Wanting Sheila Dead (21 page)

Miss Dahl got out of her way at the bottom of the stairs. Janice walked up and looked at the two men. Miss Dahl nodded.

“This is Janice Ledbedder,” she said. “Janice, this is Detective Borstoi. He's with the police. The taller one is Gregor Demarkian. He's—”

“He's a detective, too,” Janice said quickly. “I've seen him on television.”

“Maybe we could find somewhere to go,” Miss Dahl said. “It's such a huge house. There must be an empty room you could use somewhere.”

“I don't think it's necessary at the moment,” the man called Borstoi said. “I'm just trying to get some kind of feel for what happened here. It's Miss Ledbedder?”

“Yes,” Janice said. She would never correct a police officer to make him call her Ms., even though she knew she was supposed to. At least, Ivy had told her she was supposed to.

“You found the body,” Detective Borstoi said.

“What?” Janice said.

“You found the body,” Detective Borstoi said. He had that endlessly patient tone in his voice that people got when they thought Janice was being stupid. She wasn't being stupid, though. She wasn't being anything like stupid. He leaned in toward her a little. “You were the first person to see the body,” he said.

“Oh,” Janice said. “Well. I mean. I don't know.”

“Maybe we should say that it was Miss Dahl's impression that you found the body,” Gregor Demarkian said. “You were the first person into the house after you all got back from wherever it was you were—”

“It was a challenge,” Janice said. “That's kind of like a minicontest. I mean, if you don't watch the show. We were supposed
to leave the limousine and get photographed by paparazzi, and then we were supposed to have lunch at this place and then they'd see how we handled it. Andra won.”

“Excuse me?” Detective Borstoi said.

“Andra won,” Janice said again. “She won the challenge. She did the best. Anyway, that's where we were.”

“And then you came back to the house,” Detective Borstoi said encouragingly, “and you were the first one inside, and you found the body.”

“I was the first one inside,” Janice said. “But I don't know if I found the body. I mean, the body was already there. The girl. Emily. That's what she said her name was. I met her in line the first day, the day of the interviews. Casting.”

“And she told you her name was Emily,” Detective Borstoi said.

“Well, she did, but she could have been lying,” Janice said. “And as for today, I was the first one through the door, but we were all pretty much together, and she was there next to the fireplace and already dead. But the house wasn't empty when we got home. There were people here. The people who clean and stuff and some of the crew. They were already here. And Coraline was already here, too, because she didn't go.”

“Who's Coraline?” Detective Borstoi asked.

Janice heard Coraline's sniffling before she saw Coraline. Coraline must have been at the back of the pack in the living room. Now she came out into the foyer and looked at Mr. Borstoi and Mr. Demarkian. Her eyes and nose were red. She looked like she'd been crying for hours.

“I'm Coraline,” she said. “Coraline Mays.”

Janice didn't think she'd ever realized just how thick Coraline's accent was.

“You were in the house all day?” Detective Borstoi asked.

Coraline nodded. “I didn't go on the challenge. I was supposed to go, but when we all got downstairs and we were waiting for the limousine, Sheila came in and looked at us and she—she didn't like what I was wearing, so—”

“She ripped her T-shirt right off,” Janice said. “Sheila Dunham ripped Coraline's T-shirt right off, I mean. It was really dramatic. And then she said Coraline couldn't go, and then the rest of us went.”

“And you stayed,” Detective Borstoi said.

Coraline nodded. “But I wasn't downstairs. I went up to my room to change, because my shirt was all ripped up and anybody, well, anybody could see . . . So. And then when I got up there I just felt awful, so I laid down for a minute just to see if I could calm down, and I must have gone to sleep. The next thing I remember is somebody screaming her head off, and then I got up and ran downstairs.”

“And that was you screaming?” Detective Borstoi said.

