Wanting Sheila Dead(79)

Mortimer looked more confused than before. “It’s a fact, yes, but from what I understand, it’s fairly common for something like that to happen—”

“To homeless people,” Gregor said. “That’s because they try to get warm around pipes and things and sometimes they catch hold of some metal that’s too cold and they rip the tips of their fingers off. But if this woman is Karen Mgrdchian, she isn’t a homeless person. Or at least, she shouldn’t be. She’s from, where—Cleveland? I can’t remember off the top of my head. She’s not from Philadelphia. Right?”

“Right.” Mortimer now looked completely dazed.

“Well, if she was homeless, she wouldn’t have had the money to get here, and she probably wouldn’t have done all that well hitchhiking. I mean, we’re not talking about homeless for a couple of days. Homeless people don’t lose their fingertips when they’ve been out on the street for a couple of days. It takes a while for them to get disoriented enough and desperate enough to do the kind of stupid thing that makes that happen. So, I feel pretty confident in saying that this woman was not homeless. So why are the tips of her fingers such a mess that we can’t get accurate fingerprints?”

“I don’t know,” Mortimer said.

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Gregor said. “Those missing fingerprints, that’s what actually happened.”

The young woman had come back to their table, carrying a tall mug of coffee in one hand and a plate in the other. The plate was thick white stoneware and very plain. She put the coffee down, and Gregor tried very hard to ignore the single coffee bean floating on the single mint leaf at the top. She put the plate down, and Gregor just stared.

The hash browns looked all right, but the sausage seemed to be shot through with little threads of blue and green and gold.

Gregor had no idea what they were.





SIX



1


Mary-Louise Verdt resented the idea that they were all supposed to go on as if nothing had happened, that they were supposed to film interviews today and do a challenge in spite of the fact that there was yellow crime-scene tape across the study door and somebody they were living with was probably a murderer. Murderess—there weren’t really a lot of men around here, were there? Murderess was what they would have called it on those Masterpiece Theatre shows her mother liked to watch. Mary-Louise felt a little odd about the fact that she hadn’t felt as if she ought to call her mother. Even when the murder had happened, and she knew it would be on the news all across the country, she had had to be shooed onto the phone by Olivia Dahl, who seemed to be convinced that something awful would happen if they didn’t all call home at once.

Mary-Louise checked herself out in the mirror and tried to ignore Alida Akido in the room with her. Most of the time, with Alida, Mary-Louise tried not to think the things that immediately came into her mind. She wasn’t used to “diversity,” as they called it here. In her small-town high school, there were a couple of black girls, but that was it. She’d never met an Oriental person before. She corrected herself, in her mind this time, which was good. She’d actually said “Oriental” out loud their first day in the house, and she’d thought Alida was going to rip her head off. “Asian” was the word she wanted. Mary-Louise had no idea if it was part of being Asian, this furious anger all the time, and the withering disdain for almost everybody. It wasn’t nice, and Mary-Louise had been brought up to believe that the most important thing in the world that anybody could be was nice.

Of course, virtually nobody was nice here. Mary-Louise had noticed it right away. People were catty, as her mother would say—bitchy, as they’d say on television. People were always talking about each other when they knew they’d be overheard, or that the conversation would get back to the person. And then, of course, there were the interviews, the one-on-ones, where they were asked very specific questions about other people in the house and were expected to answer them “honestly.” Somebody told somebody who told somebody. That was how Mary-Louise had found out that all her clothes were “hick.”

She looked into the mirror again. She was wearing her best going-out dress, because today they were going to do a challenge where they were supposed to be interviewed on television. They had to handle themselves and a hostile reporter, and later the tape of them doing that would be played back for everybody and they would be “critiqued.” Mary-Louise hated “critiques.” She didn’t understand what the point was. If you’d made a fool of yourself in public, wouldn’t it be nicer if everybody pretended that it hadn’t happened? Maybe it was true that nobody ever pretended that nothing had happened if you were famous, because if you were famous and did something to make yourself look ridiculous, somebody could sell the story to a magazine.