Bliss House: A Novel

by Laura Benedict

  At the end of the tunnel where the rooms were, the lights were even brighter. All the furnishings had been dusted for prints, anything fabric had been removed and was stacked in large clear evidence bags. The top one contained a blue blanket or afghan of some sort. Obviously handmade. He tried to imagine the hands that made it and wondered if they were the hands of one of the victims who was being prepared for transport to the morgue.

  Lucas found Silas Hamrick, the ME, in the second room with a pair of technicians. Silas looked up. He said something to the female member of his team and came out into the narrow hallway. He looked delighted.

  “Haven’t seen one of these cases in twenty years. Exciting as hell. My money’s on the male being the judge’s brother. He went missing over thirty years ago. Everyone said he ran off with a girl. But it’s obvious he didn’t run too far.”

  Lucas frowned. “The judge’s wife said the same thing an hour or two ago.”

  “You hang around long enough, you remember things,” Silas said. “I need to get out of here. I’m supposed to be at my nephew’s confirmation party, and I haven’t seen my family in a week. The kids can wrap this up. I have to say I’m getting pretty damn sick of seeing you, Detective.”

  “The feeling’s mutual, Silas. Maybe after these two, we get a break?”

  Silas pressed his hands together in a mock prayer of supplication and looked up. “Your mouth to God’s ear.”

  Chapter 87

  As she walked through the front hall, Ariel thought she could feel the house sigh with happiness. Or was the happiness just inside her? Already the ache in her leg was subsiding. She’d hidden it from Jefferson, but she’d almost been in tears as they’d hiked through the woods from where they’d parked the Jeep.

  The idea that the police might have done something to the house had worried her. But inside it was just the same as when they’d left the day before. Maybe even better because now she had come home to it, just as Jefferson had said. He’d been right. Most people didn’t want to have anything to do with a house like Bliss House. And that was fine with her.

  On reaching the Jeep she’d turned off her phone. Within thirty seconds of turning it back on, two voicemails and two texts from her mother popped up. Of course she was freaking out. Ariel knew she wasn’t supposed to leave Gerard’s house. Her mother could come and find her if she wanted to, but there was no way she could make her leave again. She deleted the texts and the voicemails.

  Jefferson had gone upstairs to wash up, saying he was feeling nasty. They hadn’t yet come to any conclusion about where he should go next. She wanted to help him escape, but only because he had helped her.

  Before going into the kitchen, she stopped in the powder room off the main hall and turned on the light. Looking in the mirror, she took off the ridiculous golf hat and turned her face slightly. She touched the scars with her hand.

  Nothing yet. She didn’t see the same improvement she’d noticed before. Why? What had happened? She closed her eyes, breathed deeply. She told herself she’d just gotten home. All would be well soon. The house would take care of her. She just had to be patient. Her leg already felt better, didn’t it?

  In the kitchen she was careful not to get too close to the windows. She could just see the police vehicles out by the springhouse, and there were probably more cars parked by the carriage house. She was more concerned for Jefferson than she was for herself, and knew she might get in trouble for helping him. But what could they really do to her?

  While she was assembling a snack on a tray—the antique metal tray with the tole-painted yellow and green flowers that was her favorite—her phone vibrated again. She almost didn’t look, thinking it was her mother.

  The text read:

  HURRY UP! I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU!

  Ariel smiled, but her smile slowly faded. The text was from Jefferson. She remembered how he had surprised her in the tunnel, and the sudden way he’d appeared on the third floor the night of the party and insisted on talking to her. She didn’t mind helping him, but she didn’t know if she wanted anything to do with his surprises.

  Chapter 88

  There were no sounds coming from her mother’s room, where Jefferson said he was waiting. Why was he in there? Ariel listened for the television. Some normal, everyday sound. Anything. When there was nothing but silence she knew she’d made a mistake coming upstairs. The noontime sun shining through the windows around the dome cast everything in the well of the house in stark relief. She and Jefferson were alone in the house. Her mother was at the hospital, and the police were down in the underground rooms a world away.

