Page 30 of The Lost Heiress
“Who’s hungry?” Sister Mary asked, parting Ransom from his thoughts as she entered the room carrying two plates laden with bacon and cinnamon rolls.
“Me!” Vivi sang out, raising her hand eagerly into the air. “I am!”
“Here we go, then,” Sister Mary said, setting the plates down on the coffee table. “Bon appétit.”
Vivi pulled her plate into her lap and grabbed a spear of blackened bacon, which she eagerly bit into.
“There’s crawdads in the creek already,” Vivi said as she chewed.
“They’re early this year,” Ransom said, and Vivi nodded.
“Wanna go catch some after we eat?” Vivi asked.
She had a small aquarium tank in her room, which she used to house the crawdads she caught in the creek each summer. She’d name them and feed them cabbage leaves and shrimp and let them go when the fall came.
“Sure,” Ransom said. “That sounds nice.”
By the time Ransom returned to his car, it was midday and the fog had burned off, replaced by the hot, dry sun. He stood for a moment facing west, toward the broad expanse of the Pacific Ocean, which he could not see from where he stood, but he could smell it—the salt and the brine still thick in the air, carried by the wind. He closed his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath.
Sometimes, his father had told him, you had to do things in service of the family name. You had to make sacrifices that people without a name would never have to make. You had to hide parts of yourself, fold them up, and push them down and smile, even if their pointy edges bit into your rib cage with every breath you took.
Ransom thought for a moment of his brother, Theo, who had at least shared in the weight of this secret for the brief window between their parents’ death and his own. Sometimes, Ransom couldn’t help but wonder if all the tragedy that had befallen his family was some kind of divine retribution for the sins they had committed. He felt like Atlas, condemned by the gods to stand at the edge of the earth and hold up the sky. Maybe death had been Theo’s punishment, and this was his—to forever carry the weight of his family’s sins, silent and alone.
Chapter Ten
July 1982
On the northwest side of the house, past the garden, was a staircase down to the beach. The structure hugged the steep cliffside, one flight dropping down to a landing and then another flight going back in the same direction, so that it stood in what had once been a tall, neat column, five stories high. The staircase had been built with the house after Doris Oppenheimer Towers, on one of her annual visits out west, had proclaimed that it was a travesty to live in a house so close to the beach without direct access to it. What good was owning a hundred acres of land along the coastline if all you could do was look at it, and, to get to the nearest beach accessible by foot, you had to go two miles down a public highway? She wanted to walk out her door and put her toes in the sand. So Remington Towers had commissioned a staircase to be built off the garden, leading down the cliffside to the beach. Rumor had it that after the staircase was built, Doris Oppenheimer Towers had used it exactly once. She’d descended the stairs, taken off her shoes, dipped her toes in the sand, pursed her lips as if to proclaim it good enough, if not entirely satisfactory, and then climbed the stairs again.
The beach that the staircase led to hardly warranted the name. It was a stretch of sand no more than a hundred feet long and fifty feet deep. When the tides came in, they swallowed half of it, leaving only anarrow sliver of sand. The cliffs rose steeply like walls on all three sides around the beach, making it feel even smaller than it was. Barely anyone from the household used that beach. It was a long descent down those five flights of stairs and an even more arduous climb back up. The beach was small, hard, and cold—and inhospitably windy. The family much preferred the beach two miles down the road, with its soft sand and sunshine, where there was room to spread out.
Because no one used the beach, the staircase leading to it had gradually fallen into disrepair. The sun dried out the timber. Salt water settled into the cracks, pushing the fibers of the wood apart. The result was that now, instead of standing in a tall neat column, the staircase slumped noticeably to the right, as if it had grown tired of standing up straight. It creaked and swayed when you walked on it. Birdie Towers, proclaiming it to be both an eyesore and a hazard, had campaigned to have it taken down. But Charles and Florence Talbot, who both had strong attachments to Doris Oppenheimer Towers, quietly but resolutely dissented, and so the staircase stayed where it was.
Saoirse was the only one who used the staircase, secretly and often. That little scoop of sand was the one place she could be sure to be alone, where no one else would bother her. That was where she found herself that morning, the wind pressing into the cliffside in galloping gusts, the waves violently pounding the shore. The morning fog had not yet cleared. Saoirse sat on the bottom step of the staircase, her feet in the cold, wet sand. She shrugged deeper into her cardigan, her hair whipping behind her.
