Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  In her hospital bed, she jerked in alarm, as though he were standing over her still.

  Take me away from this place! Someone take me away, please!

  The voices across the room stopped, as though the Judge and the nurse had heard Bertie’s cry.

  Please. Please. Please. I don’t belong here. I have to tell Rainey.

  A machine somewhere above her head had begun a frantic electronic bleating, and Bertie’s own voice, the voice in her head, was drowning in it. Her mouth opened as she choked on the slender tube that ran from her nose to deep inside her body. She thought she would never breathe a free breath again, and her hands clenched and unclenched the insufficient blankets.

  “She’s coding!” a nurse said.

  Bertie didn’t hear any more for the roaring in her head.

  “Judge Bliss, please step outside the room.”

  “Is she dying?” Randolph said. “What’s happening?”

  They shoved past him as he stood watching his wife’s life fleeing from her as though it couldn’t get away quickly enough.

  Chapter 62

  After searching the entire downstairs as well as the second floor bedrooms, Rainey paused in the front hall, breathing hard and close to tears. She looked up. The dome stared back at her, unseeing. If it were a sort of lens, it would take in the entire house, and maybe reflect her daughter back to her. The dome had been one of the things that had drawn her to the house. It spoke to her of European art and romance. History. Whimsy. Things she loved. But it was only a decoration. It couldn’t help her.

  Before she started back up the stairs, she checked her cell phone for recent calls. Nothing. She tried Ariel’s number, counting the seconds while the call tried to connect. Again, nothing. It didn’t even connect to voicemail. Reluctantly she pressed the locator button, already knowing what it would tell her.

  LOCATION NOT AVAILABLE.

  Her heart sank. She was going to have to go up to the third floor. Maybe even the roof. She’d already checked the cellar, which had been padlocked since their arrival, and she had the only key. The place was swept clean and completely empty, except for the furnaces and the old coal bin.

  The theater was directly above her bedroom. Sometimes, as she lay in her bed at night, she imagined she could hear slow footsteps crossing the floor. She’d told herself that they weren’t actually footsteps, but just sounds that an old house might make. Karin had rushed her through the theater when she showed her the house, but Bertie had told her about traveling troupes, prohibitionists, and visiting preachers who had appeared there. The family had invited townspeople out to hear them, and many people came. Some, of course, had just wanted to see the inside of the impressive, mysterious house.

  The ballroom wasn’t a favorite of Rainey’s either, but she checked it first because it would be easy, and because she was procrastinating. She didn’t at all understand what attracted Ariel to it. Then, Ariel was a teenager. Rainey too had reveled in being completely shut off from the world when she was a teenager, but she’d managed to be satisfied with a reading nook in her walk-in closet. Finding nothing inside the room, she quickly closed the doors behind her.

  Crossing the gallery, she opened the doors to the theater room and called Ariel’s name.

  Her heart jumped when she heard an answering thud.

  “Ariel, are you here?”

  The sound came from the stage. Rather than using the steps, Rainey climbed directly up the front, grazing her leg on a metal finial on the stage’s base. The stage was empty except for a pair of wooden folding chairs that looked like they wouldn’t even hold her slight weight. Turning, surprised by a movement to her left, she saw a terrified blond woman who looked as though she had been running for her life. It was her own image, distorted by a cloudy mirror.

  “Mommy, let me out! Please, Mommy! I promise I’ll be good!”

  The voice was muffled, but sounded farther away.

  Rainey hurried toward it. “I’m coming, baby!”

  “Mommy!”

  Rainey heard terror in her daughter’s voice, the same terror that had come with a year of nightmares after the explosion.

  “Baby, I’m coming. Where are you?”

  “Mommy! They’re hurting me!”

  Rainey banged on the panels of the wall behind the stage, screaming Ariel’s name. Her head was full of noise, and she thought she would explode with frustration. In her panic, she almost missed the small, burnished doorplate at the edge of one of the panels. Finding it, she pushed. Hard. Nothing happened. Again. It wasn’t until she pushed more gently that the thing opened.

