Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  Chapter 78

  Rainey busied herself with changing the sheets in the bedroom that Gerard’s in-laws had vacated. The room had been left exceedingly clean, leading her to wonder what sort of people they’d been and where they’d gone. Gerard had spoken to her very briefly out of Ariel’s earshot, saying only that he’d had a disagreement with them. She couldn’t imagine what they would think if they knew that strangers related to their daughter’s death were sleeping in their daughter’s house. The idea had made her uncomfortable at first, but not uncomfortable enough to insist that she and Ariel could find somewhere else to stay. The thought of going to even a nice hotel with Ariel right now sounded like a new nightmare. Now that a high-profile person like her cousin Randolph was the target of a manhunt linked to perhaps two murders—she had been stunned to learn of Nick’s death from Gerard—the press and other unwelcome parties would again start circling. She would sleep in a den of actual snakes if it meant she could protect Ariel from that kind of exposure.

  The detectives hadn’t yet shown her the underground room where Ariel had been attacked. There hadn’t been time. She told herself that it was a good thing because Ariel needed all of her attention right now. But she couldn’t look at Ariel without wondering what it had been like. What her daughter had felt. How terrified she’d been. It sickened Rainey that she hadn’t known about the room and hadn’t understood the house, or the danger Ariel had been in.

  Once again, she’d done nothing to protect her daughter. She’d twice put Ariel’s life in danger because she’d put her own selfish desires first. What kind of mother did that?

  Right now, she both wanted to grab Ariel and hold her to try to keep her safe, and stay far, far away from her lest she screw up again. By coming here to Gerard’s house, relying on Gerard, she felt like she was abdicating responsibility for taking care of Ariel. She was relying on Gerard in the same way she might have relied on Will. He was taking care of them both, and it embarrassed her. But what else could she do? The police hadn’t really offered her any alternatives but to say that they’d have an officer keep watch near wherever Ariel was staying. It was hardly a comfort. Randolph was supposed to be one of the good guys, too, and look what he’d done.

  When she was finished making the bed, she went into the next room to check on Ariel. Gerard had been right about his Golden Retriever, Ellie. She lay on the bed with Ariel, settled comfortably beneath the sleeping girl’s extended arm. It was such a natural, happy sight, almost as though that terrible thing hadn’t happened to Ariel just a few hours earlier. Almost as though nothing terrible had ever happened to Ariel. Except that the arm lying over Ellie was pink with scarring, and the hand misshapen.

  Of course she should have gotten Ariel a puppy before now, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with training it.

  Selfish. So selfish.

  A few minutes later, she found Gerard cleaning up after the meal the three of them had shared in the large, high-ceilinged kitchen. The homemade soup and local bakery bread had been fresh and satisfying, and they’d all eaten hungrily, like people who hadn’t eaten in days. And in truth, maybe they hadn’t. Rainey couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat down to an actual meal.

  “Dinner was delicious,” she said to Gerard.

  Like Ellie, he looked like he belonged in this place, with its mellow surfaces of granite and slate tile. The kitchen’s ceiling was raised and peaked, open to the other common rooms in the house. With its tall windows—now dark—that looked out on the ridge, it seemed as much suited to contemplation and inspiration as cooking. She could imagine having coffee at the long hand-hewn table at the end of the room, watching the morning light illuminate the mountains, working on sketches or planning her day. Will had often talked of building a place down in the Ozarks, on a lake. Nothing as large as this house, but something with lots of light and a view of the mountains.

  “My mother-in-law keeps her cooking pretty simple,” he said. “The soup took some doctoring, but not too much. Do you want a glass of wine? I could use one, but I didn’t want to get it out in front of Ariel.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Sounds good.”

  He opened one of the several doors in the wine storage compartment in the kitchen’s island and, after pulling a couple out and putting them back, finally selected a California pinot noir.

  “This won’t suffer too much if we don’t decant it.”

