Wanting Sheila Dead(81)

“I know what?” Alida asked.

“Well,” Mary-Louise said. “You know. Maybe somebody has the gun because she wants to kill somebody else. Maybe this is all part of a plot. Or maybe it’s a serial killer who’s killing off contestants for America’s Next Superstar.”

“That girl wasn’t a contestant on America’s Next Superstar,” Alida said. “Nobody knows who she was. You’d better hurry up or you’ll be late, and you know what they’re like when you’re late. At least this time you won’t have to go outside. You won’t be able to fall flat in the mud again.”

Mary-Louise didn’t say anything to this. She waited until Alida left the room. Then she went to the windows and looked out. Their bedroom overlooked the front drive, which was full of equipment vans and vehicles she didn’t recognize. It was still raining. It seemed to do nothing but rain and rain and rain out here, and then it rained some more.

She ran her hand up and down the ruffle on her dress and then headed for the hallway herself.





2


Coraline was the first person downstairs this morning. She was standing all by herself in the foyer when the camera people started setting up. She sat down on the bottom step and watched them all get to work. On her left was the study. There was yellow crime-scene tape across the door, and a police guard, but the door was open. Coraline did not understand that. She would have had the door closed, just because the room would remind people of what they had seen the day before. Coraline could not make herself forget it. She had thought about it all last night, lying in bed, and when she had gone to sleep, she had dreamed of it. She didn’t understand it. It had not looked real when she first saw it. When she remembered it, it had looked entirely too real.

“I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about it,” she’d told her father on the phone yesterday afternoon. Olivia Dahl had insisted that all of them should call home right away, so that their families heard about it first from them and not from the television news. “I don’t think I’m going to last very long.”

“I don’t believe it,” her mother said. “I don’t believe there’s another girl there who can hold a candle to you. Unless you mean they’re going to get rid of you because of your faith. I know about that kind of thing. Think about Carrie Prejean.”

It had taken Coraline more time than it should have to remember Carrie Prejean, but it had come to her. She was the woman who couldn’t be Miss USA, or somebody like that, because she had come out against gay marriage. Actually, that incident was a little hazy in her mind. Coraline didn’t pay as much attention to the news as her mother did, and she didn’t like to watch the Fox cable news station, because everybody seemed to be yelling at everybody else most of the time.

“I don’t think you should get discouraged,” her mother had said. “We’re all so proud of you just making it onto the show, and we know you’re going to make a difference in the lives of the girls you meet. Most of them have no idea what it’s like growing up in a Christian home, or living the life of a Christian lady. It’s so much better than anything they’re used to. You’ll see. You’ll bring one of them to the Lord, and you won’t even know it.”

Coraline stretched out her legs and tried to see if she could figure out what was going on in the living room. It looked like a jumble of wires and lights and cameras. In a way, her mother was right. She did think that the life she had grown up with, the home that was always clean, and where her parents were still married to each other and didn’t fight; the Sundays at church, teaching Sunday school and then coming in at the end of the service with the children, to hear the sermon and to sing; the fact that she never had to think twice about whether her period was late or to cry for hours because some boy she’d thought she was in love with had ditched her for another girl—there was a lot of it, a lot of the ways her life was different from, say, Grace’s life, or even Janice’s. She had already figured out that she probably was the only virgin here. She was probably even the only one who wanted to be a virgin.

She wondered who that girl was, the one who had died. Was she saved? Was she in Heaven now, or in Hell? Maybe God had a special procedure for people who were murdered, or who died very young from cancer or car accidents. Maybe there really were ghosts. Coraline looked a little to the left and saw that the blood was still there on the carpet and the far wall. There was so much of it, she could tell even from this far away.