After a while Gerard found that Karin’s manic drive enervated rather than encouraged him. The drawings went away, and they never spoke of them, as though they were a kind of embarrassment. They were, to him. He fell back on contracting because he was good at it. He was organized and quality-conscious and had ideas his clients—often also Karin’s—liked. He was, they said, unflappable. Flexible. The business suited him, and he didn’t have any real regrets.
He felt the detective watching him, and was self-conscious. How was a person supposed to act when his wife lay dead in front of him? What could he say? It wasn’t true that he was unflappable. He had a habit of thinking before he spoke. Now, he could hardly speak at all. There was a knot in his chest that made him feel like he’d swallowed one of the tennis balls their Golden Retriever, Ellie, liked to chase.
Ellie was going to miss Karin. She’d been sulky that morning, wandering from room to room looking for Karin, who had been home only briefly to change into party clothes after work the previous day.
“Mr. Powell?”
Gerard raised his eyes. Was he expected to say something?
“Is this woman your wife, Karin Powell?”
“Yes, she’s my wife,” Gerard said, his voice strained. He swallowed hard. It seemed like an incredibly stupid question for the detective to ask. Yet even as his wife lay there dead, he glanced at the detective and wondered if his wife would’ve tried to have sex with the man. It was an absurd habit developed within the absurdity of his life with Karin—mentally appraising nearly every man he met against Karin’s standards for possible lovers. Standards he knew all too well. With his commanding, forthright manner and cool good looks, the detective was the kind of man who might have initially appealed to Karin. She had a taste for authoritative men and hadn’t been shy about telling Gerard he needed to be more aggressive with people. That she wished he’d be more forceful with her. More than once, he’d tried to indulge her fantasies about being dominated. But he got no thrill from tying her up or handling her fair, beautiful body roughly, and had only disappointed her, driven her into the bed of some new lover who could give her what she needed. This man, the detective, was definitely handsome, but he was still just a state police detective. Karin preferred her lovers to be powerful. And if they weren’t powerful, they needed to at least be younger. More malleable.
He’d learned to tell himself that it was only her addiction that made her unfaithful. She’d been working on it, making a show of taking her addiction medication—at least up until the past few weeks. They’d been so close to changing their lives.
“I’m sorry,” the detective said.
I’m sorry too were the words that came to Gerard’s lips, but he left them unspoken.
He watched as a pair of flies landed on Karin’s bountiful hair, and half-expected her to push up from the floor and brush them away, complaining about the humidity and the nearby farms and the smell of manure spread on the fallow fields.
“I understand you had two cars here last night. Do you know why your wife might have remained here, or even come back, after everyone left the party?”
“If she did, she had a reason.” Gerard looked up, apparently taking in the upper floors.
Lucas watched him. It was a good time to push Gerard Powell a little, while he was off-balance. His wife’s death hadn’t really hit him yet.
“Was your wife under any unusual stress?” He paused a moment and spread his large hands in a gesture of appeal. “Listen. We can go outside and talk. We don’t have to stay in here unless you want to. I know this is tough.”
“Nobody wanted this listing,” Gerard said. “Karin didn’t, at first. She thought about it for a long time.”
Then her practical side had kicked in and her apprehension about the house went away completely. “I can make it work,” she’d told him. She’d spent a lot of time in Bliss House before it was sold—soaking up the history, she’d said. Now she was lying in the hall beneath the star-painted ceiling, narrow beams of sunlight stabbing the air around her.
Gerard didn’t have a problem with the house. A couple of his workmen had been reluctant, but they worked because they needed the money. He lost a single carpenter who quit because he’d felt a hand or something pressing hard on his back and turned around to find no one there. The rest, though, had sucked it up and gotten the job done quickly. There was a lot to like about the house, and Gerard knew things about it that he suspected no one else alive knew. Things he hadn’t even told Karin. Now it was too late.
“Can I touch her?” He was numb. Touching her might make him feel something. Karin no longer looked human, but like a bizarre wax figure someone had posed on the floor as a joke. Despite the heat streaming through the open front door, she looked cold. Frozen. At least they had closed her eyes. In his head, he could still hear her voice.
“Really, Gerard?” she’d say. “Would you look at the mess my hair is? I’ll never get the knots out of it. And my nails are wrecked. I’m going to have to go to the salon at the beginning of the week. Like I have time for that.”
“I’d like to let you, but no.”
Gerard thought it was to the detective’s credit that he looked regretful.
“In these circumstances, the ME is required to do an autopsy before the body is released.”
Lucas watched Gerard’s reaction carefully. He didn’t look surprised or alarmed, but gave a curt nod.
“Let’s go outside,” he said.
Chapter 18
Rainey put her hand on the front door handle, but rested her forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the door a moment before opening it to the detective waiting on the other side.
The past twenty-four hours had been a blur of phone calls from Bertie and media types. The reporters she’d ignored with caller ID, and she’d put off Bertie by saying that Ariel was too upset. It wasn’t far from the truth.
