by Jane Haddam
Gregor looked at David Mortimer. “There’s another woman in there,” he said. “She was just standing there.”
David Mortimer jerked his head in the direction of the door and began to move. Gregor followed him. Everybody in the city knew John Jackman’s aides. Nobody bothered them. David Mortimer led Gregor through the little clusters of police officers as easily as if the scene had been entirely unpopulated.
When they got in through the front door, Gregor saw that the woman he had first seen standing over the body was still there, and still standing. There were half a dozen police officers standing in front of her, but she did not looked worried, or frightened, or—anything. She looked blank.
David Mortimer went up to one of the police officers and whispered in his ear. The police officer turned around and held out his hand.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “I’m Officer Kelsowicz. I’m glad to meet you.”
“What’s going on with the woman?”
“We don’t know.” It was another officer, a woman. She didn’t offer her name. “We’ve been trying to talk to her,” she said. “She seems to be drugged, or maybe mentally ill. It’s hard to tell.”
“Do you think anyone would mind?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, no,” Officer Kelsowicz said. He put his hand out and tapped the officer nearest the old woman on the shoulder. When the officer turned, Kelsowicz said, “It’s Gregor Demarkian. He wants to try to talk to her.”
“Gregor Demarkian,” the third officer said.
A fourth officer looked around. “That’s Mortimer from the Mayor’s Office,” he said.
“But it’s Gregor Demarkian,” Officer Kelsowicz said.
Gregor stepped forward and put an end to the confusion. Now that he was up close and paying attention, he could see that the woman was not only old and shabby, but very clean, shiny clean, as if everything about her—her clothes, her body, her hair—had been newly washed and sort of polished. She was wearing some kind of perfume, or cologne, too. It smelled like flowers, but not any particular one.
Gregor held out his hand. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Gregor Demarkian. It’s very nice to meet you.”
The old woman looked delighted. “It’s very nice to meet you!” she said. “It’s very nice to meet you!”
“You can call me Gregor, if you like,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure what you want me to call you.”
“Oh, you call me Lily, just like everybody,” the old woman said. “Lily. Lily flower. That’s what my mother used to say. She used to say that I looked just like a lily flower. That was before the helicopters came, you know, back in the days when there was grass. I used to like the grass. I liked the smell of it.”
“I like the smell of it, too,” Gregor said. “There isn’t much of it, in the city. Except in the parks.”
The old woman leaned very close to Gregor’s ear. Her breath was sour with age and, he thought, lack of dental work, but her teeth had been brushed. He could smell the mint of the toothpaste.
“I don’t go into the parks anymore,” Lily said. “I used to. I used to go there for the grass. There are children in the parks. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I knew that.”
“Some of them are real children, but some of them are not,” Lily said. “People like to disguise themselves as children sometimes. You have to be careful. It’s like that old story. The sheep in wolf’s clothing. My mother used to tell me stories. Before the helicopters came.”
Gregor nodded. “My mother used to tell me stories, too. That was right down the street. I grew up on this street. I lived in an apartment a couple of blocks from here, but that building is gone now. Did you grow up here?”
“Here?”
“In this house. I don’t remember seeing you around, but this is a couple of blocks away. I might not have noticed you.”
“I notice you,” Lily said. “You’re right there. I can see you.”
“I am right here. I was wondering if you grew up in this house, that’s all.”
Lily backed away a little. She looked around. She looked back at Gregor.
“The helicopters came,” she said. “They came and they ran all around the yard, and then there was water. It was like being on an ocean, but it wasn’t. There are whales in the oceans. There’s the Loch Ness monster. I read about that in the newspaper. I don’t think that was this house. Do you?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t.”
“Am I someplace I’m not supposed to be? I’m always someplace I’m not supposed to be these days. I don’t know how it happens. I thought I was all right in this house, though. There was a lady, but she fell down. She gave me soap for my hair. And then the helicopters came. But not here. It wasn’t here. And there was water.”
“I think it would be a good thing if you let these people take you to a hospital,” Gregor said. “I don’t think you’re feeling very well.”
“She wasn’t feeling very well,” Lily said. “She fell down. My mother didn’t fall down. She fell into a hole. It was a big black hole. I read about those in the newspaper, too. Do you read the newspapers? I don’t know if I can believe them. They disguise themselves as children sometimes. It’s very wrong of them.”
“I’m sure it is,” Gregor said.
He stepped away and motioned to the policewoman who had been closest when he first came up. She moved forward and took Lily by the hand, not by the arm.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll just take you to the hospital and see what the doctors have to say.”
“I don’t like the hospital,” Lily said. “They yell at you there.”
For a split second, Gregor thought he would have to step in again, but Lily was going without a struggle, walking along hand in hand with the policewoman as if they were two best friends from second grade.
THREE
1
It had been raining when Olivia Dahl first woke up in the morning. It had rained all through her sweep of the morning news shows, local and national and cable. It was raining now, as she took her clipboard down the long back hall to where Sheila Dunham’s voice was emanating, that grating Connecticut caw that always sounded halfway between trailer park and drunk.
