“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.
“You wanted to know what it was like to be born into my family,” she says after a beat. “Before you can understand that, you have to understand where this all began. My story, every bit of it, is tangled up with what Lawrence did.”
“Do you…do you mean to Thomas?” I ask.
“My great-grandfather was a cold, cruel man with no qualms about taking what wasn’t his,” she says, that surprisingly powerful, potent gaze of hers still fixed on me, the kind of charisma that can hold a person captive.
I let the silence linger like an invitation. But uncertainty flashes across her face. Any second, she’s going to retreat again, that maddening push-pull of any great interview. I make a snap decision and lean forward, stopping both recordings.
Her silvery brows lift in surprise. “Is that allowed?”
“We haven’t agreed to anything yet, other than a conversation,” I say. “A monthlong conversation, sure, but just a conversation. If you end up wanting to do the book, we can record things later. But if this is making you nervous, let’s forget it for now.”
You can trust me, I think at her, between every line.
She holds my gaze. Decades ago, when she was at the peak of her fame, she was so open with the press. Always smiling and waving and blowing kisses to the paparazzi, giving glib little quotes to reporters on her way down red carpets or into clubs. She’s so different than those old pictures and articles made her seem, so tightly bottled into herself, with only little glimmers of wry charm and sudden blasts of emotion slipping out.
You’re safe, I think at her.
Her mouth opens and closes twice before any sound comes out, and when she does speak, her voice is quieter, confessional almost.
“By the end of his life,” she says, “all my great-grandfather did was ramble about three things.”
Her lips knit tightly together as she carefully charts her own path forward.
“He apologized to his brother Dicky, like he was right there in the room with him. Wept about losing him like it had just happened,” she says. “And he argued with Thomas Dougherty. Raged at him, really. Lawrence’s son, my grandfather, wouldn’t let anyone else into the room—he was so afraid of what Lawrence might say, that it might leak to the press. My family’s rivalry with the Pulitzers was well underway by then—an Ives couldn’t sneeze without making it in the papers.”
I scribble three bullet points. Beside the first, I write apologizing to Dicky, and next to the second, arguing with Thomas. When I see Margaret watching me, I double-check: “Would you rather I didn’t write this down?”
“That’s my preference, yes,” she admits.
I scribble out the note and set my pen aside.
She nods something like a thank-you and then goes on: “After word reached Thomas about the silver ore my great-grandfather had cheated him out of, Thomas came back into town, furious. He’d thought of Lawrence like a brother, after all that time together, and he wanted to know why he’d been betrayed.
“But Lawrence refused to even meet with him. Day after day, night after night, Thomas stood outside that tiny hotel, screaming for Lawrence to come face him. But my great-grandfather had enough money and enough men in his employ then that he could make himself inaccessible. So eventually, Thomas left. He went to the biggest newspaper he could find back in California, to tell the story of my great-grandfather’s treachery. Eventually the reporter came to talk to Lawrence, and Lawrence responded by buying the paper.”
My jaw drops. “The San Francisco Daily Dispatch?” The start of everything for Ives Media? “He bought it to protect his reputation?”
She snorts. “Oh, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about reputation. When he talked to the reporter, he asked how much Thomas had made off selling the story, because those were the terms Lawrence Ives thought in. When he heard the dollar amount, he knew right away that the news was one more place he could bury his money and watch it fruit.
“He started mining less, investing more. Bought a beautiful home in San Francisco and sent for his younger sister—it had always been his plan to bring her to live with him once he’d built a comfortable life. But in the years since he’d been gone, she’d grown up. She’d all but forgotten him. And worse, she’d married a Dougherty, another poor farmer. Because of what Lawrence had done to Thomas, she wanted nothing to do with her brother.”
After a moment, she goes on, “At the end of his life, when he wasn’t apologizing to the ghost of Dicky, Lawrence was arguing with a phantom Thomas. Blaming him for everything that happened. Telling him he deserved what he got, to die, drunk and penniless, for being stupid enough to believe that Lawrence was responsible for him. He thought anyone who relied on anyone else would pay for it, eventually. Though I’ve always thought the lesson was that anyone who relies on an Ives will only be hurt for their trouble.”
