Wanting Sheila Dead by Jane Haddam Page B

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?”
    â€œI don’t think anybody would actually kill her,” Janice said.
    â€œThey’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’tbeen 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.
    â€œI 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