by Jane Haddam
“You mean whoever it was, wasn’t actually trying to kill me?” Sheila said. “That’s a relief. And a disappointment, if you catch my drift.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “well. You can take that up with your psychiatrist.”
“It’s not her psychiatrist who’s going to be interested,” Olivia Dahl said. “It’s the publicity people. You have no idea how excited they were about going to work on a story about somebody actually trying to kill her.”
“I don’t see why any of this matters,” Alida said. “We’re still back to where we started. Coraline was the only person in this house when that girl was killed. The only one. The rest of us were all out at the challenge. The glove was found in her bed. Obviously, she must have known this girl somewhere. There’s got to be a reason. But she’s still the only one who could have murdered her. And that’s that.”
“You’re assuming the murder was done while you were all away on the, ah, challenge,” Gregor said. “In fact, it was done much earlier in the day, before you all left, while you were all getting ready. And it wasn’t done in the study. It was done in the servants’ access corridor that runs behind all the rooms in that wing and this one. It was done there. Then the body was dragged out into the study and placed in a way that made it echo another crime that had once taken place in this house. Then the study door was closed. It didn’t take five minutes, if it took that. Of course, the position of the wall mirror was also altered, but I think that was probably done the night before, when the security camera in there was disabled. It was a silly thing to do. I think it was supposed to make the scene look like one that had happened here before, that I had been involved in, and to get me rattled, or to distract me. It didn’t. It just made it all the more obvious what was happening here.”
“Which was what?”
“Oh,” Gregor said, “it was getting done what the murderer came here—to Philadelphia now, not to this house—to get done. It was so that Janice Ledbedder could kill a girl named Emma Ware, who was once her best friend in Marshall, South Dakota.”
Everybody turned to look, but Janice was just sitting there, smiling.
EPILOGUE
Revenge is not a reason. It’s a way of life.
—Orania Papazoglou
1
On a bright day at the beginning of May, Sheila Dunham got arrested in Leonardo da Vinci Airport for hitting a skycap on the arm with her purse and then stepping on his foot with her very sharp stiletto high heel. She was in the airport with the last six girls in the competition, on the way to the European house that served as the setting for the last third of the show. She was hot, and tired, and frazzled, and feeling invincible. She thought it made sense to feel invincible. After all, she had stared down a murderer, given a hundred interviews to all those news shows who had been refusing to hire her for years, talked the network into a contract for four more seasons at twice the money, and seen her own face on the cover of Time magazine. It couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it, and she hadn’t planned it. People called her crazy, but she wasn’t half as crazy as the real crazy people were. You could tell this by the look on Janice Ledbedder’s face in those perp walks they kept showing on the evening news.
Bennis Hannaford saw the story about Sheila Dunham’s arrest sitting at the table in her own kitchen on Cavanaugh Street, drinking coffee she had made herself and pretending that she hadn’t thrown out the coffee Gregor had made earlier. The picture on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer was fascinating. There was Sheila, whom Bennis had seen a dozen times in a dozen different situations, and there was a line of girls backed up against a wall, looking panicked beyond belief. The caption didn’t give their names. The story did, but without faces to put to them, Bennis didn’t know who was who.
Andra Gayle. Coraline Mays. Ivy Demari. Mary-Louise Verdt. Faith Stackdopole. Marcia Lee Baldwin.
Bennis looked back at the picture and tried to figure out who was who. It wasn’t possible. There was Sheila Dunham, though, her foot half in the air, her heel headed down to that poor young man’s shoe—somebody must have caught it on a camera phone.
Gregor came into the kitchen looking as if he’d been up and running the country for at least the last several hours. Bennis liked this better than the way he looked when he was having trouble getting to sleep, but it still disoriented her a little. Most people had a morning look when they’d first gotten out of bed. Gregor just looked like himself.
