Page 1 of The Lost Heiress
Prologue
Present
The workers found the body on Tuesday.
Well, not the body, but pieces of it. The left femur. The pelvic girdle. Part of a skull. The investigators erected their tent in the garden, graying bones assembled neatly on tarps as they crouched in the dirt with their trowels and brushes, like on some prehistoric dig.
Florence Talbot, the housekeeper, watched it all from the upstairs drawing room, a cup of chamomile tea cradled in her arthritic hands. The pain in her fingers was so bad this morning that she could barely grip the handle of the cup, which meant, of course, that it would soon rain. She glanced up at the pale-gray sky above her, and, as if to confirm her suspicions, a singular fat raindrop splattered against the windowpane.
The storms this year had been brutal and unrelenting, quite uncharacteristic for the Central Coast of California, where perpetual blue skies and sunshine were a far more familiar sight. Florence couldn’t recall another year as bad as this one, except perhaps 1982. Then, as now, the rains had eroded the claylike soil under the Towers family home. And then, as now, Ransom Towers had hired a local construction company to refortify the east wing, which sat precariously on the cliffside, overlooking the Pacific. It was while digging down to the footings that the builders had found her, or what remained of her. Forit was her, Saoirse Towers—Florence knew it deep in her bones, just as strongly as she felt the shifts in the weather. Before the DNA tests confirmed it—before the news choppers hovered over the house at all hours of the day and the reporters camped out at the gate of the front drive and all the headlines declaredBody of Young Heiress Found at Family Estate Nearly Forty Years After She Went Missing—Florence knew.
Florence knew, like Florence knew everything that went on at Cliffhaven. She’d been there practically her whole life. Her soul, her mind, her heart were tethered to the weathered stones of this house, to this family. She loomed over it all, a stalwart captain of a lumbering ship, buoyed by an extensive network of eyes and ears in every nook and cranny of the estate, which granted her a sort of omnipotence that both impressed and terrified the staff. Even now, she’d enlisted Sally, the maid, to hover around the workers in the garden under the guise of fetching them tea or getting them fresh towels or being helpful in some way. Florence could see Sally’s tall, lanky frame standing attentively next to one of the investigators in their navy windbreaker and then scurrying off toward the basement, probably to bring up a spare tarp before the storm hit.
The winds were picking up. Around the investigators’ tent in the garden, the snapdragons, with their spires of pale-pink flowers, were bent at a forty-five-degree angle, as if in prayer. The winter daisies visibly shivered, their buttercup centers puckered, their delicate white petals trembling. Florence glanced back up at the sky, which was a more brutish shade of gray now. This storm would not be small. It would make its presence known. It reminded Florence in many ways of the night that Saoirse had disappeared.
Florence remembered it like it was only yesterday, for how could she not? It was Saoirse’s eighteenth birthday party, one of the biggest social events of the season, and the party had taken all summer to plan. Florence had hired a caterer all the way from Los Angeles, flown crates of orchids in from Bogotá to fill the entry hall and ballroom. The champagne was Dom Pérignon, and it flowed from a fountain sculptedof ice that, prior to melting, stood nearly eight feet tall. Four engineering students from the local Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had been consulted in its construction, and they’d drilled through the foundation of the ballroom to place pipes that would drain away the water as the fountain melted, so as not to flood the hall. As the ice melted, it revealed a series of crystal letters spelling outs-a-o-i-r-s-e, a marvel within a marvel.
The cake was red velvet sponge with a thick cream cheese frosting, seven layers tall, with sparklers for candles that sent towers of flames soaring to the ceiling when lit. There was a dance floor in front of the stage, where Casey Hart and the Londoners had been flown in from Europe to play, and fireworks at midnight that got blotted out in the storm. Still, the party was a success; Florence took some small solace in that.
The guests—some of whom had come from as far away as Paris, New York, and Shanghai for the festivities—went to bed late and woke the next morning in various states of disarray, heads aching and stomachs sour from too much champagne. It was nearly two in the afternoon the following day before anyone realized that the birthday girl was missing. A maid was the one to raise the alarm. She’d gone to wake Saoirse and found her bed empty, the pillows still perfectly fluffed from the morning before, the coverlet neatly tucked in, crisp edges and corners the way that Florence always demanded. Indeed, the bed had never been slept in.
Quietly, discreetly, Florence had orchestrated a search party among the staff, but word that Saoirse was missing soon leaked to the guests, who filled their breakfast goblets with champagne and freshly squeezed orange juice from the buffet and stumbled down to the beach, calling Saoirse’s name. They tripped and laughed and cursed the sand in their shoes. A few rolled up their pant legs or held up the hems of their dresses and darted into the frothy waves. Others, when word reached them, got up in haste, still dressed in the rumpled suits in which they had stumbled off to bed. They pushed back their shirtsleeves and thrust their socked feet into slippers, eager to join the search party. The womenjoined, still in their disheveled party dresses, pajamas, and robes. The group was a motley bunch of mussed hair and unshaven cheeks.
