Wanting Sheila Dead(71)

Olivia looked up and across the living room and saw the yellow crime-scene tape still up across the study door. There was a uniformed policeman sitting on a chair just outside it. She had no idea how long that was going to stay up or when they would be able to get back to their lives. She did know that none of it would interrupt the filming. They had no time to allow themselves to be interrupted.

Olivia stood back and held the door open. “Come right in,” she said. “Sorry to call on you all in the evening like this, but we have some things to discuss. I’ve got water waiting if anybody wants it.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” Deedee Plant was saying to Johnny Rell. “Somebody dead and right here. Right on the set of the show. And it’s funny, too, isn’t it? I’d have thought that if there was a dead body on America’s Next Superstar, it would have been Sheila.”

“Everybody wants Sheila dead,” Johnny said. “That’s why she’s going to live forever.”

Down at the far side of the dining room, Sheila was still sitting in her chair. She was leaning back in it and stretching out her legs. And she had gone back to twirling the pen through her fingers. Olivia did not like the look on her face, or the way her body moved.

Something was coming. Olivia knew it. She always did.





2


It was Ivy Demari’s idea to listen in on the meeting, and some of the other girls were not happy with the idea.

“Of course I want to know what’s going on,” Grace said, “but I’m already in trouble. This will get all of us in trouble if we get caught. And you know what she’s like. You must know what she’s like.”

“Everybody knows what she’s like,” Alida said. “I don’t see any reason for putting ourselves in jeopardy for nothing that concerns any of us. We didn’t know this girl. She wasn’t even cast in the show. She was just some crazy person looking for publicity.”

Ivy looked out at the group of them, spread out in the hall outside their bedroom doors. There were still fourteen of them, and would be for another week. They should have been spending the evening doing individual camera interviews to be used in the show to break up the action. None of them looked like they were competing on a reality show that required them to be glamorous. None of them looked entirely dressed.

Ivy tried to think of a way to put it. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “It’s not just that that girl died here, it’s who killed her. Because somebody must have killed her.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alida said. “She committed suicide. I heard Miss Dahl say so.”

“Olivia Dahl may have said so,” Ivy said, “but it isn’t true, and if you think about it, you’d know it isn’t true. I looked into that room. I could see the body and I could see it again in the mirror. She had three holes in her chest.”

“So?” Alida said.

“So,” Grace said, “people who commit suicide don’t usually shoot themselves in the chest?”

“Well, usually is usually,” Alida said. “That doesn’t meant it couldn’t happen.”

“It couldn’t happen three times.” Ivy was trying, trying very hard, to be patient. She was not Grace, or Alida. She didn’t look down on these girls because so many of them seemed never to have gotten a good education, even on the elementary level, or because they were from places that weren’t very sophisticated. Still, she thought, you’d expect they’d be able to think their way out of a paper bag.

“Look,” she said. “If this girl had managed to shoot herself even once in the chest, the pain would have been excruciating. She’d almost certainly have dropped the gun. She wouldn’t have been able to shoot herself two more times. And then there’s the issue of the gun, too. If she shot herself, the gun would be there, in the room, wouldn’t it? Did you see any gun?”

Nobody said anything. Grace and Alida looked angry. They always looked angry. The rest of the girls looked miserable.

“The gun wasn’t there in the study,” Ivy said. “I stayed as close to that Mr. Demarkian as I could, and I heard him talking with one of the police officers. The gun wasn’t there where the body was, so somebody must have taken it away. Somebody murdered this girl, whoever she was. Somebody murdered her while we were all out.”

“But it wasn’t me,” Coraline said suddenly. Then she burst into tears. “It wasn’t me. It really wasn’t.”

“I didn’t say it was you,” Ivy said.

“I know you didn’t,” Coraline said. “Nobody says it, but they’ve all got to be thinking about it. The police and everybody. I mean, I was here. I was in the house the whole time. I didn’t go to the restaurant.”