He stopped at the coffeepot to check it out. Bennis could practically see him deciding not to say anything. She didn’t believe he actually minded. Even Gregor knew what Gregor’s coffee tasted like. Gregor poured himself some coffee and came to the table. He looked at the newspaper spread out in front of Bennis. She’d turned to the interior page, and there were more pictures—pictures of Sheila, pictures of the Italian police, pictures of an old woman advancing with her own pocketbook, looking like something out of Greek myth.
Gregor sat down. “It’s not going to tell you who won,” he said mildly. “I don’t think even they know who won. I don’t think they’re done filming yet.”
“I think it’s annoying how long all this takes,” Bennis said. “And Bobby’s no help. Not that he ever was any help to anybody, but you know what I mean. He doesn’t know anything, and he wouldn’t tell me anything if he did know. And then all he wants to do is wail about whether all this brought down the resale value of the house. I told him that if he wanted to sell the house, I’d buy it from him at any price he named, but he didn’t go there. He doesn’t really want to sell it.”
“Do you really want to buy it?” Gregor asked. “Just a couple of weeks ago, you were refusing to set foot in the place.”
“I don’t want it to go out of the family,” Bennis said vaguely. She wasn’t making any sense, and she knew it. She was only making sense to herself. She looked over a few more of the pictures, the ones with the girls in them. “What’s the name of the one you said she was convinced was a spy for Fox News?”
“Grace something,” Gregor said. “Harrigan, I think, but that wasn’t the name she was using. I mean Harrigan wasn’t the name she was using. She was still calling herself Grace.”
“There isn’t any Grace here,” Bennis said. “I know which one I’d pick if I was a judge. Just from these photographs. The rest of them just sort of fade into the background, but this one pops right out. Who’s this?”
Gregor looked over. “Ivy Demaris. Demari. Something like that.”
“I like the name Ivy. What was she like? Was she a bitch?”
“I really don’t know,” Gregor said. “How could I know? I didn’t spend that much time there.”
“You know their names.”
“Yes, well. I would have to, wouldn’t I?”
“You recognized the face,” Bennis said. “Ivy’s face. And it’s Demari. They’ve got the names of the girls in the second section here. I wonder what she really did in that airport.”
“Besides assault a skycap?”
“But there must have been a reason, don’t you think? Even Sheila Dunham has to have reasons.”
“In my experience, most of her reasons come down to figuring out what’s going to get her the most publicity. You’d think she’d have had enough of publicity after the last couple of months.”
“Oh, no,” Bennis said. “There’s no such thing as enough publicity.”
Then she found it. She leaned much closer to the paper, and half lifted it up in one hand. She gave a passing thought to the possibility that she was going to end up needing glasses. The explanatory paragraph was right there at the end of the first section, so that, skimming, she had almost missed it.
“Listen,” she said. “ ‘The altercation arose after Ms. Dunham became convinced that the baggage handlers had dropped her two leather suitcases deliberately.’ What do you think that means? Do you think she saw them throw them on the ground?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“No,” Benn
is said, “but I bet she thought she did. It’s the kind of thing she would think. I wonder if they’ll have video of this on one of the cable news stations. Fox will have it, I bet. Fox loves to trash her. Maybe it’ll be on O’Reilly.”
“Were you always this obsessed with cable news stations?”
“I’m not obsessed with them,” Bennis said. “I just think it’s too bad, the damned show is being filmed in my own childhood home, and I didn’t get a chance to see any of it. And don’t tell me it’s because I wouldn’t go there. I wouldn’t have had to go there. They go places and film things. Restaurants. Parties. I should have thrown a party for them.”
“I wouldn’t have come.”
“Yes, you would have. I would have made you. But you should have realized it all along. Nobody ever really murders people like Sheila Dunham. They’re too easy.”
Gregor looked like he wanted to break some furniture, but Bennis ignored it.
Then she got up, folded the paper, and said, “Time to check in on the situation with Sophie.”
2
Sophie Mgrdchian recovered better than anybody had expected her to, but she did not come back to Cavanaugh Street.