  She noticed Jefferson’s backpack lying open on the gallery rug, empty of whatever had filled it earlier.

  Don’t open it, Button. It’s full of fire.

  Jefferson stood in the doorway of her mother’s room. He looked different than he had just a few minutes before, but Ariel wasn’t quite sure why. Something about the way he was watching her.

  “What is it? You’re too funny, texting me when I was just downstairs.” She laughed nervously. Where was he going to go? He needed a hiding place. She thought of the underground rooms. Just the memory that they even existed—let alone that she had almost died there—made her tense. But right then it was suddenly important that she not let him know what she was feeling. Out of that confusion of feelings grew a single strange thought: she never wanted him to kiss her again. In fact she never wanted to be close to him again. What had changed?

  The change was in Jefferson’s eyes. How he was looking at her. The times she’d been with him before today, he’d always had a hint of amusement in his eyes, as though he never took anything too seriously. As though he believed that while things might not be great at that moment, they were sure to turn out okay. She hadn’t trusted him at first, but had put that down to her own worries. Seeing him across the gallery—the very same gallery in her vision—she saw his father’s eyes. Sharp and cruel. Mocking. She was jolted by the memory of young Randolph twisting his own brother’s heart in his chest. Fear shimmered over her skin like tongues of fire. The sunlight had formed a kind of halo around Jefferson and he didn’t look like an older teenager anymore, someone who might have been the brother of a friend, someone to hero-worship and crush on. He looked like a man.

  “It’s better here, isn’t it? Karin thought so,” he said.

  Ariel felt frozen where she stood and found herself waiting for him to approach her. But he stayed where he was.

  “She liked to do it everywhere in this house, not just in that creepy room downstairs.” Jefferson’s voice was hard, but there was a note of sadness in it. “My father liked it down there. She said she didn’t, but maybe she was lying. She was like that.”

  Now he did take a few steps toward her so that he blocked the stairway. It was as though he were sleepwalking, not really paying attention to her. Her mind told her to run, but she knew he was much faster than she, even if she could get past him. She’d never make it downstairs and outside.

  The air around them thickened.

  “I didn’t give a shit that she was a liar, you know? She was good to me. My old man’s girlfriend,” he said mockingly. “Mistress, he called her, like it was something to be proud of. He thought it was a joke, telling me I should fuck her. That she would like it. He thought she was a joke. He thought everyone around him was a joke, the arrogant fucker. I guess your old man wasn’t like that, huh? I wasn’t a lucky cunt like you.”

  Ariel wasn’t sure he wanted an answer. Unable to look at his hate-filled eyes any longer, she glanced away. He was carrying something, holding it at his side, almost behind him. A can of some sort. Was this the surprise?

  “I’m not lucky,” she whispered. His face didn’t change. Had he even heard her?

  Someone, something had heard her. The air changed again. A low rumble like thunder sounded around them, incongruous with the midday sunshine.

  “I wanted a dad like that. But that’s not what I got. I got a fuc
king narcissist, a sadist who played God with everybody he ever knew. Fifteen!” He was shouting now, his face red, twisting with pain. “I was fifteen fucking years old when he showed me that room. He told me what he did to the women he brought down there, how he drugged them and fucked them till they bled. Fifteen! What in the hell was I supposed to do with that?”

  “I’m sorry.” It was all Ariel could think to say. It wasn’t her fault she’d been born to people who cared about her. Loved her.

  Where are you, Mom? Find me, please.

  She’d gotten away from the father. Now she had to get away from the son. He was watching her too closely.

  The rumbling echoed through the house, but seemed to be coming from above. Ariel hoped against hope that someone was up there. Someone alive. Maybe one of the cops. But they were all far away in the tunnel. There was nothing here for them inside the house.

