Great Big Beautiful Life

It’s beautiful. I’m already mentally drafting how I’d describe it. The only problem is, I’m still not convinced I’ll have a reason to describe it.

Because so far there’s nothing to indicate this is Margaret Ives’s house. No photos of her illustrious family. No copies, old or new, of any of their dozens of magazines or newspapers. No framed illustrations of the opulent “House of Ives” where she’d been raised on the California coast, and none of her late husband’s Grammys on the mantel either. Nothing concrete to link her to the now-collapsed media juggernaut, or the joys and tragedies the Ives family’s competing publications had so loved to catalog back when Margaret was still on top of the world.

The door swings open again, and I spin to face Jodi, working myself up to demand answers about who exactly invited me to do eleven hours of air travel plus forty-five minutes in a rented Kia Rio for this meeting.

But then I see the woman standing just inside.

She’s shrunk a few inches, gained some weight—much of it muscle, I’d guess—and her once jet-black hair is now a mix of mousy brown and silver.

She’s been scrubbed clear of any glamour, or air of money and power, but that sly sparkle in her blue eyes is exactly the same as in every photograph I’ve seen of her, the elusive, unnamable something that had turned her from heiress to a newspaper fortune to princess of the cover page.

“Well, hello there.” The warmth in Margaret’s voice surprises me, just like it did during our few brief phone calls in the weeks leading up to this trip. “You must be Alice.”

She shucks off her gardening gloves and tosses them across the arm of the nearest white rattan chair as she strides barefoot toward me, dusting her hands off on her caftan before stretching one out to shake mine.

“You’re her,” I say. Every eloquent or even serviceable sentence I’ve ever put together has been typed out slowly, over time. The ones that come directly from my mouth usually sound more like this.

She laughs. “I was under the impression that was the point.”

She gives my hand a little squeeze, then drops it and gestures for me to sit.

“No, it is.” I lower myself to the couch. She takes the chair opposite me. “I was just trying not to get my hopes up! It didn’t work. Never does. But I keep trying.”

“Really?” She sounds amused. “I tend to have the opposite problem. Can’t help but expect the worst from people.” She flashes a smile. It’s both dazzling and sad. Sazzling.

That, for example, would not make it to a typed-and-edited sentence. But the point is, I can see it hidden back beneath those sparkly irises of hers somewhere: the truth. The one we’ve never heard before.

What it was like to be born into a world of silver spoons and golden platters, of actors drunkenly swimming fully clothed through your indoor pool and politicians making handshake agreements across your antique dinner table.

How it felt to fall in love with rock ’n’ roll royalty, and for him to love you back, wildly.

And, of course, about the other things. The scandal, the cult, the trial, the accident.

And finally, twenty years ago, Margaret’s disappearance.

What happened, but also why.

And why now, after all this time, she’s open to finally telling the story.

Behind Margaret, the door squeals open and Jodi reenters the house, toting a bucket of lemons. “Thank you, Jodi,” Margaret calls, without turning around.

Jodi grunts. I could not begin to guess whether the two women are friends, romantic partners, an employer and employee, or mortal enemies who happen to be roommates.

Margaret crosses one leg over the other. “Cute nails,” she says, jutting her chin toward my hands in my lap.

The moment of connection makes me near giddy. “They’re press-ons.” I lean forward so she can get a better look at the little strawberry-printed designs.

“I’d bet you’re the kind of person,” she says, “who tries to find beauty in everything.”

“Don’t you?” I ask, intrigued by the soft, sad smile that feathers across her lips.

She gives a half-realized shrug that reads less like I don’t know and more like I don’t like that question.

Then, like the Ives she is, she neatly reroutes the dialogue: “So how exactly would this work? If I agreed to do it.”

I don’t let the if discourage me. I know she isn’t one hundred percent in just yet, and I don’t blame her. “However you want it to,” I promise.

She arches one brow. “What if I want it to work how it would usually work?”