I sit for a moment, absorbing that. Margaret’s gaze has gone slightly cloudy, as if this thought is swirling around behind her eyes.
I clear my throat and gently nudge us back on track: “So what was the other thing?”
“Excuse me?” she says.
“You said your great-grandfather used to rant about three things,” I remind her. “What was the last thing?”
A smile tugs at her lips, wispy and unconvincing. “I think we should save that for another day,” she says, pushing herself up from her chair. “I’m in dire need of a nap.”
“Of course,” I say, as cheerfully as I can muster. “But—”
“Jodi will see you out,” she says, cutting me short with a winning smile. I jam my mouth shut and nod acceptance: I’ve been excused.
Margaret turns and sweeps from the room.
Later, I lie on the sofa at the little overgrown bungalow I’m renting, ignoring my still-unpacked bags in favor of doing research. If this was an interview for a Scratch piece, I could’ve simply sent a list of questions to one of the fact-checkers to follow up on. In fact, if I get this job, it might be worth hiring someone freelance to do my legwork so I can focus on the writing and interviews themselves, but until I have someone, it’s up to me.
I look back on my list of things to check out, and start with Dillon Springs, Pennsylvania.
All of this was so long ago that birth and death records weren’t even being filed yet. There’s no way to confirm most of what Margaret told me, since it’s anecdotal, but as we move forward in history, I’m going to need to be able to verify everything.
I text a couple of freelance fact-checkers to get their availability in the coming months, then go back to reading about Dillon Springs, a tiny town that does, in fact, consider itself “the birthplace of modern American journalism,” a fairly lofty claim, especially considering that Lawrence Ives never once went back to Dillon Springs and it was his San Francisco–born son who became the true media magnate of the family.
Lawrence had owned three newspapers by the time he died, but he had no involvement in how they were run day to day. His son, Gerald, Margaret’s grandfather, was the one to push into the business of news.
As far as I can tell, there are no prominent Iveses still in Dillon Springs, though I’m guessing if Margaret did a DNA test, we’d be able to find a slew of cousins, given how large a family her great-grandfather was born into.
Next I search for Thomas Dougherty, but if any more of his story is out there, the first five pages of search results don’t yield it. I try his name along with Dillon Springs, but still have no luck.
From there, I move on to reading about the first big mine lode, and the forty-two tons of silver, a number confirmed by multiple sources, codified into history by now, because—while, honestly, Ives made his fortune across multiple industries—this particular mine and its treasure offered the punchiest, most impressive headline.
Headline. It jump-starts something in my brain.
I open a new browser and run a search for Ives’s first newspaper acquisition, rather than scouring my preinterview notes. There it is: the San Francisco Daily Dispatch. If Lawrence bought it out, then I’m guessing the story about Thomas Dougherty’s betrayal at Lawrence’s hands never ran, but I send an email to their archives department to see if they have any copies of issues from that far back that haven’t crumbled into dust, just in case.
Then I start looking for information about the inn Lawrence bought, and something strange happens.
The Ebner Hotel comes up right away, exactly where I’m expecting it, in the Nevada town where the Ives fortune began.
The issue is, while the hotel is a historic landmark built during the gold rush, it wasn’t called the Ebner until after the family sold it, in the 1970s. When Lawrence acquired it, it had been called the Arledge, and then in 1917, it had been renamed the Nicollet, for the duration of the Iveses’ ownership of it.
So why didn’t Margaret call it that? It wouldn’t have been called the Ebner until…fortyish years after her one visit. Why would her first reaction be to call it by its current name?
It’s a small, probably meaningless discrepancy, but the way her voice stuck when she said the name keeps wriggling in the back of my mind.
Maybe she has been back there since her family sold it off. But why wouldn’t she want me to know that?
Or am I just overthinking a meaningless mistake?
I fire off a text to the group chat, and when I don’t get a quick reply, I message Theo too: Can I run something by you?
