Wanting Sheila Dead(96)

What Coraline really hated was this thing where they were none of them ever allowed to call home, except for the limited call they got to make to their families after the murder. They couldn’t have their cell phones. They couldn’t use the phone here except in the evenings, and then there was only one, and all of them had to share it. It was impossible to get any time for a really good talk.

She walked around the room again. She looked up at the mirror again. She looked at the floor. There used to be two carpets on the study floor, Oriental ones like the ones in the living room, but the carpets closest to the fireplace had been taken away. There were still bloodstains on that, too.

Coraline heard a sound and looked up. She was starting to get supersensitive to sounds. It would make her look guiltier if anybody noticed.

Ivy was standing in the doorway to the study. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Coraline said.

She revised her impressions in her head. Janice was not the only one who was being nice to her. Ivy was being nice, too. The problem was, she didn’t like it when Ivy was nice to her. There was that hair. There was that tattoo. Back in Southport, only guys got tattoos, and only guys who weren’t nice. Ivy could ride with a motorcycle gang when she was back home. For all Coraline knew, Ivy could be a prostitute.

“They’re going to put a buffet out in the dining room,” Ivy said. “You ought to come and eat something. People really aren’t ostracizing you, no matter what you think.”

Coraline thought about telling Ivy about Deanna, and how Deanna didn’t want to sleep in their room anymore, but she wasn’t sure Ivy would understand. Janice would understand. Janice was almost like the girls she knew at home, and so was Mary-Louise, although neither one of them were saved. Didn’t anybody get saved outside the South? Maybe the people who got saved outside the South just knew more about television and things like that, and didn’t try out for shows like America’s Next Superstar.

“Coraline?” Ivy said.

Coraline looked back up in the mirror. It wasn’t tilted much forward. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t notice that it was tilted at all. Nobody would have done something so small on purpose.

“Coraline,” Ivy said again.

“I’m coming,” Coraline said.

She didn’t want to. She wanted to go back upstairs and cry some more. She wanted to call her mother and leave the house and go back home.

She had no idea what she could do and what she couldn’t do without making herself look guiltier and guiltier, because from what she’d heard them talking about this morning, she seemed to be the only person in the house who could have killed that girl.





2


Janice knew that a lot of the girls were trying to keep their mouths shut when they were talking to the police, but she didn’t see the point. It was exciting, all this. It was much more exciting than she had expected it to be, and she had gone over and over the possibilities in her head before she came to the auditions. This was going to be the most famous season of America’s Next Superstar ever. Everybody on the planet was going to watch it, because they’d want to see if they could tell which one of the girls was trying to kill Sheila Dunham. It would be even better if nobody was arrested, because then there would be suspicion everywhere. People would not only watch, they would watch closely. All the girls would be famous in no time flat. Janice Ledbedder wanted to be famous.

Most of the girls were trying to pretend they didn’t know anything about crime, too, but that was even sillier, in Janice’s opinion, than trying to keep their lives a secret. She had no secrets in her life. Everybody in Marshall, South Dakota, knew she loved to watch all those true-crime shows on television. A lot of the girls liked to watch them, too, and if they didn’t they had mothers who liked to watch.

“I saw the one about the murders at Margaret’s Harbor,” Janice had told Mr. Demarkian when she’d been called in to talk to him and Detective Borstoi. “They made a City Confidential about that and an American Justice, too, and there was stuff on it on Forensic Files. I think maybe that was because of all the celebrities. Everything’s more interesting if there are celebrities, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think,” the police detective had said.

Janice ignored him. “They did the one that happened here, too,” she said. “It was the first thing I thought of when I heard the name of the house. I mean, I wouldn’t have known it was the same place, you know, because all those pictures of the outsides of big houses look alike. But then somebody said the name and I knew. And I’m not the only one. Mary-Louise knew, too. She’d even looked it up on the Internet.”