Wanting Sheila Dead(26)

“You can’t do this,” she said. “You’re being filmed, right this minute. It will get out. You can’t keep—”

“Shut the hell up,” Sheila said.

Olivia knew that look. Olivia would have said that Sheila was having a brainstorm, except that brainstorms were something else these days. Sheila had reached the landing for the second floor. Olivia was keeping pace, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Sheila went down the second-floor corridor and threw open a door. It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, and they’d had a late night. They’d had that silly dinner. Olivia never did understand why they always had that dinner, why a dinner with servants should be one of the tests of whether a girl could be a “superstar.” What the show meant by “superstar” was “paparazzi bait.” Those people could barely eat with utensils, for God’s sake.

The first room was the wrong one. The two girls in it both sat up in bed and looked confused, but Sheila was out in the corridor again in a flash. Olivia was beginning to feel winded. Sheila was panting as if she were about to have a heart attack.

“Sheila,” she said.

Sheila tried the second room on the same side of the hall. Two girls again sat up. One of them slid back down under the covers and hid her head. They were the wrong girls.

“Sheila, for God’s sake, there are cameras running,” Olivia said.

Girls were beginning to stick their heads out into the hall. Some of them were even coming out to look around. None of them was the one Sheila wanted, and she went on opening doors.

She looked drunk, Olivia had to admit it. When they saw the film of this, they were going to assume she was drunk. She was reeling. There had to be something wrong with the woman.

They were almost to the end of the hall when Sheila found the right room. Olivia tried to grab onto her arm, but it was no use. Sheila went barreling into the room and ripped the covers off the girl in the bed nearest the door. It was the wrong girl. Sheila crossed the room and ripped the covers off the other girl. She took them off in a single sweep, and then tugged again and again until they fell in a heap on the floor.

Grace Alsop was curled almost into the fetal position but entirely exposed to the air. Sheila grabbed her arm and pulled her right off the bed to the floor.

“Get up,” Sheila said. She was so angry, she had gone brick red in every part of skin that was showing. “Get up. Stand up. You filthy little whore. You don’t think I know what you are? You don’t think we’d all guess?”

Grace was getting up, favoring one of her arms and wincing. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. She should have demanded it, but it didn’t come out that way.

“Wellesley my ass,” Sheila said. “And don’t you dare pretend there’s anything wrong with you. You want a broken arm? I can give you a broken arm. I can give you a broken head—”

“For God’s sake,” Olivia said.

Sheila advanced on the now-standing Grace, grabbed the top of her sleep shirt, and ripped. The front cloth came away from Grace Alsop’s body in ragged tatters.

Olivia grabbed Sheila’s arm. This time, Sheila did not resist.

“You can’t do this,” Olivia said. “You have to realize you can’t do this.”

“She’s a spy,” Sheila said, perfectly calm.

“You don’t know that,” Olivia said.

“Her father is the entertainment news director for Fox.” Sheila was still calm. Olivia thought Sheila was much worse when she was calm. “Her name isn’t Alsop. It’s Harrigan. She doesn’t go to Wellesley. She doesn’t go to college at all. She’s twenty-eight. I knew she looked old.”

“You hurt me,” Grace said.

Sheila leaned forward and grabbed Grace’s wrist—Grace Harrigan, Olivia told herself. But she knew the girl was Grace Harrigan and not Grace Alsop. She’d discovered that information herself. That was the only reason Sheila knew it. Sheila would never do any of her research on her own.

Sheila jerked Grace toward the door to the hall and then out of it. By now, all the girls were there, or nearly all of them, standing as close to the walls as they could get and trying to figure out what was going on. Sheila pulled Grace out where they could all see her. The entire front of Grace’s sleep-shirt was gone. She was standing there, to all intents and purposes, naked.

“Traitor,” Sheila said.

And now her voice was gone. Just gone. It had that tinge of crazy that was not anger and not calm and not hysteria—that was nothing Olivia understood, but that was recognizable.

“Traitor,” Sheila said again.