Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  “I wouldn’t like to say,” Janice said again.

  She was feeling very short of breath. She wondered if everybody else had said it was Coraline they were all thinking of. She wondered if the police knew.

  She just sat where she was, waiting for it to be over, saying nothing. That was the best she could do, and even that was so hard, she wanted to burst.

  2

  Ivy Demari had come to a decision. No matter how good a setup this was, no matter how far this entire project had exceeded her expectations, it was probably time to go. She hadn’t intended to go. When she’d first come up here from Dallas, she thought she’d just keep a diary of the whole thing, and then see where that would take her, once she was—as she was sure she would be—eliminated before she got a chance to see the house.

  She had been honestly surprised to find herself in the final fourteen, and even more surprised to find herself getting along well enough so that she wasn’t always in fear of instant elimination. With the hair and the tattoo, she was sure she would hear from Sheila Dunham sooner rather than later. Ivy was a level-headed person, but she didn’t take crap from anybody. She really wouldn’t take crap from a has-been B-TV ex-star, whose only source of power was behaving as badly as possible in public.

  Now she stood in the upstairs hall where the bedrooms were, and watched the police going through the rooms. The rest of the girls were out in the hall, too, except for the ones who were still downstairs. They had been told that they would not be allowed into their rooms until the search was over, but they all wanted to be right there on the scene, just in case. Ivy was sure none of them knew just in case of what, but maybe that didn’t matter, either.

  The police had already searched the room where Shari Bernstein and Linda Kowalski lived. They were just finishing up in the room Ivy shared with Janice Ledbedder. Janice was still downstairs. Ivy folded her arms across her chest and watched the men come back out into the hall, carrying nothing they hadn’t had when they went in.

  They headed for the room Coraline Mays shared with Deanna Brackett, and Coraline came up to Ivy and shuddered.

  “I wish I knew what they were looking for,” she said. “I wish I knew what was going on. Why would anybody kill that girl here? We didn’t any of us knew her.”

  “Maybe Sheila Dunham killed her herself,” Ivy said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “I hate it,” Coraline said. “All this talk about who did it and who didn’t do it. I used to like that kind of thing on television and, you know, sometimes in books, but I don’t like it in real life. I hate it. People shouldn’t make guesses when they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “Mmm,” Ivy said.

  Coraline turned away. “I guess you’re not talking to me anymore, either. Nobody’s talking to me. I hope they find out who killed that girl and arrest her. Or him. I hope they do it right away. Then maybe people will just stop looking at me.”

  Ivy had not stopped talking to Coraline. She did not think Coraline had committed a murder, but she didn’t think anybody else really believed that, either. That was not what was going on. It was just that she couldn’t concentrate on two things at once, and right now she was concentrating on the police.

  Ivy let Coraline drift away and moved closer to the door to the bedroom where the police were. If she stood right there at the edge, she could see the action inside, or some of it. The men were going through the drawers of the dresser, one after the other. They were taking out every single article of clothing, unfolding it, shaking it out, then folding it up again. When they were done with everything in a particular drawer, they pulled it all the way out and turned it over and backward.

  “Don’t they already have the gun?” Grace asked suddenly in her ear. “What do they think they’re going to find under or behind a drawer?”

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said.

  “I wonder if they have to clean up after themselves,” Grace said. “Do they leave the room a mess when they go? What?”

  “They’ve been putting the clothes back in the drawers all folded, up to now,” Ivy said. “I expect they try to leave things the way they found them.”

  “Well, they can’t, can they? Your things are never going to be the same after people have been pawing through them. God, this is really awful. I thought they searched the house the other day.”

  “Maybe they’re looking for something they weren’t looking for the other day.”

  “What? They’ve got the gun. Do they think they’re going to find bloody footprints, or something? What’s the point of all this?”

  Ivy got closer to the door. The drawers were all back in their places. The clothes were all folded and put away. One of the men was looking through a jewelry box. Another of them was dumping out a makeup bag. Both of them were wearing those whitish-but-nearly-clear latex gloves that people wore on police shows on television.

  Ivy shifted a little to get a better look. They had to know they were being watched. They just weren’t paying attention. The one looking through the jewelry box put the jewelry back and put the box on top of the dresser. Ivy found herself wondering who brought a jewelry box to a competition like this. Whoever it was must have brought it to the auditions without the faintest idea whether she’d be in the house or not. The one who was looking through the makeup bag put the makeup back into the bag.

  “I can’t believe this,” somebody in the hall said.

  Ivy didn’t immediately recognize the voice, so she ignored it. As far as she knew, the police hadn’t taken anything out of the other rooms they’d searched. That meant they hadn’t taken her diary, which was a good thing. It would be interesting to know what they’d think if they read it.

  On the other hand, they would almost certainly find it impossible to decipher her handwriting.

  One of the men started to take the suitcases out of the closet. The other one sat down on one of the beds and opened the drawer to the night table. Then he stood up again and leaned over toward the bed he hadn’t been sitting on.

  “Here,” he said.

  “What?” the other one said.

