Page 27 of The Lost Heiress
It didn’t help matters that Saoirse had required her constant vigilance. Ana had to stay one step ahead of her at all times. On Ana’s second day, she’d gone into town and bought a second set of toiletries, which she kept in the bottom of a large vase near the fireplace in her room. She didn’t touch the toothpaste or the shampoo or the lotion she’d left out on her bathroom vanity—she’d heard stories of the itching powder in the night cream and the green dye in the toothpaste that had befallen her predecessors. She was sure that the maids helped Saoirse with her missions of sabotage, so Ana set out to befriend them. She learned their names, sought them out in the kitchen or laundry to chat, and, while she helped them fold linens or dry dishes, asked them about their family, their friends, their interests, and shared her own stories. Familiarity, friendliness, a sense of compassion would—in time, perhaps—save her. It was the only means she had at her disposal, for any bribe she could scrape together, Saoirse could match tenfold.
Still, every night before she got into bed, Ana stripped the sheets and remade it to ensure there were no reptilian surprises awaiting her. On her third night, she found a tarantula under her pillow.
Her younger brother Alejandro had a pet tarantula named Harold. They called him Harry for short. Despite their scary appearance, Ana knew tarantulas were docile creatures who rarely bit people, and if they did, the bite was next to harmless. Alejandro kept Harry in a glass aquarium, but he was always getting out, and Ana had, on more than one occasion, found Harry in the pantry or the garage and coaxed him back into his cage. So Ana handled this intruder with ease, shuffling it into a spare hatbox that she found above her dresser. The next morning, she set it free in the garden, where it was sure to find an abundance of grasshoppers to feast upon.
Ana said nothing of the encounter to anyone, just as she had never mentioned Saoirse abandoning her on the beach. Let them wonder what had become of the spider; let them puzzle out why their itching powder had no effect, why her teeth weren’t stained green. No matterwhat they threw at her, she would remain calm, collected, and self-possessed. She would not be bested.
With Mrs. Talbot, Ana contrived to be subordinate, to never give her reason to be displeased with her. She had not won either Mrs. Talbot or Saoirse over yet, but she had managed to at least keep her head above water, which was no small feat.
Ana had made one real friend, at least: Salvador Santos, Saoirse’s tutor—the man who had rescued her on the road that first day. Since then, Salvador always sat next to her at breakfast and regaled her with the latest house gossip or his own stories. He had been born in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Ana learned. His grandmother had raised him. They didn’t have a lot of means, but Salvador was smart and precocious and won his way into a prestigious boys’ school and then a scholarship to Stanford, where he’d met Ransom. Salvador and Ransom weren’t friends, exactly, but they were friendly. Salvador served as a de facto tutor for Ransom’s fraternity, which Ana came to learn meant he wrote their term papers for them and secured answers to exams in exchange for cash. Salvador majored in languages and philosophy, and he spoke Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish, and French fluently. His grandmother had passed away while he was at college, so when he graduated, he had no reason to return. Instead, he had traveled all over South America, offering translation services and tutoring to get by. And then, a year ago, he had gotten a call from his old acquaintance Ransom Towers, asking for a favor. So he had returned to California to oversee Saoirse’s education. Salvador was, without a doubt, Ana’s closest friend in the house.
Now, Ana opened her bedroom door and peered down the hall, first one way and then the other, squinting into the dark. It was empty.
She padded across the hallway quietly. She knew which door it was, even though she’d never been inside. In the dark, she had to feel around for the handle. It twisted in her palm, and she sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that it wasn’t locked. She slipped in and shut it silently behind her.
Once inside, Ana flipped on the light.
In many ways, Ransom’s bedroom was a mirror image of hers, though slightly larger and with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the far corner and a built-in desk. There was a fireplace and sitting area near the door, just like in her room, but his had a liquor cabinet against the wall.
Ana locked the door behind her. That would buy her at least a few minutes if someone were to try to come in, though in that case, her only recourse would be to go out on the balcony and scale the side of the house. Ana’s stomach dropped at just the thought of it. Ransom’s balcony overlooked the cliffside, meaning any misstep would result in a staggering drop four hundred feet down into the cold ocean and jagged rocks. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.
Ana turned on the dim desk lamp and switched off the bright overhead light in the hope that, should anyone pass by in the hall, they wouldn’t see a light on under the door.
Now it was time to get to work.