  “Ariel!” She fumbled along the wall for a light. Finally, she found one of the old-fashioned push-button switches, like the one in the ballroom. Just one of the ancient bulbs in a sconce on the wall came on, its timid, wavering glow barely piercing the dark.

  Had she expected to find Ariel in here, on the other side of the wall? A part of her had. Ariel hiding. Ariel playing a game. Instead, all that came back to her was the dead sound of her own voice hitting the walls of the room.

  The room was filled with the shadows of furniture pushed to the sides, and smelled of decaying rugs and dust and wood. It was the kind of place that she would have delighted in as a child—or even now, under different circumstances. Antiques were her passion. But this place might be her daughter’s prison.

  In the quiet, she calmed some.

  “Honey? Are you in here?”

  She heard sobbing coming from a far corner of the room. She walked slowly toward it.

  “Ariel!” Her fear put an edge of anger in her voice. “Come out. Stop this. Please!”

  Was Ariel playing some kind of trick on her? Thinking it was fun to make her worry, fun to scare her? After the incident with the doors—No! I didn’t dream the doors slamming. The footsteps. I swear I didn’t!—she was frightened. If Ariel were playing games with her, it would make everything worse. She thought for a moment about simply leaving the room to let Ariel come out on her own. But her gut told her she was wrong. Those screams had been real. Ariel was here, and in some kind of danger.

  In her pocket, her cell phone rang. Ariel’s ringtone. Excited, she pulled it out to see Ariel’s smiling, uninjured face of two years earlier looking back at her.

  She touched ANSWER.

  “Honey!” she said, expecting to hear Ariel’s voice.

  Even though she’d tried to answer, the phone continued to ring. She pressed ANSWER again. The song, a snippet of music from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Ariel’s favorite, started over.

  Why? Why is this happening?

  Nothing on the phone would respond when she touched it. Her heart broke to see Ariel’s lovely face, her eyes playful in a way Rainey hadn’t seen them in a long, long time.

  The ringing was maddening. Was Ariel really trying to reach her through the phone? She had to be! And yet she’d heard her say that someone was hurting her. Rainey felt helpless with the phone in her hand. Ariel seemed close, but it was as if there were an invisible wall between them. In the second before she was about to throw the phone to the floor in frustration, she screamed for it to stop!

  It did.

  Over in the corner, something—or someone—began pounding on a trunk or wooden chest. It was loud and not quite rhythmic. Below the pounding, another cry:

  “Mommy! Mommy, please!”

  Stuffing the phone back into the pocket of her robe, the instinct to rescue her daughter sent her to a trunk in a dark corner. Ariel was sobbing and crying, “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over.

  Rainey pulled the heavy trunk as far away from the wall as she could so she could have the advantage of the triangle of light coming from the open doorway. She tried to reassure Ariel that she would be out right away as she slid the trunk, but the girl was hysterical. Rainey sobbed with frustration.

  The trunk was lashed with thick leather straps secured by tarnished brass buckles. Unnerved by fear and the terrified—and terrifying—sounds coming
from the trunk, Rainey’s hands shook as she tried to undo the straps.

  “I’m getting you out, honey! It’s okay!”

  Rainey finally got all three buckles undone. Relieved and grateful, she knelt to open the trunk, trying not to think about the fact that someone had locked her daughter inside.

  She lifted the heavy lid with both hands and had to stand to get it all the way open.

  As she looked down, a rush of frigid air blew out of the empty trunk, passing through her body as though she were made of linen. The force knocked her back, onto the floor. The pounding was replaced by the sound of childish footsteps running from the room.

  “Mommymommymommymommymommy!”

  The voice melted into a child’s mocking laughter as it faded away.

  Chapter 63

  “The video is set up to record for three days, then dump the data.” Ginny, the post’s computer tech, slid a flash drive across the desk to Lucas. “I put each camera on a separate file for your viewing pleasure.”