Luckily, he replies quickly. What kind of thing?
Work thing, I say.
My phone starts ringing immediately.
If there’s one thing Theo Bouras can’t resist, it’s a good mystery. Probably why he’s never been quite ready to make things official with me. Mystery is not my strong suit.
“Hi,” I say brightly, answering the call.
“Alicccce,” he says, drawing my name out in a teasing way that makes me shiver.
“Theo,” I say.
“What have you got for me this time?” he asks.
“Are you sure you’re not too busy?”
“Nah,” he says. “I’ve got you on speaker while I’m developing.”
For work, his photos are all digital, but his real passion is film, so on his off days, he’s usually in his home darkroom, or out shooting.
“I’m trying to figure out why a source might lie about something trivial,” I say.
“And by source, do you mean Margaret Ives?” he teases.
“I just mean generally,” I say.
“How trivial are we talking?” he asks, clearly intrigued.
“Like saying they’ve only been somewhere once, but maybe they’ve been there more than that,” I say. “Maybe more recently than they said.”
He hums. “Like…somewhere a crime has been committed, perhaps?”
I tuck my phone between my shoulder and ear and sit back down in front of my computer, searching for news stories about the Ebner and garnering nothing much of interest. “Maybe,” I say. “But probably not.”
He thinks again. “Maybe it was, like, a rendezvous spot. Maybe she was having an affair. Cheating on the Boy Wonder of Rock ’n’ Roll before he died.”
I roll my eyes. “I never said she.”
“Fine,” he relents. “Maybe this person was cheating on their husband, Cosmo Sinclair.”
I take a sip of my now-cold afternoon coffee and swish it around in my mouth, like I might be able to taste the answer. Cosmo was already gone before the Nicollet Inn became the Ebner.
If Margaret’s hiding a visit—or multiple visits—it’s not because of an affair.
Besides, an affair might be a shocking revelation, but this is a woman who also wore her wedding dress to her husband’s funeral, knowing full well there’d be miles of paparazzi in every direction. I’m not sure I’d buy her cheating on him, and I’m even less convinced she’d feel the need to hide it so long after the fact.
“Or I don’t know,” Theo says, breaking into my thoughts. “Maybe she just forgot. The woman is, like, eighty-something.”
“Never said I’m talking about a woman,” I remind him. “Or about an eighty-something-year-old, for that matter.”
“Why not just ask her?” he says.
“Next time I talk to them,” I reply, “I will. But that’s not until Tuesday.”
“So she’s giving you a couple of days off,” he says. “Interesting.”
There’s a distinctively flirty edge to his voice. It makes my stomach flip-flop in a not entirely pleasant way. I know what he’s getting at: that I could come home and we could hook up. And that sounds pretty nice.
But a few weeks ago, when I’d sent a screenshot of one of his late-night text messages to my friends, Bianca had pointed out something that had been bothering me ever since.
Have you noticed, she wrote, that this man NEVER just asks you to hang out? He literally only ever sets you up to ask HIM to hang out.
Cillian wrote back, I’ve noticed. He is my enemy.
Priya chimed in, As long as you’re getting what you want out of this arrangement, ignore the haters, Alice.
The thing is, I’m technically not. I would’ve gladly agreed to be Theo’s girlfriend months ago if it was on the table. But it wasn’t, and there wasn’t anyone else I was interested in, so I didn’t really see the point of giving him an ultimatum. So we’d continued on like this, and it was mostly fine—I really liked being with him, whenever we actually were together.
But I’d been paying attention since Bianca’s observation. And she and Cillian were right.
Every text was what are you up to tonight, or a picture of a bottle of nice bourbon he’d gotten, or a shirtless photo he thought might be enticing but was mostly just embarrassing, no matter how good he looked in it.
The man would not just say, Hey, Alice, want to come over tonight?
And because I hadn’t taken any of his bait since that fateful day in the group chat, I hadn’t seen him for my last two weeks in LA before shipping out this way.
“Alice?” he says now, in my ear. “You still there?”
