Wanting Sheila Dead(109)

Mary-Louise was ready for this. When she was first trying to get on the show, the little brochure they had sent her about how to try out had had a list of things that could help her chances, and one of them was writing an application letter that made her sound “interesting.” Mary-Louise did not think she was a very interesting person, but she came from an interesting place, and she was proud of that.

“Holcomb, Kansas, is where the In Cold Blood murders happened,” Mary-Louise said happily. “That was the murder of a whole family in their farmhouse in the middle of the night. Their names were the Clutters. They had a big farm, and a pretty big house, out in the middle of nowhere, really, and then one night this guy who’d worked as a hired hand for them came with another guy he’d met in prison and they robbed the house, and tied up the Clutters, and killed them. It was a really big deal.”

“Was it?” Sheila Dunham said. “I don’t remember hearing about it on the news.”

“Oh, I don’t, either,” Mary-Louise said. “It happened before I was born. It probably happened before you were born, too. November 15, 1959. It was really famous at the time, but what made it more famous and the reason everybody has heard about it is that this writer named Truman Capote wrote a book about it. It’s called In Cold Blood. There have been two movies made of it, and then another movie was made about Truman Capote that was sort of about it, about him writing the book about it, but it wasn’t a very good movie. I mean, I tried to see it in the theater, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. It was one of those floaty movies, if you know what I mean.”

“So this interests you? Murders?”

“Well, you know, it’s interesting that it happened where I live,” Mary-Louise said. “Holcomb is just a farm town, really. There are lots of them all over the state. They’re not anything special. But we’re special, because that happened to us.”

“Do you play video games?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you play video games,” Sheila said. “You know—”

“Oh, no, I do know,” Mary-Louise said. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t think for a minute. I like some games, sort of. I guess you can call them video games. I like Bookworm.”

“What’s Bookworm?”

“It’s where you spell things and if the words aren’t long enough, red tiles come down and they can make you lose. I’m pretty good at spelling.”

“Do you like any other video games?”

“Not really,” Mary-Louise said. “I mean, you know, I’ve got a computer at home, but my parents want me to use that for school. They don’t like it when I just goof around with it. And a lot of the boys have those game systems things, like Nintendo, you know, but it’s all just blowing things up, so I don’t think that’s very interesting.”

“Why did you try out for America’s Next Superstar?”

“Really?” Mary-Louise said. “Well, I guess I tried out for the same reason everybody does. Because I wanted to win. And because I wanted to get away from home. I mean, you can get away from home by going away to a fancy college, and my parents would probably have paid for that, but I didn’t do all that well on the SATs. And, you know, it’s not that I’m a great singer, or a great dancer, or anything like that. But you don’t have to do all that, from what I can see. You just have to be a personality. And I’ve got a lot of personality.”

“Did you expect to be cast when you were asked to come in and audition?”

“I didn’t think I’d get asked to come in and audition,” Mary-Louise said. “You really wouldn’t have believed it when I got that letter. I went running all over the house, just screaming. And all my girlfriends were jealous. They really were. The girl who’s cheer captain this year sent in a tape and didn’t get asked. I laughed so hard, I thought I was going to explode. Not that she was a friend of mine or anything, or bad to me, you know how that goes. It’s just that I’m not the kind of person who wins things, and there I was. It was wonderful.”

“Did you shoot at me in the Milky Way Ballroom?”

“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “No. No, of course not.”

“Did you see who did?”

“Well,” Mary-Louise said, “I was standing in the middle of the crowd, you know, when you started talking. And after we heard the shots, I looked around and, right near me, there was that blond girl and she had the gun. But I thought that was a little funny, because I didn’t hear anything. I mean, I was standing so close, I should have heard something. And then later one of the girls here told me that that wasn’t actually the gun that fired any shots. I heard the shots today, though, when they went off. They were really loud.”