  The first one put his latex-gloved hand over the bedspread and then under it, moving carefully, inching along as if he would set off a bomb if he made any sudden movements. Then he made a sort of strangled noise and stood up. He was holding a little wad of beige something, crumpled up in his hand.

  “My God,” Alida Akido said, from right over Ivy’s shoulder. “That’s Coraline’s bed. That’s Coraline’s bed.”

  “What?” Coraline said.

  The other girls had rushed the door by now. The policeman with the beige wad was holding it in the air. The other policeman was holding out a plastic evidence bag. The first policeman dropped the wad in and the second one sealed up the bag.

  “They took something from your bed,” Alida said, swinging around at Coraline. “It’s you, isn’t it? It’s always you. We all told you to go away and leave us alone, and you wouldn’t listen. Well, I don’t want you here. I don’t. And I’m not going to have it. They took something out of your bed!”

  “What did they take out of my bed?” Coraline was in tears, again. “What did they take? There wasn’t anything in my bed. I don’t even keep my nightgown in my bed.”

  “Just stop it,” Alida said. “Stop it. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares. You’re just stupid white trash and we don’t want you here.”

  “I want her here,” Ivy said.

  “Just shut up,” Alida said. “I want this stupid, murderous bitch out of here right now. I won’t sleep on the same floor with her. I won’t eat at the same table with her. I won’t look at her face again. And if she comes anywhere near me, I’ll claw her to shreds.”

  3

  Olivia Dahl was standing at the foot of the stairs when the police came down and went out the front door to their cars. There was a lot of calling back and forth, and what she thought was people on cell phones. Two of them came back in and asked to speak with her, b
ut they didn’t have much to say.

  “Mr. Demarkian and Detective Borstoi are on their way,” one of them said.

  The other just sort of nodded, and Olivia felt as if she’d like to slap one of them. Was it really necessary for police to be this annoying? They had taken something from one of the rooms upstairs. She supposed it was whatever it was they had come to look for, because they didn’t seem to be interested in looking anymore. She went into the interview room and looked around to make sure that the crew was striking the set and packing away all the equipment. Then she came back into the hall again.

  Sheila was standing near the bottom of the stairs, looking out the open front door to the police cars in the driveway.

  “I take it they aren’t leaving yet,” she said.

  “They said Mr. Demarkian’s coming. Him and that detective, Borstoi, who was here before.”

  “This seems to have backfired,” Sheila said. “You wanted to hire Demarkian, and now it seems the police have hired him. Or maybe not. I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore. Nobody tells me anything.”

  “I think this may be a good sign,” Olivia said. “They found something. They were carrying something when they came downstairs. And I don’t think they would have come back tonight like this if—”

  There was sound from upstairs, and they both looked up. Olivia thought that what she heard was a scuffle, girls physically fighting, but then there was a high-pitched shriek, and she saw that the girls were all pouring out into the main hall from their bedroom wing.

  “Get out of here!” someone was screaming.

  Olivia tried to see through the clutch of moving girls, but it was impossible. Nearly all of them were there together and moving in a clump, except for Ivy, who was hovering around the edges of it all anxiously.

  A moment later, Olivia realized there was somebody else at the edge, but she wasn’t hovering. She was being pushed, and each time she was pushed she staggered a little and almost fell down.

  “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!” Coraline screamed.

  The crowd of girls surged at her almost in a mass. It was like watching bees swarm. Alida was right out in front of it and she had her hands on Coraline’s side.

  “Get out of here,” she shrieked—yes, Olivia thought, that was the voice she had heard a second ago—“Get out of here and don’t come back. Don’t you dare come back. What’s wrong with you? How sick are you? Nobody wants you here.”

  “I’m not going, I’m not going,” Coraline screamed back. “You can’t make me go. I’m not going.”

  “You’re going now,” Alida said, and this time, when she shoved, she shoved hard.

  Coraline stumbled again, and fell, and suddenly she was coming down the stairs, falling end over end like a rag doll, howling all the way, the tears streaming down her face in big wide gushes. Olivia rushed up the stairs to break the fall, and as she did the police came back into the house. Alida had not stopped advancing. She was marching downstairs, most of the other girls right behind her, and she was still shrieking.

  “Die!” she was saying, “I wish you’d die! I wish they’d arrest you! Get out of here. Get out of here!”

  “Wait a minute,” one of the policemen said, grabbing Alida by the wrist. “Calm down. What do you think you’re doing?”

  The other policeman had rushed to Coraline and was now helping her up. “Are you hurt? Should we call an ambulance? Do you think anything is broken?”

  “You’d better be damned glad she isn’t dead,” the first policeman said to Alida. “We’re going to arrest you for assault, but we could be arresting you for murder. What did you think you were doing?”

  “She’s the one you ought to arrest for murder,” Alida said. “She’s the one who murdered that girl and left her body right there in the study for the rest of us to find it. She’s going to murder the rest of us in our sleep before she’s done. I want her out of here. I want her out of here. Nobody wants her here and she ought to be gone.”

  “I want her here,” Sheila Dunham said.

  Everybody stopped making noise. Everybody. Coraline stopped crying, and Alida stopped making a fuss as the police officer tried to put handcuffs on her.