“Yeah, but I’ve actually got to go,” I say. “Thanks for the help.”
“Anytime,” he says.
He thinks he means it, but he doesn’t.
After perusing online for a solid hour, I find a place to pass a Saturday night.
Rum Room sits tucked behind a row of scraggly trees, on the opposite side of the road from Little Croissant, though a half mile down the road.
I never would’ve seen it from the street, and it’s not close enough to the beach to be a proper tourist spot, which is better for my purposes.
It’s also only a ten-minute walk from my rental, so I leave my car behind and head over.
It looks like a small ranch home, with a wooden deck wrapped around its front half, green-and-white-striped awnings hanging over its rectangular windows. Several massive live oaks lean over the patio, multicolored Christmas lights strung haphazardly between them to illuminate the wooden tables below, all of which are full.
I walk up the ramp to the front door, past both a neon hot dog sign and a fake shark head, mounted directly to the white clapboard exterior.
The inside of the restaurant is an exercise in chintzy maximalism, every inch clad in either tropical wallpaper, tacky hot dog–related signs, or jewel-toned tile. A host dressed in black greets me with a smile and an efficient nod. “Do you have a reservation with us tonight?”
“No, sorry,” I say.
“How many?” he asks.
“Just one,” I say, peeking over his shoulder toward the bar. One open stool, wedged between two groups. “Can I order food if I sit there?”
“Definitely,” he says. “Otherwise, we’re probably running at about a thirty-minute wait.”
“The bar works great for me,” I tell him, and he gestures me past. I squeeze between the two parties and plop my bag on the counter. “Sorry,” I tell the woman next to me when I accidentally elbow her while trying to get my jacket off.
“No prob,” she says, then turns back to keep talking to her friend.
Something in my chest wilts. Maybe I should’ve just bitten the bullet and invited Theo to come visit me. This could be a long, lonely month. Especially if, moving forward, interviews are as short as this morning’s. I do a quick scan of the room. Two more doorways jut off from this one, to a larger dining room, but this one is mostly filled with two-tops—people having a drink while they wait for a proper table.
My heart lifts a little when my gaze reaches the back corner. The one closest to the bathrooms.
Hayden’s dark head is bent over a laptop, a half-eaten salad forgotten at his left elbow, and a glass of water to the right of his computer.
I leave my stuff behind and dismount my stool to go say hi.
Just like at Fish Bowl, he doesn’t look up even when I’m standing right beside him, his focus singular and intense on his screen.
“Are you stalking me?” I ask.
He jumps in surprise, like he had no idea I was there. Then his gaze locks on me, and a horrified expression crosses his face. “Of course not,” he says. And then, as if he needs proof: “I was here first.”
“Hayden,” I say. “I’m kidding. It’s a tiny island. We’re bound to keep running into each other. Relax.”
He does. Visibly. But only for a second. Then, seeming to remember something, he stiffens and shuts his computer.
“I’m not here to spy on you,” I promise. “I just saw you from the bar and thought it would be weird not to say hi. So, hi.”
His eyes wander from me to the bar and back again. “You make friends fast.”
“I’m not with them, actually,” I say. “But who knows what two rum cocktails might do?”
He opens his mouth, closes it again, and nods.
The silence starts to curdle into something awkward. “Have a good night!” I say, and begin to turn.
“Alice?”
I pause, swivel back to him.
“Do you want to sit?” he asks.
I study him, trying to read his serious expression. “I can’t tell if you’re just being polite or if that’s a real invitation.”
The face he makes, I am nearly certain, is an actual smile, no matter how faint. “You can basically always assume that I’m not just being polite,” he says.
This makes me laugh. That probably should’ve occurred to me sooner. It’s not like he’s been a paragon of manners in the last few days since we first met.
“I wouldn’t want to interrupt…” I say.
“You’re not,” he insists. “I need to be done working. I need…a distraction.”
I smile. “A distraction?”
He winces. “I didn’t mean that to sound—”
“A distraction sounds nice,” I say.
