I glance down at her hands, hoping they might move like they did the other day, that she can give me some kind of sign all of this is getting through.
But they just lie there, limp in her lap.
The sleeve of her cardigan is snagged on something around her wrist, and I go to straighten it, smiling a little as I do. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about Hope House, that when they get the patients dressed, they’ll add little bits of theirown jewelry from home, something to help things feel a little more normal, a little less sad. I’d brought up a box of Mom’s stuff when we moved her in. Not the fancy pieces like Grandma Eileen’s ruby ring or the tennis bracelet Dad got her for their twenty-fifth anniversary, but some of the costume bits she had, things I’d seen her wear occasionally.
Her sweater has gotten caught on the little enamel flowers of a silver bangle, a bracelet Mom actually hadn’t worn all that often in my memory, but one I liked for how different it was from anything else in her collection. The silver filigree makes it look like a tiara in miniature, and the flowers are cute and colorful, a now-faded riot of pinks and blues and yellows.
I situate it on her wrist, running my thumb over the silver disk that makes up the center of the bracelet, like a full moon rising over a garden.
For the first time, I realize there’s an engraving on the disk, faded with time and wear but still visible.
I lift Mom’s wrist up, her arm limp, and tilt the bracelet toward the window.
The light catches on the disk, a brief glare stinging my eyes, but not before I see the letter delicately etched into the surface.
L
LANDONP. FITZROY, ESQ.
5/12/84
E—
Sorry if my handwriting’s a little shaky, but that’s what seeing your return address on an envelope did to me. Not even two fingers of bourbon could get my heart to stop racing, so I figured I needed to write back to you right away, penmanship be damned!
First of all, you’re welcome for the bracelet. I need to come clean and confess I didn’t have it made—I actually found it in a flea market on the road between Foley and Daphne. One of those little side-of-the-road things that sells fruit and big bags of boiled peanuts. But I think that makes it more magical, and I hope you do, too. Like it was meant for me to find, meant for me to send to you, meant to open up some kind of path back to each other.
It made me think of you because it was so delicate, so feminine. The filigree, the little enamel flowers, all of those seemed soyou, so imagine my surprise when I looked more closely and saw there was an “L” engraved on that little silver disk in the center.
Is it awful and chauvinistic of me to like the idea of you wearing my initial?
Maybe. But if this is all I can give you of my name—for now—that’s enough.
Ellen, I know there’s a chance that you just wrote me that note to be polite, a good Southern girl sending her thank-you notes—even to a bastard like me—but I have to believe it’s more. I have to believe you miss me, too.
Lo and I are done. It never should have started, and I’m so sorry for all of the pain it has caused you, but you broke my heart, sweet girl. You stopped talking to me, and I didn’t know how else to get your attention. I promise you—Iswear, yet again—that she doesn’t know about us, never even suspected. I haven’t even told her I’m planning on coming back to St. Medard’s Bay for Memorial Day.
I’m planning to take the boat out to that little cove you showed me. The one my bootlegging great-uncle apparently used to hide out in.
May 28. Early evening for the sunset.
Meet me there?
In hope (as always, forever),
LPF
It’s impossible to know just how many words were written about Lo Bailey’s trial and the death of Landon Fitzroy, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read every one of them.
There were at least two books, both the kind of cheap paperback you could buy on a wire rack at the grocery store, each with a contrasting view of what happened.Sweet Sixteen: Alabama’s Deadly Prom Queenobviously posits that Lo did it, but given how much it gets wrong (Lo was nineteen, she was never prom queen, and at one point, the narrative breaks with reality completely and claims Lo killed Landon to get her hands on incriminating recordings of various political high rollers, apparently because she wanted to blackmail them and start a fancy brothel in Birmingham), it’s almost offensive that they ever expected anyone to pay $2.99 for that trash. Adding insult to injury, I had to pay a lot more on eBay, thanks to it being long out of print.
The other one,Deadly Waters, Deadly Love, comes down much harder on Landon Fitzroy, who’s portrayed as a reckless playboy, seducing a naïve teenager only to get himself killed because he didn’t take the storm warnings seriously—and because he was desperate to bed his barely legal mistress after a long separation. It’s not well written, either, but at least it mostly sticks to the facts of the case: no blackmail, no Best Little Whorehouse in Alabama flights of fancy. Also, it was less expensive to track down, although when I look at how much money—not to mentiontime—I’ve been giving to all things Lo and Landon for the past two years, it’s probably ridiculous to care about an extra hundred bucks here or there.
Books, flights, hotels, private investigators… all of it adds up.
But no one ever said obsession was cheap.
The fact thatthisbook exists, though, that you’re now holding it in your hands?