  “Three days?” Lucas asked. “Just three days?”

  “Best that I can tell, unless he backed it up somewhere else before he died. I’ll see if he’s got cloud back up, but try to be patient, okay? You just handed it to me an hour ago.”

  “So there could be a record going back further, then. Somewhere.”

  “Could be,” she said. “I’ll let you know.” She turned back to her screen without further comment.

  Lucas watched the silent video of Nick sitting on the couch, half-dozing as he watched television in the darkened living room. On the screen, he saw what Nick hadn’t been able to see: a shadow crossing the room, clinging close to the wall, then appearing right behind him. The garrote was hard to make out on the screen, so it almost looked as though the men were engaged in pantomime. Nick jerked back, the killer bent forward, his arms taut while Nick flailed and clutched at him. Almost three agonizing minutes passed.

  It wasn’t until the killer began pouring the bleach over Nick that Lucas averted his gaze. He would have to watch it many times and knew it wasn’t going to get easier.

  Fortunately, the preceding days’ footage was unremarkable in comparison. He started at the beginning and watched as Nick came and went. When he reached the last couple of hours recorded two days earlier, he saw Roberta Bliss standing on the front porch. She touched her hair and adjusted her skirt while she waited for Nick to open the door. When he finally did, he gathered her in a warm embrace.

  Lucas made a note: 9:05 P.M., after interview at the Waffle House.

  When Nick and Roberta Bliss disappeared from the screen, Lucas switched to the file with the living room camera footage. After a brief conversation, Roberta Bliss went out the patio door, and Nick disappeared into the kitchen. A few moments later, Nick returned carrying an open bottle of wine and two glasses and went outside as well.

  Roberta Bliss didn’t show up again on any of the files, so Lucas guessed she must have left from the patio. But the bedroom video showed that, twenty-five minutes after he’d gone outside with the wine, Nick made a cell phone call that lasted about ten minutes. He paced as he talked, and his lips were too close to the phone to read. When he hung up, he was wearing a grim smile.

  The rest of the videos, up until the murder, showed only Nick, and an hour and a half of a woman who let herself in to clean the house.

  Now they had at least a tentative link between Roberta Bliss’s assault and Nick’s murder. Lucas called Tim Hatcher in to see if he’d started researching Nick’s phone records.

  Chapter 64

  Gerard sat in his truck in front of the house. He saw now that there was no returning to normal life, because screwed-up was the new normal for him. He couldn’t get Nick’s agonized, waxen face out of his mind. All he wanted to do was sleep, but he knew it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

  He was so dazed that it took him a moment to realize Ellie was barking at him through the dining room window, dancing her paws back and forth across the windowsill. The sill was covered with deep scratch marks, evidence of her perpetual excitability.

  There was a game he and Karin played sometimes when they came home, going close to the window, peering in on Ellie.

  “What do you think she’s trying to say?”

  “Ball! Ball! Ball!”

  “Maybe ‘Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!’”

  The more they talked about her in front of the window, the more excited she got, her barks turning into frantic whines.

  “I think she’s saying, ‘Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!’”

  “She gets that from you, not me,” Karin would say.

  Thank God for Ellie.

  He let Ellie outside to do her business, and when she was done he grabbed a tennis ball from a basket by the front door and threw it for her until she tired. She signaled that she was finished by lying down in the grass to mouth the thing while rolling on her back. How many ball covers had she chewed off? Hundreds, certainly. He kept a case of cheap tennis balls in the garage just for her.

  “Ellie girl, where’s your dignity?” he called to her.

  Hearing her name, she jumped up and ran over to him. He knew that dogs weren’t supposed to be able to smile but with the ball in her mouth she seemed to be wearing a happy, foolish grin.

  “You’re shameless,” he said, scratching her behind the ear.

  In answer, she dropped the ball at his feet and rubbed her face—drooly mouth and all—against his blue jeans.

  At least Ellie’s life was back to some kind of normal.

