Bliss House E-Book

Laura Benedict

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The past never stays buried at Bliss House... Rainey Bliss Adams' perfect life came to an end one spring afternoon, when her husband was killed in an explosion that horrifically burned their fourteen year-old daughter, Ariel. Desperate for a new start, she takes Ariel to live in the beautiful house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Bliss family has lived for over a century. Once there, Ariel starts to mysteriously heal. But as a series of tragedies begins to unfold, it becomes clear that a darkness lurks behind the dignified façade of Bliss House - one which will drive both mother and daughter apart, as each is forced to confront its evil on her own... Richly Gothic, creeping and dark, Bliss House is a haunting tale of loss, love - and the secrets our houses can keep.

Leseprobe

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

Author Q&A

Reading Group Questions

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 just 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.

After his breathing slowed, he got up from the bed. Was he talking to himself? Praying? He was saying something she couldn’t make out, as though he were talking to someone—but not her.

Though she was loath to move, she rolled carefully onto her side and tried to cover herself with her dress. If only she were lying on her own soft bed, in her own apartment, maybe then she could bear it. She might feel hopeful then, like she might be able to save herself. But in this place—this strange, awful place—she saw little reason to hope.

Michael tucked in his shirt and did up his pants and belt. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t make out anything he was saying.

“Michael,” she whispered. Her throat was scratchy and dry from screaming.

He wouldn’t look at her.

“Michael, I don’t understand.”

Still without looking at her, he turned on one of the sink taps. The water stuttered out, a rusty orange color, and he let it run until it was a narrow stream. Finally he splashed some water on his face and, dripping, grabbed a towel from the chair to dry himself. When he was done, he smoothed his hair back and tossed the towel at her. It landed, covering her arm, but she didn’t move to take it.

“Clean yourself up,” he said.

He went to the door, then turned back to her, took a disposable lighter from his pocket, and tossed it too on the bed.

“For the candles. And if you do something stupid, like start a fire, it will only kill you. It won’t hurt anyone else.”

As the door shut behind him, Allison—propelled from the bed by the sudden realization that he was going to leave her behind—grabbed the doorknob and pulled. But she was too late. She heard a bolt shoot into the doorframe, probably from the brass lock a few inches above the doorknob. Pounding on the door, she screamed for him.

“Don’t leave me here! Michael!”

Remembering the curtains on the other side of the room, she ran to them, thinking she could break the window if it, too, was locked. She slid the curtain along the wooden rod.

But there was no window. Only a gray, unbroken expanse of wall.

Chapter 2

Present Day

Standing a few feet behind her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ariel, in the hot Virginia sun, Rainey Adams watched her staring up at Bliss House. If it had been possible to will Ariel to love it as much as she did, Rainey would have done it in a heartbeat.

It was a house from Rainey’s dreams, rising from its bed of tattered gardens on two stories of firm yellow brick, its face boldly pushing forth from between two shallow wings. The third floor was a mansard crown of aged gray slate, relieved by several chimneys and windows set deep into shadowed cornices that made them seem secretive even in the afternoon light. The lower floors were layered with shutterless arched windows taller than a man and punctuated with iron accents whose points looked more dangerous than decorative. But the creamy white trim and pale stone outlining the house’s edges lent Bliss House a tentative air of softness and kept it from looking too severe. Too guarded. From the outside, one of Bliss House’s primary architectural oddities—a dome crowning the central well of the house—was barely visible. Overall, the house gave an impression of contradicting itself, as though it weren’t sure of what sort of house it meant to be.

Rainey, though, was certain it was meant to be hers. While she’d found it intimidating on seeing it for the second time in her life (the first having been when she was only eight years old, and then she couldn’t go inside), it was like nowhere she’d ever lived before, and she found that she wanted to cling to its immutable presence. It was solid and old and beautiful and challenging, all at the same time.

Ariel needed the stability a place like Bliss House could give her. Rainey needed it, too. As an interior designer who spent much of her life making homes for other people, she’d always believed that the atmosphere of a house was shaped by the people who lived in it. Yet here she was, looking for comfort and strength from a thing made of bricks and mortar. She and Ariel, like the house, had been damaged by their sad—even tragic—histories. But she had plans for the house beyond the critical repairs and renovations that she’d already done. She would heal it, as it would help to heal the two of them. It would be a home where Ariel would feel safe, and together they would bring the kind of happiness to Bliss House that would make it worthy of its name.

