“Listen,” she said. “The fact is, she’s the only one who could have done it, and she’s the only one I can think of who might have had a motive. I think she’s trying to wreck the show.”
“Why would she want to wreck the show?” Janice asked. “Don’t be silly, Grace. She’s just as much involved in the show as any of the rest of us.”
“She may seem like she is,” Grace said, “but she’s one of those born-again people, isn’t she? They’re all a little off-balance, if you ask me, and a lot of them are violent. They get crazy. That’s why they believe in God.”
“Oh, come on,” Mary-Louise said. “I believe in God. Everybody believes in God.”
“I don’t,” Grace said, “and not everybody believes in God in the same way. Some people believe in God and they’re very sensible about it. But the born-again types aren’t sensible about it. They’re fanatics. I think she’s trying to wreck the show. I think she thinks it’s sinful, or something, and she’s trying to shut it down.”
“By killing somebody none of us knows and who wasn’t even supposed to be in the show?” Linda Kowalski said. “And anyway, that other girl had a gun, didn’t she? At the Milky Way Ballroom? There were shots and she was there holding the gun, and that was why the police arrested her.”
“Well, guns can be planted,” Grace said.
“In somebody’s hand?” Ivy said.
Grace hadn’t heard her come in. She didn’t think anybody had. They all turned to look at Ivy’s green hair streak and then looked away again. Grace didn’t like any of the girls in this competition, but the longer they lived together, the more the one she liked least was Ivy Demari. It wasn’t just the tattoos or the weird hair. It was the attitude.
“Guns can be planted,” Grace said again. “They can be. And I don’t know about in somebody’s hand, but that’s still not to say the gun wasn’t planted. After all, they let that girl out because the gun she was holding wasn’t the one that fired the shots they got out of the wall at the Ballroom. I heard that police detective talking to Gregor Demarkian about it.”
“We’re all hearing entirely too much about what the police detective said to Gregor Demarkian,” Ivy said, “and you’ve got to stop this now. You’ve got poor Coraline on the edge of a nervous breakdown as it is. I can’t get her in here to eat something, and she should eat something. She’s going to collapse.”
“Good,” Alida said. “Let her collapse. Let them send her home. Get her out of here. Then I can go back to sleeping at night.”
“She could do it again,” Deanna broke in. “The next victim could be any of us.”
Grace thought Ivy was going to slap somebody. “Why would it be any of us?” she asked. “It’s Sheila Dunham somebody has been firing guns at. It’s Sheila Dunham somebody wants to kill. And no, I don’t think that somebody is Coraline, and neither do any of you.”
“Speak for yourself,” Grace said. “I think that somebody is Coraline. And wanting to kill Sheila Dunham makes even more sense. It is a religious thing. Sheila Dunham has to represent the worst kind of cultural depravity as far as somebody like Coraline is concerned. She probably looks like an agent of the devil. Maybe Coraline thinks she can wipe out depravity and sin and get us all back to God if she just gets rid of Sheila Dunham.”
“And the other girl?” Ivy asked.
“Sheila Dunham has a daughter,” Janice said suddenly. “I heard about it. They don’t talk to each other anymore. Maybe the girl who died was Sheila Dunham’s daughter, and—”
“And what?” Ivy said.
“Oh,” Janice said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t think Coraline did it, either, you know, because, well, she isn’t that kind of person. She’s very nice.”
“For God’s sake,” Grace said.
Ivy took a plate from the stack on the sideboard and started loading it with food. “I’m going to take this to Coraline,” she said. “She’s sitting out on the stairs. She doesn’t want to go into the living room and she really doesn’t want to go into the study. I think the entire pack of you are first-rate bitches, I really do.”
“Somebody has to make sense in a situation like this,” Grace said. “Somebody has to do something to protect us from getting hurt, and the show doesn’t seem to give a damn. I think they ought to post a guard in here to make sure she doesn’t go off her nut again and kill somebody else.”