Waiting for the women to respond, I caught a movement over near the patio.
Someone stood inside the glass French doors, watching from the dining room. It was a woman, but I couldn’t quite make out her face. Then she moved slightly, and, in a reflected flash of light, I saw the faded blond hair, the thick stroke of silver at the hairline that seemed to exist to highlight the long, pinkish scar just above her eye. Her mouth was wide and thin, firm with intent.
Olivia.
Heedless of both Terrance and the women around me, I hurried into the cool embrace of the front hall. As my eyes adjusted, I found that there were five or six people who hadn’t come back outside on hearing of the accident, standing in the middle of the hall, beneath the dome. I didn’t have the presence of mind to greet them, and if they were offended, I couldn’t help it.
I knew before I went into the dining room that Olivia wouldn’t really be standing by the window, or anywhere else. But perhaps there would be some vestige, something moved or disturbed. If it were possible for anyone to come back from death on the strength of her ties to a particular place, Olivia would be that person. Every room was stamped with some piece of artwork, some fabric, some piece of furniture that had been hers, or whose history she knew. Her face was on a number of portraits. I hadn’t yet changed anything in either her bedroom or morning room, even though she had left all of her personal belongings to me. Bliss House itself had belonged to her. So why would she leave in death?
The dining room wasn’t empty, but there was no Olivia, and I surprised myself by feeling disappointed rather than relieved.
Marlene, our housekeeper, looked up from the table where she was putting out a stack of linen luncheon napkins from the press in the butler’s pantry. I thought she was around fifty years old at the time, but even at twenty-seven I was a poor judge of the age of anyone who might be over thirty. In truth, Marlene was barely forty then, but she hadn’t bothered to cover the premature gray mixed into her brown hair, and her eyes were dark but not wide or lively. Beneath the short sleeves of her black, summer wool dress, her arms were fleshy and loose. There was a kind reserve in her eyes that I appreciated, even though what she said next brought me up short.
“Mrs. Bliss would have me put out more sherry. Because of the accident.”
How many more times would I have to hear similar suggestions beginning with the words Mrs. Bliss would have? Grief and the possible presence of Olivia couldn’t quell my own self-consciousness and irritation.
“Sherry, and Scotch too, I think,” I told her, my voice sounding breathless even to me. “The men may want something strong.”
She went back to arranging the napkins on the Sheraton sideboard, which, like the baronial dining table, was overladen with food—ham biscuits, gelatin molds and tomato aspics, deviled eggs, peach and apple pies and crumbles, fruit salad, fried chicken, and fried chicken livers—that people had been bringing to the house for two days, and with more that Marlene and her helpers had made. The dining room was Marlene’s purview. Not mine. I didn’t like the room at all, and almost never used the steep, narrow stairs in the minuscule hallway between the dining room and kitchen, even though they were the closest to the second-floor nursery.
The dining-room walls—twelve feet high like those of the rest of the rooms on the first floor—were completely covered with a mural of staring eyes. Not human eyes, but the eyes of peacock feathers that were so precisely drawn that they looked like they’d been painted from the memory of a terrible dream. Press had told me he’d been made to count them once as a punishment for some infraction he couldn’t now recall. How many eyes did he say there were? More than a thousand, I think. What a thing to do to a child!
But it wasn’t just the walls. There, drooping in a grand crystal vase that someone in the family had brought from some long-ago European trip, was a lush armful of peacock feathers that begged to be touched. Stroked. The coronas around their opaque pupils glimmered gold.
All those eyes. Had they witnessed Olivia’s return? My mind was restless, and I was so shaken that I believed I could feel my blood pulsing through my veins.
If Olivia could come back, why not Eva?
Chapter 5