Great Big Beautiful Life(101)

“Roy and Cosmo weren’t included,” I note.

“Dad had always welcomed Cosmo into the family, and to a lesser extent Roy,” she says. “So I knew this had to be something delicate. We went into the library while Roy and Cosmo had dessert. I remember there was a fire roaring in there, even though it was the dead of summer in California. But that was Dad. He had his routines.

“He had us sit down then and blurted it out, without any kind of preamble. He just said it: ‘We’re being extorted.’

“Mom nearly fell out of her chair. ‘By whom?’ I remember her asking. ‘For what?’ But something about the look on my father’s face broadcast the answer loud and clear to me. I just knew. Then he pulled the letter out of his dinner jacket and handed it to us.

“The funny thing is—well, not funny, but you know, peculiar—is that I didn’t even care about what Dad had said once I saw that handwriting. All that mattered to me was that Laura was okay. That she was finally writing to us.”





The Story


Their version: Laura Ives was the right hand of the high control group the People’s Moment for Metaphysical Healing. Laura Ives was just another victim of David Ryan Atwood. Laura Ives was a sucker. Laura Ives was a mastermind. She was a villain; she was a fool.



* * *



? ? ?

Her version: When she was small, Laura loved zebras. The family had had some, for a time. They’d gotten them because her grandfather’s mistress made a crack about wanting one. They’d gotten rid of them when Laura was eleven and her heart couldn’t take seeing them in captivity anymore.

Freddy had granted his younger daughter’s wish immediately. He wasn’t attached to the zebras. He wasn’t attached to much in his father’s mansion on the coast. For some reason, he just continued doing things the way Gerald always had.

Freddy’s anger was like his father’s too, flaring up whenever control over his life slipped out of his grasp. Freddy may have never stormed out on his family the way his father had, but he’d let his jealousy and shame destroy his marriage all the same.

He didn’t understand how it worked—why he couldn’t stop himself from driving off the people he loved most in the world, how he always ended up right back here, in this big, empty castle.

He never said any of this aloud. Not to anyone. He wouldn’t have known how to begin, or when to say it. But Margaret wasn’t the only person writing letters that were never sent.

Years later, after he died, she’d read them. Most, heartbreakingly, were to her mother. But many were for Laura and for her.

The night he told Bernie and Margaret about the extortion, about the four million Laura was demanding in order to keep her grandfather’s secrets, he was strangely calm. As if all that anger, covering up the pain and regret, had calcified into something stable rather than explosive. Steel. A blade.

They argued for a while about what to do. Bernie cried—a startling rarity, and just as startling was the way Margaret’s father wrapped her mother in his arms, soothing her. It had been so long since she’d seen them touch each other like that. They were a true family in that moment, which only made Laura’s absence more pronounced.

The problem with determining what to do was, none of them knew Gerald Ives’s secrets or how much they were worth. Only Laura did. Bernie was inclined to give her the money on the chance Laura might actually need it, that it might soften her stance concerning the family. Freddy was inclined to refuse. “She won’t be able to prove anything she says,” he reasoned, “and if we pay them once, they’ll keep asking for more.”

“Then we give them more,” Margaret said. “Who cares? If it brings Laura back…”

“How would it bring her back?” Freddy said. Rhetorically, Margaret figured, but she had an answer ready.

“We’ll give it to her,” she said. “But only to her. In person.”

Bernie straightened up at that.

“There’s no reason to think she’ll agree to that,” Freddy reasoned. “Those weren’t her terms.”

“Then we negotiate new ones,” Margaret insisted. “We have to try.”

It took five days to set the plans, all orchestrated over quick phone calls made from public telephones by a woman who wasn’t Laura and gave them no name. All the usual stipulations you saw in the movies were made: no police, come alone, tell no one, no funny business.

The calls came straight to the Ives family home, fielded by Freddy at all hours of the day and night. But after the meeting was set, the three of them agreed it should be Margaret who went. She told Cosmo she was going to see her sister but didn’t dare give him the details, beyond that Laura had agreed to meet.

Any more information than that and they would’ve found themselves in their second real fight. A fight without any purpose, since nothing Cosmo could possibly say would change Margaret’s mind about this.

Darrin drove her to the diner, out in Palm Springs, with strict instructions to leave her there for exactly two hours. Whomever Freddy had spoken to on the phone was adamant that no one else from the Ives family—or representing it—could be present, or the deal was off, and whatever information Laura had would be released. Not that that mattered to Margaret, but it was important that Dr. David and whoever else believe it did, or she doubted she’d ever see her sister again.