  When it was opened, he took the bottle and a pair of glasses and led her into the family room on the other side of the kitchen fireplace. Again, she was surprised to find how relaxed yet sophisticated the furnishings were. Karin had seemed to be anything but relaxed. From the mix of neutral suede-covered furniture arranged over the old-wood floors and contemporary rugs, Rainey chose one of a pair of deep-seated chairs close to the fireplace and sank into it.

  Taking a glass from Gerard, Rainey realized her hand was trembling. The simple act of sitting down in this comfortable room seemed like such a normal thing to do. It shook her.

  “God, I’m a mess,” Rainey said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. It’s been a hell of a day. Maybe you just should’ve gone to bed after Ariel.”

  “I’m not usually such a wimp.” Rainey took a shaky sip of the wine, and then another larger one.

  Gerard sat across from her. Ellie appeared seemingly from out of nowhere, plodding across the room to collapse with a weary sigh at his feet. When Rainey sat forward, looking anxiously in the direction from which the dog had come, Gerard said, “She’s fine. She’s asleep. It’s what she needs right now.”

  Rainey retreated into the chair. They sat in silence for a few moments, listening to Ellie’s breathing deepen as she relaxed close to her master.

  “We can’t go back to the house,” she said finally. “I don’t know what in the hell we’re going to do, Gerard. It’s . . .”

  “Sick,” Gerard said. He hunched forward, suddenly animated, as though he’d been waiting to speak. “That house has a sickness. I always felt like something was strange but never grasped it, never understood it. I don’t know what kind of man Randolph Bliss is or what his family was like, but either he corrupted that house or it corrupted him. And it got to Karin. I know it got to Karin. Or he did, the bastard.”

  Rainey didn’t know how to respond. Gerard took her silence as reprobation.

  “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

  “It wasn’t anything I haven’t thought already. Randolph is my family. Ariel’s family, too. Maybe that’s why we’re—I don’t know. Maybe it’s why we’re so involved. If we hadn’t bought the place from Karin, maybe she wouldn’t have gone back there.”

  Gerard took a long draught of wine, set the glass firmly on the table between them.

  “Whatever happened to Karin was going to happen to her regardless of who lived in the house. If it had still been empty, it would’ve happened anyway. She was pregnant by either that animal or his son, and one of them killed her because of it. Or because she’d aborted it. There’s no way to tell, unless one of them confesses.”

  “Oh, my God, Gerard. I didn’t know. That doesn’t even sound possible.”

  “Hypersexual disorder,” he said. “Her parents and her sister, Molly, refused to believe it. Karin tried to tell them, but they thought she was being dramatic—even after she told them she’d gotten a clinical diagnosis. She did her best to keep it in check with drugs and spent a lot of time in therapy. But she couldn’t control it for very long. There were times when I had to come and get her from places . . . well, they weren’t the kind of places you or I would ever think of going. The way she was made her vulnerable to stuff. You’d think she’d be aggressive—and she was, in business—but not necessarily when it came to sex. She was compulsive and lived for the rush. Being in that house, I guess with the judge in the beginning, satisfied that compulsion. It made sense that she later took on the son. Probably just to mess with the judge’s head.”

  Rainey’s stomac
h clenched. That room. Where Randolph had attacked Ariel, her little girl. Karin had been her parents’ little girl, too. She’d wondered at Karin’s always-seductive appearance, but there’d been nothing about her to suggest that she’d been ill in that way. The idea that Karin had been obsessed with sex seemed so strange, so foreign to her.

  “When did you know?”

  “That she was pregnant? I’d known for a few weeks. But I didn’t know about the abortion. We’d agreed that we would keep the baby. Raise it together, no matter whose it was. I had no idea that the father was one of those assholes. I’ve had a medical thing since I was eighteen that means I can’t have kids of my own, but half of that baby would’ve come from Karin, and that meant something to me.”

  He shook his head, picked up his wine glass but didn’t drink from it. “I sound like some kind of loser, don’t I? That’s what Karin saw. That’s what she had to see.”

  His voice was bitter.

