Bliss House: A Novel
Page 1
BLISS HOUSE
LAURA BENEDICT
For Ann Arthur Benedict, my favorite Virginian, and Cleve Benedict, her Prince Charming
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
From case file 8214.P of the Virginia State Police, Homicide Division. Listing from the records of Powell Company Properties:
OWN A TREASURED PIECE OF HISTORY IN THE
TIMELESS FOOTHILLS OF THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS
Built in 1878 by industrialist Randolph Hasbrouck Bliss as a country retreat, Bliss House is one of seven American homes designed by the prominent black French architect Jean-Paul Hulot. Its serene setting among sixty-two acres of orchards, pastures, and ponds, gracious formal gardens, and rambling woods offers the ultimate in pastoral privacy. A yellow-brick Second Empire gem, Bliss House features 9 original bedrooms, a generous kitchen with butler’s pantry, paneled study, theater, formal dining room, salon, partial cellar, and rooftop storage space, 8 full & 2 half-baths, and central air. Stone patios, mansard roof, nine working fireplaces (including the kitchen), and original cherry moldings throughout are among the many period details. Once an inn, Bliss House also offers six servants’ bedrooms with a separate kitchen, living area, and entrance, plus a detached four-car garage with a second-level apartment.
Located forty-five minutes from Charlottesville and Interstate 64, near historic Old Gate, Virginia, settled in 1744 on the James River. Bliss House invites endless possibilities: spa, inn, private residence, or luxurious business suites.
Attractively priced.
Chapter 1
A Generation Ago
The blindfold kept Allison from seeing, but the chilly air around her smelled sweet and damp. There were flowers nearby—roses, she guessed—and the drip drip drip of water. They might be underground, even in a cave.
How thrilling!
Michael, her lover, stood close, touching her neck, her shoulder. When he touched her breast, she giggled.
He shushed her with a whisper.
Why do we have to be so quiet?
Nothing in her life was ever this quiet. Rattling dishes, noisy customers, the gossip of the restaurant’s kitchen staff filled her days. At night, she listened to records or watched television, hung out at her mother’s house, which echoed with the shouts of her half-brothers and neighborhood kids, or she went dancing in bars near the university. It was only since she’d met Michael that her life had turned quiet. Slower. They never went dancing, and he often brought takeout when he came to see her in her two-room apartment. He’d told her that making love with her felt like the most important thing he’d ever done. That they didn’t need other people around. And while she thought the notion that their sex was important was kind of silly, she never told him because it might have hurt his feelings.
He helped her sit down on something soft. A bed, perhaps.
Were they in his house? She’d asked him more than once where he lived, but he would only tell her that he lived with his family, not too far away. She sensed that he didn’t have a good relationship with them. Not everyone had a mother like hers, who loved her enough to not get into her business—especially since she’d left home. She knew she was lucky that way.
Tonight, before they left her apartment, he’d told her he had a surprise for her. She’d looked up at him expectantly, hoping they were going somewhere special like the Grange, the big resort hotel a few miles outside Charlottesville. When he’d called to set up their date, he’d told her to put on something pretty, and she’d dug out a ruffled yellow sundress from the back of her closet and tamed her unruly hair as best she could.
“I know this sounds weird, but I need you to ride in the back of the car. On the floor.”
When she told him there was no way she was going to do that, he had asked her to please, do it for him. It wasn’t so much, was it? And didn’t she like surprises?
So she’d found herself on the floor in the back of the Cutlass as they drove through the night, her dress crumpled beneath her, and her long red hair clinging to the picnic blanket he’d laid on the back seat. She’d tried to convince him that she could sit beside him with the blindfold on, or just close her eyes, but they both knew she couldn’t do it, which made them laugh. He kept the blindfold up front with him.
Before they drove away, he put a Boz Scaggs cassette in the stereo, and gave her a vial of coke and the tiny spoon he always carried in his pocket.
“It’s kind of a long drive,” he said. “I want you to enjoy the ride.” His smile didn’t quite reach his brown eyes, which were sometimes hard for her to examine under the shadow of his brow. Even though he was nineteen, a year younger than she, Michael seemed older than a lot of the university guys she met. The difference was in the things that he didn’t do, immature things like getting stupid-drunk, or tearing at her clothes when they made out.
At first she’d tried to guess in what direction they were headed by paying attention to which way the car turned and watching the streetlamps outside the window. But when she opened the coke, she had to concentrate to keep it from falling off the tiny spoon, and quickly lost her orientation.