Overwhelmed with a feeling of hopefulness, Rainey reached out to touch her daughter’s hair, but then quickly drew back her hand. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

It was a ridiculous question, and she knew she was opening herself up for the worst kind of derision. Ariel had become an expert at taking advantage of her eager desire to make things right between them. All she had to do was turn and fix Rainey with one of her practiced, uncaring looks with eyes that looked too much like Will’s eyes. In life, the three of them had been a solid, happy unit. In death, the man they had both lost was always between them.

“You’re kidding, right?” Ariel leaned awkwardly on her cane, a scowl aging her once-delicate features. She hid her thinned, cropped hair beneath a slouchy patterned cap, and her scars beneath clothes that hung loose on her slight frame.

Rainey bit her lip to keep from asking Ariel if she meant “kidding” as in this-has-got-to-be-a-joke, or “kidding” as in this-is-the-coolest-place-I’ve-ever-seen. She’d been expecting a strong reaction to Bliss House—one way or the other—from Ariel, who had refused to even look at pictures of it before they arrived in Virginia.

Ariel started forward slowly. The accident—yes, it was an accident, even if Rainey herself was responsible—that had claimed Will Adams, Ariel’s father and the center of Rainey’s world, had also left the entire right side of Ariel’s body burned and badly scarred. Two years earlier, she’d been a lithe twelve-year-old who was already several inches taller than her mother. She had loved gymnastics and ballet, and wore her then-lush black hair knotted in a taut bun at the back of her head. Her porcelain skin had been free of the blemishes that plagued other girls, and her blue eyes—like her father’s—were alternately full of harmless mischief and solemnity.

That girl was gone, replaced by an angry, unforgiving teenager who had spent too much time in and out of hospitals, and stabbed her walking cane into the ground as though every step were a punishment. She saw every mirror as an enemy. Her depression and anger turned the time she and Rainey spent together into a shared silent cage that seemed to grow smaller with each passing day.

Rainey was finally used to her daughter’s wrecked beauty, the fierce red flesh along her jaw that spread like a chafing hand over her right cheek. She longed to gently touch the scars that ran from Ariel’s face and down her arm to the back of her hand. She missed the giggling girl who looked so much like her daddy, missed the intermingling of their hair—Rainey’s so blond and Ariel’s so dark—as they read or played computer games together, or cuddled on the couch to watch a movie. Missed looking into her daughter’s eyes and seeing something, anything, besides hurt and contempt.

To My Adorable Mommy, I Love You Soooooooo Much!!!! Ariel had written in bright gold on the last Valentine she’d given Rainey, over two years earlier. Yes, she missed so much about her baby girl.

“It was hard to get good pictures of the front of the house,” Rainey said, following Ariel. There was a pebble in her open sandal. The driveway hadn’t yet been repaved and was a minefield of small rocks and three-inch-deep potholes. “You’d have to go way back down the drive, and out there the trees get in the way. It will be clearer in the winter.”

What will winter be like here? She hadn’t thought about things like snow removal or even about the cost of heating such a monster of a house. Before buying it, she’d only been in Old Gate once, and by that time Bliss House had been sold to a doctor outside the family. But then it was sold again to become a successful inn run by a married couple, the Brodskys, whose ownership had ended in a tragic murder. Before it was sold the first time, Bliss House had been in Rainey’s mother’s family for over a hundred years. Now it was hers.

In a better market, Bliss House might have cost her half-again the one-point-four million she’d paid for the house and land. Between her own trust fund and Will’s life insurance, she had a very manageable mortgage and, if she acted carefully, they could live quite comfortably for at least the next ten years. Ariel would be out of college by then—if she would even go. They hadn’t exactly been diligent about home schooling.

Will would never have believed she could let things get to this point. God only knew Rainey could hardly believe it herself.

When they reached the landing below the front door, Rainey looked up to the distant rooftop. Barely five feet two inches in her shoes, she suddenly felt insignificant. Beside her, Ariel seemed much younger than she was, and more vulnerable. It was as if they were two tiny, fragile dolls about to enter a massive new dollhouse.

Two ragged, broken dolls.

Chapter 3

The first night Ariel lay in her new bed, in her new room in the strange house, she dreamed like she hadn’t dreamed since long before the accident.

