Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  What kind of woman could stand in a window like this and let herself be watched? But Rainey couldn’t look away. Both she and the woman were completely absorbed. Transported. The woman’s breath clouded the sun-warmed glass, clouding and fading, clouding and fading as she breathed, as the man’s other hand came around her other side, sliding down her hip, covering her hand, mimicking its rhythmic movement. Whatever he was doing caused the woman’s mouth to open wider, and Rainey saw more than heard her fractured gasp of delight.

  As the woman bent in the throes of her certain orgasm, the loosely-tied ribbon fell, so that her hair spilled around her, hiding her face and her breasts, and Rainey saw the too-familiar contrast of hair to skin. She almost cried out in disbelief, but didn’t. If the woman heard her, she might leave the window, and the whole scene might disappear. It was as if she’d seen the whole performance before and wanted it to play out again. She could feel the heat flooding the woman’s body as though it were her own.

  The black-haired man behind the woman pulled her tight against him, at first burying his face in her mass of hair, then emerging to cover her shoulder, her neck with lingering kisses. He squeezed both breasts, roughly fondling the nipples, and the woman gave a little scream, her chin shooting up. Her eyes opened, and Rainey could see that the woman was now looking down at her. Rainey blushed, caught in her own puzzled excitement, but still couldn’t look away.

  A cloud passed over the sun, and Rainey saw the woman’s face clearly. It was Karin Powell, looking very much alive.

  The man put his hands on the woman’s shoulders and spun her so that Rainey could see her only in profile. He stepped forward, never more than a few inches from the woman who was—impossibly!—Karin Powell, his torso shining with sweat. He was handsome. More gloriously handsome than anyone she’d ever seen. Dropping to his knees, he roughly parted Karin’s legs. When he wrapped his arms around her thighs and buried his face between them, Rainey blushed.

  I shouldn’t be watching. But I must, must watch, because I know . . .

  If she were telling herself the truth, she knew she would want to be in that window herself, with them. With him. Because she felt she knew him.

  She was certain she knew those arms, the feeling of those hands on her breasts, and the feeling of his penis deep inside her. And the way her thighs burned after he’d rubbed his unshaven cheeks against them. Of course she’d never minded because he was hers, and she, his.

  But it couldn’t be Will. It couldn’t be Will because he would never be with another woman. It couldn’t be Will, because Will was dead.

  Rainey couldn’t force her voice above a whisper.

  “Who are you?”

  Rainey stumbled as she ran through the kitchen garden. First, she tried the door that led directly into the servants’ quarters, but it was locked. Hurrying to the mudroom door, she opened it and rushed through the back of the silent house and to the servants’ staircase. The stairs to the servants’ rooms were steep and narrow, but she hardly noticed because her feet felt light. She had to know. She had to see who it was.

  When she reached the second floor, she wasn’t sure which way to go. She was all turned around, and breathing heavily. A tickling rivulet of sweat ran down her back. Everywhere she looked the doors were closed and looked exactly the same.

  She opened the doors to one room after another. Empty. Empty. Empty.

  Putting her hand on the doorknob outside the last room, she quickly drew her hand back and touched her own throat for warmth. The doorknob had been as cold as ice.

  “Hello?”

  There were sounds coming from inside. No voices, but a kind of high, electric hum. By now her body felt electric as well.

  Karin Powell was dead. Will was dead. There must be strangers in her house!

  But the effects of what she’d seen lingered inside her. She’d felt the woman’s breath on the window as though it had brushed her own cheek. No one touched her anymore.

  Braving the icy doorknob, she turned it and pushed open the door. A rush of cold air flew at her from the room, as though it would send her backwards. But she kept moving forward.

  A pair of windows on the far wall cast their suddenly gray afternoon light across the bare floor. The cold of the room chilled the sweat covering her chest. The air was crisp, but smelled so heavily of sex that she could barely breathe.

  Empty.

  Rainey walked slowly to the window that looked down on the herb garden. Even against the light, she could see the traces of fog etched on the glass. And in the center of the fog, the letter R.

  For Rainey. For me.