“Well,” I say, “I haven’t done anything exactly like this before. Usually I’m doing features and profiles. I spend a couple days, or weeks, with a person. And I write about my observations, crack some jokes. It’s an ‘outsider looking in’ perspective. This would be different.

“It’d be about getting your experience onto the page. ‘Insider looking out.’ That would take a lot longer, months probably, just for the first round of research to be able to write a draft and figure out where my holes are. I’d rent a place nearby, and we’d have a schedule, times for sit-down interviews, but also time for me to just shadow you.”

“Shadow me,” she repeats thoughtfully.

“Follow you around in your normal life,” I clarify. “See what you grow in your garden, who you spend your time with. Hang out with you and Jodi, and any other friends you’ve got in town.”

Margaret’s chin juts forward, her eyes closing on her own quick, blunt laugh. “Do me a favor and say that again when she gets back in here.”

Mere seconds later, Jodi comes streaming into the room, carrying two glasses of lemonade. She plops them both down on the coffee table.

“Thanks, Jodi,” I say, determined to win her over.

She marches back out the way she came in.

“I’d die without you,” Margaret calls teasingly after her.

“Don’t I know it,” Jodi shouts, before disappearing through the doorway.

I take a tiny sip of the lemonade, which turns into a long gulp, because it’s amazing, fresh and crisp with torn mint leaves swirling around along with the ice cubes.

I set the glass down and force myself to get back to business. “Look, there are a lot more experienced writers you could pair up with. There are hundreds of people who would push me in front of a bus to get this job, and honestly, I’d understand it if they did.”

“Troubling,” Margaret says.

“My point is, if you’re ready to tell your story, you deserve to have it told exactly how you want it to be. It needs to be yours, no one else’s. And that only works if you’re doing this with someone you completely trust. But I can promise you, if you end up wanting to write this book together, your voice will be front and center. That’s my top priority. Making sure it’s your story.”

Her smile fades, her face sobering. The crinkles at the corners of her eyes and the folds at the edges of her mouth deepen, proof of an entire life lived, not just those first thirty-three years she spent in the public eye, but the thirty she spent as a recluse after that, and the twenty since she vanished.

“What if,” she says slowly, “that’s not what I want?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure I’m following.”

“What if I don’t want it to be my version of the story?” she asks. “What if I want the whole awful truth? What if I’m done living with my version of events, where I’m always the hero, and I want to sit down and see things in black and white for once?”

Her question catches me off guard. If anything, I’m used to having to reassure my subjects that I’m not there to twist everything they say into a brutal takedown piece. That I want to see the full picture, right down to their humanity.

Margaret’s brow arches at my hesitancy. “That a problem?”

I scoot to the edge of the couch. “It’s how you want it told,” I repeat. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we do.”

She considers for a long moment. “One more question.”

“Anything.” She could ask for my most embarrassing sex story, and I’d trot it out right now. I need her to understand she’s safe with me.

Her gray eyebrow arches wickedly again. “Are you always this perky?”

I let out a breath. This is too lengthy and important a job to kick things off with a lie.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

Her chortle is interrupted by a sound like wind blowing through glass chimes. Margaret glances at the driftwood clock on the Grammy-free mantel.

“That’ll be my two o’clock.” She sweeps onto her feet. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Alice Scott.”

I bounce up onto mine too, grabbing my unused notebook and recorder. “Either way,” I say, “thank you. Seriously.”

“For what?” she says, sounding genuinely baffled as she leads me back through the maze of hallways.

“For today,” I say. “For giving me a chance.” For the fact that I finally have something work related to tell my mom that won’t make her eyes glaze over with disinterest.

“It’s just a chance,” Margaret reminds me as we reach the front door. “Don’t thank me for that. Everyone deserves that much. And I’ve still got a couple other branches to shake, see what falls out.”

“I completely understand, but—” My words drop off as she swings the bright pink door open, and I realize how wrong I was.

