But Daddy would never hurt anyone, would he?
The EMT dropped her cigarette in the grass and stepped on it. It was a good thing her mother wasn’t watching. She complained when she found cigarette butts left by workmen in the yard. It was not only disgusting, she said, but it was a fire hazard. Their Missouri house had been close to the woods, and brush and leaves on the ground could easily catch in a dry fall.
Had the nearby woods caught fire when the house exploded? Ariel had never gone back to where their house had been. If the woods were gone, then the tree house her father had built her was gone too. She scanned the trees nearest Bliss House as though she might see it there, reborn.
Below her, the cop pointed to the butt smoldering in the grass. Shrugging, the EMT ground it out harder, and bent to pick it up. They left, heading toward the front of the house. Thinking the police might be coming inside to search the way her mother had said they might, Ariel slid down off of the tub. As she went back to her hiding place in the linen closet, she chanced to see her own face in the mirror. If it weren’t for the small but significant healing she saw there, she knew that she would be feeling worse. Far worse.
Chapter 16
State Police Detective Lucas Chappell had no love for Bliss House, and he wasn’t at all happy about being inside it again. While the house had certainly improved cosmetically since he’d been there five years earlier, it still wore a palpable air of malice. If anything, it was stronger now, more intentional. The house didn’t want him or anyone else there. The immediate scene of the murder in the case he’d worked on back then—the murder of the innkeeper’s wife by the innkeeper himself—hadn’t even been inside the house, but in the surrounding woods, over a hundred yards away. Still, the house had been an issue. The innkeeper, who was now on death row, had told them it had driven him mad. Only a handful of old-timers in Old Gate admitted to believing him. But everyone involved in the investigation understood the house had been a factor.
The house’s history explained why, when there was a suspicious death like today’s, the county sheriff almost immediately called in the state police. It was just Lucas’s dumb luck that his partner, Brandon Stuart, was on vacation, leaving him on his own. At least this time he was in charge of the investigation, and it wasn’t the first time the locals had worked with a black detective.
“When the photographer finishes up, Mrs. Adams, we’ll have the medical examiner and the tech team come in. They should only be here a few hours.”
Rainey Adams was keeping her composure, but she still looked as shaken as anyone who had found a body in her front hall might be. He had looked over the county officer’s notes before coming into the house. Lorraine Adams was a 36-year-old interior designer, but looked much younger (an unnecessary note from the too-eager local officer) and had moved into the house less than a month earlier with her fourteen-year-old daughter. There had been some sort of party at the house the night before, but all the guests had gone by eleven P.M. The dead woman had been a guest, the real estate agent who had sold the house, and also happened to be the wife of the contractor who had done the renovations.
It hadn’t been an enormous renovation, but the house looked more solid and less tatty than it had looked before. Lucas had lived in Virginia all of his life, and he was used to the way people held onto things. They found immense value in longevity. Longevity meant stories. Sometimes he felt he had lived so many of those stories that he was a part of the soil, the very air of the state.
“I started to call Gerard, her husband,” Rainey said. “But I couldn’t do it.” She bit her lip. She wore no makeup, but she was neatly dressed. That made sense. She’d told him she’d awakened, showered, and was on her way to make breakfast just before walking into this mess. Karin Powell had obviously been dead a while, so it would’ve been a very cool thing for her to go to bed, then rise and shower before calling the death in. The tiny woman in front of him didn’t appear that calculating, but he’d been fooled before.
“It’s taken care of,” Lucas said. He touched Rainey’s elbow. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable somewhere else? Why don’t we go into the kitchen?”
It wasn’t until Rainey was making tea for them both that she wondered how the detective had known to press the decorative panel in the hallway to reveal the disguised kitchen door. People usually had to have it pointed out to them.
She could hardly focus. The whole thing was complete madness. Why had Karin been in the house after the party at all? If there really had been someone with her, how could she not have heard? Rainey wanted to know, to understand. But the important thing at that moment was to protect Ariel.
Was this her fault, too? Death had followed them here, halfway across the country.
