Wanting Sheila Dead

by Jane Haddam

  FIVE

  1

  Andra Gayle had a roommate named Marcia Lee Baldwin, who made her very uncomfortable. Maybe the truth was that any roommate would have made her uncomfortable. Even somebody who was just like her, who was from her own kind of neighborhood, who had her own kind of history—but it was impossible for Andra to accept the idea that anything like that could happen. Girls with her kind of background and her kind of history did not end up on America’s Next Superstar unless they had somehow managed to overcome all the signs of being who they were. It wasn’t that the show was prejudiced against black people. There had been two black winners and three black runners-up over the course of only nine cycles so far. It wasn’t that the show was prejudiced against people whose families were nothing like the Leave It to Beaver sort of thing. What Andra thought the show was prejudiced against was ghetto, by which she meant a way of talking, and a way of behaving, that was so natural to her she was still having trouble convincing herself that people could be any other way. And yet, that was something she’d known before she came here. That was something she had worked on long and hard when she’d been making her audition tape.

  The problem with this particular arrangement—with this spectacular house on the Philadelphia Main Line, which was a place only rich people had lived in forever—was that there was no place within walking distance that she could get to to do anything useful. If she looked out the windows she saw grounds, huge wide swathes of them, all green and wooded with no buildings anywhere, and no roads. There was a front drive, which was not only paved but, according to Marcia Lee, was made especially so that it melted any snow that fell on it. Andra would have really liked to know how that worked. It sounded impossible. The drive didn’t seem to go anywhere, though. It went around in a circle in front of the front doors and then it went off through trees. Andra supposed there had to be a road out there somewhere. But she didn’t think there would be stores and public phones and the other elements of real life.

  “I don’t see what you’re worried about,” Marcia Lee had said, when Andra had first started to get antsy after that blowup between Sheila and Grace. “She pulls these things all the time. You can’t take it seriously. And things like that with Grace are almost certainly staged.”

  “Staged?” Andra said.

  Marcia Lee was a tall girl with very red hair and the air of having done everything and seen everything and known everything that anybody would ever want to. Before this morning’s craziness, she had been closest to Grace, because she and Grace had been the only ones who could talk about what good times they had had in places like Paris. Andra was not unused to girls who had been to other countries. There were girls back home who had moved there from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador and places like that, and who sometimes went “home” to visit their relatives for a funeral. That was different than this. Marcia Lee and Grace seemed to have gone to other countries just because they wanted to. They didn’t have relatives there. Andra didn’t know what to make of this yet. She also knew she couldn’t keep up with it.

  Marcia Lee just stood there, looking impatient. “Staged,” she said, a little more loudly than she usually talked, as if Andra were deaf or retarded. “They do those things on purpose to get good television action for the show. They need the drama. Then they can put the clip on a commercial and it looks like all kinds of things are happening, and people watch.”

  Andra considered it. “Grace is upset. And Sheila Dunham punched her. She pushed her down on the floor.”

  “Well, of course Grace is upset,” Marcia Lee said. “I’d have been, too, if it were me. But it’s her own fault. She had to know that the show was going to look into the backgrounds of all the girls that made it into the house. Why did she lie? I’ll bet she’d have had a better chance of ending up right where she is now—I mean in the house, you know, not in trouble—anyway, she’d have had a better chance of ending up here if she’d just been honest about who she was. I’d bet Sheila Dunham would just have loved to have that man’s daughter on this show—”

  “Why?” Andra said. “I thought she hated him.”

  “Oh, she does,” Marcia Lee said. “She hates him because he’s always airing stuff on Fox News about how awful the show is and how badly done it is and how lame it is and how nobody should watch it. Actually, I heard it was more complicated than that. It’s like some kind of a vendetta. Sheila got him fired from NBC, or wherever he was last time, and it took him a couple of years just to find a job and he had to sell his apartment. That’s the apartment where Grace grew up. Anyway, I’m probably getting this wrong. Grace told me a few things, but I didn’t realize at the time that she was talking about her own father, and there it is. There are a lot of people who hate Sheila Dunham. No wonder somebody tried to shoot her at casting.”

  Andra wandered out into the hall. The girls who had been lounging around there were gone. Andra headed for the big formal front staircase. This house was like a palace in a movie. The staircase curved. The ceilings were incredibly high. The rooms were big. The foyer looked like people should be standing in it wearing ball gowns and gloves that went all the way up to their shoulders. It made Andra twitchy. It really did.

  The other girls all seemed to be in the big living room at the front—but it wasn’t called a living room, and Andra couldn’t remember what it was called. She walked past it, trying not to make any noise. She wanted a telephone, or maybe a television. She wasn’t sure. There was nobody for her to call. Her mother almost never had the phone service working, and if she did, she’d been so massively stoned that she wouldn’t be able to make sense anyway. She’d just start in again on that whine about wanting a little money to make sure old Mama didn’t starve. And Andra had to admit it: Old Mama really was starving. There was no getting around the cheeks that sucked in like deflated balloons and the ribs that poked out. The problem was that it was all the drugs and it didn’t matter how much money she gave her. Mama didn’t eat, and what she did eat came right off with the cocaine she took when she had more than her usual in folding cash.