She walked with her father through unfamiliar woods, looking for a comfortable place to share the picnic lunch her mother had packed for them. Ariel was hungry and tired. The straps of the heavy backpack she wore dug cruelly into her shoulders. But her father laughed when she complained that she wanted to take it off, the sound of his voice echoing through the gold- and red-painted trees. She loved her father’s laugh.

“Don’t open it, Button,” he said, ruffling her hair. “It’s full of fire.”

The dream-logic of his answer made sense to her, and she trudged on, breathing heavily over the noise of leaves crunching beneath their feet. They headed downhill, the weight of the pack propelling Ariel forward so forcefully that she stumbled. Spying a stream in the distance, she stopped thinking about her burden and ran. Sunlight cast shards of silver on the water, and she couldn’t wait to get to it so she could splash the water on her face.

Once she broke through the trees, she saw that the sky beyond the stream was vast and cloudless. Falling to her knees on the muddy bank, she shrugged the pack onto the ground. The water was cool on her skin, and she gathered it to her again and again, heedless of the way it soaked her sleeves and untethered hair. She felt as though she could kneel there forever, and never be thirsty or weary again. Finally, she sat back on her heels and wiped the water from her face with the dry hem of her shirt.

Looking up, she found the sunlight was brighter. It spread without shadow, but instead of bringing warmth, it was spreading cold, and she shivered. She turned around, and saw that the woods had disappeared—and, with them, her father.

“Daddy?”

She scanned the pale tundra that, only a moment before, had been a forest blazing with color.

Beside her, the backpack shifted. Something was moving inside, wriggling against the canvas. She reached out to touch the pack, but drew her hand back, afraid, as the clip securing the cord at the top of the pack began to slide off all by itself. The pack opened a few inches, and tiny tongues of flame darted out, reaching for her.

She struggled to her feet, but the flames shot forward, growing longer and longer, chasing her as she ran toward the flat, frozen landscape. She screamed for her father. He had to be near!

“Daddy, where are you?”

The sound of her own choked words awakened her as she struggled to break free of the dream.

The walls of her new bedroom were bathed in a mellow gold light, and the air—like the air in her dream—had turned brutally cold. It was a winter cold, not the welcome chill of a late summer night. A curtain across the room stirred, and Ariel saw that the window was open. She groped for the blanket folded at the end of the bed. Finding it, she pulled it to her. Why was the room so bright? She didn’t remember the nightlight that her mother had plugged in the night before being so strong.

“I’m right here, Button.”

Ariel turned her head to see her father sitting in the chair nearest the bed. He leaned forward to smile at her. It was a sad smile.

In that split second of recognition, Ariel felt a weightless thrill in her stomach, like that moment before the plunge down the first hill of a roller coaster. How many nights had she awakened in the darkness, wanting to see his face?

The thrill quickly faded.

This can’t be real.

“Shhh. You’re all right,” he said, rising from the chair to stand over her.

Ariel held out her arms to him. “I want to be awake. I want you to be here, Daddy.”

Her friends had always wanted to come to her house to see her dad because they thought he was cute. Even though he was a lawyer, he kept his wavy black hair—so much like her own—a little long. Because he almost never got angry or said mean things, he always looked young, and not wrinkled like some of their fathers. But it was his eyes that made so many people like him. Cheerful, blue eyes, the color of her friend Melody’s blue finch. Now, he was dressed in his weekend clothes—khakis, a bright red polo shirt, and the embroidered canvas belt with the ducks on it that Grandma Adams had made for him before she died, and that her mother teased him about.

“You see me. I’m here.”

“But you’ll go away,” she said, sounding like a very young child.

His eyes were darkened by the shadows in the room, and they didn’t look as happy as she’d first thought. Still, she wanted to memorize every bit of him. To remember.

“No. I won’t. I promise, baby girl.”

She was still reaching out for him, but he wouldn’t come close enough. If only he would gather her into his arms to keep her warm. But she knew if she tried to touch him, he wouldn’t really be there.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, his breath making clouds in the air. “I’m watching you.”

Ariel, shivering and not really wanting to go back to sleep, lay back on the icy pillow.

“Stay, Daddy.” She was so tired that she barely heard herself speak.

