Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  The noise in the hall had stopped. No, the screaming had. There was a soft, dull murmur that was girls talking in low voices, but Janice was sure that Sheila Dunham had to be gone. Janice couldn’t see what she could possibly do to cause Sheila to go into one of her patented fits, but the longer she was in this house the more she began to think that nothing had to cause it. Sheila Dunham just had fits. If you were handy, you were it.

  The problem was, Janice wasn’t particularly “smart,” either. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t run around saying dumbo things about, well, stuff, the way some people did. It was just that she wasn’t much interested in books and reading, which meant she hadn’t gotten a good score on the SAT tests. That was the big thing about getting into a college. Janice got very good grades, but other people also got very good grades, and those people got better scores on those tests. The SATs. The ACTs. Some people could get out of Marshall, South Dakota, just by going away to school. When they went away to school, they never came back again.

  Of course, just wanting to get out of Marshall was “uppity.” There was that.

  Janice got out of bed. Her robe was lying over the back of the chair next to the bed. Each of the beds in each of the rooms had its own chair next to it. Janice put her robe on. It was pastel blue and had a little clutch of kittens embroidered at the place where a breast pocket would be. She rubbed the embroidery a little and frowned. She’d heard a lot about diversity, and about how people thought differently and lived differently and liked different things depending on where they were from and what kinds of family they had, but she’d never entirely believed it before she came here.

  She thought about putting on her slippers and decided against it. None of the other girls wore slippers except for Coraline Mays, and Coraline was obviously just as clueless as Janice was herself.

  She stepped out into the hall. The girls were mostly sitting on the floor, except for the black one, that Andra Gayle. She was leaning against one of the walls and looking murderous.

  “I don’t think she can actually get away with touching you,” one of the seated girls was saying.

  Janice wracked her brains and came up with a name: Linda Kowalski. Linda Kowalski was Catholic and had a rosary she kept on her bedside table. Her roommate was a girl named Shari Bernstein, who was Jewish and came from somewhere in New York that was not New York City. Janice felt rather proud of herself for remembering all of that.

  She worked her way down the row to her own roommate, who was not hard to find. This was a girl named Ivy Demari, and she had white-blond hair with an electric green streak in it. Janice thought you could probably have found Ivy on the moon.

  “What’s going on?” Janice whispered.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Grace said. Her face was still red. “Miss Dahl was just telling me not to go anywhere, and then she left herself, and now I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do. I’m not giving that vile little bitch another chance to kick me.”

  “Oh, Grace,” Coraline said.

  “She’s a bitch and worse,” Grace said. “And I’m not going to watch my language about it, either.”

  “This is what’s going on,” Ivy whispered.

  Then she grabbed Janice’s hand and squeezed it. Janice had been a little worried about Ivy at first, but it had turned out that Ivy was actually Very Nice, even though she had tattoos.

  “I meant it about not being allowed to touch you physically,” Linda said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that on this show, or on any reality show—”

  “The contestants do it,” Shari said. “They get into fights sometimes.”

  “The contestants, yes, well,” Linda said. “But Sheila Dunham isn’t a contestant. You could sue her.”

  “You could if you aren’t really a spy,” Shari said. “I mean, if you’re really a spy, you could sue her, but you might not win. If you see what I mean.”

  “Of course I’m not really a spy,” Grace said.

  “Is your father really that guy she was talking about?” another girl said. Janice had to work at it a little, but she came up with a name: Mary-Louise Verdt.

  Grace shifted a little on the floor. She was sitting down with her left leg stretched out across the hall carpet. Janice could see bruises starting to emerge on her thigh.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “My father really is who she said he was. But I’m not a spy. I haven’t talked to the man for six years, for God’s sake. I barely talked to him when I was still living at home. And Wellesley, my foot. I did go to Wellesley. I even graduated.”

  “They can throw you off the show for lying about things, I think,” Coraline said. “We all had to sign that form, do you remember, promising that everything we said was true and we promised it on pain of perjury and that kind of thing.”

  “We did sign such a paper,” Alida Akido said. “I remember.”

  “We signed a lot of papers, but I didn’t read them,” another girl said—that was Marcia Lee Baldwin.

  “There are so many of us,” Janice whispered to Ivy. “I have trouble keeping them apart.”

  “There are only fourteen of us now,” Ivy said. “There were thirty, four days ago. More.”

  “I know. But I still get confused.”

  “Half of them have changed their names, you watch,” Ivy said. “Or worse. It happens every season.”

  “I didn’t change anything,” Janice said.

  It was true, too. She hadn’t changed anything. She had just left some things out, like how she wasn’t . . . ever first. She was popular enough, but never first. She looked a little sideways at Ivy and wondered what Ivy had been back where she was from. Somehow, she just couldn’t imagine Ivy on a cheerleading team.

  “You don’t understand the real problem here,” Grace said. She was now getting very carefully to her feet. “It isn’t being thrown off the show or not. Who gives a flying damn? It’s what’s going to happen next. I wonder which one of you is going to put this up on YouTube.”

