by Jane Haddam
“No,” Mortimer said. “The mayor suggested that we get away from my office and from any of your usual places, and meet somewhere where nobody would be looking for us. Not that I know who would be looking for us, but you see what I mean. I have some information. Some of it comes from the Merion police, and they’re fine with it. They’re willing to talk to you all you want. The other comes from the Bryn Mawr police, and they’re—”
“Not willing to talk to me,” Gregor said.
“No,” Mortimer said. “Not at all.”
“Well, why should they be?” Gregor said. “I haven’t been hired by them. Len Borstoi is probably a very good cop with a very good record. Why would he want to look like he couldn’t solve his own cases without outside help?”
“You did say you wanted information about what was going on with the reality show people,” Mortimer said. “And now that there’s actually been a murder—well, the mayor thought you’d like to be kept informed. If you see what I mean.”
“Sure,” Gregor said. “That’s keeping me up at night, too. Why can’t they just bring you a cup of coffee in this place? There aren’t more than three other tables with people at them. What is it you think I want to know?”
“It’s the gun,” Mortimer said. “This girl, the one called Emily, who supposedly shot at Sheila Dunham last weekend at the Milky Way Ballroom in Merion—”
“Supposedly?”
“Well, I guess she did,” Mortimer said. “Forty or more people saw her aim the gun and pull the trigger, and lots of the ones close to her heard noise. But here’s the thing. We took two shells out of the wall behind where Sheila Dunham had been standing, and—well—neither of them came from the gun the girl had.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “Yes. All right. That would make sense. Let me tell you something. You took a few shells out of the body, or, rather, the study at Engine House, after the murder yesterday. And those shells matched the shells that the Merion police found in the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom.”
“Well, we didn’t do anything,” Mortimer said. “The Bryn Mawr police did. But yes, that’s it exactly. How did you know? Or did you guess.”
“I suppose I guessed,” Gregor said, “but it wasn’t a very hard guess. It’s the only way it would make sense really. Have you ever read any Agatha Christie?”
“No,” Mortimer said. “I can’t say I have.”
“I’ve got a friend who really likes Agatha Christie novels,” Gregor said. “He’s been on me to try them for years. I kept resisting him, but then he had a bunch of them sent down to Jamaica while I was on my honeymoon, and there they were, so I read some of them. She was a very smart woman. You wouldn’t think so, but she was.”
“I don’t know that I’d ever thought about it,” Mortimer said.
“One of the things she’s constantly stressing in the Hercule Poirot novels,” Gregor said. “And yes, I do know about The Inquirer constantly calling me the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. It used to annoy the hell out of me. Anyway, one of the things she’s constantly stressing, or Hercule Poirot is, is that you have to pay attention to what actually happened.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Mortimer said.
“It makes sense, but most of us don’t do it,” Gregor said. “Take Sophie Mgrdchian. What actually happened?”
Mortimer looked confused. “We don’t know that yet, do we? She’s still in a coma and nobody is completely sure why?”
“We found her on the floor of the foyer of her house, in a coma, yes, and with this woman who says she’s Karen Mgrdchian, widow of Sophie’s brother-in-law, Marco, there with her. And Karen Mgrdchian, when we found her, said her name was Lily and seemed very disoriented. So far so good? That’s what actually happened.”
“Yes, all right,” Mortimer said. “So what?”
“So that’s what we should be concentrating on, and not the seven thousand things that might possibly have been the reason that brought Karen Mgrdchian to that house. Because that’s the other thing we know. Karen Mgrdchian’s fingertips have been destroyed. That’s a fact. Isn’t it?”
Mortimer looked more confused than before. “It’s a fact, yes, but from what I understand, it’s fairly common for something like that to happen—”
“To homeless people,” Gregor said. “That’s because they try to get warm around pipes and things and sometimes they catch hold of some metal that’s too cold and they rip the tips of their fingers off. But if this woman is Karen Mgrdchian, she isn’t a homeless person. Or at least, she shouldn’t be. She’s from, where—Cleveland? I can’t remember off the top of my head. She’s not from Philadelphia. Right?”
“Right.” Mortimer now looked completely dazed.
“Well, if she was homeless, she wouldn’t have had the money to get here, and she probably wouldn’t have done all that well hitchhiking. I mean, we’re not talking about homeless for a couple of days. Homeless people don’t lose their fingertips when they’ve been out on the street for a couple of days. It takes a while for them to get disoriented enough and desperate enough to do the kind of stupid thing that makes that happen. So, I feel pretty confident in saying that this woman was not homeless. So why are the tips of her fingers such a mess that we can’t get accurate fingerprints?”
“I don’t know,” Mortimer said.
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Gregor said. “Those missing fingerprints, that’s what actually happened.”
The young woman had come back to their table, carrying a tall mug of coffee in one hand and a plate in the other. The plate was thick white stoneware and very plain. She put the coffee down, and Gregor tried very hard to ignore the single coffee bean floating on the single mint leaf at the top. She put the plate down, and Gregor just stared.
The hash browns looked all right, but the sausage seemed to be shot through with little threads of blue and green and gold.