Ariel was more distant than ever. She’d stuck to her room, watching movies and sleeping or reading, and their conversation was limited to what she might want to eat. The hats had been replaced by a tangerine hoodie that she kept zipped up to the neck and covering her hair. Not satisfied with hiding in her room, she was retreating even further. Rainey imagined her melting away, disappearing into herself, and leaving Rainey behind. Neither mentioned Karin Powell, whose presence was between them as though she were there in the flesh. Just like Will. Two ghosts.
Rainey had made sure that Ariel had seen a decent therapist—Lynne Pogue—after Will’s death, and had suggested, when she’d taken up a tray with some breakfast that morning, that Ariel should give Lynne a call if she wanted to talk. But Ariel had barely lifted her eyes from the movie on her laptop and mumbled a thank you for the breakfast.
Since the police had gone the day before, Rainey had felt utterly alone. Worried about Ariel, worried that they had made a horrible mistake coming here. She’d wandered through the house, arranging and rearranging the furniture in the salon and the unoccupied second floor bedrooms. But she avoided the third floor. Imagined Karin Powell’s footsteps on the stairs. How had she not heard her?
Lucas stood in the front doorway of Bliss House, but Rainey Adams didn’t seem disposed to let him in. He’d even called first to set up the time. Now he was short on patience.
He’d released his people from the scene early the previous evening after nearly taking the entire house apart, looking for something, anything, that would explain why Karin Powell had died in Bliss House. He’d told Rainey they were looking for a note, or some evidence that someone besides Rainey, Karin Powell, and Ariel had been in the house after the party. They were also looking for Karin’s belongings. Her purse with her identification had been found in her car, but they hadn’t found her keys or her phone yet. Or her other shoe. They had confirmed with Gerard Powell that the shoe Rainey had found belonged to the dead woman. Now he needed to talk to the daughter. The day before, the Adams woman had asked him to wait on the interview because the daughter was upset.
He wondered if that was the only reason.
“She’s in the library, Detective,” Rainey said. “Please don’t let this take too long.”
The last time Lucas had been in the small library off of the living room—or salon, as Rainey called it—its shelves had been stuffed with faded paperback books and case after case of VHS tapes of old films. The Brodskys hadn’t quite caught up with the whole DVD revolution. The room had also contained an old Siamese cat who—apparently oblivious to the chaos around Mim Brodsky’s murder—had greeted him with a grouchy cry from a cat-hair-covered loveseat and went quickly back to sleep. But this time, what he saw when he followed Rainey into the study pierced his heart.
The girl sat in a broad leather chair, her legs hidden beneath a long skirt in the same way her face seemed to be hiding beneath her orange hood. Even so, he could tell she was tall for her age. She looked up from the book she’d been reading, and he thought he could see a challenge in her blue eyes. He tried to keep looking at her eyes because he didn’t want to stare at the ruined skin on her neck and right side of her face. Her right eyelid drooped, too, so he tried to focus on the left. On the job he’d seen a lot of exploded motel meth labs and catastrophic car accidents, so he was no stranger to burn victims. But he’d never seen the beauty of a child so destroyed. Looking at her face was like looking at heaven and hell at the same time.
Still, he refused to look away. One of them had to be a grownup.
“Ariel, this is Detective Chappell. You don’t have to talk to him any longer than you want to, sweetheart,” Rainey said. She perched on the wide arm of her daughter’s chair like a lioness guarding her cub.
“Then I can go back upstairs now?” Ariel stared back at him.
Lucas came forward, thinking he’d shake her hand, but he suddenly put his right hand in the inner breast pocket of his sport coat, feeling for his digital recorder. He would’ve been reaching to shake her damaged right hand, which rested, palm up, in her lap.
“What are you reading?” He laid the running recorder on the table and sat in the chair opposite hers.
The question took her by surprise, and she glanced down at the book. He thought she would answer, until she turned to look up at her mother. Ah, not so brave, he thought. Running to mommy for cover. He could tell without looking at Rainey that she was about to jump down his throat.
“Let’s make this as brief as possible for both of us, okay? That works for me, too,” he said. “Yesterday must have been tough, with all the police and technicians here.”
He opened a case he’d brought from the station and set up a small digital machine on the table. “First thing, I need to get your fingerprints, and your mother’s. We have to be able to exclude your prints from everyone else’s.”
Rainey was first. Her hands were ice cold, and she was silent as he pressed and rolled her fingertips over the machine’s screen. Ariel couldn’t disguise her curiosity, and rose to her knees in the chair so she could watch.
When her turn came, she made a crack about her prints being in the system for the rest of her life. Lucas simply smiled.
Rainey stood close by. He heard her breath intake sharply when he gently took her daughter’s damaged hand and rested it on the scanner. The skin felt slick and soft, but he kept his face neutral. He figured that it must really suck to be a fourteen-year-old with her kind of problems, and didn’t blame her for being out of sorts.