  Chapter 28

  Someone was calling her name, but Rainey didn’t want to wake. Her left cheek was pressed hard against the duvet on her bed where she had collapsed, and her head felt heavy with sadness. Keeping her eyes closed against the shaded light of her bedroom, she willed whoever it was to go away and leave her alone. It wasn’t Ariel. Ariel would’ve simply come to find her. No, it was someone else. Someone who had let herself into the house.

  “Rainey, honey, are you here? Ariel?”

  Rainey finally recognized Bertie’s voice. Of course Bertie would let herself in. Bertie never meant anyone any harm. But she was stubborn, and Rainey knew she wasn’t going to go away.

  Bertie was dressed in a snug pink sateen skirt, pink espadrilles, and a broad straw hat accented with a peony blossom as big as a luncheon plate. Her face was nearly hidden by the stems of the globular potted plant she carried ahead of her like a sacrificial offering.

  “The Amish produce stand just put these out,” she said, handing the giant chrysanthemum to Rainey. “I just love fall blooms. Especially golden ones. They’ll open in a couple of weeks, I would think.”

  “Thank you,” Rainey said quietly. “They’ll be beautiful in the kitchen.”

  Bertie brushed a scattering of potting soil from her otherwise spotless white top, causing the flesh of her exposed upper arm to jiggle a bit. Then she looked at Rainey and smiled.

  “You know, those silly Italians think that chrysanthemums signify death, but don’t you worry about that. Everyone else—everyone sensible, that is—knows they mean friendship.” She hurried back to close the front door, shutting out the midday heat. Then she followed Rainey as she carried the flowers toward the dining room.

  “Where . . . ?”

  Rainey stopped and turned back to her. For a moment she thought Bertie was talking about the woman and man in the window, but then she realized she was asking where Karin fell. “It happened over there.” She tilted her head, indicating the area near the back of the hall. “There wasn’t any blood.”

  Bertie sighed. “If I were Catholic, I’d cross myself,” she said, hurrying to catch up. “I would anyway, if I could be sure of doing it right. I’ve heard that if you do it backwards, you can accidentally conjure up the devil.”

  Rainey wasn’t sure she heard Bertie correctly, but was a little afraid that she had. She didn’t strictly believe in the devil, but only the presence of something malicious and evil could explain what she’d seen—imagined she’d seen?—in that window. What she’d felt inside that room. A shudder moved through her.

  Bertie, who had been following closely, put a hand on her arm.

  “I’m so sorry. I know it must’ve been awful for you. It was careless of me to bring it up. Randolph is always telling me I don’t know when to stay quiet.”

  Rainey was touched by the concern in Bertie’s eyes. But she couldn’t tell anyone what she’d seen. Who would believe her? It might have been the heat plus her grief and shock all muddled together.

  “No worries,” she said, covering Bertie’s soft hand with her own. “It’s just something we have to get used to.”

  Bertie brightened. “The thing to do is to get your mind off of it. What are you doing in here?” She hurried into the dining room, the lining of her skirt rustling busily. “Oh, you’re taking off the wallpaper. Look how much you’ve done already!”

/>   “I needed to do something,” Rainey said. “I can’t open my design business for a while. It wouldn’t seem right.”

  She couldn’t imagine clients visiting Bliss House anytime soon. Human nature would lead the curious there to waste her time looking at the crime scene—if the location of a suicide was even called a crime scene. It would be even worse if the police finally decided that Karin had been murdered. She wished she knew for certain what was true and what wasn’t. Only Ariel might know for sure, and even though they’d been communicating more, Ariel had become totally silent on the subject. She, like Rainey herself, seemed to want it all to go away.

  For Rainey, the immediate answer to any degree of stress was any kind of work. There were fabric and lighting suppliers to contact, and antiques-hunting trips to take. At least Virginia and the surrounding states were rich in the kind of furniture she liked to use in her favorite projects. The trips would be fun—a way to get familiar with the people and the landscape—and she looked forward to maybe taking Ariel with her. But that part would hinge on Ariel’s willingness to go. She was making some progress, but how much healing would she require of her body for her to feel good about leaving the house? She hadn’t even yet agreed to see the new doctor in Charlottesville.