“I’ve been in the house before,” the detective said, as though reading her thoughts about the door. “Used to be in these old houses that the kitchen would be in the basement with a dumbwaiter to the dining room, or outside the house completely because of the summer heat. But I saw you’re an interior designer, so I imagine you know plenty about houses.” He tucked his notebook into an inner pocket and held out his hands for the mugs she’d taken from the cabinet. His green eyes were serious. Rainey sensed he was trying hard to be friendly. He set the mugs on the table.
Both his demeanor and appearance were meant to inspire confidence. He appeared comfortable in his European-cut, dark khaki suit, and his shoes bore a perfect military shine. Above his crisp white shirt and somber tie, he was immaculately shaved, and his hair was cropped close and razored neatly around his ears. At one point she’d seen the back of his head and noted that his hair was thinning near the crown, even though he might have been a couple of years younger than she. He was tall, maybe even over six feet, and his high cheekbones gave him a look of arrogance, though Rainey knew she wasn’t in any kind of shape to be critical or make any kind of judgment. He didn’t smile. It wasn’t a day for smiles.
“Gerard said he thinks the galley part of the kitchen used to be something else,” Rainey said. “There’s so much to know about the house.”
“This house has been a lot of things,” he said, looking around.
The tension in his voice got her attention.
“What do you mean?”
“Last time I was here was five years ago.”
Rainey stared at him a moment. Five years? Of course, the Brodskys. She wouldn’t own Bliss House if it hadn’t been for the murder. The thought struck her with its full force. Another woman’s blood had helped her become the mistress of Bliss House.
Mistress of Bliss House. It sounded absurd in her head, and the weight of it felt crushing. The massive house, the history she hadn’t considered thoroughly. Why hadn’t she thought more about what it meant to live in a house where a murder had been committed? She’d uprooted Ariel and had just run away to Bliss House, assuming it would be a haven. What in the hell had she been thinking?
“I need to sit,” she said, fumbling to pull a chair away from the table. Her pulse was racing.
The detective leaned down slightly to get a closer look at her.
“It was a mistake for us to talk so soon,” he said, frowning. “I’m going to get one of the EMTs to look you over.”
“Wait.” Rainey put a hand on his forearm. “There’s something I need to tell you. It’s about my daughter.”
The detective nodded and sat down.
“Ariel’s not . . .” What was the word she was looking for? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t come.
Seeing the question in his eyes, Rainey hurried with more of an explanation. “Ariel may have seen Karin fall. But she didn’t even recognize her. She’d seen Karin’s picture, and maybe seen Karin from a distance. I don’t know. From the way she talks about it, she might have dreamed the whole thing.”
“If she had a similar dream, it sounds like it was a big coincidence, don’t you think? Did she say if she dreamed that there was someone with Mrs. Powell?”
Rainey shook her head.
“Nobody else. I’m sure. I’m so sorry. I know it sounds strange.”
“It would help if I could speak to her. Could you bring her in for a statement?”
She cut him off.
“Absolutely not!” The idea of taking Ariel to a police station sent a spike of anxiety through her. “I can’t do that to her. She’s not even fifteen yet, and she won’t leave the house.”
“I don’t understand.”
Was it just skepticism in his eyes, or did he already think she was lying about everything?
Rainey clasped her hands together. “She was in an accident,” she said, trying not to rush her words. “Not here. In St. Louis. She was badly burned, and she doesn’t go anywhere unless it’s to the hospital or to see a doctor. That’s just the way it is.”
She barely listened to his expression of sympathy, and spoke quickly when he’d finished.
“Can you wait to talk to her here? Will you come back tomorrow?”
Lucas followed Rainey Adams out of the kitchen, and watched her hurry up the front stairs to her daughter’s room. He lingered near Karin Powell’s body, which the ME had finally covered completely, and looked up through the well of the house, past the bronze chandelier hanging from the hand-painted dome. He’d seen the ceiling up close, with its sparkling stars painted on a field of deepest blue, like some kind of primitive planetarium. There were constellations he didn’t recognize. It had always puzzled him as to why someone would want it to appear to be nighttime in their house, twenty-four seven.