When they were done, the girl retreated to her chair, her mother again at her side. Lucas didn’t get the sense that it was a comfortable arrangement. The girl seemed solitary, and not very affectionate.
“Ariel, did you know Mrs. Powell? Had she ever spoken to you?”
Ariel shook her head.
“I’ll need you to answer for the recording, if you don’t mind.”
“No,” she said.
“Had you seen her before the party?”
“Mom talked about her, and she showed me a picture of her online. I don’t see a lot of people in person.”
“Not even that night?”
“I might have watched some of the party, but I wasn’t sure who she was. After the party, Mom showed me the pictures she took with her phone, and she was in a couple of them. Am I done?”
Rainey put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. There was a world of sympathy in her eyes when she looked at her. Lucas wondered how much sympathy a kid could stand.
“So you never saw her around the house at any other time? Did she come upstairs during the party?”
“No.” Her answer was vehement.
“How do you know, if you weren’t watching the whole time? Did anyone else come upstairs or to your room, maybe to say hello or to bring you something?”
The girl started to answer, but then hesitated when her mother stood up.
Some of the hair in Rainey’s ponytail had come loose and hung in blond wisps on both sides of her face, making her look younger and more disheveled than he imagined she usually was. Her peasant-style blouse hung wide and loose over her short denim skirt. She looked like her clothes were a size too big, as though she’d recently lost weight. If she wore a size two, he would’ve been surprised.
“She never met her,” she said. “Most of the people in the house didn’t even know Ariel was here.”
Lucas kept his voice controlled.
“Mrs. Adams, we’ve got a lot of questions to answer here. You can imagine that Mr. Powell will want to know why he woke up two days ago to learn that he’s now a widower. Please, let your daughter speak for herself.”
The air in the room seemed to still instantly. The color drained from Rainey’s face.
Ariel put a hand to her hood as though to protect it, or herself, and looked anxiously from her mother to him.
Then he remembered what one of the deputies had told him the evening before: that Rainey Adams had come to Virginia after her husband had died in a gas explosion at their home. It was obviously the reason the girl was disfigured, the accident Rainey Adams had referred to. He felt his face flush. Damn, I’m an ass.
“Sorry,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as lame as he thought he did. “I’m just trying to cover all the possibilities here.”
“Really?” Rainey’s voice was stiff. “I don’t think so. I think you’re harassing us because that’s how you get your thrills. Has this been fun for you?”
“I chose my words carelessly, Mrs. Adams. We’re just looking for answers.”
“Ariel gave you answers. She doesn’t know anything.”
He looked at the girl, but she’d turned her face to the window. From that angle, he couldn’t see any scarring on her face at all. She was just a shy, slightly gawky fourteen-year-old.
“Your mother says you saw Mrs. Powell fall from the balcony. Tell me about that.”
“I don’t know what I saw,” she said quietly.
It was a start. He waited. To her credit, her mother didn’t jump in. She sat watching her daughter.
Ariel shifted in the chair, but still didn’t turn around.
“It was foggy. Like in a movie, or something out of focus. It didn’t look like Mrs. Powell. She was younger. Not as pretty.”
Out in the hall, the grandfather clock chimed the half hour.
“When I first woke up, I heard talking. And noises like someone running.”
“Inside the house?” Lucas said.
“I knew it wasn’t outside, so I went out of my room. I looked over the railing to the front hall first.”
Now she turned to him. Lucas paid close attention to her words, not wanting to be distracted by her scars. He leaned forward a little.
“Then I looked up, and I saw her kind of balanced on the railing, but it was hard to see because of the fog or whatever it was. She raised her arms up in the air and then she was falling. She looked at me.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from Rainey Adams, who touched her daughter’s arm, obviously concerned. But the girl stopped her with a slight, impatient gesture.
“Had you ever seen her before?” Lucas asked.
Ariel shook her head. “No.”
“How was she dressed?”
She hesitated so briefly that, if he hadn’t been paying attention, he might have missed it. “A nightgown. A white nightgown.”
“Are you sure she was looking at you?”
“Why shouldn’t she be sure?” Rainey asked.
“That’s how I knew it wasn’t Mrs. Powell,” Ariel said. “Like I told you, this girl was younger. She had red hair, but she was a different person.”
Lucas had wanted to see how confident she was, and he had his answer. She was utterly convinced. But it still didn’t make any sense.
“After she fell, what did you do?”
She blushed. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t call for help, or go down to see what happened?”
“That’s enough!” Rainey said. “She answered your questions.”
“Mrs. Adams, please. Her recollections are important.”
Ariel leaned slightly toward her mother.
“Did you see anything else? Anyone else?” He still wasn’t satisfied.
“We’re done, Detective.” Rainey stood. “She doesn’t have anything else to say.”
Bliss House: A Novel Page 9
