Page 76 of The Lost Heiress
Astrid flexed and relaxed her ankle. “It’s so delicate, so intimate,” Astrid said. “Almost like wearing lingerie on your feet.” Astrid turned to Florence. “What do you think?” she asked.
For a moment, Florence didn’t answer. It was one thing for Astrid to defy Scarlet. Scarlet would burn her cigarette pants in the fireplace and chastise her at the breakfast table. But RJ was a different story. Florence thought back to that night in Italy when they had merely had a laugh at his expense. She shuddered to think what he might do if he found out that Astrid had openly defied him.
“They’re lovely,” Florence said.
They left the store with two pairs and some ribbons and elastics that Florence would sew into the shoes herself.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
August 1982
Ransom found that he could not stay away from Cliffhaven. Even when he was on the other side of the country—in a committee meeting, conversing with his staff, or eating dinner alone at night at his townhome in Dupont Circle—his mind would wander back to that stone house on the cliffside and the people in it. Ana, in particular, was at the forefront of his mind. She was not who she claimed to be; that much was certain.
There was an Ana Rojas, age twenty-three, from San Bernardino, California, who studied nursing at CSUSB, but the girl under Ransom’s employment was decidedly not her. That Ana Rojas was still living in Colton and was spending her summer working part time at a local Dairy Queen. When Bass’s guy had gone to the home address that “Ana” had listed on her application, he’d found a girl claiming to be Ana Rojas living there. She was short, barely five feet tall, with traces of auburn in her dark hair and a constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose—definitely not the Ana Rojas who was in residence at Cliffhaven. Furthermore, the real Ana Rojas had no idea who the girl was who’d been impersonating her all summer. When Bass’s privateinvestigator had shown her a picture, she stared at it blankly, claiming she’d never seen the girl before in her life.
Bass had wanted to confront the imposter immediately and have her promptly removed from the house, but Ransom had stayed his hand. He preferred to go into any encounter, especially a confrontation, sure footed, armed with the facts. And at that point in time, the only thing they knew about the girl for sure was that she wasn’t Ana Rojas. So he’d hired his own investigator to look into their false “Ana,” but weeks had ticked by now, and he had learned, frustratingly, nothing about who this woman actually was and what she was doing there. Every potential lead that the investigator had tried to track down had resulted in a dead end. Ransom was left only with his own speculations and wild conjectures, which his mind spun, unprompted, at all hours of the day and night.
The most likely scenario, which Ransom came back to again and again, was that this “Ana” was some sort of tabloid spy. He had come across them before—the people who dug through his trash looking for prescriptions or damning receipts or befriended his assistants and plied them with drinks, mining all possible avenues for any speck of dirt they could find so they could cobble it all together into some salacious story they could sell to the highest bidder. And he knew the gossip rags would pay top dollar for dirt on his family, because they had done it before.
Then there were the people who didn’t outright work for the tabloids but who were happy to sell his family out for a few bucks or their own fifteen minutes of fame. There was the too-eager classmate of Theo’s at Brown, who had leaked to the gossip rags the parties his brother attended, how many drinks the underage freshman had had, how many girls he had slept with. The maid who had been under his mother’s employment for years, who had sold a story to theNational Enquirerthat his father was a closeted polygamist and kept a secret second wife in the basement. People would do anything to feel important, to feel seen or heard. They lusted after the spotlight that constantly trailed his family, wanting to be welcomed into its warm glow.
He tried to catalog in his mind the conversations he had had with Ana, the details he had divulged about himself, his family. What she might have seen or heard while living at the house, anything that could incriminate them or cause public shame. He recalled, with a twist in his gut, the intimate conversation they had had that night in the hotel room in LA. He had told her that he played a part, that he was not who he pretended to be, that he—God, how had Ana put it?—“focus grouped his personality.” He’d asked Ana to tell him when she’d last masturbated—not because he’d wanted to know but to prove a point that there were certain things that everyone kept to themselves. Still, he doubted that Ana would provide that context when retelling that particular piece of their conversation. He imagined how his words might sound when played through the distorted mouthpiece of the media, devoid of compassion or empathy, how his actions would look when filtered through the cold lens of public scrutiny. He was an actor, a two-faced, duplicitous liar; he had said as much himself. He was a pervert who harassed a young girl under his employment—that is how they would spin it.