He couldn’t help but admire the restoration work the Adams woman had arranged. The Brodskys had let things run to disrepair in the last years of the inn, an obvious result of their increasingly deteriorating mental states. The floors hadn’t been stripped or polished; the drafty windows and peeling caulk and paint had never been repaired. Several of the stairs leading onto the roof were completely rotted through. Their fussy furniture hadn’t quite suited the dignity of the old house, either. Because Bliss House did have a dignity that wouldn’t be denied.
Now the bulky walnut secretary that had served the Brodskys as a check-in desk was gone from the south wall, as was the stark white brochure stand and the loveseats and several sets of overstuffed floral chairs that had been scattered around what the Brodskys had called the Great Hall. Now the hall wore a mellow shine in the early-afternoon light, giving the house an appearance of comfortable, substantial warmth, if not luxury.
An appearance.
In his gut, Lucas knew there wasn’t one thing wrong with Bliss House. Everything about it was wrong.
Karin Powell had jumped—or had accidentally fallen, or been pushed—about thirty feet, from the third-floor gallery. One of the techs was still dusting the railings for fingerprints. Not a huge height to fall from. Five years earlier, Karin Powell might have landed on a sofa or chair. Even now, she might have gotten away with a broken limb or two if she’d landed well. But the medical examiner, Silas Hamrick, had shown him how she’d landed solidly on her back, breaking several ribs but leaving her face unmarked. There was no blood outside the body, but rigor was quickly setting in, pulling her cheeks away from the front of her face and mouth so that she looked as though she were trying to smile. While Hamrick was doing his preliminary examination he’d discreetly covered the woman’s groin with a plastic sheet. Lucas was aware that many women chose not to wear underwear as a regular thing, but the fact that she had died so boldly exposed gave the scene a lewd, suggestive appearance.
“If it was suicide,” Hamrick said, “it was a risky way to go. Not reliable.”
Not reliable. It would have been an even dumber way to murder someone. And the Adams woman claimed to have slept through it all.
But just the fact that she’d made such an outrageous claim made her seem less likely to have been the one who committed the murder. Or perhaps she just wasn’t very smart. He was anxious to talk to the daughter, but he’d caved in to the mother’s request that he come and talk to her the next day. Something about the way she’d been so protective about her daughter had gotten to him.
The medical examiner had gone, and techs who would take care of the body were hanging around outside, waiting for the husband to show up before they took it to the morgue at the hospital. It had been Lucas’s call to have them wait. It made a difference for some people to see where a death had occurred. Plus, he was interested in seeing Gerard Powell’s reaction.
He made himself go upstairs, feeling the oppressive weight of the place with every step. At least Rainey Adams had had carpet runners installed on the stairs, so that his footsteps no longer echoed in the vast hall.
He nodded to the female tech dusting the second floor railings.
“All done upstairs,” she said. “So far, it’s pretty clean down here.”
“Let’s do the doors on this side, too,” Lucas said.
She didn’t demur or even blink, but went back to her work.
The Brodskys had lived in the house’s servants’ quarters. The bedrooms lining the second floor gallery still had brass plaques centered on them at doorknob height: Dolly Madison, Mr. Washington, E.A. Poe, Pocahontas Suite, Maybelle Carter, Pearl Bailey, Robert E. Lee. An eclectic Who’s Who of Virginians, one of the Brodskys’ attempts to cement themselves as a historically recognizable part of the neighborhood.
In life, the Brodskys hadn’t been significant—historically or otherwise. In death, they’d simply become notorious, like the house itself.
He had had an officer do a casual search of every room except the daughter’s. His own search was more to re-acquaint himself, distasteful as it was.
The stripped and shredded mattresses, the mice running through the place, the trash cans overflowing. The smell of mold and even—God help them—excrement. The odors in the Brodskys’ quarters like a disused abattoir. The crude writing. The smell of death everywhere. And then Mim Brodsky’s chest of drawers. Perfect, as though encased in glass or frozen in time. Soft things, tenderly laid aside. Silk scarves and lingerie. Infant clothes and photographs of their children when young. You could imagine her turning the pages, touching each photo as though sealing it for all time.
