t really care who it was. She had gone into the interview with the police and Mr. Demarkian feeling like she was about to be arrested at any moment. She was the one who was in the house all yesterday afternoon. She could say she was in her bedroom, crying her eyes out over Sheila Dunham and her torn T-shirt, but there was no way to prove that. And if she had been in the house, shouldn’t she have heard the shots? Of course, the gun could have had a silencer, but she hadn’t heard anyone talking about a silencer. She’d been listening, too.

  She thought it had been wrong for her to come here. It was all well and good for her mother to talk about providing a Christian inspiration, but this was not a Christian place. Most of the other girls didn’t even like Christians, and when Coraline tried to provide a Christian inspiration, they told her she was a bigoted jerk. They’d only just started, and she’d already found it easier to sit still and keep her mouth shut.

  When the police had asked to talk to her, Coraline had gone into the living room and sat down on a chair across from the fireplace. The room was so large, police technicians could be working on it at one end and interviews could be going on at the other, and nobody got in anybody else’s way.

  “Show us where you were standing,” Gregor Demarkian had said.

  Coraline had looked around and blushed. Of course, she’d been standing right there at the end of the couch, just a little behind Faith Stackdopole, who had the silliest name she’d ever heard. But she’d wanted to stand behind somebody. She’d wanted to be where Sheila Dunham couldn’t see her. And that, of course, had been the wrong decision. The gun had been there. Right there. When it was all over, Coraline had seen it lying on the ground.

  “I was right behind Faith,” she’d said, as carefully as she could. She was trying so desperately not to seem guilty. “And in front of me to my left was Suzanne. And next to me and behind me was Janice. And I was thinking that if I wasn’t so afraid of Sheila Dunham, I’d have bee
n able to sit on the couch, and that would have been better. You could see the girls on the couch. On camera, I mean. They’re the ones who are going to get noticed when the show airs.”

  Coraline had no idea if the show would air now that there had been a gunshot, but maybe it would. Maybe that would make “good television.” People around here were always talking about good television.

  “Could you tell where the gunshot was coming from?”

  All right, that was true. There had been no silencer today. The gunshot was very loud. Everybody had heard it.

  “It just happened,” she had said, threatening to break into tears again. “It just did. We were all sort of jumping up and down, and yelling ‘yay’ and ‘dynamite,’ and that kind of thing. We were all just making noise. And then there were those sounds, you know, and everybody stopped.”

  “Everybody stopped completely? They stopped moving around as well as talking?”

  “Well, no,” Coraline had said. “There was a lot of moving around. And then, you know, people were making noise. And other people, people from the crew, were running around. We all thought somebody had been hurt.”

  “But nobody had been.”

  “No. No. That was a good thing. I hate it here. I want to go home. I didn’t think it would be anything like this.”

  Now Coraline stood in the door of the study and thought that she had completely lost track of who had asked her which questions. She knew one was Detective Borstoi and one was Mr. Demarkian, but she wasn’t paying attention to either of them. She’d just wanted to cry, and to go to her room and hide, except that she wasn’t sure she was welcome in her room. Last night, her roommate, Deanna, had gone down the hall to talk to people and never come back.

  Coraline went into the study and looked around. There was still blood in places. There was blood on the hearth, and on the wall, and on the ceiling—only a little of it on the ceiling, just a drop or two. She went to the mirror and looked up at it. It did tilt a little forward—who had she heard talking about that? Somebody. If you looked at the back of the mirror you could see there was something like a ribbon there, or two ribbons, and the mirror was hanging on them. Coraline didn’t think anybody had done anything about the mirror on purpose. If that was how it was fastened to the wall, it would be easy for it to just come loose a little and let the mirror hang forward. Maybe it would come so loose that the mirror would crash to the ground, and then there would be shards of glass everywhere.

  What Coraline really hated was this thing where they were none of them ever allowed to call home, except for the limited call they got to make to their families after the murder. They couldn’t have their cell phones. They couldn’t use the phone here except in the evenings, and then there was only one, and all of them had to share it. It was impossible to get any time for a really good talk.

  She walked around the room again. She looked up at the mirror again. She looked at the floor. There used to be two carpets on the study floor, Oriental ones like the ones in the living room, but the carpets closest to the fireplace had been taken away. There were still bloodstains on that, too.

  Coraline heard a sound and looked up. She was starting to get supersensitive to sounds. It would make her look guiltier if anybody noticed.

  Ivy was standing in the doorway to the study. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” Coraline said.

  She revised her impressions in her head. Janice was not the only one who was being nice to her. Ivy was being nice, too. The problem was, she didn’t like it when Ivy was nice to her. There was that hair. There was that tattoo. Back in Southport, only guys got tattoos, and only guys who weren’t nice. Ivy could ride with a motorcycle gang when she was back home. For all Coraline knew, Ivy could be a prostitute.

  “They’re going to put a buffet out in the dining room,” Ivy said. “You ought to come and eat something. People really aren’t ostracizing you, no matter what you think.”

