“Thank you again,” he says. “I really think this is gonna be just the thing.”
Before he retreats into his room, I work up my courage and say, “You mentioned in your email you were writing a book?”
August nods, reaching into his back pocket for his phone.
“We are.”
We.
“About that guy who died in Hurricane Marie?”
“Landon Fitzroy,” he supplies even though I knew the name.
“Right. Well, I’m thrilled y’all are here, and especially excited you wanted to stay at the Rosalie. Surprised, honestly. Most people choose the condos these days, the ones on Airbnb, Vrbo… probably some other acronym I haven’t even heard of yet.”
August finally lifts his gaze from his phone, frowning at me in confusion.
“Of course we’d stay here. I mean… this is the place. Where it all happened.”
Now I’m the one who’s confused. “The storm?” I say. “Marie got us pretty good, but—”
“No,” August says, shaking his head. “I mean this is the place Landon Fitzroy died. This is where they found his body.”
The nameFitzroyis an old one, dating at least as far back as the medieval era. Often given to the illegitimate children of noblemen, the name literally means “son of a king,” and if Landon Parkes Fitzroy was not born into royalty exactly, he was pretty damn close.
His family was the kind of rich you only become when previous generations have committed themselves to being as thoroughly evil as possible, and the Fitzroy family tree is full of these types. A war profiteer here, a plantation owner there. A Fitzroy in the 1920s who managed to somehow be both Alabama’s attorney generalandone of the biggest bootleggers for miles. (It goes without saying that one of the reasons he was so successful at this endeavor was that he’d used his political and legal power to drive out the competition.)
Landon’s father, the formidable Beau Fitzroy, had risen higher than any of his ancestors, becoming governor of Alabama in 1982, just two years before his only son and heir was killed in a storm off the coast of a little town called St. Medard’s Bay.
The reason Landon had been in St. Medard’s Bay at all that summer?
The affair he was having with a nineteen-year-old, Gloria “Lo” Bailey.
Before Hurricane Marie swept Landon Fitzroy into memory, the Governor’s Son and the Smalltown Tramp was nothing more than local gossip, the story barely making its way past Montgomery, much less to the rest of the country. People whispered about it, gave one another knowing looks when the rumble of a private jet engine was heard overhead or a yacht three times the size of any other ship in St. Medard’s Bay Harbor made anchor. But powerful men—even married ones with bright political futures ahead of them—have always been drawn to beauty, and Lo Bailey had that to spare.
Still, it was a shock when Landon’s body was found among the wreckage of Hurricane Marie, and even morestunning when the coroner ruled that he had not died as a result of the storm at all, but had instead been murdered.
By none other than Lo Bailey. Or so the state claimed.
Rumors flew with the speed of hurricane-force winds: Landon had been lured to his death by a teenage temptress who knew her time was running out, who knew that once Landon got serious about his future, there would be no room for her in it. As a lifelong resident of a town that had seen its share of deadly storms—one of which had killed her own father before she was even born—Lo, the story went, would’ve known that the chaotic aftermath of a hurricane would cover her tracks, make the death seem like just another storm-related tragedy.
But there were other rumors.
That Beau Fitzroy had pulled every string at his disposal to see his son’s death classified as a homicide, that he intended to see someone punished for what had happened to Landon, and Lo was the perfect target. It was her fault his son had even been in St. Medard’s Bay, her fault that he was in danger of careening headfirst into scandal, her fault that Beau Fitzroy’s most cherished dream—to build a political dynasty the likes of which the South had never seen—was as dead as his heir.
And it wasn’t like the case was without merit.
Lo was caught in two lies that cost her her credibility. She claimed she never asked Landon to come to St. Medard’s Bay as the storm approached, but the prosecution had phone records that showed two calls, made several hours apart, from the beach house Landon had purchased for Lo Bailey the year before.
As for the bruises on Lo’s arms in the days following the storm? She claimed she fell while trying to secure a window at her mother’s store, but the purple marks encircling her biceps didn’t look like the sort of thing you’d get in a fall. Theydid,however, look very much like someone’s fingers gripping her. Maybe someone trying to push her away or hold her back before she could deliver a killing blow?
Then there was the testimony from one of Lo’s closest friends, who swore she saw Lo in the vicinity near where Landon Fitzroy’s body was eventually found, and that she hadheard Lo threaten that if Landon were ever to leave her, she’d make sure it was the last thing he ever did.
But while it didn’t paint a favorable picture of Lo, in the end it was all apparently just too circumstantial for some members of the jury. Whatever the truth of the matter, a mistrial and a DA surprisingly reluctant to retry the case meant that while Lo Bailey was tainted by scandal, she was not, in the end, branded a murderess.
At least not in the legal sense.
In the hearts and minds of the American public?