He and the tech had tied a piece of yellow crime scene tape around the railing where the medical examiner had determined that the woman had probably gone over. It was directly opposite the front of the house, midway between the daughter’s and the mother’s bedrooms and up one floor. The third floor gallery ran all the way around the inside of the house, unbroken by stairs. There was a double set of stairs at the back—one set that had been used by the servants, and one for the family. At the top of each set was one of the strange little hallways that showed up between a few of the rooms. Hallways that each ended in a single narrow window, presumably there to keep the house from being too dark.
Rainey Adams’ bedroom was the kind of room his mother was always bookmarking online and in magazines. A late-nineteenth century planter’s bed, with four tall turned posters with delicately carved pineapples at their bases, and a mass of pillows nearly covering the headboard. An ivy-patterned couch set in front of two tall windows overlooking the formal—now yellow and wild—garden. Rich oil paintings of houses and architectural landmarks hanging above the fireplace and arranged in groups on the walls. The scent of some herb or flower everywhere. Definitely a woman’s room. Lucas was uncomfortable on the pale cream rug with its apricot flowers and green tendrils that seemed to continue to the walls, disappearing in the lush garden wallpaper. There were women’s clothes hung in the enormous pediment-topped armoire and carelessly strewn along the floor. The trail led to the bathroom, which also overlooked the garden.
As a cop, it was his job to know about Rainey Adams, but he was self-conscious standing in front of her dressing table, his gloved fingers gently moving her scattered jewelry and bits of scrap paper with notes jotted on them: Buy paper towels! Get shutter nailed back—tell G. P.O. Box!
G for Gerard? He wondered what sort of relationship she had with
the contractor. Was there something there? He took out his own notebook.
It wasn’t the room of a calculating, obsessive woman. In fact, there was a sense of relaxed disarray about the room that he didn’t feel in any other part of the house.
He had just come out of another bedroom—one that looked as though it was being set up as an office—when he heard his name spoken downstairs. He leaned over the railing to look. The outline of Karin Powell’s body emerged from the plastic sheet like a piece of macabre artwork.
“Somebody looking for me?” he said.
One of the sheriff’s deputies stood just inside the open front door, which had been open all morning, filling the house with flies.
“He’s here,” the officer said.
The victim’s husband. Maybe the murderer. He couldn’t help that his thoughts went there. Husbands had a bad rep when it came to being suspects. Mostly because they were so often guilty. Right now he didn’t have a single bit of evidence to call it a murder, a suicide, or an accident. He had next to no information. Just a bad feeling, and a worse location.
Chapter 17
Gerard Powell looked down at his wife’s supine body, the exposed side of her face revealing a smear of fiery red lipstick that looked as though it had been applied by an overeager child. Still, he thought. She’s finally still.
In life, Karin had been in constant motion, so charged with internal energy that he was sometimes reluctant to touch her, lest his own calm be completely shattered. There had been a time when that energy had captivated him, and he saw in her everything he wasn’t but thought he needed to be. In those early days, they would lie in bed, cuddling and talking about how, together, they were like one perfect person. She offered him momentum, and the encouragement and incentive to build amazing, revolutionary things—churches and houses and bridges that looked like no others, projects full of life and light and beauty. He could see them in his head, and even got out his drafting tools again to draw them, with Karin standing close, her slender fingers gently massaging his shoulder or absently stroking his hair, the curve of his ear. He was her rock, the lodestar on which she could focus so that she could tame and control the roiling creative and sexual mania that kept her pacing, moving, talking, planning. She couldn’t quite put what she wanted to do into words, but she’d believed that one day she would do exciting, important things. Maybe design gorgeous clothes, or upgrade her dull old general studies degree to an MBA and make them a ton of money by starting a company that would be on the Fortune 500. But she complained that the MBA classes didn’t move fast enough, and she’d started selling cosmetics and made easy money and lots of local connections. Her talent for sales led her to a real estate license. Her listings were pricey properties, the kind that sold even when the economy was poor.
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