  Unwilling to wait for someone to save her, Ariel turned and ran as fast as she could for the back stairway. Up was her only chance.

  Chapter 89

  Rainey pulled up in front of the house.

  As she shut off the car her eyes were on Gerard, who was fumbling with opening the front door of Bliss House.

  There were no police to be seen, except for a single car at the carriage house. The rest of the vehicles were presumably far out on the property, near the springhouse.

  So much for protection.

  As she hurried up the front stairs, shouting for Gerard to get the door open, she stumbled.

  Bliss House didn’t want them inside.

  Hamrick’s techs worked without chatter. Lucas suspected they, like Hamrick, were in a state of awe over the find of the bodies. They wore protective masks and white hazard suits, and while they’d left the door to the room with the bodies open, they wouldn’t let him inside. He was anxious to see if either of the victims had any sort of identification on them, and was most curious about the female. The male was almost certainly Michael Bliss. The presumption was they’d been murdered. The male had obviously sustained some kind of chest injury, but the details of the female’s death were less evident.

  He hadn’t gotten to the house soon enough to hear all of Ariel’s story right after she’d been attacked. But piecing it together with the interview he’d done with her in the library, he suspected the unidentified female might have been the woman she’d seen go over the balcony the night Karin Powell died. And now Ariel had mentioned a baby, too. He made a note to ask Hamrick if there was a baby involved somehow. Would it even be possible to check for signs of pregnancy in the female’s body, given its state? Science needed to give them the answers—especially since so many of the major players in this mystery were dead, and the only witness (if you could call having visions being a witness) was a child who might be half out of her mind.

  Lucas sat down on the bed’s bare mattress. The place was practically airless, the stuff of claustrophobic nightmares. What in the hell had these walls, and this barbaric headboard with its bloodthirsty hunters, witnessed? How many generations of degradation? This was no cozy nest for lovebirds, even if the judge and his son had been screwing the lovely Karin Powell here. And it was no hidden playroom for the kiddies, or housing for servants. Whoever had carved it out of the dirt had had very specific, very unpleasant motives in mind. But who would ever know what they were?

  Creeped out by his own thoughts on the room, he decided to take one more look around, and mention the female’s possible pregnancy directly to one of Hamrick’s techs instead of waiting to talk to the doc himself before heading up to the main part of Bliss House by the fireplace staircase to see if he could learn anything else there.

  The lever on the front door’s lock moved, but the door wouldn’t budge. Gerard’s shoulder ached from shoving against it, and he cursed, not wanting to believe that there was no rational reason for the door not to open. The fact that there was no give at all told him nothing had been pushed against it, and he doubted Ariel would’ve had the strength to move anything that heavy anyway. Rainey had stood by for a minute or two while he’d tried her key, but then she’d lost what small amount of patience she had left and took off to try the nearest doors and windows. Gerard suspected it was fruitless. The house was secure. Ironically, he and Rainey had made it so.

  He rested a moment, breathing hard, and watched Rainey hurry around the corner of the house. A charged stillness had settled over everything, and though she was running she seemed hampered by the thick humidity of the summer afternoon. It killed him to see the way she was suffering, worrying about her daughter. He felt responsible for what was happening. His work had made it possible for her and her daughter to move in here. His wife had brought her here, had allowed herself to become entwined with Randolph Bliss and his twisted son. Worse, he knew he hadn’t watched over Ariel the way he should have. It was his fault she was here and in danger. Even if they found her safe inside, any friendship he might have had with Rainey was certainly spoiled.

  He’d gone to bed the night before thinking about her voice in his ear, the way her petite body fit against him as she kissed his cheek. At first it had felt strange and disloyal to think of her as he was lying there on sheets that still smelled of Karin. But he’d let his mind go there, and didn’t regret it.

  Giving up on the front door, he ran after her.