“Of course I’m going to do Good Morning America,” Sheila was saying. “Do you think I give a flying fuck whether that little bitch from the Today show still has friends? It wasn’t my fault she drove her husband off the edge of a cliff and he got cancer just to get away from her. And that’s what happened, don’t believe anything else. Stupid bitch.”
It was halfway possible that Sheila was drunk. It wasn’t likely. In spite of all the rumors, Sheila didn’t usually drink first thing in the day. People just needed an excuse for her behavior.
“God, what do you have on?” Sheila was saying. “Why is it nobody knows how to dress anymore? You can’t wear that crap on the set of a national television show. I don’t care if nobody is going to see you. You look like a load of shit exploded in your pants. Do you have an IQ? Did some college actually take you? Did you graduate?”
Olivia arrived at the door of the room they had designated as their “office.” It was actually the old housekeeper’s office back when this had been the house of very rich people who lived with what Sheila would call “style.” Sheila herself had no style. At the moment, she was wearing enough black spandex to put the entire Olympic gymnastics team in mourning. The little girl with her—one of the second assistants, Olivia thought—was wearing a bright blue and green horizontally striped minidress. She looked like an awning in distress.
Olivia cleared her throat. “We do have work to do,” she said.
“I was getting work done,” Sheila said. “Little Miss Fat Ass here was being incompetent. Nobody has any brains anymore. Have you noticed that?”
“I’ll deal with Good Morning America,” Olivia said to the awning.
The awning sniffed, and nodded, and then hurried away. Olivia and Sheila both watched her go.
<
br /> “Cow,” Sheila said. She said it loudly enough to be heard in the hall.
Olivia sat down in the nearest chair. “You shouldn’t do that to the assistants,” she said. “We need them. There’s an awful lot of necessary but mindless work that has to be done on a show like this, and you don’t want somebody like me wasting my time doing it. You can’t go on Good Morning America.”
“Of course I can. They asked me. Who is it, these days? Paula Zahn? God, but that woman is a brainless twit. Where do they get the people they put on these shows, anyway? It’s like they think all of America is made up of mental defectives who want nothing but mush with their coffee. Not that that’s too far off the mark, mind you, but you’d think they’d at least try to look as if they gave a damn about something or the other—”
“You can’t go on Good Morning America because the assumption throughout the media is that we staged that little mess last weekend. Staged it for publicity.”
“Did we?”
“No,” Olivia said.
“We should have,” Sheila said. “It’s worked like a charm, hasn’t it? Why should I care what they think about it? Let them think it. I’m the woman they love to hate. So what? That’s good. Let’s go on Good Morning America and really let them have it. By the time I’m done with them, they won’t be talking about what’s-her-name anymore.”
“According to Janice Ledbedder, her name is Emily.”
“Is it Emily? Have the police found out? Why aren’t we counterattacking here? The police aren’t doing their job.”
“The police are doing the best they can. At the moment, they also think you’re the most likely explanation of Emily and her gun. Not that you inspire hatred, but that you hired her. And if they decide to make that their working assumption, you could be in a lot of trouble. It’s not like it was thirty years ago, you know. They arrest people who cause phony incidents—”
“You just said we didn’t cause it.”
“We didn’t.”
“Well, then.” Sheila was pacing. Sheila was always pacing. Sheila never stayed still. “If we didn’t cause it, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Which one is Janice Ledbedder?”
“South Dakota.”
“I remember. And there was the other one. What’s the other one?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Olivia said.
“Yes, you do,” Sheila said.
Olivia looked down at her clipboard for a moment. A moment later, she looked up, and Sheila Dunham was gone. She took a deep breath. The back corridor on the ground floor didn’t matter, but everywhere else in this house there were cameras, running twenty-four seven. That was the point of a reality show. You filmed everything, and then you took all the footage and edited it down until it made good television. The problem was, none of that footage ever really disappeared. It showed up everywhere. It showed up on YouTube.
Olivia left the clipboard on the desk and got up. She could hear Sheila’s footsteps pounding down the hallway, and then the sound of that swinging door. She hurried a little. It didn’t take much. Sheila was easily winded. That was because Sheila had never been able to really quit smoking.
Olivia made it to the swinging door just in time to see Sheila disappear upstairs. She hurried out into the foyer. It was a big foyer with a chandelier, just the kind you’d expect a robber baron to have. Olivia took the steps two at a time and caught Sheila on the first landing.
“You can’t do this,” she said. “You’re being filmed, right this minute. It will get out. You can’t keep—”
“Shut the hell up,” Sheila said.
Olivia knew that look. Olivia would have said that Sheila was having a brainstorm, except that brainstorms were something else these days. Sheila had reached the landing for the second floor. Olivia was keeping pace, but it didn’t seem to matter.
Sheila went down the second-floor corridor and threw open a door. It was barely eight o’clock in the morning, and they’d had a late night. They’d had that silly dinner. Olivia never did understand why they always had that dinner, why a dinner with servants should be one of the tests of whether a girl could be a “superstar.” What the show meant by “superstar” was “paparazzi bait.” Those people could barely eat with utensils, for God’s sake.
