“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.