  “Why would any of us put this up on YouTube?” Coraline said. “And how would we manage it?”

  “Cell phone video,” Shari said.

  “And if one of you don’t do it,” Grace said, “then one of the crew here will. There are cameras everywhere, haven’t you noticed? They’re filming us all the time. One way or the other, this thing is going to be on the Internet by the end of the day, and it’s going to be everywhere, and I mean everywhere, by the end of the week. Courtesy of my father.”

  “Your father is going to show a tape of this everywhere in the world?” Mary-Louise Verdt sounded confused.

  “No, you rank idiot,” Grace said. “My father being who he is means other people are going to show this to the world. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to be sent home right this minute or not. I’m going to be made a complete and utter idiot. Which was the point.”

  “You know, I’ve thought that, too, sometimes,” Coraline said. “That it’s all done on purpose. You know, to make more drama.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Grace said. “Of course it’s all done on purpose. I mean, it’s Sheila Dunham we’re talking about here. It’s not like she’s Tyra Banks. The world doesn’t worship the ground she walks on. She wouldn’t have any career at all anymore if she didn’t behave like a complete asshole in public and on unpredictable occasions. It’s what she does. No wonder that silly little blond girl tried to murder her.”

  “Oh, do we know that’s what it was about?” Coraline asked. “Emily, I mean. Was Emily a contestant on the show? I thought I’d seen all the shows and I don’t remember her.”

  “But she looked familiar, didn’t she?” Mary-Louise said. “I remember thinking that when I saw her. She looks very familiar.”

  “Maybe she was on the show for just a little while and then she got booted off, and she was wearing makeup, you know, or clothes, different things,” Coraline said. “I’ll admit I don’t always remember the girls who go home first. I mean, they’
re not on very long and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Grace said again. She was standing all the way now, but still leaning against the wall for support. Janice thought that that bruise on her thigh was going to be nasty. “Would you people please wake up? This is a game she plays, and you’re all getting suckered into it. All of you. I’ll bet you anything that Emily didn’t try to murder her at all. I’ll bet you it’s a setup. That’s what they’re saying on the news.”

  “We’re not supposed to watch the news,” Coraline said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Grace said.

  Then she stomped off toward her own bedroom, limping but obviously furious.

  Janice watched her disappear through her bedroom door and then another girl, Suzanne Toretti, disappear after her. Suzanne looked scared to death.

  Janice turned to Ivy. Ivy was looking at her fingernails.

  “I didn’t realize it would be so tense,” Janice said. “I guess I didn’t really think about what it would be like at all. I just thought it would be something to do. Something that wasn’t just staying in South Dakota. If you know what I mean.”

  Ivy got up and held out a hand for her. “Of course I know what you mean,” she said, “but Grace has a point. Sheila Dunham probably does do these things on purpose. And it’s a good way to get yourself killed. Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t think anybody would actually kill her,” Janice said.

  “They’ll just want to,” Ivy said. “We can change the name of the show. We can call it Wanting Sheila Dead.”

  Janice giggled and allowed herself to be led back to her room, where her clothes were carefully hung up on one side of the closet and her slippers were still sitting side by side under her bed. She wished she could be sure that she would never be the one that Sheila Dunham was yelling at, but nobody could be sure of that.

  Sheila Dunham even yelled at the girls who won.

  FOUR

  1

  There had been a murder on Cavanaugh Street once, years and years ago, and Hannah Krekorian had been suspected of committing it. Gregor remembered that almost as well as he remembered moving back to the street after his first wife died. Cavanaugh Street was a place where odd things happened, but the odd things were almost never bad. Donna Moradanyan Donahue decorated things for holidays when she wasn’t too pregnant to stand on stepladders. She’d once turned the entire brownstone building where Gregor lived—and where she had lived herself before her marriage—into a gigantic Christmas package, complete with a bow. She’d decorated the street for Gregor’s and Bennis’s wedding, too, although she’d had several helpers for that one, and it had included long lines of white ribbon running down the sidewalks. It was a good thing John Henry Newman Jackman was mayor of Philadelphia. If there had been a stranger in that office, Donna would have been arrested and fined on a regular basis.

  There was nothing decorated up and down the street now, although it was close to Easter. At least Howard Kashinian hadn’t dressed himself up as the Easter Bunny this year. Even John Jackman hadn’t been able to keep Howard for getting arrested for that one, although it had been mostly a matter of the police thinking they’d discovered a peculiarly flamboyant pedophile. The truth was, Howard was no more a pedophile than he was a decent attorney. He was just an idiot.

  There was enough rain to prompt banalities about Noah and his flood. Gregor made his way through it, holding an umbrella very carefully over his head, and went down the small, clean alley to the back of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. When they’d rebuilt here after the old church had been destroyed, they’d been careful to have everything done exactly right. The “alley” looked like one of those small pedestrian paved streets in London, and they didn’t leave its maintenance to the city. They hired a firm to come in and clean it and the two courtyards at each end of it, and another firm to dig it all out of the snow, when the snow came.