I did not completely understand.

Margaret’s two o’clock is standing on the top step in slate-colored chinos and a white T-shirt.

It’s not the outfit that makes my heart sink and all the blood drain from my face—though the idea of wearing long pants in weather like this certainly does give me pause.

It’s the hulking, dark-eyed, hawk-nosed man wearing it.

Hayden Anderson.

Four years ago, you might’ve said Hayden Anderson the music journalist, and that would’ve been a fair summation. But if he were still just a music journalist, I wouldn’t know his name, let alone what he looked like. I have a decent memory, but I don’t make a habit of memorizing Rolling Stone bylines.

However.

He’s no longer just Hayden Anderson the music journalist.

Now, he’s Hayden Anderson the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The one who wrote that doorstop-length gut punch about the Americana singer with dementia.

Now he’s the Hayden Anderson that Margaret just referred to as another branch to shake. A more successful, more well-known, more more branch.

His dark eyes cut from me (expression blank, he doesn’t recognize me; why would he? I am an unimpressive branch) to Margaret (in whom he is only marginally less disinterested) as his low rumble of a voice says, “Am I early?”

“You’re exactly on time,” Margaret says warmly. “Alice was just going.”

I would describe the expression on Hayden’s face as a distinct mien of who the hell is Alice, like he’s already forgotten there’s another person standing immediately in front of him, or possibly didn’t actually register me the first time our eyes met.

“Hi!” I recover enough grip on my organs for my heart to be pumping blood again, my lungs to be pulling in oxygen, and my hand to be reaching out to shake his.

He lifts his slowly, as if he’d like some more information before he agrees to physical contact.

“I was just leaving,” I promise, and that seems to do the trick. Finally, his very large, very warm, very dry hand folds around mine, dips once, and drops back to his side.

“Thanks again,” I tell Margaret over my shoulder as I hurry out onto the sidewalk.

“I’ll be in touch,” she tells me, and I force a smile, like my heart isn’t a little bit breaking and I’m not on the verge of tears over the dream job I’m ninety-nine percent sure I’ve just missed out on.

2

I spend my first night at the Grande Lucia Resort eating Twizzlers and googling Hayden Anderson while convincing myself the world isn’t ending.

First I read a dozen rave reviews of his book. Then I stumble across a Publishers Weekly article that estimates its first year’s US sales to be upwards of two million. Lastly, just to torture myself, I watch an interview with Hayden and the book’s subject, Len Stirling, wherein Len informs the interviewer that he’d already considered nine writers before Hayden even threw his hat in the ring. Hayden, without any trace of humor or irony, leans forward to add, “I’m very competitive.”

I cut my own groan short.

There’s still a chance Margaret will choose to work with me.

Maybe she’d rather work with a woman. Maybe she always roots for the underdog. Maybe she just has a natural distaste for tall, muscular, talented men who write the kind of biographies that not only don’t make a person fall asleep but also go so far as to make said person weep multiple times while she’s reading alone at the bar of her neighborhood taqueria back in Highland Park.

There could be lots of reasons why she doesn’t want to work with Hayden, and surely there could be at least several why she would want to work with me.

I nod to myself, more enthusiastically than I feel, as I flop back on the cheery gingham bedspread, gazing out the window, upside down, toward the beach beyond the hotel’s courtyard.

I should’ve known a secret like Margaret’s whereabouts couldn’t last forever.

It had all started four months ago, when my profile on the former child star Bella Girardi came out. That piece was the thing I was absolute proudest of in my career thus far. I had a full folder of sweet emails from former colleagues and glowing screenshots of online chatter about the story after it went live.

And all of that, in itself, would’ve been more than enough to make the weeks of writing and rewriting and back-and-forths with my fact-checkers and editor all worth it.

But at the bottom of one very short email there was also a little something extra.