“It might have been,” Janice said. “But everybody else got in just after I did. I mean, it wasn't like I was alone in the foyer for more than a second or two. They all came running in from outside. And I remember seeing the body and going to the study door and then I think I did scream, but I think somebody else screamed before I did, only I'm not sure—”

“And by the time I got all the way down the stairs, everybody was screaming,” Coraline said. “And people were crowding into that room and crying and, I don't know. But I went to the door and looked in, and then somebody sort of bumped me from behind, and then I'm not sure. Some people went over to the . . . the body. They went and looked at it.”

“I looked at it,” Olivia Dahl said. “I had to. There was no way to know from the doorway if the girl was still alive. And somebody called nine-one-one.”

Janice saw Detective Borstoi and Mr. Demarkian both look at the room together, and then at each other.

“I really didn't know who she was,” Janice said. “I mean, I did talk to her that first day when we were waiting in line, but she didn't say much. She didn't say anything at all really, except for her name when I asked her. I sort of talk a lot when I'm nervous. But I'd never seen her before that time and I hadn't seen her since, you know, until this.
She was just sort of there and then she wasn't there and then, you know, whatever.”

“Did you by any chance see where she went after you and she parted, that first day in Merion?” Mr. Demarkian asked. “From what I've been able to understand, all the girls were waiting in line, and then they were let into the Milky Way Ballroom, and there was a sign-in desk, and you went there—”

“That's right,” Janice said. “We went to the desk and gave our names and there were people with clipboards who told us where to go.”

“Do you remember this Emily stopping at the desk?” Mr. Demarkian asked.

“I really don't,” Janice said. “I don't remember anybody. Oh, except for Ivy. She's one of the girls who made it into the house. But everybody remembers Ivy because she's white-blond and she has a neon green streak in her hair, so it's hard not to notice. But I was so nervous, and I was trying so hard to go to the right place and not make a mistake, I really wasn't paying much attention.”

“What about here, today?” Mr. Demarkian asked. “Was there anybody in the foyer when you came in?”

“Oh, no. Not that I noticed.”

“Could you hear anybody moving around?”

Janice shook her head. “It all happened really fast. It really did. I came in, and I left the door open when I did because everybody was right behind me. So I could hear the rain, and I could hear the other girls, and I could hear one of the judges, Johnny Rell. I could hear him talking. I couldn't make out the words but I knew it was him. And then everybody else started coming in right behind me. So if there was something quiet going on someplace, you know, if somebody was dusting somewhere or something, I probably wouldn't have heard it.”

Gregor Demarkian looked out over the sea of girls crowding in the doorway to the living room.

“What about the rest of you?” he asked. “Did any of you see or hear anything?”

There was silence.

“Did any of you touch the body in any way?” Detective Borstoi said.

Janice was sort of surprised to hear his voice. He had faded into the background when Mr. Demarkian was talking. Maybe that was why Mr. Demarkian was the great detective, and Janice hadn't heard of Detective Borstoi at all.

The girls in the doorway were all murmuring, but they were all murmuring “no.” Janice tried to remember if that was right—surely, if somebody had touched the body, she would have seen it? Maybe not. She was still feeling a little sick, and she was finding it hard to remember anything.

“It's like my mind is all jumbled up,” she said to Mr. Demarkian. “I'm not usually a scatterbrain, but I can't seem to remember when things happened or in what order. I just saw the body and—but I knew it was dead. I knew right away. I don't know why. I think somebody shot her. There were red holes in her chest.”

“And you could see that from the door?” Detective Borstoi asked.

“I could see it in the mirror,” Janice said, and suddenly it all started to make sense to her. “That's what happened. That's what I forgot. I got into the foyer and I looked into the study because the door was open. You know, not because there was anything for me to do, or anything like that, not that I was doing it deliberately. I just sort of did it because the door was open, and I was there. And then I saw the body near the fireplace and my head sort of jerked back, and then I saw the same thing in the mirror. There's a big mirror tilted over the fireplace and I could see the body in that, and there were big red holes in her chest.”

Detectives Borstoi and Mr. Demarkian looked at each other. Then they both walked over to the study door and looked inside. Then they came back.