Her father leaned down and rested a hand on her leg—the leg that a piece of metal from the house had nearly cut in two. Did she feel the pressure of his hand? She wasn’t sure because her eyes closed, and she no longer felt anything.

Ariel woke up on her stomach, her face mashed into the pillow. The room was stifling with humidity, and she’d kicked off the covers to the foot of the bed. A sheen of sweat had pasted her tank top to her back. With a tiny pang, she remembered the cold of the night before. With the memory of the cold came the memory of her father. She quickly rose up on her hands and knees, the heat and sticky sheets forgotten.

The chair was still near the bed. Empty. But she could feel that he’d been there. Something had changed. Despite the heat and the sweat, she felt better than she had since the accident.

Chapter 4

Rainey washed her cereal bowl and spoon and put them on the drain board of the sink to dry. Most of the maintenance work on Bliss House had been done before they’d arrived, supervised by Gerard Powell, the husband of the real estate agent who had handled the house purchase. Repairs to the aging slate roof, the doors, stairs, and floors of all the usable rooms refinished, walls painted, and the heat pumps replaced. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do much of anything to the kitchen. The only things that were different from the day she’d come out from St. Louis to close on the house, three months earlier, were a new microwave and an electric stove that replaced the professional eight-burner gas range the former owners had installed.

All her life she’d had a passion for things old and quaint and unusual. Her passion, along with an artistic eye and years of training, had led to a comfortably profitable interior design career. Their house near St. Louis, just over the Missouri River, had been custom-built for them, and she had filled it with the antique treasures she couldn’t bear to pass on to clients. Eighteenth-century Irish tables, a set of Welsh chairs, thirteen gilt-edged mirrors from a Louisiana Creole plantation house, a trundle bed from a Kentucky barn that was two days from being demolished. Even her kitchen had been furnished with cabinetry salvaged from a dowager house near Forest Park. They were strings to the past that tugged at her because her own past had been so rich and full of love—like Ariel, she had been an only child, adored by her parents.

“But an antique gas stove?” Will had said, pausing as he pried open pistachio nuts—a quick after-work snack he washed down with a local micro brew. He wore the somber gray suit he’d put on for court, but had loosened the plum necktie she had laid out for him that morning. He wasn’t wild about the color, but she loved it because it made his eyes look as blue as the day she’d met him, fifteen years earlier.

“Can’t we just get one that looks retro?”

“Look at the molding on the doors. It’s gorgeous,” she’d said, her voice full of a proprietary awe that Will knew well. She ran her fingers over the stove’s pristine cream-colored front. “It’ll last another seventy-five years.” She wasn’t listening to him. A few days later, Will simply nodded when she told him the technician was scheduled to do the installation.

As always, Will had trusted her.

It wasn’t her fault that the technician had rushed the retrofitting of an electronic ignition into the stove. It wasn’t her fault that he was about to miss a payment on his truck and had to get to the credit union before it closed. It wasn’t her fault that their house was so tightly built that Will hadn’t smelled the gas filling the house before he unlocked the door. People from two miles away had reported the explosion. What none of them had seen was the second floor of the house rise, only to collapse onto the ground floor, crushing what hadn’t shot away in the initial blast. But Ariel, who had been down at the mailbox, had turned to look back at the house at the explosion’s initial roar. Ariel had seen more than enough.

The kitchen in Bliss House was in the shape of a T, and much more suited to a busy inn or a family with servants than a woman living on her own with a fourteen-year-old. Here in the long galley there were two deep, adjoining sinks with ridiculously long drain boards, and a food prep counter with open shelves above and below for pans and bowls. The racks on the walls already held a few knives and the other cooking tools she’d been able to find. There was also an industrial dishwasher with two brand new plastic dish racks sitting ready to slide automatically through it, but she’d yet to turn the dishwasher on. She’d never run anything like it, and, actually, she was a little afraid of trying it.

Around the left-hand corner of the galley was the part of the kitchen where all the cooking was done. There was the pitiful stove, a new microwave, a plate-warmer, a substantial refrigerator, more open shelves for pantry goods, and a handsome five-foot-long marble counter for making dough or candy. Rainey’s mother had made hard candy for gifts every Christmas, and she had romantic visions of doing the same with Ariel. Around the other corner was the butler’s pantry, with its gas fireplace (all of the fireplaces in the house had once burned wood, but now they were fitted for gas), rows of elegant glass-fronted cabinets, and a broad antique Irish table she was told was original to the house, where she and Ariel would eat most of their meals.