Loved the piece, LindaTakesBackHerLifeAt53 wrote. P.S. That Cosmo Sinclair song about Margaret Ives that u and Bella talked about is one of my all-time faves. Did u know Margaret’s living down on an island in Georgia now, selling art under a fake name?

That was it. No more information. And when I emailed Linda back, I got no reply.

I spent two weeks researching any connection Margaret might have to Georgia (none that I could find), and googling combinations of her name with “art” and “island,” to no avail. Margaret Ives vanished entirely from public view in the early two thousands, and mostly the rumor mill seemed to suggest she’d married an Italian olive farmer half her age and settled down on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

At first, I was ninety percent sure Linda was lying or misinformed.

There was no way Margaret Ives was in Georgia, on a little island that survived on local tourism, within a long day’s drive of the west Tennessee hometown of her late husband, Cosmo Sinclair.

But the idea wouldn’t let go of me. The rumor had to come from somewhere, I thought, even as I tried to talk myself out of my innate optimism.

I started trawling online message boards. Anything to do with Cosmo’s music, with the illustrious Ives family, with Margaret’s disappearance.

Nothing. On any of them.

And then I found the conspiracy theorists. People posting pictures of “Elvis” at a mall in Tuscaloosa. Or JFK wearing a bucket hat and a barely buttoned shirt, white chest hair spilling out around his gold chain necklace, in Miami. It took a while to find the Margaret post, just because the mystery of what happened to her had faded with time.

People knew about Ives Media, and they knew about the family’s palatial estate (now owned by the state and open for tours). They of course knew about the whole snafu with Margaret’s sister and the cult, and they could probably instantly call to mind the famous black-and-white photograph of Margaret and Cosmo running, hand in hand, up the courtroom steps the day that they eloped, his blond hair slicked back and hers teased into the beehive style of the time.

But after Cosmo’s tragic death, his widow had largely retreated from the glare of the spotlight. So that when she disappeared altogether, twenty years ago, no one was quite so interested as they might’ve been.

Most people had simply accepted that we’d never find out what happened to her. Just another Amelia Earhart, a woman lost to time.

But there were still some active Margaret Ives online communities dedicated to the rumors surrounding her vanishing. To debunking or proving them, depending on the poster’s point of view. They were treated like true-crime-junkie communities, bits of old interviews trotted out as evidence for or against a favorite theory.

Those specific message boards got me nowhere.

The Not So Dead Celebrities message board, however, led me here, to Little Crescent Island.

And if I could find her through that post, there’s no telling how many other Hayden Andersons might be flying cross-country to Little Crescent Island this very minute.

My phone buzzes on the mattress beside me, and I feel around until I find it. My stomach rises expectantly—maybe Margaret’s already made a decision—but then I see the screen.

Theo. Now, a different sensation rumbles in my stomach, that anxious flutter I still get when I hear from my on-again, off-again not-boyfriend.

How’d it go with the heiress? he asks. I’m touched he remembered. Probably too touched. I haven’t talked about much else the last few weeks. But still! He reached out to check in—that’s something!

I hesitate over how to phrase it and settle on: She’s intriguing and her house is a dream and I want the job so, so, so badly.

All true. It wouldn’t do me any good to add and I’m terrified I’m not going to get it, because a six-foot-three rock face of a man with a Pulitzer and a scowl to freeze a Gorgon is on the scene.

I watch the phone for a minute, two, three. I set it aside. I was drawn to Theo for his easy confidence and his laid-back, carefree way of moving through the world. There’s something so appealing about a person who doesn’t take anything too seriously. Until you have to text with one. Theo’s terrible at it. To be fair, I’m not amazing myself, but he’s the king of sending a message, to which I immediately reply, and then waiting a full day to acknowledge my response.

By then I may have lost my dream job and also fully melted into this bed, the puddle formerly known as the writer Alice Scott.

“Get yourself together, Scott!” I cry, pitching myself back onto my feet and slapping my laptop shut.