“We talked it over,” her niece Clarice said. “I’ve got no idea why she was fighting with my mother, and she either won’t tell me, or she’s forgotten. So we’ve decided she’ll come live by me in Atlanta. If we can get a good deal on the house, I know a very nice retirement community with waterfalls and peach trees.”
“Atlanta explains what I couldn’t understand,” Gregor told Bennis as they headed toward the Ararat at six o’clock. “I knew there was a daughter, and I thought the daughter would be watching out for the mother. But, as it turns out, the daughter had taken a job in Georgia a couple of years ago. Not that she wasn’t starting to get suspicious. She even had the police run out there a couple of times, but they didn’t find anything.”
“And Karen—whatever her name was was already gone?”
“Susan Lee Parker,” Gregor said. “You should have seen the paper trail she had. A good fifteen arrests for fraud in ten states. Two incarcerations, one here in Pennsylvania for a scam she pulled in Altoona about twenty-five years ago. The other out in California. Where, by the way, they charged her with murder but couldn’t make it stick. They never found a body.”
Bennis made a face. “There are probably going to be bodies strewn across the landscape,” she said. “You’ll end up on City Confidential again, talking about serial killers.”
“Not City Confidential. They’ve already done an episode on Philadelphia. I don’t think they do more than one on a place. But they’ll get her for murder this time. They’ve got the body. Or part of it. She did a fair job with the lye, but it was only a fair job. She’s getting old, I expect. It’s all gotten too much for her.”
“Well,” Bennis said drily, “thank God for that. Tibor said they were going to have a memorial service for her at Holy Trinity—I don’t remember when. I still say it was amazing that you knew there was going to be a body in the basement.”
“It wasn’t amazing at all,” Gregor said. “Susan Lee Parker was a fairly run of the mill female serial killer. And con artist, of course. More of a con artist, a con artist first, maybe. I don’t think she’d have killed anyone she didn’t think she had to. But it’s a well-established pattern. Male serial killers kill for sex. Female serial killers—with one or two exceptions—kill for money.”
“I still don’t believe she fooled Sophie Mgrdchian into thinking she was Karen,” Bennis said. “I’m sorry, I find this a lot more confusing than you seem to.”
“I don’t know that she did fool Sophie Mgrdchian into thinking she was Karen,” Gregor said. “The word from Sophie is that she was suspicious from the first, and that may be why she ended up on the foyer floor as soon as she did. That wasn’t Susan Lee Parker’s usual pattern. The idea was to worm her way into a house and then stay until she had all the money. She didn’t have close to all the money when she knocked Sophie out.”
“Mmmm,” Bennis said.
“At any rate, she killed the real Karen Mgrdchian, but nobody else. I was wrong about Clarice being in the basement, too, because Clarice was off in Atlanta, and Marco Mgrdchian died a long time ago. No, that wasn’t amazing. What you really ought to be asking is how I knew about Emma Ware.”
“Mmm,” Bennis said again.
They had been walking along at a steady but not very hurried pace. Gregor had not been paying attention. Now he looked up and realized that they had gone far past the Ararat. They were all the way at the other end of the neighborhood, in front of Sophie Mgrdchian’s house.
“We missed our stop,” he said.
“Not exactly,” Bennis said. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and came up with a set of keys. “I’ve got the keys. I thought we’d go in and look around.”
“What for? You’re not going to find more evidence than the police have picked up already.”
“I’m not looking for evidence,” Bennis said. “I’m being practical for once. This house is for sale. Clarice Mgrdchian wants a load of money for it, but I’ve got a load of money. It’s the last whole house in the neighborhood that doesn’t belong to somebody we don’t want to move. So . . .”
“You want to buy a house,” Gregor said.
“We could throw dinner parties,” Bennis said, “or, you know, not. Come on, Gregor. Let’s go take a look. Maybe it was falling down on Sophie Mgrdchian’s head, but maybe it wasn’t, and maybe it would be easy enough to renovate. Then I can make a deal with Grace for my apartment, and she can have a place big enough to put a harpsichord in.”
