Great Big Beautiful Life(4)

“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.