Page 40 of The Lost Heiress
Church laughed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“So what do you make of it all?” Nisha asked, looking down at the bones spread out on the table.
“I’m not sure yet,” Church said. “It still feels like a riddle of sorts. How does a young woman vanish at her own birthday party without anybody seeing anything?”
Nisha nodded. “And then throw a John Doe into the mix.”
“Right,” Church said.
He stared down at the weathered bones on the table. He used to find a certain solace in physical evidence. Unlike witnesses, physical evidence didn’t lie. It didn’t obfuscate, manipulate, or deceive. It could, however, be misinterpreted. Church had learned that the hard way. Facts, physical evidence—you had to be careful in how you strung them together, how you constructed meaning out of them. He’d learned to be distrustful when they took you too easily to exactly where you wanted to go. Facts and evidence, they could become a mirage of sorts—especially when you were in the middle of a hard case where every lead had seemingly dried up.
Church knew better than anyone—when you were thirsty like that, and desperate, facts and evidence could lead you further away from the truth, rather than closer to it, and, ultimately, to your own destruction.
Chapter Thirteen
1951–1958
When Astrid turned twelve, she went off to boarding school on the East Coast, and Verity followed her two years later, leaving Florence back at Cliffhaven to attend public school in the nearby town. Without Charles, Verity, and Astrid, the house felt, for the first time since her mother died, too big and lonely. Florence tried her best to make friends at the local school she attended, but she was shy and awkward. She ate her lunches alone in the school library, arrived right before the first bell in the morning, and left promptly after the last bell rang so she wouldn’t have to hang about the halls by herself. She felt her aloneness like a presence, heavy and shameful, an embarrassing stench that followed her that everyone could smell as soon as she entered the room.
One afternoon when Florence was feeling particularly despondent, she allowed herself to cry. She made sure she was alone first, without any witnesses, and climbed into the window seat in the parlor. She pulled her knees to her chest and let the tears come, like she was opening a spigot slowly. She buried her face in her knees and felt her salty tears dampen the thin cotton of her dress.
“Florence.”
She looked up at the sound of her name. She was no longer alone—Doris Oppenheimer Towers was standing there, her purse over hershoulder, clearly on her way out somewhere. She glanced at Florence curiously.
Florence opened her mouth to say something—to apologize, perhaps, for the inconvenience of her public display of emotion—but no words came out.
Doris sat next to her on the window seat, setting her purse in her lap.
“Well, what’s the matter?” Doris asked matter-of-factly.
“Nothing,” Florence said. “I’m sorry. I just—I had something in my eye.”
“If you’re going to lie, you have to do it better than that,” Doris said. She glanced down at her watch. “I have a hair appointment to get to, so out with it. Why the tears?”
Florence shifted in her seat and took a deep breath. “I suppose it’s because ... well, at school, I don’t—I don’t have any friends,” Florence said sheepishly.
Doris blinked at her. “Well, of course you don’t, darling—you have elevated tastes,” Doris said, as if it should be obvious.
Florence had never thought of it that way, as if there were something lacking in her classmates, rather than something lacking in herself.
“I recognized a kindred spirit in you the first time we met,” Doris said. “We’re a rare breed, Florence, you and I, and not everybody understands us. And we certainly don’t want to bother ourselves with them if they don’t. Listen to me: we don’t take guff from anyone. We do things our own way, which is how they should be done.”
Florence didn’t see anything in herself that resembled Doris, but she was delighted that Doris did.
Doris handed Florence her kerchief. “Now, dry your eyes, dear,” Doris said. “If you’re going to cry over someone or something, make sure they’re really worth it. Tears dry out the skin terribly.” Doris stood up. “Grab your purse, Florence. Nothing soothes the spirit quite like having your hair set.”
On weekends, Doris took Florence to the nail salon to get their nails done, to the fortune teller to have their palms read, to the antiquestore to get an eighteenth-century tufted ottoman that no one was ever allowed to rest their feet on. Doris instructed Florence in the ways of the world.Never trust a man who doesn’t marry. Always wear gloves when leaving the house. Be generous with your maid and stern with your children.
Doris Oppenheimer Towers was the most glamorous person Florence had ever met. Doris adored fashion and was an advocate for Dior’s “new look”: the boned girdles, the dresses with full skirts that nipped in at the waist. “A woman should look like a woman,” Doris said, eschewing the shapeless shift dresses that had dominated the previous decades. Twice a year, she went to Paris to order her wardrobe for the new season. Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy. She wore bold colors—poppy red, canary yellow, bright persimmon—in delicious fabrics: lace and taffeta, twill and tulle. She always wore gloves and a silk scarf in her hair.
Scarlet insisted that everyone in the house, including the staff, attend church on Sunday, but Doris never did. When Florence asked her about this, Doris said, “If God has a problem with my absence in the pew on Sunday morning, he knows where to find me.” And when Florence asked her why Scarlet never said a thing about it, Doris laughed and said, “Darling, make no mistake—this is my house, not hers.”
For it was Doris’s house, Florence learned. It had been built for her by her late husband, Remington Towers, as a wedding gift back when they were married in 1897. Doris loved to regale Florence with the family history on weekday afternoons while Florence sat at the writing desk in Doris’s room and did her homework. Remington Towers was a cowboy in every sense of the word, Doris told her, flush with money his family had made in the Gold Rush of ’49. He had come east to find a bride, and he had fallen head over heels for Doris from the very first time he laid eyes on her across the way at the opera house on Dudley Street in Boston. He’d brazenly shown up at her parents’ house the next afternoon to call on her without an introduction.
For her part, Doris did not much care for Remington. He was forty-nine years old to her seventeen; he was unshaven and wore leather cowboy boots and a Stetson hat instead of the black pointed shoes andtop hat that were the fashion among gentlemen. But he had money. Lots of money. And Doris—the daughter of the respected Oppenheimer family, who had helped settle the city of Boston, and heiress to a now-dilapidated oil fortune—did not. So she married him.
As his wedding gift to his young bride, Remington purchased one hundred acres of land on the Pacific Coast and started building a house for her. Cliffhaven, he christened it. Every year, Doris would make the long trek out west to see the house, and every year, Doris would proclaim it wasn’t finished yet, and she’d return east, to her family home in Boston. There, she birthed their sons, Augustus and Sebastian, and raised them, as out west, Cliffhaven grew steadily bigger and grander as the years wore on.
