The yellow tape was coming down from across the door of the study. Police were walking in and out of the foyer. People in lab coats had gone into the study again and then come out, and now people in lab coats were in the living room. That Gregor Demarkian person had left, fetched by a girl who looked young enough to be his daughter and who drove the kind of car Coraline had only heard about. It was a tangerine orange two-seater convertible Mercedes-Benz.
Janice had explained it. “That’s not the woman it belongs to,” she’d said. “I’ve seen a picture of the woman it belongs to in magazines. She’s some kind of writer, I don’t know. I never could read much, you know what I mean? Anyway, she’s his wife now, and she’s a lot older than that. She must have loaned the car to whoever that is.”
Coraline didn’t really care who it was. She had gone into the interview with the police and Mr. Demarkian feeling like she was about to be arrested at any moment. She was the one who was in the house all yesterday afternoon. She could say she was in her bedroom, crying her eyes out over Sheila Dunham and her torn T-shirt, but there was no way to prove that. And if she had been in the house, shouldn’t she have heard the shots? Of course, the gun could have had a silencer, but she hadn’t heard anyone talking about a silencer. She’d been listening, too.
She thought it had been wrong for her to come here. It was all well and good for her mother to talk about providing a Christian inspiration, but this was not a Christian place. Most of the other girls didn’t even like Christians, and when Coraline tried to provide a Christian inspiration, they told her she was a bigoted jerk. They’d only just started, and she’d already found it easier to sit still and keep her mouth shut.
When the police had asked to talk to her, Coraline had gone into the living room and sat down on a chair across from the fireplace. The room was so large, police technicians could be working on it at one end and interviews could be going on at the other, and nobody got in anybody else’s way.
“Show us where you were standing,” Gregor Demarkian had said.
Coraline had looked around and blushed. Of course, she’d been standing right there at the end of the couch, just a little behind Faith Stackdopole, who had the silliest name she’d ever heard. But she’d wanted to stand behind somebody. She’d wanted to be where Sheila Dunham couldn’t see her. And that, of course, had been the wrong decision. The gun had been there. Right there. When it was all over, Coraline had seen it lying on the ground.
“I was right behind Faith,” she’d said, as carefully as she could. She was trying so desperately not to seem guilty. “And in front of me to my left was Suzanne. And next to me and behind me was Janice. And I was thinking that if I wasn’t so afraid of Sheila Dunham, I’d have been able to sit on the couch, and that would have been better. You could see the girls on the couch. On camera, I mean. They’re the ones who are going to get noticed when the show airs.”
Coraline had no idea if the show would air now that there had been a gunshot, but maybe it would. Maybe that would make “good television.” People around here were always talking about good television.
“Could you tell where the gunshot was coming from?”
All right, that was true. There had been no silencer today. The gunshot was very loud. Everybody had heard it.
“It just happened,” she had said, threatening to break into tears again. “It just did. We were all sort of jumping up and down, and yelling ‘yay’ and ‘dynamite,’ and that kind of thing. We were all just making noise. And then there were those sounds, you know, and everybody stopped.”
“Everybody stopped completely? They stopped moving around as well as talking?”
“Well, no,” Coraline had said. “There was a lot of moving around. And then, you know, people were making noise. And other people, people from the crew, were running around. We all thought somebody had been hurt.”
“But nobody had been.”
“No. No. That was a good thing. I hate it here. I want to go home. I didn’t think it would be anything like this.”
Now Coraline stood in the door of the study and thought that she had completely lost track of who had asked her which questions. She knew one was Detective Borstoi and one was Mr. Demarkian, but she wasn’t paying attention to either of them. She’d just wanted to cry, and to go to her room and hide, except that she wasn’t sure she was welcome in her room. Last night, her roommate, Deanna, had gone down the hall to talk to people and never come back.
Coraline went into the study and looked around. There was still blood in places. There was blood on the hearth, and on the wall, and on the ceiling—only a little of it on the ceiling, just a drop or two. She went to the mirror and looked up at it. It did tilt a little forward—who had she heard talking about that? Somebody. If you looked at the back of the mirror you could see there was something like a ribbon there, or two ribbons, and the mirror was hanging on them. Coraline didn’t think anybody had done anything about the mirror on purpose. If that was how it was fastened to the wall, it would be easy for it to just come loose a little and let the mirror hang forward. Maybe it would come so loose that the mirror would crash to the ground, and then there would be shards of glass everywhere.