Wanting Sheila Dead(69)

Gregor’s phone began to beep in the way it did when he got a text message. He pulled it out of his pocket without looking at it.

“I knew you couldn’t see the body in the mirror,” he told Tibor. “Today, you could see the body in the mirror. I saw the body in the mirror. But when Robert Hannaford’s body was in the same place, all you could see was stuff on the opposite wall of the room.”

“This is important?” Tibor asked.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said, looking down at his phone and clicking the little button that would allow him to read the text message.

He expected it to be from Bennis, wanting to know what they were going to do about dinner, but it wasn’t.

MEET ME 745 AM DEXMALI CITY AVE, the message said. IT’S ABOUT THE GUN. DAVID.

Gregor tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. He hated text messages. David Mortimer should have called.





FOUR



1


Olivia Dahl was not afraid of Sheila Dunham’s rages, even when they were public rages. She’d been with this circus long enough to realize that the rages were always at least half calculated. Even when they seemed to be both spontaneous and off the wall, there was some part of Sheila’s brain working in the background there, little hamster elements among the synapses making the world go round. The image was so compelling, Olivia was having a hard time getting it out of her head—Sheila’s skull full of hamsters, all furiously pumping on wheels.

At the moment, Olivia was mostly worried about getting the legal pads placed on the table in front of the chairs where Sheila expected the other judges to sit. It was a ridiculous gesture. The judges were not corporate heavyweights or government heads of departments about to attend a meeting that would change the lives of thousands of people forever. They were just a small collection of D-list celebrities whose careers were long over, trying to look both important and unintimidating for a television audience that didn’t care about them in the least.

Olivia knew the numbers that were important to this show. She knew them even better than Sheila did, and Sheila was surprisingly coherent on the subject of numbers. What the viewers of this show wanted to see was the eliminations, which girl would go home this week, who would be caught on camera crying or fuming as they dragged their bags into the night.

Olivia had not been in favor of renting Engine House for this show. It was a wonderful place; she understood why rich and reticent people had lived here. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? The people who had lived here were the kind of rich people who had no interest in being famous. That was why they’d tucked themselves out in the country where almost nobody was likely to drive by.

All the pads were on the table. Next to each pad were two ballpoint pens and a water glass. Three carafes of iced water were standing on trivets in the middle of everything. The tablecloth was gone. This was not a conference room. It was the Engine House formal dining room. Dinner parties had been held here, and in the distant past there had been dinner parties with a hundred people at them. Olivia thought that would have been something to see.

Sheila was standing near the baize door to the kitchen, leaning against the wall just next to a portrait of a woman in a gauzy long dress. She was not having a fit or a meltdown. She was just standing there.

“I don’t like this picture,” she said. “Do you? It looks like she’s wearing a prom dress instead of a ball gown. I hate prom dresses.”

“I think it was the style of the time,” Olivia said.

“I hated the prom, come to think of it,” Sheila said. “But then, nobody asked me. I had to ask a boy I knew from drama club, and you know how that kind of thing works out. He’s some kind of enormously important gay rights activist in San Diego now. Did you go to your prom?”

“We’ve been through this,” Olivia said. “I went to my prom with a boy I’d dated since the seventh grade. He went off to college. I went off to secretarial school. That was the end of that, and there isn’t anything interesting about my life since. How could there have been? I’ve been working for you for nearly twenty years.”

Sheila pushed off from the wall and pulled out the chair she was supposed to sit in for the meeting. It was at the head of the table. It couldn’t have been anywhere else. She sat down.

“It’s a long time, twenty years,” she said. “Don’t you ever want to get up and go someplace else? Take another job? Take a vacation?”

“I took a vacation once,” Olivia said. “You had a nervous breakdown in O’Hare Airport and I had to come back.”

“You didn’t like coming back.”