  Seeing him in this house, knowing how laid back he was most of the time, Rainey believed he could’ve raised another man’s child and been a terrific parent.

  “She was sick. Her judgment was pretty skewed, Gerard.”

  “I was giving her a hard time about drinking at the party. That’s what we were fighting about. She said I wasn’t the only one giving her shit about it, so I guessed that whoever had gotten her pregnant was at the party too. No one else knew. But there was no baby by then. She just hadn’t told me. I don’t know what she was waiting for.”

  “You have to forgive her for that.”

  “Forgive her?”

  “She must have had a reason. She didn’t deserve to die because she was keeping secrets from you. But she’s beyond your anger about it. If you hold onto it, it’s only going to be harder on you.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t blame her for anything. I just thought you should know what had been going on between us,” he said. “How Karin’s weakness made her vulnerable to that man and that house. Randolph Bliss is evil. What he was affected her.”

  “We still don’t know anything about the why part. You can’t just say that the house is bad and Randolph is evil. That Karin died because he’s evil—not mentally ill, but actually evil. Is that even possible?”

  Gerard sat, quiet, for a moment. Then he looked into Rainey’s eyes, and she saw he was serious. “Yeah. I think it’s definitely possible.”

  The silence broadened between them as they finished their wine. Rainey thought about the implications of his words. Evil. Was it a state of being? What about her own selfishness? Had her insistence that they have the antique gas stove been a kind of evil? Maybe she’d helped to bring on what was happening to them now because her selfishness demanded it. She was the one who had insisted on moving into and staying in a house with a dubious reputation. She hadn’t been thinking of Ariel but only of herself. And if she was honest with herself, she knew she’d been the one running away, wanting to feel better, wanting to be around new people. New possibilities. Her selfishness was, perhaps, a lesser evil. But her weakness had allowed the greater evil to creep in. She’d made them vulnerable.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go shut things down for the night.” Gerard got up and called Ellie to him. They went to the kitchen, and Rainey heard him moving around then opening the back door to take Ellie outside.

  She poured a bit more wine into her empty glass and drank it in two swallows. Sitting back in her chair, she realized she was a little drunk. Will had often teased her about what a lightweight drinker she was. Now, a part of her wanted to drink more, to finish off a bottle and sink into a state where she didn’t have to think about evil or regrets or how much danger Ariel was in. A memory of one of her mother’s uncles, telling her ten-year-old self that she was a spoiled brat after she’d refused a piece of his daughter’s birthday cake because it didn’t have enough icing on it, floated into her mind. Spoiled. Maybe that was her problem.

  But Jefferson. Hadn’t he been spoiled from the beginning? It was obvious that Bertie doted on him, and Bertie had probably never had an evil thought. Her son had turned on her. A man, a boy, who could turn on a woman like Bertie? Yes, that was evil.

  After another splash of wine, Rainey decided she’d had enough. She knew self-reflection wasn’t one of her strong points, and although she’d made Ariel go to therapy after the accident, she didn’t believe in it for herself. The mental work of getting from Point A to Point B without falling into some kind of self-pity trap frustrated her too much. She had enough to deal with keeping Ariel alive and herself half-sane.

  When she heard Gerard come back inside, she took the nearly-empty bottle and her glass into the kitchen. He took the bottle with a polite thanks and didn’t even seem to note how much was left. Rainey set the glass in the sink.

  “You remember where your room is?”

  Rainey nodded. He looked tired and thinner than when she first arrived in Old Gate. She remembered seeing him the night of the party, standing beside Karin who looked devastating in her tight dress, sex incarnate. He had looked so normal, so calm. But now she knew the truth. Despite the hell Karin’s death had put him through he was still calm. Handling everything. He’d lost his temper with Jefferson, but everyone knew a man could only be pushed so far. She respected him, appreciated that he wasn’t perfect.

  Before she left the kitchen, she stopped in front of him and raised her hand to his unshaven cheek. She thought it was to his credit that he looked a little surprised, but didn’t push her away. Standing on her toes, she kissed his other cheek and whispered thank you.