In the butler’s pantry Rainey was dismayed to find that there was no order in the way the moving people had unpacked the sets of dishes and glassware she’d recently bought.

The moving company had sent a pair of workers—a muscular African American woman with close-coiffed gray hair and a sallow white man of about fifty who smelled of breath mints—who arrived just after the half-filled moving van had come and gone. They asked no questions and kept their heads down, diligent, the whole time. They spoke to each other in whispers, as though they were in a church. Rainey had tried to be friendly, offering them coffee, but their reticence had made it clear that they just wanted to get their work done and get out.

The truth was that, uncommunicative as they were, Rainey had liked having them around. With every passing hour in the vast house, she worried that she’d made a huge mistake. She had imagined living an idyllic, healing sort of country life for a while, then maybe—when Ariel was ready—turning most of the first floor into a studio where she could meet clients. But the house would need even more work if she were to do that. And she would have to start socializing to get those clients.

She sank onto the window seat at the end of the butler’s pantry with a heavy sigh. The sun was warm on her skin, and she rested her head gratefully against the glass. She felt chilled all the time now. Always petite and small-boned, she’d lost fifteen pounds that she could hardly afford to lose. When a client back in St. Louis had recently told her how great, how thin she was looking, Rainey had seen a glint of envy in the woman’s eyes that sickened her. Did she really want to spend the rest of her life being beholden to people who were so vain that they could envy a woman who couldn’t eat because she’d accidentally killed her husband?

She looked up at a sound from another part of the kitchen, and saw Ariel heading for the refrigerator, wearing a nubby pink bathrobe Rainey had bought for her to wear at the rehab facility. Its sleeves were already too short, but the rest of the robe looked too big for her. Her hair was long enough that it was hard to tell where it no longer could grow behind her left ear, but Rainey knew the scarred flesh was there.

Ariel took milk and an apple from the refrigerator and pulled a box of cereal from a shelf. When she turned, she noticed Rainey.

“Hey, honey,” Rainey said, not wanting to startle her. She wanted to help her—God, how she wanted to get up to help her—but she made herself stay in the window seat.

Unfazed, Ariel asked her where the bowls were.

“Here,” Rainey said, finally jumping up. She had at least organized the Portmeirion china that she’d ordered for everyday use right away. She grabbed a bowl and dug out a spoon from the chaos in the silverware drawer.

“Sit down,” she said, putting the bowl on the oak tabletop that separated them.

Ariel glanced around, but didn’t say anything else. Rainey was glad to see some curiosity in her eyes.

A shadow changed the light in the room for only a second, and Rainey saw her daughter’s face darken. Ariel was looking out the window.

“What is it?” Rainey turned around. She hurried to the window, but it looked straight onto the herb garden, and not out to either side. “Did you see something?”

Rainey turned back to Ariel, but she was gone. From the sounds she heard coming from the dark hallway leading to the back stairs, Ariel was already making her slow, labored way back to her room. Calling after her wasn’t going to get her back. Rainey sighed.

Out in the mudroom, whose entrance was in the front galley of the kitchen, someone was knocking purposefully on the porch door. Ariel had seen whoever it was through the window and fled. As Rainey crossed the kitchen to answer the door, she was less curious about who was there than how her daughter had just been able to enter and leave the kitchen without using her cane.

Chapter 5

“I’ve wanted to meet you in person for the longest time, dear Rainey. Notes and Christmas cards every few years just aren’t the same thing.” Roberta “Bertie” Bliss stood behind a chair at the table in the butler’s pantry. “May I sit?”

Rainey colored, totally off her game. “Oh, I’m sorry, Roberta. Of course.” She gestured to Bertie, as well as the solid young man who had followed in her wake.

“You must call me Bertie. Everyone does, except the Judge, of course.”

Judge Randolph Bliss was a remote cousin of Rainey’s. It was his family Rainey and her mother had stayed with on her childhood visit to Old Gate. Her mother had driven her out to see Bliss House, where Randolph had grown up, but they hadn’t gone inside because the family that had bought it wasn’t home. The house had imprinted itself on her memory. Just being close to it gave her a strange sense of belonging.