“I thought she had a harpsichord.”
“She’s got something call a virginal,” Bennis said. “Come on. All you have to do is look around. It won’t kill you.”
3
Gregor didn’t think it would kill him to look all the way through Sophie Mgrdchian’s house, but he did think it might kill him to live with Bennis while she renovated it. In fact, he would not only have to live with Bennis. He would have to live with Bennis and Donna, because Donna would be part of fixing up any house Bennis decided to buy. Gregor had visions of upholstery fabric swatches and tile samples all over his kitchen, and then he followed Bennis through the foyer into Sophie Mgrdchian’s oversized, high-ceilinged living room. There was too much furniture in it, and all of the furniture had little square lace things over the backs of it.
“So,” Bennis said, staring at the walls. “I thought you were going to tell me about Emma Ware.”
Gregor wanted to know why she was staring at the walls. Was she going to want to have them knocked down? Or painted pink? What?
“I didn’t know her name was Emma Ware,” Gregor said. “I was fairly sure her name wasn’t Emily Watson, because that was the name she gave the police. And she didn’t have a record of any kind. Her fingerprints weren’t on file. She was just a very young girl who wasn’t saying anything to anybody but her lawyer.”
“Did she tell her lawyer who she was?”
“No,” Gregor said. “She didn’t. But here’s the thing. I knew that whatever was going on had to be about the deliberate attempt to murder this girl. That had to be what was going on, because that was what happened. She wasn’t a celebrity. She wasn’t Sheila Dunham’s daughter, Mallory. We did get in touch with Mallory eventually. She’s older, she’s married, and she won’t talk to her mother if she can help it, but she isn’t lying dead in a Pennsylvania morgue. So we had this young girl, and it didn’t make sense that she was connected to one of the celebrities on the show, or even to one of the staff. She just wasn’t—I don’t know how to put it. She didn’t look like she came from the city.”
“You mean she looked like a hick,” Bennis said.
“Something like that,” Gregor said. “At any rate, I thought that what made sense was to look into the backgrounds of the girls in the competition and find one who might have a reason to murder somebody. As it wa
s, I might as well have saved myself the trouble, because Janice Ledbedder kept telling me why she had a reason to murder somebody. She talked about it all the time. All the time. To anybody who would listen, and to a lot of people who didn’t want to. Janice had a long-time boyfriend. His name was Brian Ellendorf, but she never actually used his name. She never used anybody’s names. I should have picked up on that.”
“Why would she use their names?” Bennis asked. She was drifting out of the living room into the dining room. “It’s not like you would know who they were.”
“No,” Gregor said, “but it’s her style of speaking. She usually does mention names. She just didn’t when she was talking about this particular thing. Janice had a boyfriend, named Brian. They’d been going out together since junior high school, and then, right before the senior prom, Brian dumped Janice to take Emma. This was not a small thing to Janice. It humiliated the hell out of her. It especially humiliated the hell out of her because she’d always considered Emma sort of her protégé, the poor little plain girl that a girl like Janice takes on to make herself look good. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Brian Ellendorf, but I’d be willing to bet anything that he had some sense that there was something wrong with Janice. Whatever the reason, he dumped the one girl and then took the other. And Janice started thinking of ways she could get rid of Emma and not get caught at it. And that’s when she got the invitation to audition for America’s Next Superstar, and that gave her her chance.”
The dining room was a horror story. The furniture was so large and so heavy, Gregor thought it would sink the house. There were two display hutches, both with decorative plates behind their glass doors. There was a hanging light fixture that looked like it might come alive and bite somebody.
“That part still doesn’t make sense to me,” Bennis said. “I mean, I get that they both sent in audition tapes, and Janice’s was chosen and Emma’s was not, but I still don’t see how Janice got Emma to come all the way down here to do—well, what, exactly?”
