Wanting Sheila Dead(72)

“You were here,” Alida said.

“But I’ve got no reason to want to kill anybody,” Coraline said. “I didn’t even know that girl. I wasn’t even one of the people who talked to her at casting. And I thought she was in jail, anyway. We all thought she was in jail.”

Ivy closed her eyes and counted to ten. She opened her eyes again. This was really very simple, and they were all wasting time.

“You were here but you were upstairs,” Ivy said. “You didn’t hear anything because—well, because you can’t really hear anything in this house. It’s huge, and the walls are all six inches of plaster instead of drywall or whatever it is that modern houses use. And we don’t know about the gun, you know. It might have had a silencer. That would explain why none of the staff heard anything—”

“None of the staff heard anything because they were all out back smoking cigarettes.” Alida made a face. “I’ve seen them. They all go out in the back courtyard near the garages and smoke. Anytime anybody is not looking.”

“I guess,” Ivy said, “but it still comes back to what I said. She was here, and somebody murdered her here. Either she found out that we were here and came on her own, or somebody told her where we were and asked her to come. We can’t just ignore the fact that somebody murdered her. And that means it’s really important for us to know what’s going on down there at that meeting.”

“Why?” Grace demanded.

“Maybe they’re going to cancel the season,” Mary-Louise said. “Do you think they would do that? There’s been a death. That’s a big thing. Maybe they just won’t want to go on with it.”

“They’ll go on with it,” Ivy said. “It’s expensive to do something like this. If they don’t do the season, they don’t make the money they’re expecting to make, and they’ll still have to pay all these bills. I’m not worried about them canceling the season. I’m worried about what they’re going to do about the murder—oh, I don’t know. Security measures, maybe? More background checks for the bunch of us? Guards?”

“Do you have something to worry about from a background check?” Alida asked.

“No,” Ivy said. “I don’t. But there’s another consideration that none of you seems to have thought of. She was murdered here. Maybe there’s somebody here right now—”

“It doesn’t have to be somebody here right now,” Coraline said frantically, bursting into tears again. “It could be somebody from the outside. It could. Somebody could have come in and done it, somebody who has nothing to do with the house and nothing to do with the show. Maybe somebody just snuck in here and—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, make sense,” Grace said. “You’re such an idiot. Really. Of course it has to have something to do with the show. It’s always about the show. It’s at casting. Now it’s here. Why would that girl have been at casting and here if it hadn’t anything to do with the show?”

“Maybe somebody is just using us,” Janice Ledbedder said. Ivy felt sorry for her. She was so obviously working hard to say calm, and to sound reasonable. “Maybe somebody who knew the show was going to be filmed out here, maybe they convinced this girl to come, and then they called her out here. I know, they could have said they were somebody from the show, and told this girl that there was a place—”

“And then what?” Grace demanded. “Then this girl got to casting and decided to shoot Sheila Dunham because there wasn’t a place? Where did she get the gun? She had a gun at casting, in case you don’t remember.”

“Maybe,” Mary-Louise Verdt said, “maybe she was somebody who didn’t get called in for an interview, and she was upset about it. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“It would work for the shooting at casting,” Ivy said, “but it doesn’t make so much sense with her getting murdered here. If she was a girl who sent in a tape and didn’t get asked in for an interview, I could see her coming in and shooting Sheila Dunham because she was angry about it. I can even see her coming out here to try it again once she got released from jail. What I can’t see is somebody shooting her once she got here.”

“Maybe it was self-defense,” Janice Ledbedder said. “Maybe she came out here, with a different gun, I guess, because I don’t think the police would have given back the gun, would they? Anyway, maybe she came out here and somebody found her in the library and she tried to shoot them and—”