  There was a big dining room with a big table and—Andra counted—twenty-four chairs around it. There was a room up front that looked like somebody’s office, with a desk and books and a little sort of half-statue of somebody sitting on the mantelpiece. All the rooms in this house had fireplaces. Even the bedrooms had fireplaces. There was a phone on the desk, but it looked like something in a play. The desk looked like something in a play, too. The phone was big and black with old designs all over it, and a dial that turned instead of buttons. The desk had skinny little legs that curved.

  Andra went over to it and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. Maybe it wasn’t a real phone. Maybe it was just for decoration. Andra hated the way they tried to keep you from contacting anybody in this place.

  She went over to the bookshelves on one side of the fireplace and looked at the spines of the books. “Aristotle,” one of them said. “Nichomachean Ethics.” Andra looked on the shelf below that and found “Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.” That made her feel a little better. She knew about Pride and Prejudice. That had been a movie, with Keira Knightley. She’d even tried to see it. She’d had to go forty blocks to find a movie theater that was playing it, but she had liked the commercials so much. She’d liked the women in big dresses that went down to the floor and the way everybody was so polite to each other all the time. In the end, though, she hadn’t been able to sit through it. She hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on. It was all so slow. There didn’t seem to be a point.

  She turned away from the bookcase. Did people actually live in this house? If they did, where were their television sets? Anybody who had a house like this would have to be rich. If Andra were rich, she’d have at least thirty television sets, all big ones, the kind that hung on the wall. She’d have a better carpet than this, too, something that didn’t look so worn. She might keep the house the same otherwise.

  She turned to g
o, back out into the foyer, in search of other halls, other rooms. She wanted to call somebody. She wanted to call the weather line, if that was all there was. She wanted to talk to somebody outside of this.

  She looked up and saw that there was somebody else in the room, just inside the door, that girl with the weird hair, Ivy. Whenever Andra heard the name “Ivy,” she thought about Poison Ivy. Poison Ivy was a character in a movie, one about Batman. It was only after she’d seen that movie half a dozen times that a teacher in school told her that there was a plant called poison ivy, and if you touched it you got a bad rash and itched.

  This Ivy did not look like poison, just very odd. Her hair was odd, and the clothes she wore were odd, too. They always seemed to have stripes and arrows and patterns on them, and to glitter a little.

  “Hi,” Andra said. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now. There was no rule she knew of that said they couldn’t be in the other rooms of the house, but she still felt as if she’d done something wrong.

  “Hi,” Ivy said. “We’re all in the living room. And we’ve got stuff, you know, like coffee. Why don’t you come join us?”

  “I was just looking around,” Andra said.

  “I know. I looked around, too, yesterday. It’s a great house, don’t you think? But it’s stuffy. That’s the kind of people who must live here. Stuffy people.”

  “I was wondering if people lived here at all,” Andra said.

  “Oh, they do. Or they sort of do. The house belongs to this guy who is a descendant of the old guy who built it in the first place, this guy who was big in building railroads back before there were cars or planes or anything. And he’s got sisters and brothers, I think. But nobody spends a lot of time here anymore, because there were about three murders in the house about ten years ago.”

  “Murders?” Andra said.

  “Yeah, the guy who owns the house, his father was killed in here, in this room. And then one of his sisters was killed upstairs in one of the bedrooms. I’ve been trying to find out which one, but I haven’t been able to. I think it would be neat to live in a room where somebody was murdered, don’t you? Maybe their ghost is still haunting the place, and you could talk to her.”

  “Ah,” Andra said. That didn’t sound good at all.

  “Come on and join us,” Ivy said. “It’s better when we’re all together, and you don’t want to be out of too many of the shots they use for the show. Grace is having a public fit, but she’s got the right, under the circumstances. If I was the first one Sheila Dunham pulled her crap on, I’d be hysterical.”

  Andra looked around. People really lived here, but they didn’t have television sets. She would have to file that one away somewhere and consider it later.

  “Marcia Lee,” she said, “my roommate, she says that Sheila Dunham got Grace’s father fired from some job he had and ruined his life.”

  “Not Grace’s father,” Ivy said. “Grace’s father is older than Sheila Dunham and he’s been a big deal in entertainment news for years. No, it was some guy on NBC when Sheila was still on the Today show. He was really young and she unloaded all over him and he got kicked off the show, and then he couldn’t ever find another job in the business and he just disappeared. It’s a famous story. If it had been a couple of years later, he would have been okay, because by then everybody knew she was crazy, but there it was. Don’t you ever watch, you know, E! or things like that? It’s not like any of this stuff about Sheila Dunham is a secret.”

  “Right,” Andra said.

  “Come on over and have something to eat. I think we’re supposed to go somewhere and film something in about half an hour. It would have been earlier if it hadn’t been for the thing with Grace. And Grace hasn’t left, by the way. She’s staying put and holding her ground. This ought to be interesting.”

  “Yeah,” Andra said.

