Wanting Sheila Dead Page 13

  Sheila Dunham said, “Do you think that was smart, what you did out there?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Alida said.

  “Holding the umbrella in front of your face. Do you think that was smart?”

  “I think it successfully prevented the photographers from photographing me,” Alida said.

  “And you think that’s what you want to do?”

  “I think that’s what most celebrities do,” Alida said. “They try to avoid the paparazzi if they can.”

  Sheila leaned in, far enough so that Alida couldn’t help smelling her breath. It was very bad breath.

  “Wrong,” Sheila said. “You’ve got to be a star on the level of Brad Pitt to want to avoid the paparazzi. That’s just something you say when reporters ask you, because you don’t want to sound like a jerk. When you’re a celebrity on the way up, or a celebrity who isn’t known for anything but being a celebrity—well, then you need the paparazzi as much as they need you. More. Do you know what people like Paris Hilton do? They make deals with these guys. They make a point of being easy to photograph at least some of the time, because not to be photographed is not to exist. Not to be photographed is not to be famous.”

  Alida took a deep breath. There was nothing to say. There wasn’t even anything she wanted to say.

  Sheila stood back. “So,” she said. “I watched all your performances. And we’ll have the pictures at judging, to back this up. But I know right away who has won this challenge. You need to be seen and photographed in a way that makes you look good. Some of you did all right. Some of you did not do so well. Some of you were hopeless, like what’s-her-name out in the car. But Johnny and Mark and I have talked it over, and the winner of the challenge is—”

  Alida stood very still. She wouldn’t be the winner of the challenge, so she assumed that Grace would be. If Sheila hadn’t sent Grace home, then Grace could not be out of the competition.

  Sheila made a flourish with her arms and announced, “Andra!”

  The word bounced across the restaurant foyer like a Ping-Pong ball.

  Andra Gayle squealed and jumped up and down, and did all those other things winning contestants loved to do in front of the cameras.

  Alida nearly spat.

  2

  Ivy Demari was completely astounded that she hadn’t been the subject of one of Sheila Dunham’s patented on-camera rages—almost as astounded as she was that she’d managed to make it into the house at all. No matter what she had told Dennis at home, she hadn’t really thought that America’s Next Superstar was her thing, except perhaps in the sense that the casting always contained one or two freaks. She certainly looked like the freak in this particular group. She was the only one with visible tattoos. Grace had a small Chipmunk on her left buttock, but she didn’t have the buttock on display. She was the only one with hair that wasn’t a normal color for hair, too. Even her mother had warned her about that one before she came. Still, Ivy thought, you had to be yourself. She really hated all the normal colors for hair.

  They had been ushered into the restaurant, which was very small and empty of all other patrons. That didn’t seem like the best way to do this. Ivy could see that regular, ordinary people probably could not be included in a day like today. You’d have to chase them around and get them to sign releases in case their faces showed during one of the shots you wanted to use for television. In real life, though, there would be lots of other people in the restaurant besides the celebrity of the moment, and the celebrity of the moment would have to find a way to deal with them. Ivy almost wished she had agreed to go to those clubs where a bouncer kept watch at the door and only let in the people he thought would “count.” Dennis always wanted to go to those clubs, even though he wasn’t sure of getting in. Dennis always wanted a lot of things.

  They were being shown to a table near the back window wall that overlooked a little waterfall. They were all trooping along like girls in line at summer camp. Ivy let herself be seated in the chair that looked directly outside. Then she heard Janice fall into the chair to her right, as thick and breathy as if she were collapsing.

  “Oh, whoosh,” Janice said. “Can you believe that happened to Mary-Louise? She’s one of the nicest girls here, too. Not catty, like so many of them. It’s like any of us could mess up at any time, and then what would happen? We’d go home, that’s what would happen.”

  Then there was the thing where so many of these girls lived and breathed the show, and nothing but the show. Ivy looked up as Grace Alsop and her roommate Suzanne Toretti took the other two chairs at their table. Grace looked the way she had always looked, Sheila-attack or not: like one of those girls’ boarding-school girls who didn’t talk to anybody who wasn’t on her cotillion invitation list. And Ivy knew cotillions. They did cotillions in Dallas.

  “You could have come out if you’d wanted to,” Ivy’s mother had said, at around the time Ivy was making the audition tape she’d sent to the show. “Do you know why you do things anymore? Do you care?”

  “It’s a chance to see a part of the country I haven’t seen before,” Ivy had said.

  “If you want to see a part of the country you haven’t seen before, use your American Express.”

  “It’s a chance to do something I haven’t done before, then.”

  Her mother had put her coffee down on the kitchen table and sighed. “It’s a chance to get away from Dennis without having to hurt his feelings straight on, and you know it. I warned you it wasn’t going to work out when you started dating him. You’ve got more ambition than that.”

  Ivy had wanted to point out that she wasn’t using any ambition she might have had, but she hadn’t. She got along with her mother. She got along with her father, too. It made her the odd man out at most of the places she liked to frequent.