It started in good fun, for it was all a game to them, this “Find the birthday girl” brigade. The sun was shining, the salty air felt cool against their skin, and, back at the house, a full breakfast was waiting for them. Nothing bad had happened yet. They would find Saoirse, probably shacked up on the shoreline with a boy, his jacket tented over them as they slept. Or, perhaps, she had passed out in the stables after getting it into her head that she’d take a drunken midnight ride on her thoroughbred, Jack Abbott, and they would all have a good laugh about it. Like that time when Saoirse was twelve and she’d taken the family boat out by herself and crashed it into the crags off the shore of Catalina. The Coast Guard had found her hours later, sitting serenely atop the platform of a buoy, snacking on crackers and caviar, and remarking what a lovely day it was for a swim. Oh, Saoirse, their dear wild child. The things she got up to. It would be another story to tell after dinner when the wine was flowing freely, more fodder for the gossip rags and Page Six.
They combed the beach, but there was no sign of her anywhere. They checked the stables next, then the billiard room and the indoor theater, followed by an extensive search of the gardens and the tennis courts and a trek to the family’s private airfield. As time crept on and the sun grew hotter, they started to sweat, shed their robes, unbuttoned their shirts, and complained about the heat. When a search of the observatory turned up empty, they retreated to the ballroom like refugees seeking asylum after a storm. Guests, now sober, congregated around tables like sailors clinging to lifeboats, the realization that something horrible had happened slowly washing over them, making them gasp for breath.
In the broad light of day, the grandeur of the ballroom had faded. The ornate walnut-paneled walls and gilded coffered ceilings felt claustrophobic and cage-like, the crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling somehow grotesque. Flowers wilted in their centerpieces; the tablecloths, once stark white and crisp, were stained with rings of redwine and smeared with grease. Bloody pools collected around the edges of dirty plates that had been cluttered onto trays, the leftover flanks of dull-red steaks slumped in the middle. On every available surface—the windowsills, the dessert table, the ledge of the stage where the band had played—were clusters of glasses, half full of stale champagne, lipstick smears around the edges. And in the center of the room, where the champagne fountain had once proudly stood, were the letterss-a-o-i-r-s-eglinting in the waning daylight. The previous night, a proclamation. Now, a question that no one could answer.
As Florence had flitted among the guests, tending to their variable anxieties and neuroses, the police collected statements. Florence overheard more than a few harried whispers about the Towers family curse, which made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up straight. The untimely deaths that had claimed so much of Saoirse’s family—the plane crash that had taken her parents; the skiing incident that had killed her brother, Theo; the horseback riding accident that had taken her late aunt; and, perhaps most infamously of all, the strange incident that had befallen her great-uncle Sebastian Towers, who’d drowned in the middle of Keany Square in Boston two days after his wedding, when a large storage tank exploded and unleashed a tidal wave of molasses. A string of unlikely tragedies had whittled the Towers family down to a few stalwart members. Could it be? Had the Towers family curse finally come for Saoirse too?
Now, the door of the drawing room creaked open, and Sally stumbled in, breaking Florence from her reverie. Florence turned to glance at the girl, who was still wearing her rain jacket and muddy boots from the garden. Tendrils of her red hair clung to the sides of her face, which looked unusually pale.
“Sally, your boots,” Florence admonished her. She couldn’t fathom what the girl was thinking, trekking through the house like that. She wasn’t usually so careless. “You’re dripping all over the mahogany floors.”
Sally glanced down at her feet absently, but even staring directly at the toes of her boots, which were caked in slick red clay, and the wet,bloodlike smears they’d made on the polished hardwood, she didn’t seem to register them.
“Oh, yes, I-I’m sorry,” Sally stuttered. There was a panicked, hollow look in her eyes when she peered back up at Florence. “It’s just, ma’am, well, they’ve found something. I thought you’d want to know.”
Sally’s words rattled Florence. “Found something?” she echoed. “What have they found?”
“A body,” Sally said.
For a moment, Florence almost wanted to laugh. Was the girl daft? Had she hit her head?
“Yes, child,” Florence said. “We’re all well aware of that.”
“No, ma’am.” Sally cleared her throat. “I don’t mean Miss Saoirse. I mean, they’ve found someone else.Anotherbody.”
“Another body?” Florence said.
It took a moment for the words to register. Florence took a step toward the window and peered down into the garden, but it wasn’t any use. Despite it being midday, with the storm coming in, the sky was now as dark as evening, and with the heavy rain, the investigators’ bright-blue tent was no more than an ominous dark figure crouched on the lawn, one that seemed to expand and contract, as if with breath, though Florence knew it was only a trick of the wind.
Sally watched her from where she hovered in the doorway. Florence Talbot—or Mrs. Talbot, as the staff all referred to her, even though she was not married—always seemed so ominous, so impenetrable, more of a force than a person. But as Sally looked at her now, she registered Mrs. Talbot’s small stature for the first time. The woman couldn’t be more than five feet four, and she looked her age, which was north of seventy, if Sally had to venture a guess. She looked old, frail.
Mrs. Talbot drew a shallow, rattling breath and dropped her teacup, which shattered unceremoniously on the floor.
“Mrs. Talbot, are you all right?” Sally asked, startled. She took a step toward her to come to her aid, but Mrs. Talbot raised a hand to stay her.