“You’re on a beautiful island with a growling stomach and an open schedule,” I tell myself, snatching my phone and stuffing my feet into my sandals. “Might as well make the most of it.”

Little Crescent Island is a vacation destination, but it’s not a nightlife hot spot. Most of the people here seem to be either retirees or families with kids, and it’s nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, so pickings are slim on the main drag.

The first open restaurant I come to is called Fish Bowl, and the menu posted out front seems to be ninety percent alcohol and ten percent seafood.

Inside, it’s cramped and wonderfully kitschy, with bamboo wall paneling and fishnets suspended from the ceiling, all manner of colorful plastic fish and glow-in-the-dark seaweed caught in them. A ponytailed server in a tight white shirt and short shorts whisks past me, tray in hand, and says cheerfully, “Sit anywhere you want, hon. We’re slow tonight.”

There are plenty of open tables, but two older gentlemen in matching bowling shirts are sitting at the bar, and I’m feeling kind of chatty, so I head their way. Right as I’m sidling onto a stool two down from them, though, they’re tossing money onto the glossy, dark wooden countertop and standing to go.

One catches my eyes, and I flash a smile.

He smiles back. “Highly recommend the Captain’s Bowl!”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I promise, and he tips an invisible hat before shuffling off after his companion. On the way out, the two of them stop to have a word with the ponytailed server, and she gives the lover of the Captain’s Bowl a peck on the cheek, so either they’re all locals or this place just has over-the-top service.

I go back to perusing the menu, resuming a practically lifelong debate of mine: whether to order fish tacos or fish and chips.

I’m still working on this when someone plops a massive bowl of startlingly blue liquid, ice, and roughly five fruit spears down in front of me. I look up, surprised, to find the ponytailed server smiling at me from behind the bar. “Captain’s Bowl,” she says. “Courtesy of the captains themselves.”

“Oh?” I glance toward the front door, the gentlemen from earlier long gone now. “What are they the captains of?”

“Uncle Ralph is the captain of the bowling team, and Cecil is the captain of this restaurant,” she muses. “Each has his own seat of power, but Cecil’s carries a bit more weight here, understandably.”

“Well, next time you see him, thank him for me,” I say.

She nods once. “Will do. Now, are you eating too tonight or just swimming?” She tips her chin toward the gargantuan bowl of violently unnatural blue, and I burst out laughing.

“What’s even in this?” I ask.

“Everything,” she says. “Plus some Coca-Cola.”

I take a tiny sip through the neon-pink straw, and it feels like I just inhaled sugar, then poured gasoline down my throat, but in a fun way.

“Food?” the woman—her name tag says Sheri—asks again.

I tell her my predicament, tacos versus fish and chips.

“Tacos,” she says decisively. “Always go with the tacos.”

“Perfect.” I set my menu down, and she whirls off through the door behind the bar. I look down at my drink and burst into laughter again. I’ve never been a big drinker, but I’d give this concoction a ten out of ten on presentation alone. I snap a picture and text it to Theo while I start nibbling on the first spear of fruit. You as a drink, he replies immediately. Have fun!

I will! I tell him, then set my phone down and give the restaurant another once-over. Other than me, there are two parties present at the moment: a family of five at the table under the front windows, and a guy nursing an ice water and eating a salad at the tiny booth back by the bathroom hallway.

He looks up from his water at that exact moment.

Nearly black hair, angular nose, a stern brow.

I whip back around to face the bar, nearly capsizing my stool in the process. I grab the edge of the counter to steady myself, heart racing. It probably isn’t even him. It’s probably my mind and the glow-in-the-dark ceiling playing tricks on me, forming Hayden Andersons out of random shadows.

I take another small sip of Captain’s Bowl to steel myself and then slowly, casually, throw a glance over my shoulder toward the booth.

He’s no longer looking this way. Instead he’s staring down at something in front of him, his brow tightly furrowed. Hunched over the tiny table like that, he gives the impression of a bear at a tea party, everything around him just a little too small and breakable.