Page 82 of The Lost Heiress
“How would we get there?” Astrid asked.
“We’d take the train,” Florence said matter-of-factly.
“Yes, the train,” Astrid said teasingly. “But with what money, my pet? I have but pocket change, and you have even less than I do.”
Florence’s hand went to the necklace that she wore under her dress, the one Doris had left her. She fingered the canary yellow diamond under the fabric, the halo of pearls.
“Leave that to me,” Florence said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Present
Detective Church got to the office early, which was not unusual for him lately. He’d been pulling a lot of long days, coming in before the sun rose and leaving long after it had set. He hadn’t seen daylight or felt the sun on his face in ages.
He had spent all week trying to track down Saoirse’s caretaker from that summer—Ana Rojas. It was a maddeningly common name. There were nearly a hundred Ana Rojases in Southern California alone. He couldn’t find any social media accounts linked tohisAna Rojas, though, the one he was searching for—she didn’t exist on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. He figured she had probably married and changed her surname, so he’d consulted the Towerses’ tax returns from 1982 that Leland had so disastrously gotten a court order to obtain. From that, Church pulled her social security number and ran it through the criminal databases but got no hits. It wasn’t until he searched the Social Security Death Index that he finally found her. His heart sank when he saw it: Ana Rojas had passed away in December of 1982, only a few months after Saoirse had gone missing. He eventually found a newspaper article with her obituary: she’d been killed in a car accident.A hit-and-run. Church left the office feeling defeated. He’d spent the entire week chasing down a literal dead end.
This morning, he poured himself a hot mug of coffee from the break room and meandered down the hall to the evidence room, which, this early, was dark and empty except for him. He pulled the box he was looking for from its place on the shelf and sat back down at a table to examine it.
It was the box that Florence had given him the last time he was at Cliffhaven. He’d looked through it once before when he’d first brought it in and entered it into evidence but had seen nothing of significance. It contained mostly a medley of party-planning debris, which the evidence and property technicians had catalogued and itemized, sorting everything into plastic baggies and envelopes with the requisite labels. There were filled-out RSVP cards noting the guests’ meal preferences, seating charts, a list of special dietary restrictions. Mostly, Church marveled at the fact that Florence had kept these things for forty years. What was the point? He started to absently comb through it all again, starting with an envelope of photographs.
The photos were professionally taken, some candid, others posed. There were shots of guests dancing in the ballroom, close-ups of the band playing, stills of the fireworks. Church gave them all only a cursory glance, moving each photo to the back of the stack until he was at the beginning of the night again, when the photographer had evidently gone around and gotten pictures of each of the tables before dinner. He was just about to put the photos down when one made him pause. He held it up, leaned back in his chair as he examined it. Four people were seated at a white-clothed dinner table, their arms around one another, leaning in, posed for the shot. Four faces gleamed up at him, all smiles, but there was one face in particular that caught his attention.
“Holy fuck,” he whispered.
He sat up straight, his blood running cold. He scrambled through the box on the table with both hands now, turning over receipts for the centerpieces and the menu from the caterer, the set list for theband. Finally, he found it near the bottom: Florence’s seating chart. He checked it again.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
“It can’t be,” he said. But he knew it was.
He knew what he needed to do. He grabbed his car keys.
There was one person he still had to talk to.
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Three
August 28, 1982—The Day Of Saoirse’s Birthday Party
In the early predawn light, Saoirse lay awake in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. In just a few short hours, the guests would start arriving. There would be music and dancing and champagne. They would be celebrating a birthday, but Saoirse was celebrating something else. When the clock struck midnight this morning, she had passed an invisible threshold. She didn’t feel any different, but she had suddenly become, in the eyes of the law and the terms of her trust, an adult. Finally, after so many months of being a prisoner in her own house, she was suddenly free.
She wiped a tear that had snaked its way down her cheek, leaving a warm, wet streak in its wake.
For the past year and a half, she hadn’t felt like a person. Her thoughts and feelings hadn’t mattered; her voice had been silenced. She couldn’t go where she wanted or do what she wanted or say what she needed. To be constantly watched, forbidden from leaving the house without a chaperone. Today, she got to start being a person again.
Saoirse had her own plans for tonight that she hadn’t told anyone about. For how could she tell anyone? How could she trust anyone? Shehad seen the way her brother had reacted to the choices she made—always angry, quick to judge, never hearing her out. Salvador, for instance. If Ransom had just listened, if he had taken a moment to try and understand, maybe he would have seen her side of things.
Saoirse was sixteen when she’d met Salvador. She was sullen and surly, and several months pregnant. She had refused to open her textbook or look at him when he spoke to her, but instead of growing angry or irritated, Salvador had closed his book and sat quietly across from her until their lesson time was up. On their third morning together, Salvador wheeled a television set into the library.
“Do you mind if I watch my show?” Salvador asked. “I’ve been taping it, but if we’re going to sit quietly during our lessons, I figured I might as well watch it live.”
Saoirse shrugged but didn’t look at him.
The show was in Spanish, so Saoirse didn’t understand what was being said. Occasionally, her eyes would wander to the screen. There was a girl about her age in many of the scenes. She was on a ranch somewhere out in the country, learning how to ride a horse, how to muck a stall, even though you could tell she didn’t want to be there and didn’t belong. Her jeans were designer, the kind you wore out to lunch, not the kind that was meant to get dirty. In one scene, she fell into a cow patty in the field, and Saoirse gasped.
Salvador looked over at her.
