Her first step was to find a primary source, someone who knew Chastity before she had buried herself under layers of Sterling wealth and a new identity. The small-town Nevada newspaper archives were a start, but they were a cold, impersonal record. Clara needed a human connection. She found a promising lead in a high-school yearbook she had managed to access through an online genealogy database. Under Chastity Sterling’s senior picture, there was a list of extracurricular activities, including the Future Homemakers of America club. The club’s faculty adviser was a woman named Eleanor Vance. A quick search revealed that Eleanor Vance, now in her late sixties, was still living in the same small Nevada town, retired after a forty-year career as a home-economics teacher.
It was a long shot, but Clara composed a carefully worded email, introducing herself as a freelance writer working on a story about the changing face of the American West, and how the lives of young women in small towns had evolved over the past few decades. She mentioned that she had come across Chastity Sterling’s name in her research and would love to hear any memories Mrs. Vance might have of a former student. For two days, there was no reply. Clara started to think it was a dead end. Then an email notification popped up. It was from Eleanor Vance.
Dear Ms. Thompson, the email began. I remember Chastity Sterling very well. A very driven young woman. If you’re ever in our neck of the woods, I’d be happy to chat over a cup of tea.
Two days later, Clara was driving her beat-up sedan through the vast, empty expanse of the Nevada desert, the shimmering heat a world away from the cool, foggy streets of San Francisco. She found Eleanor Vance in a small, tidy house with a garden full of resilient desert roses. Over iced tea and homemade shortbread cookies, Eleanor painted a vivid and often poignant picture of the girl who would become Victoria Sterling.
“Chastity was a girl in a hurry,” Eleanor said, her voice tinged with a sad, gentle wisdom. “Her mother had passed away when she was young, and her father, Alistair, was always working, always scheming. He was a hard man, obsessed with making money, with escaping his own humble beginnings, and he poured all of that ambition, all of that shame, into his daughter.”
She described a young girl who was relentlessly drilled on etiquette, who was forced to take voice and deportment lessons, who was constantly told that her small-town roots were something to be ashamed of, something to be erased. “She was fiercely ambitious, yes,” Eleanor continued, “but she was also deeply, deeply insecure. She believed that the only way to be loved, the only way to be safe, was to be perfect, to be powerful, to be someone else entirely. The beauty pageants, the desperate attempts at sophistication, it was all part of Alistair’s grand plan to mold his daughter into a suitable heiress for the empire he was determined to build.”
“Is there anything else?” Clara asked, sensing there was more to the story. “Any specific event she’d be terrified of people knowing?”
Eleanor was quiet for a moment, her gaze distant. “There is one thing,” she said slowly. “Her senior year, there was a scandal. A boy in her class, a sweet kid from a poor family, had a crush on her. He wrote her a poem. It was clumsy, heartfelt. But to Chastity, it was a reminder of the commonness she was so desperate to escape. She didn’t just reject him. She humiliated him. Read the poem aloud in the crowded school hallway, mocking every word. The boy was devastated. He dropped out of school a week later.” Eleanor sighed, a deep, weary sound. “But that’s not the worst of it. The boy’s family owned a small plot of land. Nothing special. But it stood in the way of a development project Alistair wanted. A month after the incident with the poem, there was a fire. The family’s barn burned down. The official cause was faulty wiring. But there were rumors. Ugly rumors. The family, broken and defeated, sold their land to Alistair for a fraction of its worth and left town. Nothing was ever proven, of course,” Eleanor said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “But Chastity, she knew. I saw it in her eyes. She knew her cruelty had paved the way for her father’s greed. It was the first, and perhaps the last, time I ever saw a flicker of genuine fear in that girl’s eyes.”
A fire. A ruined family. A secret buried under years of wealth and a new name. This was more than just a skeleton in the closet. This was a ghost. A ghost that had the power to burn Victoria Sterling’s carefully constructed world to the ground.