Great Big Beautiful Life(22)

In the dreams, Lawrence wept from relief. He knew it meant that they were saved.

He awoke crushed by reality. His brother was still gone. His sister was still starving.

After a week of dreaming, he left with Thomas for California. For the next eight years, they worked on a fourteen-person crew, digging up the occasional bits of quartz.

They’d make some money, then use it to move on and reinvest in a new mine. The more money they made, the less work Thomas and Lawrence had to do. Their job, primarily, became choosing new investments, buying up land or mines, then taking the largest cut of whatever was found there. Or better yet, proving it had metal and then selling it at a vast profit. It was a gamble, but Lawrence was good at it. Every dollar he made went right back home or else into the mines, to be multiplied.

And no matter how much they made, Lawrence’s hunger never abated. Instead, it grew and grew. The more he had, the more he craved. The more he accumulated, the more there was to lose, and the terror of that never let up.

Then, one day, he and Thomas visited a slice of land in Nevada, and Lawrence just knew, could feel the metal calling out to him through the rock. Magic stone, exactly like he’d been dreaming of.

And rather than tell Thomas, he kept it to himself.

He told Thomas he was thinking of retiring, that that plot of land they’d gone to see was worthless and he was tired of the work, of moving around, finding the crews, chasing the next lode. And he was convincing enough that Thomas left, headed back toward California to assemble a new crew on more promising terrain.

Then Lawrence bought the mine, all by himself. Weeks later, his crew struck forty-two tons of silver ore.

The first thing Lawrence bought was the local inn. Because he knew that when the news about the silver hit, there’d be dozens more men—desperate men—coming to try their luck and they’d need someplace to eat, sleep, and spend.

He was right. Of course he was. He himself was a desperate man. He knew how they operated.

Several weeks later, Thomas heard what happened, and Lawrence Ives made another decision that would change the course of the family’s history forever.





8




“Well, that’s…definitely the beginning,” I blurt into the silence.

I figured she’d start with the year her grandfather imported snow to their Southern California home for Christmas, or talk about the caviar-eating Shetland pony she got for her third birthday. Or maybe skip all that and get right to the first time she heard Cosmo Sinclair’s sexy drawling voice, and whether little cartoon hearts bloomed from her eyes in that moment.

Basically, I thought Margaret’s “beginning” would’ve been about a hundred and fifty years later and, you know, involved her on some level.

But that’s fine! This was interesting too! And she’s leading the conversation, which was the goal.

I clear my throat while I try to figure out where to go from here. “So did your family talk about Lawrence a lot? How’d you learn all of this?”

That makes her laugh. “Never. From what I hear, my great-grandfather was a miserable man, who no one mourned. But he’d journaled obsessively. And when he died, his son—my grandfather Gerald—found his diaries in the family safe. Gerald never shared them with anyone else while he was alive. But he willed them to my sister, Laura. They were very close,” she says. “He wanted her to burn them after she read them. But she couldn’t bring herself to, for whatever reason. She was always more sentimental than me.”

Holy shit. Speaking of mother lodes. Journals. From the 1800s, from the founding father of Ives Media. “Does she still have them?” As far as I knew, no one had seen or heard from Laura since well before Margaret disappeared, but because she’d never been a mainstay of the tabloids, no one was really looking for her either.

“No,” Margaret answers. “I’m afraid she doesn’t.”

Her expression goes distant, almost watery, as if she’s lost in a memory. It’s the same way she looked while telling Lawrence’s story—as if she were actually there. As if she herself had lived it, and it still made her ache.

I glance at my notes, looking for a segue, ideally toward something that doesn’t make her freeze up: “That first hotel Lawrence bought—do you happen to know what it was called?”

She blinks at me for several seconds, like she’s lost her place in space and time.

“Margaret?” I prompt.

“The Ebner.” The word seems to stick in her throat.

Curiosity prickles at the nape of my neck. “Have you ever been? Back to visit where the family fortune began?”

“Only once,” she says. “On a family trip. Just before my parents divorced, they took my sister and me to the mountains for a long weekend.” Her faint smile quickly strains and she looks away. “Family finally sold it off in the seventies.”

The message is clear. She doesn’t want to talk more about it. Not yet.

I scribble The Ebner into my notebook, along with last family trip with M’s parents, so I won’t forget to revisit it once she’s ready.

“Can I ask,” I begin cautiously, “what made you want to tell that particular story?”

This time when her eyes come to mine, there’s real force behind them, all that distance gone and instead a keen sharpness, like she could see right through me if she wanted, or else like she’s trying to project something directly into my mind, willing me to understand.