Wanting Sheila Dead(35)

“Are you afraid of her?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Olivia said. “Mr. Demarkian, I’m very good at what I do. I get a dozen offers a month to move. I could go anywhere if I wanted to. If she fires me, I’ll be in another job before the night is over. But she isn’t going to fire me. I’m the only one who knows how to keep the whole thing moving. And she’s getting worse.”

“What does that mean, worse?”

Olivia shrugged. “She’s going off like a bottle rocket more and more often. It used to be deliberate. I’d know when the crap was coming, because I’d be able to see her thinking about it. She’s not thinking about it anymore. She just seems to explode. This morning, she did something I’m pretty sure is going to get us sued by at least two people, and may get her arrested for assault as well. And it’s on camera. Of course it’s on camera.”

“I don’t actually know what you want with me, you know,” Gregor said. “I’m not a private detective. I don’t follow people. I consult with police departments on murders. You don’t have a murder, and what you do have isn’t the kind of thing I deal with. The police will do a good job of finding out who this young woman is and why she shot at your boss.”

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Well. The thing is . . .”

“What?”

“I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a murder if I don’t do something to stop it,” Olivia said. “And I don’t mean that Sheila’s going to murder somebody.”





FIVE



1


Andra Gayle had a roommate named Marcia Lee Baldwin, who made her very uncomfortable. Maybe the truth was that any roommate would have made her uncomfortable. Even somebody who was just like her, who was from her own kind of neighborhood, who had her own kind of history—but it was impossible for Andra to accept the idea that anything like that could happen. Girls with her kind of background and her kind of history did not end up on America’s Next Superstar unless they had somehow managed to overcome all the signs of being who they were. It wasn’t that the show was prejudiced against black people. There had been two black winners and three black runners-up over the course of only nine cycles so far. It wasn’t that the show was prejudiced against people whose families were nothing like the Leave It to Beaver sort of thing. What Andra thought the show was prejudiced against was ghetto, by which she meant a way of talking, and a way of behaving, that was so natural to her she was still having trouble convincing herself that people could be any other way. And yet, that was something she’d known before she came here. That was something she had worked on long and hard when she’d been making her audition tape.

The problem with this particular arrangement—with this spectacular house on the Philadelphia Main Line, which was a place only rich people had lived in forever—was that there was no place within walking distance that she could get to to do anything useful. If she looked out the windows she saw grounds, huge wide swathes of them, all green and wooded with no buildings anywhere, and no roads. There was a front drive, which was not only paved but, according to Marcia Lee, was made especially so that it melted any snow that fell on it. Andra would have really liked to know how that worked. It sounded impossible. The drive didn’t seem to go anywhere, though. It went around in a circle in front of the front doors and then it went off through trees. Andra supposed there had to be a road out there somewhere. But she didn’t think there would be stores and public phones and the other elements of real life.

“I don’t see what you’re worried about,” Marcia Lee had said, when Andra had first started to get antsy after that blowup between Sheila and Grace. “She pulls these things all the time. You can’t take it seriously. And things like that with Grace are almost certainly staged.”

“Staged?” Andra said.

Marcia Lee was a tall girl with very red hair and the air of having done everything and seen everything and known everything that anybody would ever want to. Before this morning’s craziness, she had been closest to Grace, because she and Grace had been the only ones who could talk about what good times they had had in places like Paris. Andra was not unused to girls who had been to other countries. There were girls back home who had moved there from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador and places like that, and who sometimes went “home” to visit their relatives for a funeral. That was different than this. Marcia Lee and Grace seemed to have gone to other countries just because they wanted to. They didn’t have relatives there. Andra didn’t know what to make of this yet. She also knew she couldn’t keep up with it.