He interrupted her.
“Did you see him? Do you know who he was? Dad says it was someone who wanted to get to him.”
Of course Randolph would say that.
Bertie closed her eyes a moment to gather her thoughts. After she’d called Jefferson to the hospital, she’d had time to think about what she was going to say but hadn’t come up with anything more clever than the truth.
“I know who it was, Jefferson, and I will certainly tell the police. But I’m very tired now, and I need you to tell me something.” Tired didn’t really begin to describe the way she felt.
“You’re all upset. Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this stuff.”
Jefferson was excellent at distracting her, but today she would have none of it. What if she died before she knew the answer? Her head was so damaged that she couldn’t really think straight. Death still seemed like a distinct possibility. She knew now that no one had been arrested for what they’d done to her.
“What were you doing with that Karin Powell woman?”
She’d seen her son caught in lies before. Now, he simply looked as though she’d slapped him, which was something she’d never done.
“I found one of her ridiculous fingernails in your laundry after she was killed, and—don’t try to argue with me—I know it was definitely hers, and I know you disappeared for a long time during that party. Whether you were with her then or not doesn’t matter. But I need to know if you had anything to do with her death.”
“I can’t believe you’d think I would kill someone!” He held up his hands as though he had to physically fend her off.
She shook her head with a painful effort. “I didn’t say I thought you killed her. I just want to know if you were involved.”
“You hate me.”
“Don’t be absurd, Jefferson. I told Nick that I didn’t think you could have killed her, and he agreed. But I know you. I know you’re very sensitive to, you know, women. And she was a very seductive kind of woman. Men seemed to like her, and I know you have certain needs that I do not care to discuss. That’s why I gave Nick your number and asked him to call you about Karin.”
“You don’t know, do you?” Jefferson said. “When did you talk to Nick?”
“I went to talk to him the night before . . . well, before this happened.” She gestured weakly to her bandages. “I think it was the night before. I had to talk to someone, and God knows I couldn’t talk to your father.”
Jefferson fidgeted with the collar of his Oxford cloth shirt, just like he had as an anxious little boy.
“Whatever Nick thought he knew about me doesn’t matter, because somebody killed him,” he said. “Strangled him inside that faggy little cottage of his.”
Bertie couldn’t speak. Maybe she hadn’t woken up at all from whatever medicine the doctors had given her to make her sleep for so long. She’d slept, and had such terrible dreams, and woken to this!
“I guess you think I had something to do with that, too,” he said. “What was it with that guy? Why did you talk to him about us?” His voice was getting shrill. Sweat had broken out along his hairline. “You and Karin. It was like he was some kind of girlfriend or something. You couldn’t talk to Dad, but you could talk to him? No wonder Dad . . .”
“Stop it!” Bertie said. “Just stop it!” She could feel the tightness in her chest beginning all over again, despite all the medicine they’d given her.
“Why did you have to get involved?” he asked. “Why? It didn’t have anything to do with you. That stupid Rainey and that stupid party. You just couldn’t leave it alone. You never know when to leave things alone!”
“Don’t. Please don’t be so loud.” Bertie’s words were strained. The elephant was back on her chest.
“Why?” Now he was almost shouting. “Do you know what that faggot did? He called me. He called me and said he knew about the stupid fingernail, and that he knew about Karin and me, and that he thought I probably killed her. And it was you who messed it up, Mom. You messed it up, and Dad had to fix it. Why do you always do this?”
He turned and stalked the room once more, running his hands viciously through his hair. “Why, Mom?”
“Jefferson . . .”
He returned to her, looking determined. She’d seen the same look on his face when some other child had taken one of his favorite toys, a look she thought he’d grown out of when he was six or seven. Leaning over the edge of the bed, he put his hands around her neck, pressing his thumbs into the front of her throat. Tears started in his eyes and quickly welled over. As Bertie watched her son’s face, one of the tears fell onto her cheek, and even through her rising panic she felt his anguish and was sorry for him. As he squeezed and her airway closed, it hurt less, but the bright room was quickly darkening.