  She checked on Ariel, who was sleeping soundly, and went to her own room. She fell asleep, deeply and without dreams, and if anyone paused outside her bedroom door, she didn’t hear.

  Chapter 79

  The warrant hadn’t yet arrived. Lucas stood in the weed-pocked gravel driveway in front of DeRoy Lee’s trailer with Deputy Tim and a state police response team, waiting. He was a fan of big gestures when it came to getting the bad guys. It made an impression on them, as well as on the public. Usually it paid off. He had a good feeling about DeRoy Lee. Nick Cunetta was tied too closely to Karin Powell’s death, as well as Roberta Bliss and her family, for his murder to be a coincidence. A local ex-con who had been in both the state and county penal systems was a reasonable suspect.

  He knew he shouldn’t have been as happy as he’d been to leave Bliss House before everyone else had left for the night. At least one team would hang around until morning, guarding what was becoming an ever-intensifying crime scene. But the truth was he didn’t mind leaving to stand in the moonlight outside DeRoy Lee’s shitty trailer, waiting for the bastard to come outside. At least he could breathe out here.

  The wildly incautious part of his brain was hoping that DeRoy Lee had been the murderer of Karin Powell as well as Nick Cunetta. But he didn’t want to get ahead of himself.

  The trailer sat among a small collection of six in a field well south of Old Gate, near the county line. It was an area that bred meth labs, fighting dogs, and bare-knuckle brawlers against a backdrop of hidden pot fields. Lucas was more comfortable with urban landscapes, like his hometown of Richmond. But after six years in the sticks, he was getting used to it.

  Under the response team’s lights, the trailer was a long once-white affair with brown shutters, a rotting set of stairs without a landing leading to the front door, and a lidless barbeque grill with a bent set of tongs and an open bag of charcoal that looked lonesome without a rusting can of lighter fluid beside it. A child’s pink tricycle lay on its side, visible beneath the trailer, and a motorcycle, half-covered by a blue tarp, sat a few yards into the grass. The trailer’s windows were blacked out with curtains from the inside.

  No one from the response team was expecting trouble, but they were suited up for it.

  The captain of the team pounded on the door, calling for Lee to come out.

  Lucas stood over near the car. He knew the captain preferred to keep the
detectives as uninvolved as possible in the tactical stuff. He didn’t take it personally.

  There was no glass in the trailer’s door, and no activity at the windows. The captain shouted again for DeRoy Lee to come out of the house. They just wanted him to answer some questions at the station.

  As far away as he was, Lucas heard the quick, muffled response from inside the trailer.

  “Hey, I’m coming out! Don’t freak!”

  “Open the door, slowly. Come out with your hands where we can see them.”

  In a moment, DeRoy Lee was down the stairs and standing barefoot in the weedy gravel, looking way more relaxed than any man involved in killing people deserved to look. His blond-gray hair lay softly about his shoulders like a woman’s; he was beardless, and his relaxed cotton T-shirt and—dear Lord, were those yoga pants?—pants hung loose on his muscled body. He looked like a trainer at a less than prosperous health spa.

  “You caught me in savasana,” he said with a beatific smile after Lucas introduced himself.

  “Corpse pose?” Lucas said. “How appropriate.”

  “All you had to do was give me a call, and I’m happy to come and talk to you people. You don’t need to send an armored invitation. Now, what do you want? It’s air-conditioned inside, and it’s irritatingly hot out here.”

  “You inviting us in?”

  DeRoy Lee’s face was impassive. “Sorry. There’s not room for the whole crew.” Then he smiled. His teeth were yellowed and only slightly crowded, as though he’d once had braces, but his bite was slowly returning to its original shape.

  “Detective Chappell!”

  While they’d been talking, the captain had been checking out the surrounding area with a couple of other officers. The inhabitants of the other trailers were slowly opening their doors, curious at seeing the uniforms stand down.