Page 111 of The Lost Heiress
Epilogue
Detective Church wasn’t entirely sure what made him do it, but the Wednesday after his grandmother’s funeral, he got in his car and drove the two hours inland to Wasco State Prison.
Usually when Church solved a case, he felt a sense of fulfillment. There was a certain self-satisfaction that came from untangling the web, a comforting peace that resulted from finally having answers where before there had been only questions. But the Towers case had been different. It stuck with him, kept him up at night. Did it matter, he asked himself, if Florence’s actions had been motivated by something good and pure, if they had ultimately resulted in something so ugly and destructive—cutting short not just one young life but two? Sometimes Church answered this question one way in his mind and then the other. Even so, he didn’t like to think of Florence at Wasco, dressed in a stale jumpsuit, lying on an old mattress in a concrete cell.
Now he sat at a table in the sterile visitors’ room, his knee bouncing up and down beneath the table as he waited. The lawyers whom Ransom had hired to represent Florence Talbot had worked out a plea deal on her behalf. She’d been charged with first-degree murder, the obstruction of justice, and the concealment of two bodies, but in the deal she brokered with the prosecution, she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, and the other charges were dropped. In exchange, she was sentenced to three years in prison, but she’d be out in two with good behavior. They’d sent her to Wasco State Prison,outside of Bakersfield, to serve out her term. Church had not seen her since the plea hearing six months ago.
“I’m glad you came.”
Detective Church looked up at the voice and saw Florence standing there, a guard behind her. She looked smaller in her orange jumpsuit; it dwarfed her.
He stood up as she pulled back a chair on the opposite side of the table. He wondered what the proper greeting was in a circumstance such as theirs, the captor and the captive. He sat back down when she sat.
“I got your last letter,” Florence said. “I was very sorry to hear about your grandmother.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
It had been sudden. His grandmother’s heart had stopped in the middle of the night while she slept.
“It was the way she wanted to go,” Church said. “No fuss or commotion. Quick. Peaceful.”
“Yes,” Florence said. “But still, you must miss her terribly. Regardless of the circumstances, it can be hard to say goodbye.”
Church swallowed.
He shifted in his seat and pulled out the silver rosary ring from his pocket. Because it was a religious item, he’d been permitted to bring it through security. He turned it slowly in his fingers.
“I want to return this to you,” he said. “I can leave it at the security desk when I go. They’ll add it to your things.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Florence said. “That’s for you. To remind you of the good.”
“I’m not sure it does that anymore,” Church said.
Florence held his gaze. “You said in your letter there was something you wanted to ask me in person?”
Church stared back down at the ring in his hands. He had written that. Ever since he’d made the arrest, there was such a sense of unease, uncertainty, that he’d carried with him in the hollow of his chest and the pit of his gut. He wanted to put those feelings into questions,exorcise them from his body. He had thought by the time he saw her, face to face, he’d be able to metabolize those feelings into words, into concrete questions, but he’d been wrong. He opened his mouth and closed it again.
He didn’t know how to come to terms with the fact that sometimes justice didn’t feel like justice at all. Having the answers, knowing the truth, resolving a case wasn’t always completely satisfying. He wanted things to fit neatly into boxes—good and bad, right and wrong. But the ambivalence of this case thwarted his efforts.
Florence lifted her hand from the table, as if she meant to place it on top of his but then remembered they were not allowed to touch, so she set it back down again.
When Church passed the security desk as he left, he slipped the rosary ring back into his pocket. The drive home was quiet; he kept the radio off, his mind untangling the rope of emotions in his head that he still couldn’t find the words for. He took Highway 46 west and, just north of Harmony, turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
When Church was almost home, he could see it there in the distance, jutting out from the coast: Cliffhaven. Somehow, the house didn’t look the same to him anymore. It wasn’t the mythical, impenetrable castle he’d viewed it as when he was a child; nor was it the cold, austere stone estate he’d considered it to be as a grown man. It was something else now, something he couldn’t yet name.