  Olivia could barely believe the silence. She turned around and saw that Sheila had done her thing. She had managed to get herself off on her own, with nothing and nobody around her, and now, in spite of everything that was going on, she was the center of attention. There was no spotlight on her, but it felt as if there were. It felt as if there were a dozen spotlights on her.

  Sheila advanced back toward the foot of the stairs, and the policemen, and Coraline and Alida.

  “I want her here,” she said again. “And I am the only person who gets to decide who does and does not stay in this house.”

  “She committed a murder,” Alida said. “She did it right over there, in that room. They took something out of her bed. Something that she’d been hiding.”

  “I don’t care if she shot the pope,” Sheila said. “If I say she stays, she stays. If I say you go, you go. And you are going. This is your last night in this house. I want you out of here and on a plane first thing in the morning.”

  “She committed a murder! She committed a murder!”

  “If she did, the police can deal with it. And as far as I’m concerned, the police can deal with you. I’ll have your bags brought to the jail so you won’t have to come back to get them.”

  “Bitch!” Alida said, and she was beyond shrieking now, she was beyond everything. Olivia didn’t think she’d ever heard a sound like that before. It was as if she wanted to turn her voice into a weapon. Some people had voices that could shatter glass. Maybe Alida had a voice that could shatter eardrums.

  “Bitch!” Alida shrieked. “Bitch! Bitch!”

  Sheila Dunham stepped right up to her, and spat in her face.

  SEVEN

  1

  They went out to Engine House in Len Borstoi’s unmarked police car, with Gregor riding up front in the passenger seat and Borstoi’s partner—who had never said a word, as far as Gregor could tell—riding in the back. The partner sent text messages, seemingly compulsively. Bennis sat in a chair at an empty cubicle in the police station while they all got ready to go, playing solitaire on her phone.

  “I don’t go out to Engine House,” she told Gregor once again, when he asked her if she was sure she didn’t want to come along for the ride. “And I’m really not going out to Engine House to talk about a murder. That other murder meant we almost didn’t end up together, did you know that?”

  “I did, to tell you the truth.”

  “I remember the day they executed her,” Bennis said. “I was with Christopher, and we went to a bar, and sat on stools, and watched the television there. And that was the news. It was all the news. They went over and over it. Did I tell you I don’t approve of the death penalty?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Sometimes I approve of it, and sometimes I don’t.”

  “Did you approve of it in her case?”

  “I thought it was beside the point in her case,” Gregor said. “The woman murdered for money, and she wasn’t likely ever to get out of jail. But if she did, I think there was a good chance she’d murder again. I think you know she would have. In a way, she wasn’t much different than the woman who is now calling herself Karen Mgrdchian. She killed to ensure that she had the money she wanted and thought she needed. There didn’t seem to be anybody she wouldn’t kill.”

  “The woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian is a psychopath,” Bennis said.

  “So was she,” Gregor said. “And it’s like I said. I think you know that. I think you have known it at least since your father was murdered, and I think you could have known it earlier if you’d been paying any attention to the person who murdered him. But you never did pay her any attention.”

  “No,” Bennis said. “Nobody ever did.”

  “That’s part of the explanation, too,” Gregor
said.

  He kissed the top of her head. “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be back in a bit. Don’t run your battery out. I may need to call you.”

  “I’ve got a charger in my bag,” Bennis said.

  And then, since that seemed to sum up Bennis absolutely precisely, Gregor let Len Borstoi lead him out to the car. It was nowhere near as nice a car as Bennis’s, but it was bigger. Gregor didn’t have to wonder if his legs would fit in it. He waited for the partner and was ushered into the front seat. He buckled his seat belt and thought about the first month or so after the seat-belt laws were passed, when he had deliberately refused to wear it because the government wasn’t going to tell him what to do. It had made absolutely no sense. He always wore a seat belt even when it wasn’t required. It was sensible to wear a seat belt. He believed in wearing seat belts. He thought human psychology was a very strange thing.

  “Are you all right?” Borstoi asked him.

  “I’m fine. I’m thinking about seat belts.”

  Borstoi let that pass. “What was all that you were talking about some woman calling herself something or the other.”

  “The woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry if you can’t pronounce the name. You should see how it’s spelled. It’s something going on in Philadelphia. There’s another woman, Sophie Mgrdchian, who’s lived in her house since—well, I’d guess she’s lived in one house or the other of a four-block area for all her life. And she’s over eighty. Anyway, she was found a few days ago, lying comatose on the floor of the foyer of her house, with another woman with her. At the time we found them both, the other woman seemed to have dementia of some kind, and Sophie was an old lady, so she went off to the hospital and this other woman also went off to a hospital, for observation.”

  “All right,” Borstoi said cautiously. “That sounds okay. Two old ladies in a house. One of them has dementia. The other of them has—what?”

  “Good question. Nobody knew. The police looked through her house. I looked through her house. There was nothing to tell us who her doctor was. Or doctors. Somebody with the police checked with Medicare. She didn’t seem to have been registered anywhere. But when she was found she had one of those plastic pill organizers in her pocket, and she had some fairly expensive prescription medication.”