“Hey!”
There was a roar of blood in Bertie’s ears, but behind it she heard a woman’s voice. It seemed to wake something in Jefferson, and he jerked his hands away. Bertie closed her eyes, heard Jefferson run from the room, heard the woman fall against the door as he pushed past her. Heard the woman scream for security.
Bertie knew that Jefferson was going to get away, out of the hospital, without being caught. As terrible as the thing he’d done to her was, she knew he hadn’t really meant to do it.
Poor Jefferson. Poor Nick.
Now it was her turn to cry.
Chapter 74
Gerard kept his distance as he watched Rainey trying to calm her daughter. He coughed, once, as though it would hide his emotion.
Ariel was sprawled over the back porch steps, weeping into her mother’s lap, the voluminous robe he’d seen her in the previous night trailing over them both. She was covered in blood and dirt.
Goddamn the person who did this.
Rainey had just gotten off the phone with someone at the state police who had promised to track down Detective Chappell, when they heard Ariel’s incoherent screams coming from outside the house. They found her, collapsed at the bottom of the porch steps outside the mudroom.
Gerard looked away from the two of them, toward the orchards beyond. He thought he caught a movement, but the breeze had picked up, and he saw that it was a piece of trash, maybe a plastic grocery bag that had found its way from the road. He waited a few more moments for Ariel’s sobs to subside before he spoke.
“Let’s bring her inside.”
The breeze was a hot one and he had begun to sweat. Something was very wrong all around them. The sun had dimmed, though there was no cloud in the sky, and the birds had gone quiet. He heard a car start somewhere in the distance, maybe on the other side of the woods. It was a normal sound. A sound that made sense.
“Gerry.” A whisper.
He looked at Rainey and her daughter. Ariel lifted her face from her mother’s lap to look at him. Her cheeks were plastered with tears and blood, and her lips were swollen and cracked.
“Gerry. Help me,” she whispered, her voice clear but not her own. It was the voice from the phone. The voice he’d heard nearly every day of the past fourteen years.
Rainey looked down at Ariel, then at Gerard. She pulled her daughter closer, enfolding her until the girl’s eyelids dropped closed, and she was either asleep or had fainted.
Chapter 75
Lucas passed through the front hall, headed for the kitchen so he could get some privacy to talk to the sheriff on the phone. The front door to Bliss House stood open, and an EMT tech walked hurriedly past him to the salon, where she and her partner were treating the girl.
By the time he’d arrived, expecting to have to talk Rainey Adams down because her kid had done a runner just like any other teenager might have done on a bad day, the EMT truck was already preceding him up the long driveway to Bliss House. It was a hell of a thing to stumble into: a fourteen-year-old girl bundled into a blanket half-naked, with blood on her arms and face, on top of her already dramatic scarring. Seeing her like that was one of the images he knew he’d never forget. She was a differen
t person from the girl-with-attitude he’d interviewed only a few days earlier. She was awake, and wired, talking a thousand words a minute. Unfortunately, little of it was making sense. He’d encouraged Rainey Bliss to let the techs give the girl something to calm her down, but both the girl and the mother had refused.
Now he was left to tell the sheriff the freakish news about Judge Bliss.
“This is some kind of joke,” the sheriff said.
“You’ll need to get a few uniforms out here fast,” Lucas said. “I’ve already contacted my post, but the closest folks we’ve got are twenty minutes away. Karin Powell’s husband is having a hard time sitting on his hands. The girl says she thinks Judge Bliss is dead, because she stabbed him with some kind of magic scissors or something. She’s definitely got somebody’s blood all over her.”
The sheriff cursed quietly. “That’s too many people out there,” he said. “We don’t need this to get around before we even know if the judge is dead or not.”
“Too late,” Lucas said. God, he hated provincial politics. “She said the judge’s kid is involved, too. We need a bulletin out on him.”