  Even though Karin was going to be cremated and would have no visitation, the undertaker had talked him into at least providing a dress and shoes for her to wear in the casket. The notion had seemed ridiculous to him at first. No one would see her. But the undertaker had said, “You will know. You will think about it, later.” It was a strange thing for her to say, and maybe that bothered him more than anything else.

  He didn’t like to think about the dead Karin. What that empty body was wearing when it went into the thousand-degree chamber of fire, to burn and burn, meant nothing to him. He went to her closet—not thinking . . . not thinking—and laid his hand on the shoulder of a dress. Any dress. It happened that it was bright blue silk, the color of the indigo buntings that came to the feeders in spring, a blue as bright as a child’s Easter egg. It was a dress he’d seen her in many times. Not a special occasion dress, but one that turned people’s heads on the street on any given day. In it, she looked like she owned the town, especially when her hair was brushed up and away from her face, yet loose around her shoulders. A powerful, sensual mane. That was the Karin he would remember.

  Had she met one of her lovers while wearing that dress? The dress had no zipper or buttons, but stretched so that it caressed her even as a man might. Had some other man helped her take it off, carefully lifting, sliding it over her hips, her breasts, her lips, and, finally, her hair?

  Gerard could go no further. He turned to the shelves of shoes and reached for a pair of blue heels. They weren’t the same color as the dress, and he suspected that Karin would’ve mocked his choice. He was about to pick another when the phone in his pocket rang. Grabbing the first shoes, he quickly laid them on the bed with the dress, and took out the phone. He recognized the number.

  He answered, but there was only a hollow silence on the other end.

  “Mrs. Adams?” he said. “Rainey?” His leg still ached because he’d tripped on the loose brick just outside of Bliss House. It had been a strange, embarrassing moment, and he’d been sorry that Nick was there.

  When there was still no answer from her, he waited, listening. If it wasn’t Rainey herself, then surely it was her daughter playing some kind of trick on him. He said her name again. Nothing.

  He hung up the phone. It rang again immediately. When he answered this time, there was static, rising and fading.

  What in the hell?

  The cell reception at his house wasn’t the best, but it was never this ba
d.

  “Rainey?”

  “Gerry.” A whisper inside the static.

  He told himself that he hadn’t heard it.

  “Gerry.” Only one person had ever called him that.

  “What is this bullshit?” he said, anger almost disguising the fear in his gut. It was Karin’s voice, or some simulacrum of it that made him want to scream obscenities down the phone line to whoever was on the other end of it.

  God, no. Please, no.

  “Gerard, it’s me. Rainey.” The static was gone. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Why did you call me that?” he said. “Who told you to call me that?”

  How did you know?

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Rainey said.

  “Who told you?” he repeated. “Is this your way of fucking with my head? You think this is funny?” The idea that she could be so cruel stunned him. He’d been on the receiving end of her justifiable anger, but he’d never imagined her to be cruel.

  Rainey barely heard him.

  “Please help me find Ariel, Gerard. She’s gone.”

  Chapter 65

  “I know neither of us wants to deal with them, but we have to call the police,” Gerard said. They stood in the woods beyond the maze. He looked past Rainey, through the trees, to see the house standing silent and ponderous in the sun. An historic house. An inexplicable house. He’d helped it become what it now was. No longer a feared object of infamy, but a home for Rainey Adams and her daughter. He’d made it so. Or, up to this minute, he’d thought he had.

  Once he’d seen Rainey Adams’s tear-streaked face, he forgot the strange voice on the phone. She’d come running out of the house to meet him at his truck, dressed carelessly in a pair of shorts, sandals, and a loose T-shirt. In her vulnerability, she looked no more than a decade older than her missing daughter. Despite the recent tension between them, he felt a sudden urge to touch her. Hold her. But he resisted the impulse. Karin had told him that his habit of wanting to be the compassionate hero to every woman he met would eventually get him into trouble. How ironic that she had been so concerned about his reputation.