Gregor had no idea what they were.
SIX
1
Mary-Louise Verdt resented the idea that they were all supposed to go on as if nothing had happened, that they were supposed to film interviews today and do a challenge in spite of the fact that there was yellow crime-scene tape across the study door and somebody they were living with was probably a murderer. Murderess—there weren’t really a lot of men around here, were there? Murderess was what they would have called it on those Masterpiece Theatre shows her mother liked to watch. Mary-Louise felt a little odd about the fact that she hadn’t felt as if she ought to call her mother. Even when the murder had happened, and she knew it would be on the news all across the country, she had had to be shooed onto the phone by Olivia Dahl, who seemed to be convinced that something awful would happen if they didn’t all call home at once.
Mary-Louise checked herself out in the mirror and tried to ignore Alida Akido in the room with her. Most of the time, with Alida, Mary-Louise tried not to think the things that immediately came into her mind. She wasn’t used to “diversity,” as they called it here. In her small-town high school, there were a couple of black girls, but that was it. She’d never met an Oriental person before. She corrected herself, in her mind this time, which was good. She’d actually said “Oriental” out loud their first day in the house, and she’d thought Alida was going to rip her head off. “Asian” was the word she wanted. Mary-Louise had no idea if it was part of being Asian, this furious anger all the time, and the withering disdain for almost everybody. It wasn’t nice, and Mary-Louise had been brought up to believe that the most important thing in the world that anybody could be was nice.
Of course, virtually nobody was nice here. Mary-Louise had noticed it right away. People were catty, as her mother would say—bitchy, as they’d say on television. People were always talking about each other when they knew they’d be overheard, or that the conversation would get back to the person. And then, of course, there were the interviews, the one-on-ones, where they were asked very specific questions about other people in the house and were ex
pected to answer them “honestly.” Somebody told somebody who told somebody. That was how Mary-Louise had found out that all her clothes were “hick.”
She looked into the mirror again. She was wearing her best going-out dress, because today they were going to do a challenge where they were supposed to be interviewed on television. They had to handle themselves and a hostile reporter, and later the tape of them doing that would be played back for everybody and they would be “critiqued.” Mary-Louise hated “critiques.” She didn’t understand what the point was. If you’d made a fool of yourself in public, wouldn’t it be nicer if everybody pretended that it hadn’t happened? Maybe it was true that nobody ever pretended that nothing had happened if you were famous, because if you were famous and did something to make yourself look ridiculous, somebody could sell the story to a magazine.
Mary-Louise’s dress had a ruffle thing around the neck and down the front, and then it sort of flounced. This was very common at home, but here, nobody wore dresses like that. Here, they wore dresses like the one Alida had put on, very sleek, and monocolored, and cut high on the leg. Of course, Mary-Louise’s dress was also cut high on the leg, but the skirt was so wide and swishy it looked as if it were going to fly up into the air with the first wind. It was a good thing she had no intention of going commando.
Mary-Louise leaned very close to the mirror, as close as she could get. She thought she was wearing too much eye shadow. She wondered if she had time to take it off and put on some that was less . . . obvious. She thought of the girls in her town in their prom dresses. The prom dresses were almost always made out of chiffon, and they always flounced, and the girls always wore their hair twisted up high on their heads and hairsprayed into sculpture.
Mary-Louise thought she was wearing too much lipstick, too. She ran her tongue over her lips. It didn’t help.
Alida had come up behind her, looking annoyed. “So,” she said, “I don’t see what any of you accomplished. You went crawling through the air ducts, or wherever it was—”
“It wasn’t anything like that,” Mary-Louise said. “It was just a little attic kind of place, except part of it had a really low ceiling.”
“I don’t care what it was,” Alida said. “You did it. You were up all night. And what was the point? You didn’t get any information that I could see. And you all could have been thrown out of here on your ears.”
“Ivy is right,” Mary-Louise said. “They wouldn’t throw that many of us out at once. They couldn’t do that and still film the whole show. It would cost them too much money.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alida said. “You listen to Ivy and you think she knows something. They could have slated you all for elimination right on the spot and taken a few weeks to do it. Why not? None of you get it. It’s really pathetic. You all think this is the Girl Scouts or something.”
Mary-Louise had, in fact, been a Girl Scout. She didn’t know whether this would be considered normal or stupid by the girls in the house. She hadn’t thought about mentioning it before now. She sat back on the vanity chair with its rickety wire backing and started to gather up her things.
“I can’t believe you’re going out like that,” Alida said.
“It’s the best dress I own.”
“And you didn’t think about getting anything special for the show? It’s a show. You’re trying to play a part. You’re not really being yourself, no matter what they say in the interviews.”
“There wasn’t any time to buy any clothes,” Mary-Louise said. “We got to casting, then we got put in the top thirty, then that got pared down to twenty, then that got pared down to fourteen, and then we came here. All in one day. I don’t even know if there were any stores where we were.”
“I don’t mean you should have bought a dress after casting,” Alida said. “I mean you should have bought some things before you ever came out here. You should have at least considered the possibility that you’d end up in the house and come prepared.”
