Great Big Beautiful Life(87)

They pulled up to the front of the house as the team of doctors was leaving.

For some inane reason, Margaret took that as a good sign—trouble averted, pain schooled into submission by the iron grip of the Ives patriarch. Laura knew better.

She collapsed in the driveway at the sight of those white coats descending the steps.

Margaret sank down in the gravel beside her, holding her sister as she trembled.

Twenty minutes. That was how long he had been dead already. Margaret’s first thought had been a selfish one: She’ll never forgive me.

But she was wrong. That very night, her younger sister had slept beside her in her bed—or not slept, rather, but cried and hiccuped and cried some more—while Margaret stroked her hair and tried to think of soothing words that wouldn’t be outright lies.

It will be okay didn’t feel right. Neither did he’s in a better place now, because who was she kidding? She had no idea if that was true.

Instead, she murmured “I’m here,” over and over again, like a prayer, until Laura’s breathing finally evened out into the rhythm of sleep, just before sunrise.

The headlines were horrible. She shouldn’t have gone looking, and ordinarily she wouldn’t have, but since this was about Laura, she felt it was her duty.

Socialite Sisters Cavort at Cosmo’s “Rock ’n’ Brawl” as Grandfather Dies, one rag proclaimed, beside a picture of the scene that had unfolded outside the arena, between her and the photographer who’d taken Laura’s picture.

One spot of luck was that, in Margaret’s efforts to take the man’s camera, she’d become the shiny object at which all the others pointed their lenses, her face hideous in her fury, her hair slicked to her head so that it could fit beneath her wig, and her right eye nearly swollen shut.

Another spot of luck: She and Laura were just one story after a night full of them. Most of the news Margaret pored over with her morning tea was more concerned with the melee of the concert and the “sheer depravity” of Cosmo’s performance, which supposedly brought it on.

The low, guttural singing. The wild dancing. And the moment he’d touched one concertgoer’s hand to his cheek, which she’d seen every paper describe in its own wildly different way, including one confident assertion that he’d licked the woman’s palm.

On the one hand, there was a comfort in seeing the media criticizing someone other than her or her sister. On the other, now that she’d escaped last night’s trance, the scales had abruptly fallen from her eyes concerning Cosmo Sinclair.

She felt furious with him for his part in how everything had gone. One concerned clergyman had been quoted in an article calling him a pied piper, leading young ladies to their doom, and while ordinarily this would’ve struck her as ridiculous, now she thought that uptight puritan might’ve been onto something.

She’d been stewing on this when Briggs, their butler, came into the breakfast room to inform her that she had a visitor.

“I don’t have anything on my calendar,” she told him.

“I know, ma’am,” Briggs replied.

“Then why did they let someone through the gate?”

Briggs’s face went red. “I’m not sure he knew what else to do. Mr. Sinclair was adamant.”

“Mr. Sin—” She dropped off, backtracked while she asked herself the question, He couldn’t possibly mean that Sinclair, could he?

By the tiny dip of Briggs’s chin, yes, yes, he did mean that Mr. Sinclair.

She didn’t remember standing, but she was standing nonetheless. “What does he want?”

“I’m not sure, ma’am,” Briggs said.

She wavered for a moment, unsure what the best course of action would be. Then she remembered Laura sleeping up in her bed and had a thought.

“Show him to the library,” she told Briggs. “We’ll be down shortly.”

Only several minutes later, as she sat on the edge of her bed, Laura—whose nose had been reset by a doctor last night and looked all the worse for it today—drew her legs up to her chest, wound her arms around them, and said, “I’m not going down there.”

“Oh, come on, Laur,” Margaret said. “You look fine. Much better than me.” She waved a hand at her black eye, but Laura shook her head and lay back down.

“It’s not about that,” she said. “I just—I don’t want to see Cosmo Sinclair. I don’t want to think about him. I don’t even want to listen to him anymore. For the rest of my life, that song will make me sick to my stomach. All he’ll ever remind me of now is the night I lost my dearest friend.”

Oh, how that made her chest keen.

There had been a time when Margaret had been Laura’s best friend, but that didn’t sting nearly so bad as the rest, the fact that her younger sister was now almost totally alone.

“Oh, sweetie,” she cooed, smoothing one hand over Laura’s head.

“Just get rid of him, will you?” Laura said quietly.

“Of course.”

And Margaret went downstairs to do just that.





26




Hayden parks at my house on Thursday night after work, and we take the trail through the trees back to Rum Room with our laptop bags slung over our shoulders.

“Does it ever bother you?” I ask. “Not being able to talk about what you’re working on?”