The Lost Heiress: A Novel by Elizabeth Klehfoth

Author:Elizabeth Klehfoth [Klehfoth, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2025-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Present

Detective Church leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. His head was starting to throb from all the reading he’d done, the strain of studying small text and puzzling out handwriting in the old case files, which had never been digitized. Instead, there were several large binders full of typed and handwritten reports, microfiche, and photographs that had degraded with time. The pages had yellowed, the ink had faded, and everything smelled musty, like an old library book. Church had been through the whole thing now, catalogued timelines and persons of interest. The details swam around in his head, untethered.

A cold case was like a giant puzzle that had been partially assembled, the edges and corners filled in, the middle a patchwork of center pieces and the maddening empty spaces between them. Normally, Church enjoyed the slow, laborious process of examining each piece and figuring out how they fit together; he loved the challenge of looking for the needle in the haystack that someone else had missed.

But the Towers case was frustrating. Often, crimes were solved by one of two things: witness testimony or physical evidence. What was perhaps most remarkable about Saoirse Towers’s case was the scarcity of either, when one would think the circumstances under which she disappeared would have lent themselves to an excess of both. How was it, Detective Church wondered, that in a house full of guests gathered for the express purpose of celebrating Saoirse’s birthday, nobody had noticed that the guest of honor was missing? Surely somebody would have seen or heard something? Anything.

But when the police interviewed the guests the evening after Saoirse disappeared, the timeline they were able to cobble together of Saoirse’s activities the night prior was piecemeal and fuzzy. One guest claimed to have seen her floating on a swan raft in the outdoor pool, sipping champagne, at the same time that another saw her eating cake in the ballroom. One guest might have seen her crying in the bathroom. She had given her handkerchief to a tall dark-haired girl in a silver party dress weeping over the sink, but it could have been someone else—she didn’t get a good look. On only three points were the guests decidedly unanimous: the night was dark, the drinks were flowing, and the storm was loud. The party and the weather worked in unison to create the perfect cocktail of chaos and distraction. Part of Detective Church couldn’t help but wonder if that was purely coincidental or by design.

When the police searched the house and grounds the next day, they were dismayed to find that the whole scene had been compromised. The household had known about Saoirse’s disappearance for hours before they alerted the authorities. By the time the police arrived, any evidence that the storm had not washed away had been destroyed by the guests in their search. The halls were smeared with muddy footprints going in every which direction, the gardens trampled, every surface in Saoirse’s room touched by dozens of hands.

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