It struck Ana as odd—unsettling, even—how neat and sterile and, well,barethe room was. This was the room that Ransom had grown up in, spent his whole childhood in, and yet there was nothing to suggest that a child had once occupied it—no school memorabilia hung on the walls; there were no trophies lining bookshelves or ribbons to denote past achievements. There were no photographs of Ransom with ruddy cheeks displayed in frames, his sweaty hair pushed back, his arms slung around the shoulders of his teammates on a rugby pitch—no pictures of him on a beach vacation with his family. There were no personal photographs at all. Instead, there were black-and-white landscapes—the sun peeking through clouds in Yosemite, snow-covered pines in a forest, a fallen tree in a still lake.
Even Ransom’s bookcase lacked warmth or personality. There were no well-wornChronicles of NarniaorHardy Boysbook sets, no Stephen King paperbacks or James Bond novels or guilty pleasure reads. Instead, there were only the classics, books by Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, books on architecture and large tomes of nonfictionlike Gibbon’sThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Shiny, leather-bound first editions. It was the kind of bookcase one might curate for a public space to give the appearance of being educated and well read, but surely not the kind of bookcase that reflected one’s individual tastes and passions.
Who had a bedroom like this—so cold, so devoid of individuality or sentiment?
Ana pulled open Ransom’s bedside drawer, thinking that surely there would be something there that marked Ransom as human—just flesh and blood like the rest of us. A stash ofPlayboys, perhaps, a bottle of lube, a box of condoms—but she found only a Bible and a pair of spare reading glasses. She shoved the drawer closed.
“Fucking sociopath,” Ana muttered.
She turned her attention to Ransom’s desk next. It sat along the far wall, in front of the window. In the center was a thick taupe box with a screen, an Apple II. Ana recognized it from the commercials she’d seen on TV. She’d never known anyone who had their own personal computer before. The library at her school had a single Xerox Alto, but it was a large boxy station, and only the engineering students used it. She tried the main long drawer in the middle of Ransom’s desk first, but there was nothing of significance in it, just a bunch of pens and paper clips, a bottle of Wite-Out, and a blank legal pad.
Next, she opened the top-right desk drawer, which was organized into a mini filing cabinet. This one took Ana a while to go through. There were contracts for the construction on the east wing, background checks and employment paperwork for the household staff, tax returns going back several years, and a will. Nothing of interest to her. She shut it with a growing sense of irritation and tugged on the handle for the bottom-right desk drawer, but this one wouldn’t budge. She pulled on it again. It was locked.
Bingo.
Ana got a paper clip from the center drawer and went to work. It took her only about a minute, and she was in.
The drawer was mainly empty, aside from a thick black leather notebook and, on top of it, a silver frame.
Ana pulled the frame out first. The glass was dusty, so she held it with the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled over her fingertips so she wouldn’t leave prints. In the frame was a picture of a girl with dark auburn hair. She had on a heather-gray sweatshirt, a crimsonSin the middle emblazoned with a tree. The girl was only half turned toward the camera, as if she had been walking in the other direction and the person taking the picture had called her name, so she’d turned around. Her hand was halfway to her face, and her mouth was open, as if she’d been caught mid-conversation. Behind her was a thicket of redwoods, soft afternoon sunlight dappling through the trees.
The photograph was so casual and spontaneous, so unrehearsed—a genuine moment caught and preserved behind glass—that it made Ana want to keep looking. It played out in her mind like a home video, or a memory—this girl walking through the forest on a crisp fall afternoon, her jeans tucked into her Wellington boots. In the shade of the tall trees looming overhead, the air had a wet chill to it, but when you stepped into a puddle of sun, it was pleasantly warm. The girl was talking about her art history class, some Swedish artist she had just learned about, and Ransom, trailing along behind her, had paused, raised his camera, called her name.
Just then, there was a rattling sound, and Ana looked up, pulled from her reverie. She glanced across the room, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from, and then she saw it: the black orb of the doorknob seemed to shudder, turning incrementally in one direction and then the other. Then the whole door moaned as someone tried to tug it open. Someone was trying to get in.
“Fuck,” Ana said. She immediately lowered herself to the floor, hiding behind the desk.Who would be up at this hour?she wondered.And who would need access to Ransom’s room?She’d been meticulous; she’d studied the maid’s schedule. She came in only on Friday afternoons to clean it—Ana was sure of it.
She heard a mechanical click, and the knob turned again.
Double fuck,she thought.
Whoever it was, they had a key.