“Interesting,” Mr. Demarkian said.

Janice thought the entire day had been entirely too interesting, but that was something else.

Grace Alsop had waited patiently, while all those people were in the house, to be pointed out and exposed. She'd expected Sheila Dunham, at least, to have told that Gregor Demarkian person who her father was, and what she was assumed to be doing in the house and on the set. Of course, Grace only had the vaguest idea of what it was Sheila thought she was doing. She'd told the entire truth when she'd said that she hadn't spoken to her father in years, but even if she had, what could she get for him by being a contestant here? It would be different if she were some kind of investigative journalist, or if she wanted to write a book about her experiences on a reality show. As it was, all she wanted was a diversion for a few weeks, and a chance to see if she'd be any good at it. She'd been at loose ends for a while. She had an excellent education. She was bright enough. She knew what she liked and what she didn't like. She just couldn't get herself to focus on any one thing for any period of time.

Maybe that was the real reason she had had so many fights with her father, and why she had stormed out of their apartment in New York the way she had. Maybe it had nothing to do with Fox News and the political causes it championed, or the Republican Party and the way it was behaving about . . . about . . . Grace couldn't remember what it was she had objected to. She knew it wouldn't be hard to find objections. She objected to most of what the Republican Party did, just because it was the Republican Party.

There was still yellow crime-scene tape across the door to the study. It was the first thing anybody saw when they were coming downstairs. There was a uniformed officer standing guard at the study door. That would only last for twenty-four hours, and only that long just in case the police wanted to come back and look things over again. Grace thought they'd looked things over well enough. There had been dozens of them, and so many test tubes, she'd thought she was in a remake of some old Roger Corman horror movie.

Dinner was due to begin at seven o'clock, as usual, in the big
dining room. Most reality shows that put contestants together in a house left them to cook for themselves. This one provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the dining room, and served and cleared, as if they were all training to be Jacqueline Kennedy instead of Paris Hilton. At least, Grace assumed that what Sheila Dunham was looking for was somebody like Paris Hilton, or maybe Tara Reid—somebody who would make a big splash in the tabloids and be photographed drinking until she fell over or was caught in a hotel room with somebody else's husband.

Did anybody know what a superstar was anymore? Michael Jackson had died. The television stations went insane over it, sending camera crews to stake out the front of the house even though nothing was happening there, doing tribute show after tribute show. At least Jackson had had talent. You could see that in the way he danced in his old music videos. What about Anna Nicole Smith? All she'd ever done was to be very pretty and take her clothes off to prove it. Then she'd gained a lot of weight and lost it again.

Every bedroom in this house had its own bathroom. Grace was sitting in hers, looking at her face in the big mirror. It was absolutely the wrong house for this show. It was a house for the old-money rich. There were nice things here, but they were subtle things. There were none of the things the contestants on this show would think of as necessary to people who had a lot of money. There wasn't a single large-screen, wall-hanging TV. In fact, as far as Grace could tell, there was only one TV, and it was downstairs in a little room near the kitchen. Grace wouldn't be surprised if only the servants were expected to use it.

Her hair was a mess. Her makeup was smeared. She washed the makeup off and ran a brush through her hair. She didn't wear makeup most of the time. At college, nobody had. That was one of the great things about going to a women's college. She leaned close to the mirror and checked out her eyes. She wasn't going to cry over Sheila Dunham.

She got up from the little vanity stool and went out into the bedroom. Her roommate Suzanne was sitting on one of the beds, and Ivy
Demari and Mary-Louise Verdt were sitting on the other. They all looked up as Grace walked in.

“Mary-Louise is hiding out from Alida,” Ivy said. “And since I couldn't blame her, I came in, too.”

“Are you hiding from anybody?” Grace asked. She didn't actually like Ivy. Ivy made her nervous. Grace knew she was fifty IQ points to the good on most of these girls, but not on Ivy. And that made her feel worse than useless.