  She was fairly sure it was the wrong thing to say, but it was the only thing she could think of. She looked around the room again. She couldn’t imagine the people who lived here. It wasn’t like on Cribs, where there were big beds that revolved under mirrors and game rooms with all the game systems you could think of, and home theaters that even had places next to the seats for soda and popcorn. It wasn’t like anything Andra had ever seen or heard of in her life.

  But the real problem was that her name was not Andra Gayle and she had lied to Sheila Dunham, and before this morning it hadn’t occurred to her what a terrible problem that could be.

  2

  Coraline Mays knew the way this show was supposed to work. The easiest challenges were supposed to come first, so that the people with the least potential to succeed could be sent home early. Being sent home early was the thing she worried about the most. How incredibly embarrassing would it be, to have just unpacked her things and to be filmed packing them up again? And then there were the things people would say at home, about how stupid you had been even to try. You could say anything you want about how hard it was just to make it into the group of fourteen who got to live in the house. The fact was that nobody at home really counted any of the girls who didn’t make it to the house. There were the fourteen. That was your competition.

  Coraline had been half sure that there would be no filming at all today, after that fuss about Grace. She’d been even more sure that Grace would be sent home before the competition even began, but that hadn’t happened, either. Coraline could remember one season, cycle seven, where a girl who had been chosen to be part of the fourteen hadn’t been able to participate, and one of the other girls from the competition had been brought in. Then that girl had ended up being eliminated early, so maybe it just went to show. Coraline wasn’t sure what it was supposed to show. It was just the kind of thought that came to her. She thought about her family, too, and the people at her church, who all said they were praying for her.

  Coraline’s roommate was a girl named Deanna Brackett, who had come as something of a relief. Deanna was a lot more like the people Coraline was used to. She was even from the South—well, from Atlanta—which meant she had an accent that was at least a little soothing to Coraline’s ears. Ivy Demari ought to have had a Southern accent, too, being from Texas, but she was too much of a punk. Or whatever you called girls who had tattoos and green hair. She was too much of a something. She sounded wrong.

  The little house bell had gone off, and now all the girls in the living room were looking around as if they expected somebody to come in and tell them something. Even the black girl was doing that, and mostly she just looked angry and tough.

  “What do you think is going to happen now?” Coraline asked Deanna.

  Deanna got down close to Coraline’s ear. “Remember, it’s all about inside the house and outside the house. Any time you have to go outside the house, you have to be perfect. Even if it’s just on the patio or in the yard.”

  “I don’t think they call it a patio here,” Coraline said. “I think they call it a terrace.”

  “Don’t you love it, though?” Deanna said. “I don’t care what they call it. I like those little pillar things that come just up to my knees with the lions on them. It must have cost the Earth for somebody to have built a house like this.”

  Coraline made a little, noncommittal noise. She wasn’t going to say anything again about how whoever had built the house was some kind of criminal. She had said that the first time, and then it turned out that “robber baron” didn’t mean that somebody was actually a robber. It was a term for people in the nineteenth century who had made huge fortunes from the railroads and from oil—legitimate things, businesses, that everybody was supposed to do.

  Grace had stared right down the bridge of her nose at Coraline. “Don’t they make you go to school back in Podunk, Arkansas?” she’d said.

  And Coraline had had to cross her hands behind her back just to keep herself from slapping the girl. She hadn’t been upset at all that Sheila Dunham had decided to go after Grace first, and it didn’t matter to her what Grace’s real las
t name was. It served her right. It was just like everybody at home said. They were all stuck up, all those people from the east, and especially the ones from New York.

  There was a sound in the foyer, and one of the girls—the black one with the odd name—went to the doorway of the living room to see what was happening. A second later, she stepped back, and Mark Borodine and Johnny Rell walked through the doors. Coraline thought of the two of them as something like Siamese twins. They went together in her head. Mark was the gay guy you almost couldn’t tell about. Johnny was the gay guy there was no mistaking. It all came down to the same thing in Coraline’s mind. There were boys like this at home, but they didn’t stick around long after high school.

  Mark clapped his hands and smiled. He had a fake tan that looked sort of painted on, rather than actually part of his skin. “Well now,” he said. “The weather outside is awful, as you can probably tell. It’s been raining for hours. But you know what? When you’re a superstar, the weather doesn’t change to accommodate you. Your first job is always going to be, being camera ready under any and all circumstances. So. We’re going to take you into the town of Bryn Mawr for lunch, but you’ve got to get yourself there without giving the paparazzi a photograph that will embarrass you all over the tabloids. You’ve got exactly three minutes to get upstairs, get into hair and makeup, and make it out to the limo in a state fit to be photographed in. There will be photographers in places you won’t even notice when you’re going out to the car, and there will be more when you get to the restaurant. This is your first challenge. The girl who does the best will get two hours tomorrow afternoon with one of the biggest and most successful makeup artists in the business. Are you ready?”

  Girls clapped. Girls yelled. Girls screamed. Coraline had seen it on the show. She didn’t understand it.

  “Get ready,” Johnny Rell said. “One. Two. Three. Go.”

  Somebody screamed again. Everybody rushed for the doorway at once. Coraline didn’t stop to wait for Deanna. They were always telling you that this was not a place to make friends. This was a place to fight to win. Coraline was not very good at that.