  Gregor went into the courtyard and saw that Father Tibor’s apartment was lit up as if it were midnight. The apartment above it, being empty, was dark.

  Gregor rang the bell and waited to be let in. He had no idea why he did that, since Tibor didn’t actually expect him to, and Tibor also never kept the door locked. Gregor had talked to him about that a million times, but it did no good.

  Tibor came to the door and opened up. Gregor put his umbrella down, shook it off, and dropped it into the umbrella stand just inside the door.

  “I have them all here, Krekor,” Tibor said. “And I have all the papers I could find on the kitchen table. Watch the books. I made the stack the night before last and I meant to put them away, but I forgot.”

  The books included the usual collection: Areopagetica by John Milton; Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons; something in Greek. Gregor was careful going around them.

  “I wish we’d find somebody for that apartment upstairs,” he said. “I don’t like it sitting empty. I know it’s not the usual sort of thing, but there’s always a danger of getting squatters in there. Or worse.”

  “We’re not going to get squatters in,” Tibor said. “And if we did I think it could be argued that we had the responsibility to serve them. That is what a church is for, Krekor, not just a beautiful liturgy but to help us live as Christ lived. That is more books, Krekor. Be careful.”

  There were indeed more books, dozens of them, stacked against the wall between the small dining room and the kitchen. There were books stacked on every wall. The parishioners of Holy Trinity had built this apartment particularly for Father Tibor. They had put built-in bookshelves on every available inch of wall space, including in some of the bathrooms. It hadn’t been enough. There would never be enough wall space for Tibor’s books. He read everything—in six languages.

  Tibor swung back the door to the kitchen and Gregor went through to find the three Very Old Ladies sitting together at Tibor’s kitchen table, drinking coffee that looked like black mud and probably had enough caffeine to keep the entire United States Army awake for a year. They had brought their own coffeemaker. Gregor could see it sitting on Tibor’s kitchen counter next to the microwave, which was virtually the only kitchen appliance Tibor could operate without setting it on fire. On the other hand, Tibor had set the microwave on fire once. Gregor remembered it. Gregor wondered which of the Very Old Ladies had brought that coffeemaker from Yerevan, and which of her grandmothers it had once belonged to.

  The women looked up when he came in, but they didn’t stand. Gregor got the small folder he’d been carrying out from under his arm and dropped it on the table. Then Tibor motioned him to a chair, and he sat.

  “I will make you some coffee, Krekor,” Tibor said.

  Mrs. Vardanian looked skeptical. “Better have some of ours. That stuff he makes tastes like dirty water.”

  Gregor looked into Mrs. Vardanian’s small cup. Black mud was putting it mildly. The stuff was—Gregor didn’t know what. Alive, maybe.

  “I don’t think my blood pressure can take it,” he said. He opened the folder in front of him and looked at it. He didn’t have to look at it. He’d spent the morning talking to the police, and the hospital, and David Mortimer, and he knew everything he was about to say.

  “Well,” he tried. Tibor put a cup of something down in front of him. Tibor’s coffee did taste like dirty water. On the other hand, it wouldn’t actively kill him. “First,” Gregor tried again, “you might already know, Mrs. Mgrdchian is not dead. She wasn’t dead when we found her, and she’s not dead now.”

  “Is she conscious?” the smallest of the three Very Old Ladies said.

  “Of course she isn’t conscious, Marita,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “If she was conscious, he would have said so. And he wouldn’t have needed to talk to us. Isn’t that so?”

  “Ah, sort of,” Gregor said. “Even if she was conscious, she might not remember anything. And there could be other reasons to want to talk to you. The police are definitely going to want to talk to you, eventually.”

  “I don’t see why
they don’t want to talk to us now,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

  “Well,” Gregor said, “at the moment, there’s no real proof that a crime has been committed. We found Mrs. Mgrdchian unconscious, but the woman was very old, and you said she’d been reclusive for years. She could have been in poor health—”

  “We’re all in poor health, Krekor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We don’t go passing into a coma in our front foyers and having strangers in the house in the meantime. Who was that woman? Do they know what she was doing there?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “She says her name is Lily, but we know that from the other day. She’s not saying much else that’s making any sense. They’re having a hard time identifying her—”

  “DNA,” the fat little Very Old Lady said.

  “Oh, Kara, don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “The world isn’t made of episodes of CSI. Why in the name of God would the police department have samples of this woman’s DNA?”

  “Fingerprints then,” Kara Edelakian said.

  “Ah, yes,” Gregor said. “There’s always fingerprints, but the police haven’t been able to come up with a clean set. Lily’s—I suppose we’ll have to call her Lily—Lily’s fingertips are badly damaged. The best guess at this moment is that she’s a homeless woman. The homeless often have hands that have been significantly damaged. It comes from being out in the very bitter cold for a long time—”

  “It comes from putting your bare hands on metal in the very bitter cold,” Mrs. Vardanian said matter-of-factly. “Then when you try to pull them away, the skin tears. You don’t have to treat us like a pack of virgins, Krekor. We’ve all been around long enough not to be surprised by life.”