Wanting Sheila Dead(62)

Maybe that was the real reason she had had so many fights with her father, and why she had stormed out of their apartment in New York the way she had. Maybe it had nothing to do with Fox News and the political causes it championed, or the Republican Party and the way it was behaving about . . . about . . . Grace couldn’t remember what it was she had objected to. She knew it wouldn’t be hard to find objections. She objected to most of what the Republican Party did, just because it was the Republican Party.

There was still yellow crime-scene tape across the door to the study. It was the first thing anybody saw when they were coming downstairs. There was a uniformed officer standing guard at the study door. That would only last for twenty-four hours, and only that long just in case the police wanted to come back and look things over again. Grace thought they’d looked things over well enough. There had been dozens of them, and so many test tubes, she’d thought she was in a remake of some old Roger Corman horror movie.

Dinner was due to begin at seven o’clock, as usual, in the big dining room. Most reality shows that put contestants together in a house left them to cook for themselves. This one provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the dining room, and served and cleared, as if they were all training to be Jacqueline Kennedy instead of Paris Hilton. At least, Grace assumed that what Sheila Dunham was looking for was somebody like Paris Hilton, or maybe Tara Reid—somebody who would make a big splash in the tabloids and be photographed drinking until she fell over or was caught in a hotel room with somebody else’s husband.

Did anybody know what a superstar was anymore? Michael Jackson had died. The television stations went insane over it, sending camera crews to stake out the front of the house even though nothing was happening there, doing tribute show after tribute show. At least Jackson had had talent. You could see that in the way he danced in his old music videos. What about Anna Nicole Smith? All she’d ever done was to be very pretty and take her clothes off to prove it. Then she’d gained a lot of weight and lost it again.

Every bedroom in this house had its own bathroom. Grace was sitting in hers, looking at her face in the big mirror. It was absolutely the wrong house for this show. It was a house for the old-money rich. There were nice things here, but they were subtle things. There were none of the things the contestants on this show would think of as necessary to people who had a lot of money. There wasn’t a single large-screen, wall-hanging TV. In fact, as far as Grace could tell, there was only one TV, and it was downstairs in a little room near the kitchen. Grace wouldn’t be surprised if only the servants were expected to use it.

Her hair was a mess. Her makeup was smeared. She washed the makeup off and ran a brush through her hair. She didn’t wear makeup most of the time. At college, nobody had. That was one of the great things about going to a women’s college. She leaned close to the mirror and checked out her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry over Sheila Dunham.

She got up from the little vanity stool and went out into the bedroom. Her roommate Suzanne was sitting on one of the beds, and Ivy Demari and Mary-Louise Verdt were sitting on the other. They all looked up as Grace walked in.

“Mary-Louise is hiding out from Alida,” Ivy said. “And since I couldn’t blame her, I came in, too.”

“Are you hiding from anybody?” Grace asked. She didn’t actually like Ivy. Ivy made her nervous. Grace knew she was fifty IQ points to the good on most of these girls, but not on Ivy. And that made her feel worse than useless.

Ivy and Mary-Louise were on Suzanne’s bed. Grace couldn’t even ask them to get off. She went to her own bed and shooed Suzanne a little to the side. Then she sat down herself.

“I’m not running away from anybody,” Ivy said. “Janice is in something of a state, but she’s talking to Coraline. Come to think of it, Coraline is in something of a state, too.”

“Well, I’d be in a state if I was Coraline,” Suzanne said. “I’d be in one if I was Mary-Louise, too. You hear all these things about the way Sheila Dunham behaves, but you don’t really believe them until you see them yourself. Or she does them to you. You’ve got to wonder how much more of that stuff there’s going to be before all this is over.”

“There’s going to be a lot of it,” Grace said. “Don’t you people understand? I keep saying it, but nobody listens. It’s not real. She stages those things. It makes good television. They get hundreds and hundreds of clips, and then they use the ones that look the most dramatic.”

“I wonder if they’ll use any of the clips of the murder,” Ivy said.