Ransom thought he might be sick when he thought of this image of himself broadcast to the world—stripped down to his basest insecurities, to his most vulnerable, and then offered up to everyone for ridicule, for entertainment. His face plastered across the glossy surfaces of the gossip rags; his name reduced to a punch line on the lips of late-night talk show hosts.
He knew he had to confront Ana. He’d hoped before doing so that he’d have some real knowledge of her true identity, of the motivation behind her deception, so he’d know how best to disarm his adversary, but he was reluctantly coming to the realization that he’d have to go in blind, with only his speculations to guide him. His only choice would be to make her understand how ardently and swiftly he would retaliate if she breathed a word about him or his family to the press. The most powerful weapon he had at his disposal was fear, intimidation.He would threaten a hellfire of litigation, that he would make of her scorched earth.
And so Ransom found himself at Cliffhaven the next week, unannounced. The Senate was in recess; he was supposed to be attending an agricultural rally in Bakersfield, but at the last minute, he had diverted his plane south, toward his home’s private airfield.
When he arrived, Mrs. Talbot greeted him in the hall, as if she were not surprised at all to see him.
“Do you know where I might find Miss Rojas?” Ransom asked.
“She’s in the library,” she said.
He thanked her and headed off swiftly in that direction.
The library doors were closed, which was unusual. Usually, the double doors stood open so that you could see into the mahogany fireplace and the gleaming floor-to-ceiling bookcases on either side. Normally, Ransom would have walked right in, but something about the strangeness of it made him stop with his hand around the knob, lean in, and press his ear to the door. Through the thick oak came a low, muted moan, a girlish laugh, a sharp intake of breath.
Ransom let go of the doorknob and instinctively took a step back, registering the sounds and their meaning before they could form into coherent thoughts and pictures in his mind.
Ana was in the library, but she wasn’t alone.
It was Salvador who was with her, Ransom was sure. An image flashed in Ransom’s mind of Ana and Salvador standing side by side on the balcony the night of the Fourth of July, whispering and laughing, leaning into one another conspiratorially as they waited for the fireworks to start. Then there was the way Ana had blushed when Jacqueline had asked her about Salvador during their dinner at the Duchess, how she had admitted she thought he was good looking. And then the last time Ransom had visited, the day he’d kissed Ana in the pool, he had seen them himself, just the way that Saoirse had described—sitting next to one another at the breakfast table, conspiring.
It made a sickening sort of sense. Salvador was a ladies’ man, after all: attractive, charming, suave. He’d always had a different girl on his arm at school, lounging on a picnic blanket on the quad on a warm day, giggling and kissing, their fingers intertwined, or huddled together on the sofa in a dimly lit corner of the room at fraternity parties.
Of course Salvador had gone after Ana, and of course she had fallen for him. They lived under the same roof, ate nearly every meal together. The hours, the days, thenightsthey had spent together—it was all but inevitable.
Ransom felt a swift surge of jealousy, hot and stinging, in his gut. Then, he stopped himself. He had fallen into the trap of his feelings again, and again, they had blinded him. Ana wasn’t even Ana. He had to remember that. Ana had lied to him from the very beginning. He didn’t know this woman, not a thing about her, except that she was there for her own malicious reasons.
Well, he was done playing games. He was done being lied to. This was his house, after all, his family, and he was going to put a stop to this, here and now.
Ransom swung the door open with so much force that it flew back and hit the doorjamb with a thud. He wanted to be loud; he wanted to be obvious. This was not a time for subtlety. Let it be quick, and let it be over.
The effect was immediate. The two figures on the couch went still and turned to look at him. He saw Salvador, naked, hovering over a woman, his mouth slack, his eyes unguarded. And there was a woman underneath him, tilting her head back to look at the source of their disruption, her long dark hair falling over the back of the couch. Only, it wasn’t Ana.
Saoirse let out a loud, piercing shriek.