  “I think you should call in some professionals, dear,” Bertie said. “It’s such a big job. I don’t know that you should be up on a ladder that tall. And what if the rest of the mural under there is in terrible shape? You might not even like it. Randolph’s mother couldn’t bear it. Her son, Michael—Randolph’s brother—restored it. But after he disappeared, she couldn’t bear to look at it. Could hardly bear to be in the house at all, poor thing.”

  “We’ve had enough professionals around here the past few days,” Rainey said.

  “What about Ariel? Children can be so nimble.”

  “I’m not nimble.”

  They turned, both surprised to see Ariel standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Hi, baby,” Rainey said. She wondered why Ariel had chosen that moment to make an appearance. Perhaps she sensed that Bertie—with her sunny smile and guileless manner—was safe to be around.

  Bertie’s smile was warm. She’d taken off her hat and her bleached blond hair curled girlishly around her face. “Honey, I know you’d want to do whatever you can to help your mama. You’re a nice girl, aren’t you?”

  “Help her do what?” Ariel said. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Ariel, remember I told you about Bertie?” Rainey said. “Bertie, this is Ariel.”

  “I’ve wanted to meet you ever since your mama sent out your birth announcements, and here it’s taken all this time.” Before Ariel could answer, Bertie had her arms around her, hugging her tightly. Ariel looked stricken, but she didn’t push Bertie away as Rainey was afraid she might.

  When Bertie stepped back, there was an awkward moment. Ariel blushed and looked down at her feet.

  “I’m taking down this ugly wallpaper,” Rainey said. “I showed you. Remember? At first I thought the last people who lived here put it up. But I think it’s older than that.” She ran her hand over the exposed wall, with its hundreds of peacock feather eyes staring out at them. “What do you think of the mural?”

  “I think it’s bizarre, and totally your style.”

  Rainey laughed. It was so much like something the old Ariel might have said. Ariel had always been curious about people’s styles. Just months before the accident, they’d done her room in 1960’s Mod, with enormous graphic flowers on the walls, beanbag chairs, brightly painted Danish furniture and a furry arctic white rug splashed across the wood floor. When Rainey had ordered furniture for Ariel’s bedroom in Bliss House, she’d chosen simple wood pieces with contemporary but not trendy lines. Ariel could make it her own when she was ready.

  “I’m not sure why, but it just fits the room,” Rainey said. “I’m sorry you don’t like it.”

  Ariel suddenly addressed Bertie. “Is Jefferson with you?”

  “Do you know Jefferson?” Bertie brightened further. “I didn’t know you’d met him.”

  Rainey watched her daughter closely. Ariel’s voice faltered as she spoke.

  “Mom told me about him. I guess I saw him. Out the window or something. Tell him thank you for the hat.”

  The hat she wore today was pink crochet, with an orange flower. It was pulled down over her forehead and ears, so that she had the look of a very young flapper. She looked from Bertie to her mother, then abruptly backed into the kitchen, leaving the door swinging behind her.

  “I told you she’s shy,” Rainey said. “You’ll have to excuse her.”

  “Why, she’s just a baby! She looks somewhat like you. Especially her cheekbones. But I bet she favors her daddy.”

  Chapter 29

  With her mother busy, Ariel spent the rest of the afternoon searching the hallways and rooms at the back of the house looking for . . . she didn’t really know what she was looking for.

  That first night she’d met Jefferson he’d said something about the house that bothered her. He’d said that he understood about Bliss House, and knew why it was different from every other house he’d ever been in.

  “It’s like the way the Greeks talked about God,” he’d said. “A dual nature. It’s not just one house. It’s one house with two natures.” The gold light from the chandelier had framed his head like a fuzzy halo. “Like you.”

  The Greeks? Maybe he had been trying to show off because he was in college and she wasn’t.

  “What do you mean, like me?” she said.

  He’d put his hand to her scarred cheek. His palm and fingers felt cool, damp, and, most of all, very large. She couldn’t back away from him because she was already sitting flush against the wall.

  “This part of you is ugly,” he whispered.