After the coke, she got antsy—her mother was always telling her not to fidget—and poked her head up to take a quick peek out the window. Because she was only jus
t a hair over five feet tall, she had to shift, getting onto her knees to see anything. But she made too much noise, and Michael admonished her, his voice loud over the music.
“Hey! Don’t look!”
She ducked back down, laughing nervously. He’d never sounded angry with her before.
“You’ll spoil the surprise,” he said. “I just want you to be surprised.”
Chagrined, but still feeling playful, she told him she was sorry, and promised to be a good girl. She hadn’t been able to see a thing outside the window, anyway. The streetlights had disappeared, and she had only seen her own face, pale and curious, staring back at her from the glass.
By the time he stopped the car, the Crosby, Stills, and Nash tape that had replaced Boz Scaggs was nearly over, and she was feeling carsick. The last few minutes of the drive had been slow, down a gravel road, but he still wouldn’t tell her where they were. He bent over the front seat to tie the blindfold for her.
“Hold your hair. Just like that, to the side. I don’t want to hurt you.”
It was more of a command than a request, but at least he was being gentle with her. When they had sex, he was also gentle. But always, when he came, she had a sense that he was holding something back, hiding a part of himself. Was it frustration? Anger? He didn’t like to talk about himself or his feelings. Some guys were like that. And that was okay with her. She had secrets of her own, so she didn’t push or question.
With the blindfold snugly settled, he’d led her away from the car, solicitous about where she walked. She clung to him so she wouldn’t fall. She was high enough, excited enough, that she didn’t ask any questions. If he wanted to play some games, she could stand it. The sex he thought so important was good, even if it was getting a little predictable. If he tried to hit her or hurt her the way that some guys she’d gone out with had, or the coke stopped coming, she would stop seeing him.
The night smelled like the woods, and she could hear peepers and a single distant bullfrog. It was so reminiscent of night on her grandparents’ farm in West Virginia that she felt sad and nostalgic and happy all at once.
She’d been in love, once, in high school, and this felt almost like that. At least when she was high like she was now. Michael—not Mike, never Mike—wasn’t perfect. Sometimes he didn’t call her, then showed up at her door again without warning or apology. Before tonight, she hadn’t heard from him in two weeks. The first week of waiting to hear from him had been painful, and just a couple of days earlier she’d had a bowling date with a guy who worked at the jewelry store next to the restaurant. He’d been bugging her for months, and she was feeling bored and angry with Michael. She hadn’t decided whether to tell Michael about the date, but she’d gone to make him jealous, so she thought she might. Then he’d called her out of the blue like he hadn’t been away at all, and she hadn’t been able to stay mad. Plus, he had her for sure when he pulled out the coke.
Now that she was sitting—wherever they were—he turned her head slightly so he could reach the ties of the blindfold.
“Let’s see how quiet you can be.”
The velvet blindfold fell into Allison’s lap.
Such a strange, unsettling room! Were they in some castle chamber? That was the first impression she had, maybe because of the damp, chilly air. Like so many other little girls, she’d bought into that fairy tale dream of marrying a prince and living in a castle. But this place felt too claustrophobic to be part of a castle, and wasn’t at all romantic. Even the candle flickering in a niche carved into the rough, blank wall seemed to lack warmth. But the adjoining wall was covered by a set of heavy curtains hanging from a thick wooden rod. They were the kind of curtains she’d imagined hanging in a house like Thornfield in the novel Jane Eyre; curtains that would keep out not just the cold, but the creatures that roamed the moors at night. She could make out deer and horses stitched into a black or dark blue field. Without much light beyond a weak, amber bulb in a single electric sconce on the wall, and the candles, it was hard to make out colors. The bedspread on which she sat was a different design, but equally elaborate, and the bedposts were tall, only inches from the ceiling. A high bedside table held a vase with red roses, a simple wooden box, an ashtray, and a tarnished silver candelabrum with lighted candles standing in three of its five arms. A pile of threadbare towels sat on a wooden folding chair pushed up to a table that looked as though it could barely seat two people. The furniture looked to Allison like things out of a museum. Only a covered plastic bucket, a metal cooler in the corner, and the rust-stained pedestal sink looked like they were from the current century.
“This place is weird,” Allison said. “Do you live here?”
Michael got up from the bed and opened the wooden box on the bedside table. Because of his height and the restricted dimensions of the room, he looked like a giant trapped in a walled cage. If he wished, he could easily have pressed his palm against the ceiling.
