She turned away from the bookcase. Did people actually live in this house? If they did, where were their television sets? Anybody who had a house like this would have to be rich. If Andra were rich, she’d have at least thirty television sets, all big ones, the kind that hung on the wall. She’d have a better carpet than this, too, something that didn’t look so worn. She might keep the house the same otherwise.
She turned to go, back out into the foyer, in search of other halls, other rooms. She wanted to call somebody. She wanted to call the weather line, if that was all there was. She wanted to talk to somebody outside of this.
She looked up and saw that there was somebody else in the room, just inside the door, that girl with the weird hair, Ivy. Whenever Andra heard the name “Ivy,” she thought about Poison Ivy. Poison Ivy was a character in a movie, one about Batman. It was only after she’d seen that movie half a dozen times that a teacher in school told her that there was a plant called poison ivy, and if you touched it you got a bad rash and itched.
This Ivy did not look like poison, just very odd. Her hair was odd, and the clothes she wore were odd, too. They always seemed to have stripes and arrows and patterns on them, and to glitter a little.
“Hi,” Andra said. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now. There was no rule she knew of that said they couldn’t be in the other rooms of the house, but she still felt as if she’d done something wrong.
“Hi,” Ivy said. “We’re all in the living room. And we’ve got stuff, you know, like coffee. Why don’t you come join us?”
“I was just looking around,” Andra said.
“I know. I looked around, too, yesterday. It’s a great house, don’t you think? But it’s stuffy. That’s the kind of people who must live here. Stuffy people.”
“I was wondering if people lived here at all,” Andra said.
“Oh, they do. Or they sort of do. The house belongs to this guy who is a descendant of the old guy who built it in the first place, this guy who was big in building railroads back before there were cars or planes or anything. And he’s got sisters and brothers, I think. But nobody spends a lot of time here anymore, because there were about three murders in the house about ten years ago.”
“Murders?” Andra said.
“Yeah, the guy who owns the house, his father was killed in here, in this room. And then one of his sisters was killed upstairs in one of the bedrooms. I’ve been trying to find out which one, but I haven’t been able to. I think it would be neat to live in a room where somebody was murdered, don’t you? Maybe their ghost is still haunting the place, and you could talk to her.”
“Ah,” Andra said. That didn’t sound good at all.
“Come on and join us,” Ivy said. “It’s better when we’re all together, and you don’t want to be out of too many of the shots they use for the show. Grace is having a public fit, but she’s got the right, under the circumstances. If I was the first one Sheila Dunham pulled her crap on, I’d be hysterical.”
Andra looked around. People really lived here, but they didn’t have television sets. She would have to file that one away somewhere and consider it later.
“Marcia Lee,” she said, “my roommate, she says that Sheila Dunham got Grace’s father fired from some job he had and ruined his life.”
“Not Grace’s father,” Ivy said. “Grace’s father is older than Sheila Dunham and he’s been a big deal in entertainment news for years. No, it was some guy on NBC when Sheila was still on the Today show. He was really young and she unloaded all over him and he got kicked off the show, and then he couldn’t ever find another job in the business and he just disappeared. It’s a famous story. If it had been a couple of years later, he would have been okay, because by then everybody knew she was crazy, but there it was. Don’t you ever watch, you know, E! or things like that? It’s not like any of this stuff about Sheila Dunham is a secret.”
“Right,” Andra said.
“Come on over and have something to eat. I think we’re supposed to go somewhere and film something in about half an hour. It would have been earlier if it hadn’t been for the thing with Grace. And Grace hasn’t left, by the way. She’s staying put and holding her ground. This ought to be interesting.”
“Yeah,” Andra said.
She was fairly sure it was the wrong thing to say, but it was the only thing she could think of. She looked around the room again. She couldn’t imagine the people who lived here. It wasn’t like on Cribs, where there were big beds that revolved under mirrors and game rooms with all the game systems you could think of, and home theaters that even had places next to the seats for soda and popcorn. It wasn’t like anything Andra had ever seen or heard of in her life.