  “Tell me if the Wicked Witch of the West is advancing,” Grace said. “The last thing I need is another surprise.”

  “She’s off at a table with Andra and that Chinese girl,” Janice said.

  “You can’t call Alida Chinese,” Suzanne said. “She’ll bite your head off. I don’t think she’s a very nice person, do you? I mean, she’s terribly snobbish, and she’s—she just doesn’t like anybody. She doesn’t just relax and talk.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying things like that,” Grace said. “You know they’re taping everything we say. And filming it. You’re going to get us stuck in some segment where we sound like first-class bitches, and I’m going to be there as much as you, even if I don’t go along with it. She’s probably just nervous. It’s probably her culture or something.”

  “You know what I heard,” Janice said, leaning in a little. Ivy wondered if she imagined that this would mean that no microphone could pick up what she was about to say. “I heard that Sheila Dunham had a daughter, only now the daughter doesn’t talk to her anymore. She’s on drugs, or something. She ran away from home. I don’t remember.”

  Ivy sat up a little straighter. That was odd, she thought. She’d heard that story, too. And there was something—

  But Grace was going on. “That’s an old story,” she was saying. “It was all over the news at the time. The daughter had a drug problem, and she’d been picked up for shoplifting a couple of times and the next time it happened, she was going to go to jail, so Sheila had her put in one of those youth facility things, you know, the ones that are practically like jails.”

  “A private jail?” Janice looked confused. “Is that legal?”

  “It’s not in this country,” Grace said, “but they have them on islands in the Caribbean and things where it is. They take the kid’s passport when he shows up and then they make everybody get up at the same time and go to sleep at the same time and eat meals at the same time. And if you don’t behave they throw you in solitary. You can look it up on the Internet if you don’t believe me. A lot of really rich parents put their kids in places like that when they think the kids are out of control. So anyway, Sheila put her daughter in o
ne of those, and the daughter managed to escape, somehow. Anyway, nobody has ever seen her since.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Janice said. “Is it a jail? Or is it rehab? What?”

  “It’s both those things.” Grace shrugged. “I barely talk to my father as it is, but if he’d ever done anything like that to me, I’d have found a lawyer and sued him over it. Although you can’t really do that, I think, when you’re a minor your parents can do pretty much anything they want to you until you’re eighteen.”

  “No,” Janice said. “That’s not true. You can call the authorities and charge them with child abuse. I know that’s possible.”

  “They aren’t going to charge someone like Sheila Dunham with child abuse,” Grace said. “And they’re not going to do it for sending her daughter off to some place that says it’s a psychiatric facility. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they don’t take children away from rich people almost ever.”

  “What about Britney Spears?” Janice asked.

  “What about her?” Grace said. “They didn’t take the children away from her and put them in a foster home, did they? Their father sued for custody and he got it, but it isn’t the same thing. Anyway, Sheila’s daughter disappeared. Maybe she went to live with her father. I don’t know who that was. Nobody knows. Somebody Sheila was married to when she first started working, I think. Nobody ever talks about her. Which makes me think she really did disappear. It’s just the kind of thing the tabloids really like.”

  The waterfall really wasn’t a waterfall. It was the turn wheel of an old mill, placed in the river in such a way that the water should have turned it as it passed through. Ivy wasn’t sure why the wheel wasn’t moving. She wasn’t sure of the name of the river, either. She didn’t think there was a major river that went through Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, but then she was only sketchy at geography. It was other things she was good at.

  “A girl who got herself thrown out of history class in the eighth grade by throwing Brandenburg v. Ohio in the face of her history teacher is not going to be happy for life with a guy whose highest ambition is to have really neat body art,” her mother had said.

  “I like really neat body art,” Ivy had said, but she hadn’t gone on with it, because of course her mother was right.

  Janice poked her in the arm. “Ivy? Are you all right?”

  Ivy shook her head. She wondered what compromises you had to make to become “accomplished,” as her mother had put it. She didn’t like the idea of making compromises at all.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about the Kennedys.”

  “You mean the political Kennedys?” Grace said. “Why?”

  “It was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis I was really thinking of,” Ivy said. “When we came in here, I thought that it wasn’t very realistic, putting us in an empty restaurant without other people in it, because in real life, celebrities eat with everybody else—”

  “Not really,” Grace said quickly. “They go to places that keep most people out.”

  “Most people, not all people,” Ivy said. “And lots of times they go to places that are stuffed with people. That’s why you get all those awful stories about people like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. But then I remembered about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

  “What about her?” Janice said.

  “They used to clear places for her,” Ivy said. “When she was still married to Onassis. If she wanted to shop, you know, they’d send a team of people in and they’d clear out the entire store if they had to, and then she’d come in and shop. And at Vail, too, they’d clear an entire slope. There are celebrities who live in a sort of bubble.”