It was the Fourth of July; her brother was home. Her godfather, William Bass, had arrived the night before.
Normally, Saoirse was thrilled to see Bass. They’d always enjoyed a special relationship, unlike any of the relationships she had had with the other adults in her life. Her mother had either ignored or criticized her; her father had doted on her, but he was good in a way she never could be, and she knew she constantly disappointed him with her temper and her wayward antics. But Bass was different. With him, itwas never about rules or discipline, expectations or behaving oneself. It was always about having a good time. When, at six, Saoirse had baldly told a visiting congressman’s wife that her hair looked like a dead rat, her mother had nearly spat out her wine and then harshly glared at her and sent her to bed without supper. Her father had apologized to the woman profusely and then brought Saoirse a bit of bread and soup in her room, gently chastising her for the way she had made the woman feel. But Bass had only laughed when he’d heard her remark and given her a Toblerone. Saoirse’s one regret was that she’d made the remark right before a family-planned trip to the Maldives, and after, there had been talk about whether she would be allowed to go. She’d overheard her mother, father, and Bass discussing it one night in her father’s study as she pressed her ear against the door.
“I personally find it refreshing when a young lady speaks her mind,” Bass said. “And she was telling the truth—the woman’s hair did look like a dead rat. Honestly, I think Saoirse was doing the woman a favor by telling her. I don’t see why she should be punished for it.”
“She’s a child, Will,” Birdie said. “I don’t care if Angela’s hair looked like the pope; she was mortified. Now just see if I’m ever invited back for canasta.”
There was a pause, and Saoirse could picture her mother taking a drag on her cigarette. “That girl is impetuous,” Birdie said, “and I will not stand for it.”
“I don’t believe Saoirse had any malicious intentions,” Charles said. “But she must be taught that her words have consequences and that we have an obligation to the feelings of others.”
“You don’t want Saoirse to grow up to equivocate, to pussyfoot around things,” Bass said. “You want her to know her mind and speak it. Don’t punish the girl for doing exactly that.”
In the end, Saoirse had been allowed to go on the family vacation, but not without a very long lecture by her father that she had genuinely tried to pay attention to—but she’d ended up counting the panels in the ceiling above his head instead.
That was not the first or only time that Bass had rescued her. When Saoirse was ten and had broken the heel of one of her mother’s favorite pairs of vintage pumps while playing dress-up, Bass had sourced another pair and helped her replace them in her mother’s closet before Birdie was any the wiser. When Saoirse was twelve and had gotten into a fight at school with another girl, it was to Bass whom Saoirse took her pink slip, Bass who accompanied her to her parent-teacher conference, Bass who defended Saoirse’s conduct, all while her parents were kept blissfully unaware. Saoirse had always felt she could confide in Bass her secrets, her true opinions, without fear of judgment or reprimand. He understood her in a way few other people did. Partly, perhaps, because they were so similar. They both loved to have a good time, to entertain, to be the center of attention. They were impulsive and had quick tempers that could be slow to cool.
Bass was the first person she’d tried to plead her case to when Ransom pulled her out of school and dragged her back to Cliffhaven. She’d fully expected him to be on her side. She remembered phoning him from her father’s old study because Ransom had had the phone removed from her room. She’d sat huddled in the alcove under the desk, lest a maid passing by in the hall see her and try to take the phone away or disconnect the call. She’d pressed the receiver to her ear so hard it hurt, desperate, and almost dropped it when she heard Bass’s voice on the other end, she was so relieved to have finally reached a lifeline, someone who could do something to help her. She’d told him the whole sordid story, the words tumbling out of her like one long tangled rope of hurt, barely pausing for breath between relaying one betrayal after another. When she finished, she gulped down air and waited for Bass’s response. She’d expected him to be shocked, confused, outraged. To ask questions and shout expletives.
Instead, his voice came over the phone steady and measured. “I understand that this is hard, Saoirse,” he said. “And I hate to see you so upset.”
The cold realization washed over her then—he’d already known what had been done to her, and he hadn’t done anything to stop it.