  Coraline thought about telling Ivy about Deanna, and how Deanna didn’t want to sleep in their room anymore, but she wasn’t sure Ivy would understand. Janice would understand. Janice was almost like the girls she knew at home, and so was Mary-Louise, although neither one of them were saved. Didn’t anybody get saved outside the South? Maybe the people who got saved outside the South just knew more about television and things like that, and didn’t try out for shows like America’s Next Superstar.

  “Coraline?” Ivy said.

  Coraline looked back up in the mirror. It wasn’t tilted much forward. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t notice that it was tilted at all. Nobody would have done something so small on purpose.

  “Coraline,” Ivy said again.

  “I’m coming,” Coraline said.

  She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back upstairs and cry some more. She wanted to call her mother and leave the house and go back home.

  She had no idea what she could do and what she couldn’t do without making herself look guiltier and guiltier, because from what she’d heard them talking about this morning, she seemed to be the only person in the house who could have killed that girl.

  2

  Janice knew that a lot of the girls were trying to keep their mouths shut when they were talking to the police, but she didn’t see the point. It was exciting, all this. It was much more exciting than she had expected it to be, and she had gone over and over the possibilities in her head before she came to the auditions. This was going to be the most famous season of America’s Next Superstar ever. Everybody on the planet was going to watch it, because they’d want to see if they could tell which one of the girls was trying to kill Sheila Dunham. It would be even better if nobody was arrested, because then there would be suspicion everywhere. People would not only watch, they would watch closely. All the girls would be famous in no time flat. Janice Ledbedder wanted to be famous.

  Most of the girls were trying to pretend they didn’t know anything about crime, too, but that was even sillier, in Janice’s opinion, than trying to keep their lives a secret. She had no secrets in her life. Everybody in Marshall, South Dakota, knew she loved to watch all those true-crime shows on television. A lot of the girls liked to watch them, too, and if they didn’t they had mothers who liked to watch.

  “I saw the one about the murders at Margaret’s Harbor,” Janice had told Mr. Demarkian when she’d been called in to talk to him and Detective Borstoi. “They made a City Confidential about that and an American Justice, too, and there was stuff on it on Forensic Files. I think maybe that was because of all the celebrities. Everything’s more interesting if there are celebrities, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think,” the police detective had said.

  Janice ignored him. “They did the one that happened here, too,” she said. “It was the first thing I thought of when I heard the name of the house. I mean, I wouldn’t have known it was the same place, you know, because all those pictures of the outsides of big houses look alike. But then somebody said the name and I knew. And I’m not the only one. Mary-Louise knew, too. She’d even looked it up on the Internet.”

  “Looked up what on the Internet?” Mr. Demarkian said.

  “Looked up the house,” Janice said. “The first night we were here. We aren’t allowed to have Internet, really, but there was a computer in one of the offices downstairs and we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be in there, so we were using it. We were IM-ing, if you want to know the truth. It’s terrible, being stuck up here without being able to talk to anybody practically ever. Anybody outside, I mean. We’re really not allowed to. So we did that and we looked at pictures of the house and talked to people, except I didn’t talk to anybody because, you know, nobody I knew was on.”

  “Tell us where you were when you heard the shots,” the detective said.

  Janice took a deep breath and brightened right up. This really was exciting. Nothing like this ever happened in South Dakota. There was crime there, but it was the kind of c
rime that would make anybody bored.

  “I was standing behind the couch in the back row,” she said. “Not that there were really rows, if you know what I mean. It’s just that even though the couch is big, it isn’t big enough to have ten girls strung out in a single line behind it, so we were all sort of squished together. I had Coraline in front of me to my right, a little, and then in front of me to my left a little there was Deanna Brackett, Coraline’s roommate.”

  “And who was to either side of you?” the detective asked.

  “Faith Stackdopole on my right, more up front, and Suzanne, I think, on my left. I’m not really sure about that. We were all just sort of moving around until the last minute.”

  “Did you hear the shots when they happened?” Mr. Demarkian asked.

  “Well, of course I heard them,” Janice said. “I mean, they were very loud. I’d have to have heard them.”

  “Do you know what direction they came from?”

  Janice shook her head. “No. No, they were just there. Just sort of everywhere, if you know what I mean. I thought they were close, but they would have to be close, so I don’t see that that’s any help. Really, it was just—well, we weren’t expecting it, were we? And then everybody starting yelling and running around, and somebody got off the couch—that Shari girl, I think. And she was jumping around and yelling, and so was everybody else.”

  “There’s a police technician over there,” the detective said. “She’s set up to test your hands for gunshot residue. I’m obliged to tell you that you do not have to agree to take such a test without a lawyer, but—”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Janice said. “This really is exciting, isn’t it? Do you think they’ll do an episode of American Justice on this one? It would be so wonderful if they did. Then maybe I’d be on two television programs instead of one. They could interview me the way they do, you know, with a backdrop of justice scales or something, and then the person talks about what it felt like to be there.”