  Chapter 90

  Jefferson tackled Ariel on the back stairs, grabbing her around the waist. Her forehead hit a step with a crack that vibrated through her skull. She didn’t lose consciousness, and felt the blood, slick against the wood. Perhaps stunned by his success in knocking her down, he momentarily loosened his hold and she scrabbled away, clawing at the stairs, propelling herself up, up to the third floor. To some kind of imagined safety. She was driven by a need, a certainty that she was going in the right direction. The third floor was the heart of the house. How strange. How unbalanced. Her life might be slipping away, but all she could think about was the house. It had let her down. Betrayed her.

  She made it to the last riser and groped for the floor above it. This hallway was where she’d been pushed weeks ago, and now she’d found her way back up those stairs. A few more inches was all she needed.

  Why had he let go? She didn’t dare look back—that much she knew. She kept going forward, keeping her mind focused on getting to the ballroom. There had to be safety there, if nothing more than the stairs beside the fireplace that would take her to any police who were left. Yes, they were a long way down, but she could scream, couldn’t she?

  But it wasn’t to be. She’d stumbled only a few feet toward the front hall when she felt something cold on her unprotected back.

  “This is for you, you little bitch. You freak!”

  When she turned she got a second blast of—oh, God, what was it? It burned!

  “This should feel familiar,” Jefferson said. “Getting burned out there in St. Louis. Good times, yeah? Hot times!” He laughed at his own joke, squeezing the metal can over and over, squirting charcoal lighter fluid over her skin like it was water.

  When the fluid first touched her it was cold, but it quickly began to sear. The pain in her eye was unbearable.

  Please, God! Not again!

  It was as though she were still on the front lawn, lying in the smoking grass, her eardrums nearly shattered, her skin on fire.

  As he poured and poured the stuff on her, he called her hideous names.

  “Your fault, you little cunt! You and your cunt of a mother! Everything is your fault!”

  Still she kept crawling, stumbling to the hallway despite the pain. The smell of the stuff threatened to overwhelm her, and Jefferson himself was like some ponderous animal dogging her. He ranted like a madman, but she would not give in to him! Too much had been taken away from her already. He wasn’t going to take her life. They moved forward as one writhing, violent beast until they could go no farther. The air in front of them had thickened to a point that movement wasn’t possible. Is this what death feels like?
Ariel could barely form the thought. Some invisible force shoved them backwards so they were driven apart, the abruptness of it causing Jefferson to soak himself with a long stream of lighter fluid he’d meant for Ariel.

  Ariel landed on her back near the ballroom’s open doorway. The massive pain inside her head and the burn of the chemical made her want to curl into a ball and disappear. Or die. It didn’t matter to her.

  The motionless air was filled with the rumbling sound that might have been thunder. The house shook.

  Enraged, Jefferson stood and let out an inhuman roar of frustration. Through eyes narrowed with pain, Ariel saw him hurl himself toward her, his handsome face a hideous mask of fury.

  Not knowing what instinct compelled her, Ariel drew back her knees. When he was just inches away she closed her eyes and kicked out, making contact. While she would never know exactly where she’d landed her kick, his cry of surprise told her she’d done something right. Not wanting to wait to see what he would do, she rolled onto her side to get up, half-anticipating that he would be attacking again.

  But when she looked, Jefferson wasn’t the first thing she saw.

  Rainey reached the herb garden outside the kitchen. She paused, noticing Lucas’s car parked at the end of the drive. Several other vehicles were parked in the grass near the remains of the springhouse. Hearing something behind her, she glanced back to see Gerard catching up with her.

  “Maybe Ariel’s with them.” Rainey said the words, knowing she was wrong.

  Rainey hadn’t wanted to see the place where her daughter had been trapped. As far as she was concerned, she never would, unless Ariel wanted her to. But she knew it was unlikely she could avoid it. She owned the property, and there would probably be some kind of inquiry. She would need to know the details because the place was, ultimately, her responsibility.