Bliss House: A Novel by Laura Benedict

Author:Laura Benedict [Benedict, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781605986012
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-06-08T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 41

Gerard let Ellie in the house ahead of him. She trotted straight for her water bowl in the kitchen, and drank until she had to come up for air. Finding Gerard nearby, she leaned against him happily, staining his pants with water.

“Let’s get you fed,” he told her, scratching her behind the ear.

They’d spent the night in a rough hunting cabin that he knew about in the hills overlooking Old Gate. There had been a few pieces of sealed jerky and a couple of bottles of water in the room’s single cabinet. That was all the food, but there was a worn plastic bag with a pack of rolling papers and a couple of joints’ worth of pot in the cabinet, pushed off to the side. He’d split the jerky with Ellie, and that was all the food they’d had since he’d walked out on Molly.

The evening was temperate, and he and Ellie spent much of it sitting on the cabin’s canted porch, listening to crickets, frogs, and night-birds. When Ellie found a raccoon skull in the brush at the edge of the cabin’s small dirt yard, he let her keep it. She tried to play with it, nosing it awkwardly up the slope of the porch floor as though it might, at last, move on its own. Finally, she pushed it into a hole in the boards, where it disappeared. After a few minutes of whining, she went back to where Gerard sat and lay on the floor with a disappointed sigh. At five years old, she was still very much like a puppy. Gerard didn’t want to imagine how lonesome he’d be without her, now that Karin was gone.

In the fading light he rolled a joint, then realized he had no matches to light it with. So much for that. He didn’t really need it to disengage from reality, anyway. The woods were enough. They had taken away his ability to concentrate on anything but the sounds around him and the rumble in his stomach. Karin, Molly, the police . . . they were a long way off.

When he found himself nodding off in the uncomfortable chair, he went inside to lie down, thinking it would be just for a couple of hours. He let Ellie up onto the camp bed to sleep with him, preferring her warmth to that of the dubious wool blanket piled at the bed’s foot. It was well past dawn when they awoke to the sound of noisier birds, and started for home.

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