  “Well, I know something else celebrities do,” Grace said, “and I’m going to do it. I don’t see I have anything to lose. If I’m not the first person eliminated this week, I’ll be shocked out of my skin. Are they letting us order things?”

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said.

  She looked around. The waitresses were working their way through the tables, holding out menus, which did make it seem as if ordering was on its way. The menus did not look like they could be the ones the restaurant used most of the time, since they were only two sides of a single piece of laminated cardboard. Maybe it was the kind of place that served very small portions of everything to women who couldn’t eat anything and still maintain the weight they wanted to be for social occasions.

  Ivy tried to think. She didn’t really know what she was doing here. She didn’t know if she wanted to win the competition, or just get some air time on television, or if she was just wasting time generally and, as her mother said, letting Dennis down gently. And other people’s private lives weren’t her business. But still . . .

  She looked around the room. Sheila Dunham had left Andra’s table and gone on to another one, this one with only three girls at it. She looked so old up close like this, and so tired, and so unhappy. The lines in her face were all hard, and all the wrong kind.

  “I’m sure she’s had absolutely a ton of plastic surgery,” Janice said, leaning in close. “She always looks so bitter. Did you ever notice that?”

  “Did you ever wonder why we’re all here, trying to be just like somebody who’s so bitter?” Grace asked.

  “We all think we’ll do it better when we do it ourselves,” Ivy said, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. She was thinking about that first day, when that girl had stood up and fired that gun at Sheila Dunham’s head.

  At least, that was what Ivy thought had happened.

  The waitress had arrived at their stable. She took Suzanne’s order first, something with chicken and French words in it.

  Then she turned to Grace.

  Grace put the menu on the table.

  “I’ll have steamed broccoli on a bed of white rice,” she said.

  Ivy paid attention. The waitress looked startled.

  “We don’t actually have—” she started.

  Grace waved her away. “I’m sure the kitchen can make it up for me,” she said.

  EIGHT

  1

  Things moved faster these days than they used to. There were cell phones, and computers, but Gregor thought the real reason was that there were so many more people. When Gregor had first started working, businesses had put up HELP WANTED signs in their windows and taken in almost anybody who walked in off the street. There was a lot of work and too few people to do it. Or maybe it had only seemed that way, because women had stayed home and done their own laundry and housework, and that had left the field of paid employment look more open.

  Actually, Gregor had no idea what his mind was nattering on about. It was the kind of thing he thought about these days. Maybe that was getting older. Maybe that was getting married again. What it probably actually was was the fuss with the court-appointed attorney. In Gregor’s day, most court-appointed attorneys half slept through their cases. Now there were kids fresh out of law school who took being a court-appointed attorney as a crusade.

  He got out of the cab in front of the Wilson Deere Memorial Hospital and looked around. The woman on the phone had sounded very young, almost too young to have graduated from anything. There was nobody waiting for him at the door, so he went inside. Here was something that had not changed. The interior landscape of public mental hospitals was as grim and terrifying as it had always been.

  The big ground-floor foyer had linoleum on the floors and walls the color of pale pea soup. There was a male attendant at the front desk. The desk was behind a cage of barbed wire. Weren’t the inmates all upstairs and restrained by orderlies? Maybe people came in off the street and threatened the staff, for whatever reason.

  The young woman he was waiting for was standing near the elevators, looking through her briefcase. There were no chairs to sit down in. There were no magazines to read while you waited. Gregor thought of Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, and then he thought that this young lawyer wouldn’t have the faintest idea who Olivia de Havilland was.

>   Gregor went up to the elevator. “Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I’m looking for LeeAnn Testenaro.”

  “Oh,” the young woman said. She dropped the briefcase, looked at it for a moment, and then picked it up. “Oh,” she said again. “Excuse me. Yes. Mr. Demarkian. I’m LeeAnn Testenaro.”

  Gregor held out his hand. In his youth, men did not offer their hands to women. They waited for women to offer their hands instead. It all seemed unnecessarily complicated for this time and place.

  LeeAnn took Gregor’s hand and shook it. Then she dropped it and looked at her briefcase again.

  “I don’t mean to look this disorganized,” she said. “It’s just that I’m not used to this kind of thing. I mean, our usual case, in Legal Aid, is of some kid who robbed a liquor store or got so incredibly stoned on something that he wandered into a police station and puked all over the desk sergeant.”

  “Did that really happen?” Gregor asked.

  “Oh, yes,” LeeAnn said. “And you wouldn’t believe how hard it is defending people who do things like that. It’s as if they wanted to go to jail. You can’t get them to shut up. We’re up on the fourth floor. They’re expecting us.”

  “Good,” Gregor said. He punched the elevator button and the doors opened directly. The elevator was gray and ugly and metal. There was no carpet on the floor.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” LeeAnn said. “We don’t do anything to make life easier for these people. Do you know who ends up in here, most of the time? Homeless people. A lot of them are genuinely mentally ill. A lot of them are just addicts, but they can get very out of it and seem mentally ill. I spent all last winter getting dozens of them committed for four-day observations.”