“Hold on,” the sheriff said. In the background, Lucas heard him calling in his chief deputy.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you to keep your pants on until we get there,” the sheriff said, returning to the phone. “If the girl didn’t kill him, he’s got nothing to lose because he’s already killed one person. Maybe two. Did she say if he was armed? Shit. I’d never have thought it of him.”
“No firearms that she knows of, but I’d bet he carries one concealed, at least,” Lucas said.
“That he does,” said the sheriff. “My daddy signed the order for it himself twenty or more years ago.”
After he hung up, Lucas hurriedly looked through the cabinets to find a glass, then turned on the tap to fill it for the girl. The pipes groaned like some living thing.
This house. God, I hate this house.
He hurried back to the salon, where he handed the water to a grateful Rainey. She put it down in front of the girl, who was telling one of the EMTs that there was no way she was going to the hospital. Her eyes were shining. Glassy. She looked as though she might have a fever, but he suspected that she was just experiencing a delayed adrenaline rush.
Noticing him, she said, “Did you find him? Did you see him?” She leaned forward in the chair, her hands white-knuckled from gripping the arms. The EMT trying to take her blood pressure for a second time tried to gently push her back.
The late afternoon sun gave the room an uncharacteristically cozy appearance. Despite the people gathered, it was quiet and tense. The room and the house seemed to be filled with the same sense of anticipation as the girl.
“Where’s Mr. Powell?” Lucas said, realizing that there were only four others in the room: the girl, her mother, the two EMTs.
A brief shadow of guilt passed over the mother’s face.
“Where is he?” he repeated.
The girl answered. “He didn’t say where he was going, but I heard him go upstairs. You didn’t go with him. Why didn’t you go with him?” Her voice rose, panicked. The mother put her hand on the girl’s arm and said her name.
“What room? Where?” Lucas stared at the mother, wanting to curse her for her stupidity. “If the judge isn’t dead, do you think he won’t be soon if Powell finds him?”
“He didn’t say anything,” Rainey said. “And why shouldn’t he go after him? You haven’t done anything yet. Look what that man did to my daughter!”
One of the EMTs spoke up. “She said something about a ballroom.”
Lucas nodded his thanks. “Does she need to be seen at the hospital? Because I want you all out of this house as soon as possible.”
“We’re just about done here,” the EMT said. “I’d recommend we take her in. Depends on what mom here says. She’s not in any danger, no.”
“The sheriff’s on his way with more officers,” Lucas said to Rainey. “We’re going to have to secure the house, so you need to leave here until I let you know it’s safe to return. Do you understand?”
Rainey nodded, but the girl shouted her protest. “You can’t make me leave, Mommy! You can’t take me away from here! What about you? He said you’d been in that room, Mommy! You can’t leave here either!”
Deciding that the girl was her mother’s problem, Lucas headed upstairs.
To his mind, the ballroom was second only in creepiness to the bizarre theater across the hall. It made a kind of sense that there would be a secret passage somewhere inside of it. The girl had said there was also an entrance to the underground rooms out in the old springhouse on the property. Why hadn’t they found it when they were investigating the Brodsky murder? So many secrets. He almost found Bliss House’s ability to keep its secrets admirable. But to believe that, he would have to acknowledge that Bliss House was a living, practically breathing place. He didn’t think he was that far gone. Yet.
From the stairs he could see that the pocket doors to the ballroom were open. He unholstered his Sig Sauer P220 and tactical light.
The room was empty except for a pair of tables and some exercise mats. As he turned toward the fireplace, the reflection of his light caught a tall mirror and made him jump.
Shit. He hated how freaked out this place made him feel.
The opening beside the fireplace was short, and he had to duck inside. He shone the light down stairs that were narrowly situated between rough brick walls, and steep as hell. Which is where, he figured, they probably led.
Shit and shit.
