Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
“You’re here to expose me in some way?” Ransom asked.
Elena shook her head. “No,” she said. “All I want is the truth.”
“The truth,” Ransom said sarcastically. “Coming from someone who posed under a fake name, who came into my home under false pretenses. Has anything you’ve told me since I met you had any semblance of truth?”
“If I’ve been dishonest, it’s because you’ve given me no other choice,” Elena said heatedly.
“Any time my family has tried to get answers, we have been met with silence or legal sleights of hand. We do not have—how did you put it? ‘Vast resources at our disposal.’ Or ‘lethal lawyers.’ I saw a way to finally get answers, and I took it. If that makes me a liar, so be it.”
Ransom rubbed his forehead, trying to puzzle it out. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How did you come about the job posting?”
“Sophia, my sister, is a nurse at UCLA,” Elena said.
“She saw the job posting that Jacqueline put out. She knew who Jacqueline was, who she worked for, and she told me about it. I thought—if I could just get through the doors, I don’t know—maybe I could find something that would finally tell me the truth about what happened that day.
But I knew you’d never hire me if you knew my real name, if you knew my connection to Rosie. ”
“And Ana Rojas—who is she?” Ransom asked.
Elena shrugged. “I don’t know her. My cousin, he sort of runs a side business making fake IDs. This time, of course, the ID had to be a real person. He knew a girl who fit the profile we were looking for—someone our age who was going to nursing school—and he paid her to use her information.”
“So everything you’ve told me about yourself is a lie?” Ransom asked.
“No,” Elena said. “Mostly, I’ve been myself. I’ve told the truth. My relation to Rosie and the real reason I’m here are the only things I’ve been dishonest about.”
“Well, I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time,” Ransom said. “Everything I have to say about what happened that day, I’ve told to the police.”
“I’ve read their report,” Elena said. “Your version of events doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Well, those are the facts,” Ransom said. “Whether or not you can make sense of them is beyond my purview.”
Elena bristled at his condescension. “The facts contradict themselves,” Elena spat.
“You weren’t there!” Ransom said, raising his voice now. He breathed deeply, tried to rein in his temper. “Any view you have on the matter is pure speculation,” he said.
“It’s not,” Elena said. “Rosie and I, we talked on the phone most days. She told me about the people she met while working the front desk at the Duchess—celebrities, politicians, once, the Prince of Wales. She told me when you and Theo came in.”
Ransom grew very still.
“You probably didn’t notice her at first, didn’t think anything of her—but she took note of you,” Elena said.
“You were quiet and aloof, she said, standing back from the desk, barely acknowledging her with a glance. There was a girl with you who didn’t speak, and you held on to her arm.
Your brother, Theo—she thought he was handsome and charming.
He smiled at her, asked her for her name.
You can imagine what a rarity that is for a front desk girl.
The next day, he came by himself to ask for directions, and he leaned against the front desk like he had nowhere else to be.
They talked for half an hour. He seemed kind.
Later, he called down for more towels, and she brought them up.
It was the Lotus Suite you were staying in—do you remember? One of the nicest suites in the hotel.”
Ransom had a look of quiet panic in his eyes.
“Theo answered the door when Rosie knocked; he invited her in,” Elena went on.
“You were playing cards around the coffee table in the sitting room—Go Fish, she said. It was you and Theo and that girl. Theo asked Rosie if she wanted anything to drink. She asked for a Coca-Cola, and the two of them stood out on the balcony, talking. She stayed for over an hour. When she had to leave, he walked her to the door. The three of you were going sailing the next day, on your yacht, to Catalina, he told her. It was Rosie’s day off, and he asked her to join you.
She was so excited that night when we spoke on the phone.
It was all she could talk about,” Elena said. “The next day, she was dead.”
Silence settled between them.
“I am very sorry about your cousin,” Ransom said. “Truly sorry.”
“I don’t need your condolences,” Elena said. “I need answers. You claimed it was just you and Theo and Rosie on the boat that day. Just the three of you—no mention of the other girl who was there, the one from the hotel room. Why? Who was she?”
Ransom didn’t answer.
“Your story—it’s not the whole truth, is it?” Elena said. “You’re leaving something out.”
Ransom took a deep breath. “If you don’t believe my account of things, then read the coroner’s report. He ruled it an accidental drowning.”
“He also said there was evidence of blunt force trauma,” Elena countered.
Ransom didn’t speak.
“Rosie never would have gotten into that dinghy without a life jacket,” Elena said.
“She was terrified of the water. She didn’t know how to swim.
” Elena leaned forward, pleading. “Ransom, please. You have to understand—this was the dearest person to me in the whole world. Rosie was like my sister. And the not knowing—I can’t do it anymore.
Please. I’m not here to gather dirt on your family.
I’m not here to take you down. I just need to know what happened that day. What really happened.”
Ransom fixed her with a steely gaze.
Over the past several months that she had known him, he had been cold and prickly and aloof.
But there had also been moments when she had seen something else in him—flashes of kindness and generosity, real moments of vulnerability.
Moments that made her think—hope—that he was the type of person capable of telling her the truth that she was so desperately seeking, someone who could set her free from her torment of not knowing.
“I don’t think it was you who hurt Rosie,” Elena said. “It was Theo in the dinghy with her. And Theo, he had a history of—”
“Those were all unsubstantiated rumors,” Ransom said. “The girl from Vassar, she never pressed charges.”
Elena pursed her lips. “You said yourself Theo was many things.”
Ransom fell silent.
“I understand why you’d want to protect Theo when it happened,” Elena said. “He’s your brother, and you loved him, however flawed he may have been. But he’s gone now. What’s the use in protecting him anymore?”
“I’m sorry,” Ransom said, “but I can’t give you what you want.”
There was a finality in his voice, and Elena felt his words to her core—the cold, swift kick of denial.
“Coward,” she said, the ball of anger slipping into her belly. It was a fire that heated her whole body. She stood up.
She had come so far; she had gotten so close.
She had never felt so angry and so helpless at the same time.
She clenched and unclenched her hands. This can’t be it.
This couldn’t be all there was. She hadn’t spent the past three months at Cliffhaven for things to end like this, to return home with nothing.
She grabbed her purse and stood up, walked toward the door. The whole time, her mind was spinning, grappling for an idea, a plan, to turn everything around before it was too late. There had to be something she could still do.
She paused at the door and glanced down at the purse clenched at her side.
She thought of the hard, cold metal gun it hid.
She had only ever brought it with her as a means of protection.
She was going to live in the house with the very man who might have had something to do with Rosie’s death.
She couldn’t walk into the lion’s den without a chair.
She had never before imagined using the gun for harm or intimidation. But.
But. But. But.
She was desperate, wasn’t she? And she was out of other options. If he wouldn’t give her the truth, there was still something she could do to pry the truth from him, whether he was willing or not.