Pulling out a perfectly rolled joint, he lighted it, took a hit, and handed it to her. She didn’t much like to smoke pot when she was doing coke, but the whole evening had turned surreal, and she was thinking she could use a little help to relax and settle her stomach.
Michael lay down near her, resting his head against her thigh. She’d thought he was handsome, but now she noticed that his nose was just a bit too large for his face, and his chin was too round compared to the sharpness of his nose and the size of his jaw.
Why didn’t I notice that before?
He looked different from how he looked back in her apartment. She shivered. At the last moment before leaving the apartment, she had grabbed a sweater that her grandmother had crocheted for her. But the sweater did nothing to break the chill of the room.
“What do you think of it?” Michael asked.
“It’s . . . I don’t know,” she said. “It’s really cool, I guess.”
A look of disappointment crossed his face. “You don’t like it. I should’ve known you wouldn’t like it.”
“That’s silly. Of course I like it.”
He took the joint and sat up again to flick the ash in the crystal ashtray on the table. He seemed anxious in a way she’d never seen him act before.
“I hoped you would. What about the flowers? You like them, don’t you?”
Allison laughed. “What’s up with you? Why are you being so weird? How come you don’t have a TV in here? Or a phone? You don’t even have a telephone.”
He offered her one last hit off of the joint before he took it back, and crushed its cherry in the ashtray. When it was out he laid it carefully aside.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he said, getting up.
Allison lay back, resting on her elbows. “Are we in your parents’ basement or something?”
“Something like that.” He stood over her.
With a mirthless smile, he lifted her up a few inches, only to drop her again farther back on the bed. She weighed less than 110, and he was at least six feet tall and almost 200 pounds. He often just picked her up and moved her if she was in his way or wanted her somewhere else. It was a dumb jock kind of thing to do, and she had known the dumbest jocks in high school. Sometimes it bugged her the way he treated her like she was some kind of doll, but usually she thought it was pretty funny. And she liked that he wasn’t dumb. In fact, there were times when he said things that made her feel like she wasn’t very smart.
“Hey, don’t be mad, okay?” She held out her arms for him, and smiled. But her smile died when she saw his eyes.
“Why did you turn out to be such a stupid cunt?” he said.
Before she responded, Allison waited just a moment to make sure she’d heard him right. But it wasn’t just his words. He was kneeling over her, and his face, so close to hers, was ugly and distorted.
“What did you just call me?” She shoved at his chest, putting him off-balance for a moment. But he didn’t fall. “Get away!”
“Did you think I wouldn’t know?” He snatched at the skirt
of her dress, roughly pulling it up to her waist. “I can smell him on you! I can smell your nasty little cunt already. Ever since you got in my car tonight. You stink like dead fish.”
Allison flushed with embarrassment. Fear.
“He didn’t touch me . . .” was all she could manage. She’d always been a terrible liar. If she’d made out with the other guy, it wasn’t any of his business. Michael had abandoned her like she didn’t even matter.
“Look, you’re not even wearing underwear, like the whore you are. Wanting to make it easy for me. Just like your whore mother. Shitting out those little bastard brothers of yours.”
She tried again to push him away, but he was able to hold her down with one arm as he slid his pants off. Now her terror was mixed with an angry shame. Her mother’s second husband hadn’t been her husband at all. But nobody knew that, did they? He couldn’t know! And what did it have to do with her?
“What’s wrong with you, Michael? Stop it!”
She screamed as loudly as she could, but Michael didn’t stop. When he entered her, it felt nothing like it had before. The size and shape of him was the same, but that was all. Even more disgusting to her was how he slipped so easily inside her—she’d been ready when they arrived in the room, excited because of the coke, because of how he’d breathed, warm and tingling, on her neck. How horrible it was, as though she’d been anxious for this. Oh, God, the shame! He pounded against her so violently that her head banged repeatedly against the bed’s immovable headboard. Squeezing her eyes shut, she screamed and screamed.
No one came for her. There was no panicked knock at the door, no shouted promise of help on the way.
As he climaxed, he gave a triumphant, inhuman roar that filled that sepulchral room and silenced Allison with her own fear. She lay there, willing herself to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Or dead. When it was over, he rolled onto the bed beside her, shuddering with each breath, heat radiating from his body.
Her dress and body were soaked and stinking with his sweat. She lay quietly, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, afraid to make a sound. If she did, he might be reminded to come at her again. She couldn’t think of a time when they’d had sex twice in one night, but this was a different Michael.