He kept his progress slow and careful. The field was narrow enough that he would have an easy shot at anyone he came upon who needed shooting, but he was equally vulnerable. Steep as the stairs were, by the time he reached the bottom after 107 steps (he’d always been a counter, particularly when he was nervous), he’d had to make at least four turns. This was not a basement. The angle and depth of the staircases told him they were below and outside the footprint of the house.
“Powell!” He stopped on the bottom stair before entering what seemed to be a cave-like tunnel. He could see a wall directly ahead of him, but his voice seemed to resound in a larger space.
“In here.”
The voice came from the right, and he believed it was Powell’s. A small amount of yellowish light came from that direction as well.
“Come out where I can see you,” Lucas said.
“I think you better come and look at this,” Powell said. “There’s nobody else here.”
Lucas entered the tunnel carefully, clearing the seemingly endless dark space to his left, then checking out the space to his right, which turned out to be a doorway. The tunnel extended beyond it but turned into more of a hallway, with smoother walls and a couple of low-wattage lights on the wall.
He felt his breath constrict in his chest. He hadn’t been wrong. It looked like a hallway to hell.
There were three doors that opened onto the hallway on the left. He found Powell standing in the first room.
Working on a drug case early in his career, Lucas had busted a dealer who kept a couple of badly-used prostitutes in a secret room behind a wall in his basement. It had been a crude place, with concrete walls and bare mattresses on the floor. The stench had been sickening. The girls turned out to be North Carolina runaways who both ended up in the hospital for several weeks. The room in which he found Powell was less crude, but it had a similar prison-like feel. The low ceiling, rough walls, stained sink, and the curtain rod hung on a hopeless blank wall spoke a language of evil.
There was blood. It had stained the bedclothes and was smeared on the bedside table and the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, looking down. Dark blots of fresh blood followed an irregular path past him and out the door. He stepped outside the room and followed the stains past the hallway and a short way into the darkness of the tunnel, which he now saw canted slightly upward toward the ground’s surface. The judge
had gone out that way, just as the girl had. He made a mental note to ask Ariel why she didn’t go back into the house by the stairs. Turning around, he went back into the room where Powell waited. The exploration of the tunnel and the possible discovery of the stabbing victim (if he could be called a victim) could wait for the arrival of the other officers. They couldn’t be far away, but there was no way to hear their approach. Wherever this place was, it was a universe away from the rest of the world.
“Was he here when you got down here?” Lucas asked, though he thought he knew the answer.
“If he had been, he’d be dead now,” Powell said without emotion.
Despite the dramatics, Lucas didn’t give him a hard time. The person who had assaulted the girl had probably killed the guy’s wife as well. Lucas had to keep his head and not let Powell know how sure he was that the judge, or the judge’s son, was his wife’s killer. But after the disturbing interview he’d had with the judge at the hospital he understood that Randolph Bliss was a cold, cold bastard, and probably a very successful psychopath. If he was indeed their perp, there was plenty of evidence with the blood and whatever DNA was on the bed to nail him.
“We need to get out of here. I don’t want this scene contaminated any more than it already is. Let’s go.”
Powell didn’t respond.
“We’ll get the crime scene techs down here. What is it?”
“It’s Karin’s,” he said.
Lucas saw where Powell was pointing. A shiny gold sandal lay on a chair. He’d seen the other in the dining room after they found Karin Powell’s body.
Chapter 76
Gerry.
God, he had hated it when Karin called him that. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her in all the time they’d been together, and now that he was hearing it after she was dead, it felt unbearable to him.
But why was he hearing it now? Twice in one day?
There was no one to ask. He already knew the answer: It was all in his head. It was the guilt talking. The guilt from the knowledge that he’d let Karin get involved with a man like Randolph Bliss. A powerful man from an obviously sick family. But of course he hadn’t known that Randolph Bliss was the one, before. And what about the kid, Jefferson? He certainly didn’t put it past Karin to have been screwing them both. She was ambitious that way. If the baby had lived, it would’ve been a Bliss, certainly.
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