Page 26 of The Lost Heiress
A boy stood up from his lounge chair, a striped towel thrown over his shoulder. He was almost a teenager, tall and sinewy.
“Hello,” he said, sticking out his hand with a friendly smile. “I’m Charles.”
Florence reached out and took his hand. It was dry and warm and steady. “Florence,” she said.
“Florence,” he repeated. “It’s nice to officially meet you. Will you be joining us?” He inclined his head, indicating the pool.
“I, um, I don’t know how to swim,” Florence said sheepishly.
“How do you not know how to swim?” Astrid asked, as if Florence were stupid.
“It’s fine,” Charles said, giving Florence an encouraging smile. “We’ll stay in the shallow end, where you can touch.”
Behind him, Astrid sighed heavily, as if this were a huge inconvenience.
“And later, I can teach you, if you want,” Charles said, his voice lower so only she could hear.
Florence beamed and nodded.
The days passed quickly, one day blurring into the next, until it all felt completely natural to Florence—crawling into the twin feather bed in her and Verity’s room at night, swimming lessons with Charles in the early morning before the girls woke up, games of Marco Polo in the afternoon. Packing a pail of tuna sandwiches and cold Coca-Colas and trudging down to the beach to eat their picnic in the sand. In the evenings, they’d lie side by side on the sofa in the playroom, their feet propped up on the ottoman, an afghan thrown over their legs, as they listened to episodes ofMurder at Midnighton the radio. Verity would bury her face in Florence’s shoulder during the really scary parts, and Astrid would tease her for being afraid.
Verity, Astrid, Charles, and Florence. Florence, Charles, Astrid, and Verity. They were the four musketeers, one inseparable entity as they shuffled into church on Sunday mornings and sat side by side in their pew. One lockstep unit as they came down to breakfast in the morning or went upstairs to brush their teeth before bed.
So it came as a cold shock to Florence when Christmastime came and Verity, Astrid, and Charles went to visit their grandparents on the East Coast, and Florence was left behind. She sat at the long dining table all by herself on Christmas Day, the honey ham glistening on theplatter before her, looking intimidating with its girth, and making her feel all the more small and alone.
“Why the long face?” Mrs. Wilson asked as she set a basket of rolls down next to Florence’s plate. “You’ve been touched by an angel’s wing, child. They’ve opened the door to you; they’ve let you in. But you must remember this—they haven’t made you one of them.”
The words swirled in Florence’s head; they made her dizzy. She tried to push them away, tried to keep them from seeping into her, but she realized that no matter how much she didn’t want Mrs. Wilson to be right, she was: Florence may sleep in their beds and eat their food, she may laugh at their jokes and guard their secrets, but she was not, and never would be, a Towers.
No matter how much time passed, it would never stop feeling strange to Florence, being both on the inside and outside of something at the same time.
Chapter Eight
June 1982
On Sunday, her one day off, Ana got up early. She fumbled in the dark to turn off her alarm clock before anyone else could hear it and, in her haste, knocked over an alabaster bowl holding potpourri and sent a picture frame tumbling to the floor.
“Shit,” she mumbled in the dark.
Ana sat up and turned on the lamp on her nightstand. She silenced her alarm and then sat there for a moment, holding her breath, listening.
For such a large home, Ana felt she scarcely had any more privacy than she’d had growing up in her parents’ house, with eight people sharing two bedrooms and a single bathroom. Here, there were always people milling around: maids cleaning up after her, a chef preparing her meals—poached eggs doused in hollandaise sauce and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast every morning. Even her room wasn’t a private space. The maids came in at least twice a day: once in the morning to get her laundry and make the bed, and then again in the evening for turndown service. It made her feel lazy, like an overgrown child, to have other people doing things for her that she was perfectly capable of doing herself. She was used to a certain level of utility, self-sufficiency, independence. To have that taken from her felt stifling. If someone had told her only a month ago that this would be her life now, she wouldn’thave believed them. She had never had a hunger for grand things. That had always been her cousin Rosie.
Rosie, who after high school had moved to Los Angeles to study hospitality at Santa Monica City College. She worked night shifts as a clerk at the front desk of the Duchess Hotel in Beverly Hills. The Duchess was a historic landmark. Shirley Temple had learned her famous stairstep dance on the grand staircase of the Duchess’s lobby. Clark Gable had jumped into the hotel pool, still dressed in his tuxedo, at an Oscars after-party after winning Best Actor forIt Happened One Night. In the ’60s, the Rat Pack were spotted so regularly at the Sunset Lounge, the Duchess’s restaurant, that they reportedly had their own designated booth. All that glitz and glam did nothing for Ana, but Rosie was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. She used to tell Ana stories about the brief but electrifying encounters she had with the celebrities who stayed there. Once, she had checked in Brooke Shields, and Miss Shields told her she had nice hair. Another time, she had delivered an extra set of towels to Keith Richards’s suite, and he had answered the door stark naked, with two women in his bed. Clint Eastwood had stayed there while filmingEvery Which Way but Loose, and Rosie was responsible for giving him his wake-up call every morning at 4:00 a.m.
“Just think, Ana,” Rosie had told her once teasingly, over one of their frequent phone calls, “you’re talking to the voice that starts Clint Eastwood’s day.”
Rosie was an only child, something Ana had always envied about her. Ana was one of six, sandwiched between two older sisters and three younger brothers. She’d shared the attic with her sisters, where the walls sloped on both sides, so you could only stand up straight when you were standing in the middle, and there was a dusty single-pane window that never let in enough light. Ana existed on hand-me-downs from her sisters until she was old enough to work and put aside some of her own money. Everything she owned was inherited, worn, starting to pill under the arms from too many washes. Nothing ever fit her just right; nothing was exactly to her taste.
But her cousin Rosie had her own room. A proper room with four straight walls and two windows that let in unending light. Rosie’s mother, Ana’s aunt Magdalene, took Rosie shopping for a new set of clothes before each school year started, and Rosie had her own closet with things that she had picked out herself, that no one had ever worn before her.
Rosie was two years older than Ana but closer to her in age than either of her sisters, so Ana spent as much time as she could at Rosie’s house growing up. Rosie’s father owned a cattle ranch, and they would spend their time helping with chores, watering and brushing the horses. On the weekends, they would play house in Rosie’s bedroom, build forts with old linens, and whip egg whites with Aunt Magdalene in the kitchen for the tres leches cake they’d eat after dinner. When they were older, Rosie was the one who taught Ana how to curl her lashes and pluck her brows. When Rosie moved away to college, Ana felt a hollow ache beneath her ribs, like a piece of her was missing.
Ana still felt that familiar ache when she thought of Rosie, but it was different now. It’d grown sharper edges. She stared at the receiver on her bedside table. She wished it was that simple, that she could pick up the phone and call her cousin, tell her of the strange life she was living now. No one would understand it better, no one would appreciate it more, than Rosie. But, of course, that was impossible. She hadn’t talked to Rosie in years.
When Ana was sure that no one in the house had heard her, she threw back her bedcover and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, being careful to step over the shards of the alabaster bowl that littered the floor. She would clean it up later. For now, she had a plan she had to get to; she had to move quickly.
Ana couldn’t help but feel that she’d accomplished very little in her first two weeks here. It was too dangerous to go snooping around during the day. If she was going to make any progress, she could do it only when everyone else was asleep.