“I think it’s a very bad thing to assume you’re going to win something like that,” Mary-Louise said. “There were hundreds of girls trying out. How could I know I was going to get into the house?”
“Honestly,” Alida said. She backed away from the mirror. Mary-Louise had to admit that Alida looked very nice, almost wonderful. She was all lines and angles anyway, and the short black dress that didn’t look like it was much of anything when it was on the hanger, just straight lines and arm and neck holes—Well, Mary-Louise thought, it did look wonderful on.
“Sheila Dunham’s prowling around in the hallways,” Alida said. “She’s going to pounce on us and try to make us lose our cool. She’s a joke, really. If she hadn’t done this, she wouldn’t have any career left at all.”
Mary-Louise did not think that Sheila Dunham was a joke. She thought about being eliminated from the last challenge and blushed.
“The spying wasn’t for nothing,” she said. “I mean, we did find out a few things. We found out that the show was going to go on filming in spite of everything. And we did hear that the police hadn’t found the gun. I wonder if the gun is still in the house somewhere. They searched practically the whole place. I wonder if somebody has the gun and, you know.”
“I know what?” Alida asked.
“Well,” Mary-Louise said. “You know. Maybe somebody has the gun because she wants to kill somebody else. Maybe this is all part of a plot. Or maybe it’s a serial killer who’s killing off contestants for America’s Next Superstar.”
“That girl wasn’t a contestant on America’s Next Superstar,” Alida said. “Nobody knows who she was. You’d better hurry up or you’ll be late, and you know what they’re like when you’re late. At least this time you won’t have to go outside. You won’t be able to fall flat in the mud again.”
Mary-Louise didn’t say anything to this. She waited until Alida left the room. Then she went to the windows and looked out. Their bedroom overlooked the front drive, which was full of equipment vans and vehicles she didn’t recognize. It was still raining. It seemed to do nothing but rain and rain and rain out here, and then it rained some more.
She ran her hand up and down the ruffle on her dress and then headed for the hallway herself.
2
Coraline was the first person downstairs this morning. She was standing all by herself in the foyer when the camera people started setting up. She sat down on the bottom step and watched them all get to work. On her left was the study. There was yellow crime-scene tape across the door, and a police guard, but the door was open. Coraline did not understand that. She would have had the door closed, just because the room would remind people of what they had seen the day before. Coraline could not make herself forget it. She had thought about it all last night, lying in bed, and when she had gone to sleep, she had dreamed of it. She didn’t understand it. It had not looked real when she first saw it. When she remembered it, it had looked entirely too real.
“I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about it,” she’d told her father on the phone yesterday afternoon. Olivia Dahl had insisted that all of them should call home right away, so that their families heard about it first from them and not from the television news. “I don’t think I’m going to last very long.”
“I don’t believe it,” her mother said. “I don’t believe there’s another girl there who can hold a candle to you. Unless you mean they’re going to get rid of you because of your faith. I know about that kind of thing. Think about Carrie Prejean.”
It had taken Coraline more time than it should have to remember Carrie Prejean, but it had come to her. She was the woman who couldn’t be Miss USA, or somebody like that, because she had come out against gay marriage. Actually, that incident was a little hazy in her mind. Coraline didn’t pay as much attention to the news as her mother did, and she didn’t like to watch the Fox cable news station, because everybody seemed to be yelling at everybody else most of the time.
“I d
on’t think you should get discouraged,” her mother had said. “We’re all so proud of you just making it onto the show, and we know you’re going to make a difference in the lives of the girls you meet. Most of them have no idea what it’s like growing up in a Christian home, or living the life of a Christian lady. It’s so much better than anything they’re used to. You’ll see. You’ll bring one of them to the Lord, and you won’t even know it.”
Coraline stretched out her legs and tried to see if she could figure out what was going on in the living room. It looked like a jumble of wires and lights and cameras. In a way, her mother was right. She did think that the life she had grown up with, the home that was always clean, and where her parents were still married to each other and didn’t fight; the Sundays at church, teaching Sunday school and then coming in at the end of the service with the children, to hear the sermon and to sing; the fact that she never had to think twice about whether her period was late or to cry for hours because some boy she’d thought she was in love with had ditched her for another girl—there was a lot of it, a lot of the ways her life was different from, say, Grace’s life, or even Janice’s. She had already figured out that she probably was the only virgin here. She was probably even the only one who wanted to be a virgin.
She wondered who that girl was, the one who had died. Was she saved? Was she in Heaven now, or in Hell? Maybe God had a special procedure for people who were murdered, or who died very young from cancer or car accidents. Maybe there really were ghosts. Coraline looked a little to the left and saw that the blood was still there on the carpet and the far wall. There was so much of it, she could tell even from this far away.
The police officer at the door did not look at her. He never looked at anyone.
Coraline heard a door open at the back of the foyer. That would be somebody coming in from the kitchen or the utility rooms. When they were first in the house, Coraline had gone searching around with Janice, just looking at things. She had never seen a house like this before, and neither had Janice.