  She held her breath.

  “And this part of you is beautiful.” He moved his hand so the back of it rested against her undamaged skin.

  She’d reached out with both hands to push him away, and he’d fallen back on his heels. When he laughed, she could smell the beer on his breath.

  “I bet you’re drunk,” she said. “You should go back downstairs. I bet someone saw you come up here. They’ll come looking for you.”

  “I’ll hide. They’ll never see me.” He smiled. “It’s like a magic trick. Bliss House is like one big magic trick. First you’ll see me . . .” He held open his hands in front of her to show her that they were empty. “Then you won’t.”

  He put one of his hands to her hair, and when he took it away, he was holding her father’s cufflink. The one she kept in a box on her dresser.

  She grabbed for it, and he let her take it.

  “That’s mine,” she said, holding it tightly in her fist. “What you just said didn’t even make sense.”

  “It was a joke,” he had told her, looking kind again. “I didn’t mean to scare you. But you really don’t need to worry. No one ever sees me coming.”

  Just like I didn’t know you were going to kiss me.

  She’d hardly been able to stop thinking about it, because it had felt so good. Did he want to be her boyfriend? She suspected that he really had just wanted to tease her. Mess with the burned girl. The idea made her angry, and she felt like she was already confused enough.

  What does he want from me?

  Now, as she crept from room to room, she pushed Jefferson from her mind and was left wondering about the Brodskys. Her mother hadn’t told her much, but she’d discovered online that Mr. Brodsky had killed his wife with an axe out in the woods beyond the garden. She’d seen pictures of them: they were old people, maybe sixty. Mr. Brodsky had almost no hair and his mugshot had shown him with his jaw slack, his mouth open, like he was about to drool. He looked stoned. Or crazy. The picture of Mrs. Brodsky looked like it was taken on the dining room patio. She was smiling into the camera, her white-blond hair pulled back in a low bun. Her face was thin and bony, but she had friendly eyes
and was wearing makeup and a pretty yellow blouse. She looked a lot like one of Ariel’s mother’s clients from St. Louis.

  Mr. Brodsky was in a prison for crazy people. If he ever got out, would he come back here? The thought sent a chill up her body.

  This part of the house was much warmer than the main part of the house. Her mother had the thermostats set higher back here, since they didn’t use it. There were six bedrooms, three bathrooms, a sitting room, and an eat-in kitchen without a refrigerator or stove. Ariel didn’t know what the rooms had looked like when the Brodskys had lived here, but now the walls—constructed with row after row of narrow boards—were all painted a startling white, with pale green trim. The pale green was one of her mother’s signature colors, and was in her logo and all her printed material. It was even the color of the dress she’d worn the night of the party.

  To Ariel, the rooms looked like they might have been in a sunny, old-fashioned cottage. They weren’t frightening or unpleasant. The first time she’d looked around by herself, she’d even found the pretty robe in one of the shallow closets, and today she’d found a blue satin ribbon that she’d missed before on one of the window sills. So far, nothing in Bliss House—even Karin Powell’s death—had frightened her as much as the ballroom had. And still she knew she would go back inside it. It was waiting for her, like a puzzle to be solved.

  Every so often, she went to stand on the second floor landing to listen for her mother’s voice. But each time it was Bertie’s drawl she heard. Bertie seemed nice and hadn’t freaked out at all the way Ariel thought she would when they met. She wanted to think that Jefferson was like his mother: sweet and kind of silly and not dark at all. But as much as she didn’t want to admit it, she suspected that, inside, he wasn’t sweet at all.

  In one of the bedrooms, she climbed to the top of a stepladder the painters had left behind, and sat, thinking. She told herself that it was probably a stupid idea to imagine that there might be something—or even somewhere—hidden in the walls of Bliss House. She’d read a lot of books about houses with secret passages and creepy histories. But she had seen her father, and she had seen a woman who was not Karin Powell fall from the third story balcony. And then there was whatever had happened to her in the ballroom, when someone, or something, grabbed her. Her imagination wasn’t that powerful, was it? Her mother might say so. But for her the answer was no. It had been much more than her imagination.