The first room was the wrong one. The two girls in it both sat up in bed and looked confused, but Sheila was out in the corridor again in a flash. Olivia was beginning to feel winded. Sheila was panting as if she were about to have a heart attack.
“Sheila,” she said.
Sheila tried the second room on the same side of the hall. Two girls again sat up. One of them slid back down under the covers and hid her head. They were the wrong girls.
“Sheila, for God’s sake, there are cameras running,” Olivia said.
Girls were beginning to stick their heads out into the hall. Some of them were even coming out to look around. None of them was the one Sheila wanted, and she went on opening doors.
She looked drunk, Olivia had to admit it. When they saw the film of this, they were going to assume she was drunk. She was reeling. There had to be something wrong with the woman.
They were almost to the end of the hall when Sheila found the right room. Olivia tried to grab onto her arm, but it was no use. Sheila went barreling into the room and ripped the covers off the girl in the bed nearest the door. It was the wrong girl. Sheila crossed the room and ripped the covers off the other girl. She took them off in a single sweep, and then tugged again and again until they fell in a heap on the floor.
Grace Alsop was curled almost into the fetal position but entirely exposed to the air. Sheila grabbed her arm and pulled her right off the bed to the floor.
“Get up,” Sheila said. She was so angry, she had gone brick red in every part of skin that was showing. “Get up. Stand up. You filthy little whore. You don’t think I know what you are? You don’t think we’d all guess?”
Grace was getting up, favoring one of her arms and wincing. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. She should have demanded it, but it didn’t come out that way.
“Wellesley my ass,” Sheila said. “And don’t you dare pretend there’s anything wrong with you. You want a broken arm? I can give you a broken arm. I can give you a broken head—”
“For God’s sake,” Olivia said.
Sheila advanced on the now-standing Grace, grabbed the top of her sleep shirt, and ripped. The front cloth came away from Grace Alsop’s body in ragged tatters.
Olivia grabbed Sheila’s arm. This time, Sheila did not resist.
“You can’t do this,” Olivia said. “You have to realize you can’t do this.”
“She’s a spy,” Sheila said, perfectly calm.
“You don’t know that,” Olivia said.
“Her father is the entertainment news director for Fox.” Sheila was still calm. Olivia thought Sheila was much worse when she was calm. “Her name isn’t Alsop. It’s Harrigan. She doesn’t go to Wellesley. She doesn’t go to college at all. She’s twenty-eight. I knew she looked old.”
“You hurt me,” Grace said.
Sheila leaned forward and grabbed Grace’s wrist—Grace Harrigan, Olivia told herself. But she knew the girl was Grace Harrigan and not Grace Alsop. She’d discovered that information herself. That was the only reason Sheila knew it. Sheila would never do any of her research on her own.
Sheila jerked Grace toward the door to the hall and then out of it. By now, all the girls were there, or nearly all of them, standing as close to the walls as they could get and trying to figure out what was going on. Sheila pulled Grace out where they could all see her. The entire front of Grace’s sleep-shirt was gone. She was standing there, to all intents and purposes, naked.
“Traitor,” Sheila said.
And now her voice was gone. Just gone. It had that tinge of crazy that was not anger and not calm and not hysteria—that was nothing Olivia understood, but that was recognizable.
“Traitor,” Shei
la said again.
Some of the girls were crying. All of them had their arms wrapped around their bodies as if that would shield them from something.
“Traitor,” Sheila said again. “Bitch. Whore. Cunt.”
Grace whirled around. “Nobody calls me a cunt,” she screamed. “Don’t you even try.”
Sheila grabbed Grace’s wrist again and spun her around.
Then she lifted one Nike-trainered foot, flexed it back, and punched it directly into Grace Harrigan’s backside.
Grace seemed to lift off the ground half a foot before she first stumbled onto the carpet and then went flying, face down, with a thud.
2
It was Janice Ledbedder who had not come out of her room when the fuss started. She had stayed, instead, lying very still in her bed, hoping that Sheila Dunham would not come back to see if everybody had gotten up and gone into the hall. Janice didn’t think that would happen. She watched the show every week, every season. She watched it when it was on Oxygen and A&E in those marathon all-day season-complete runs. She knew how it worked. There were always a couple of these explosions. They happened in the house, like this one that had happened to Grace. Or they happened on set and as an official part of the show. Or they happened away from the cameras, in a parking lot somewhere, so that the only way the world knew about them was that they turned up on the entertainment news Web sites, or because somebody had a camera phone.
Janice checked the Web sites just as much as she checked the television. There wasn’t really a lot more to do in Marshall, South Dakota. She was not especially “cute,” as people said there—they never talked about pretty, or beautiful. The standard for being attractive in high school was definitely “cute.” It was nonthreatening, and it didn’t sound as if whoever had it was trying to be something other than what they were. “Trying to be something you’re not” was the biggest sin in Marshall, as far as Janice could tell. It had once made her wonder about all those people who were on television. All of them looked like who they were trying to be—but it was impossible to work out. It really was. Maybe it didn’t matter if you were uppity if you were somebody who deserved to be uppity. Maybe it was just people from South Dakota who didn’t deserve that, and that was why she had never seen anybody who “acted uppity” and still had friends. Janice definitely had friends.
