“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Olivia said. “For one thing, I don’t have them. They’re on file back in California. But there aren’t that many of them, and I’m sure I would have remembered.”
“What’s not that many of them?”
Olivia looked at the floor. “We ask three hundred people to interview,” she said. “I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. We routinely get over ten thousand tapes when we put out a call for them. Of course, we didn’t get that many at first. In the first couple of seasons, we were really straining to find girls to cast, in some ways. We could always have just taken whatever we happened to get, but those first two years there weren’t necessarily enough girls we thought were plausible. So in those days we went out looking for girls. We went to malls. We went to small towns and set up shop in the local theater. There aren’t as many theaters on Main Street anymore as you’d think there’d be.”
“I suppose it would be safe to say that this girl wasn’t from those first two seasons, because those you might have remembered.” Gregor didn’t know if this would be true, but he knew it was what Olivia believed, and he wanted to move forward. “What about the girl herself. Is she a plausible candidate? Could she have been invited to an interview?”
Olivia looked back to the study door. Everybody was avoiding it. The girls who were still downstairs were either in the living room or sitting on the stairs. Sheila Dunham was still stalking. The two gay men Gregor had been told were judges were leaning against the wall next to the front door, looking tired.
Olivia looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. “She was certainly pretty enough. I remember thinking that the first time, in the first incident, back in Merion. Pretty is a consideration. Beautiful would be better, but it’s unusual to find really beautiful girls who haven’t figured out how to make that work for them without us. Really beautiful girls have options, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.”
“When we get the really beautiful ones, it’s usually because they’re from very small towns. Rural South Dakota. Godforsaken places in Wyoming. But she wasn’t that kind of beautiful. She was pretty enough, though. It would have depended on the audition tape. You have to do more than look good to work on television. You have to have some kind of spark, and the camera has to like you. Some girls are too stiff, and some of them are just too retiring. They fade into the background.”
“Is that what this one did, fade into the background?”
“Well,” Olivia said, “she must have. I know we talked about what happened in Merion, but it was very odd. This girl must have just walked in with the rest of them and skipped the sign-in table. It just didn’t occur to me that anybody would bother. To be interviewed, you had to be on my list. In order to be on my list, you had to check in at the table. Just doing what this girl did and wandering off to sit in one of the waiting rooms wouldn’t get you, well, it wouldn’t get you anything—”
“It got her access to Sheila Dunham,” Gregor pointed out.
“Oh, I know it did,” Olivia said. “But I wasn’t watching for that. It did occur to me that some girls might try to sneak past the sorting system and get interviews when we’d rejected their tapes, so we had a rather elaborate system worked out to make that impossible. And this girl seems to have drifted in, gone to a waiting room, then went from station to station and just blended in with the crowd. Some of the girls remember seeing her, on and off, and didn’t think anything of it. Why would they? It was a huge casting call.”
“And in the room where this girl took a shot at Sheila Dunham,” Gregor said. “How many people were there?”
“There were thirty girls—well, thirty-one, with this one—and Sheila and the judges and the camera people, and that kind of thing. We were filming. Those would have been the first group of girls that would get air time during the show. The usual procedure is to pick those final thirty, then run a few of what we call challenges, then whittle those down to twenty, then run a few more challenges, then whittle those down to fourteen. It’s the fourteen who come here and live in the house. Or whatever house we have. And usually we do it all in two days. That day when we pick them, and then the next when we do the challenges. Except, of course, we couldn’t do it that fast this time. The police were involved.”
“So you did what?” Gregor asked. “What happened to those original thirty girls?”