Wanting Sheila Dead(73)

“And now we’ve got two guns,” Ivy said.

“I’m sorry,” Janice said.

“The thing is, it just seems so sensible, doesn’t it?” Ivy said. “A lot of people want Sheila Dunham dead. She’s such a terrible woman.”

“True,” Grace said.

“Look,” Ivy said. “At the very least, they’re likely to discuss what they know about what the police are doing at that meeting. All we have to do is to go to the end of this hall and use the attic access. I’ve already scouted it out. You go up, then you go over to the left a little, and then the ceiling is lower and you sort of have to go down, and you end up in this little space right above the kitchen, which is right next to the dining room. And there’s a vent.”

“You don’t even know if you can really hear anything from there,” Alida said.

“There are a lot of vents,” Ivy plowed on. “If we all go, we can team up and listen at all the vents, and some of us can go a little farther in the access space. It could even be me. I wouldn’t mind crawling. Then we’d be right there, and we’d be able to hear at least something. And that would give us some idea of what’s going on around here.”

“Well, I’m not going to do it.” Alida said. “The rest of you can all jeopardize your chances of winning this competition if you want to, but I’ve never been that stupid.”

“She can’t throw us all off the show at once,” Ivy said. “If we all go together, we’ll be pretty safe.”

“We’ll be nothing of the kind,” Alida said. “You know what she’s like. We’ll all get in trouble at once, and then she’ll pick one of us to unload on. Well, it’s not going to be me. I don’t care what the police are thinking.”

Alida stood up, and turned her back to them, and marched back to her room. She did not slam the door, but she closed it with such a determined click that she might as well have.

Mary-Louise, who was Alida’s roommate, blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “She’s always like that, really. She’s always angry all the time.”

Ivy looked from one girl to the other in the hall. There were still so many of them. The schedule called for two weeks of filming before the first elimination, in order for the crew to get in enough individual interview time and challenge time to give themselves some backup in case one of the later weeks got a little thin. Over time, some of these girls would become more sophisticated. Some of them just needed a chance to get away from home, to be on their own at last. Ivy wondered if she should tell them the other thing that had occurred to her, and decided that, no, that wouldn’t be helpful.

But it was always a possibility. There was a girl dead. They didn’t know who she was or where she came from, but that wasn’t really comforting. Ivy knew that if they didn’t know those things, they also didn’t know why she was dead. And if they didn’t know why she was dead, they didn’t know why somebody wanted to kill her. And that meant, of course, that they didn’t know that there wasn’t somebody out there who still wanted to kill one of them.

Ivy stood up.

“Come on,” she said. “We can at least find out something about something. It’ll make us all feel better.”

“Until Alida turns us in,” one of the girls in the crowd said.

Then somebody giggled, and somebody else started to cry.

Ivy thought her head was about to explode.





3


Andra Gayle did not think her head was about to explode, but she was cold all over, and feeling sick, and nothing she did could make it go away. She was not like these other girls. She had seen dead bodies before. In the neighborhoods were she had grown up—and there had been so many neighborhoods, she found it hard to keep them straight in her mind—dead bodies were a fact of life. Dealers got into turf wars, or just got tired of some guy stiffing them for the money they were owed. Users got frantic because they had no money to buy dope. There were always old people around. Old people were easy to hit when you wanted to pick up a little cash. The Korean grocery stores were less easy to hit, but they had more money.

The rest of the girls were making their way to the attic access place on the landing, and for the moment, Andra was following them. She was not as interested as they were in knowing what the police were doing. She did not trust the police. She did not trust that other detective, the one who wasn’t the police, which was something she just couldn’t figure out. These girls did not understand how things like this worked. It wasn’t hard to get a gun. It wasn’t hard to get a dozen guns. If you had the money, you could pick up anything you wanted on any street corner in the Bronx on any day of the week. Even if you didn’t have much, you could get something, although it was usually something foreign that wasn’t made very well and jammed.