Wanting Sheila Dead(117)

“You wouldn’t like to, or you’re afraid I’d bitch you out for being a rat?”

“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.”