Landon Fitzroy was the first person who ever looked at me not like I washotorsexyora fine piece of assbut like I was… special. Interesting.
Someone worth their full attention.
Someone worth getting to know.
Maybe that’s not what you were hoping for when you picked up this little memoir of mine. Maybe you wanted to hear that this dashing older man swept into the shitty bar where I was working, and next thing you knew, the governor’s married son and the nubile teenage waitress were banging against a chipped sink in a filthy bathroom.
I get it. That’s way more fun, and honestly, everything with Landon would’ve been a lot easier if that had been the truth.
But sorry to disappoint you perverts: No banging that night. Not even a kiss—unless you count the one he pressed against my cheek before his friends dragged him out to a waiting car.
In fact, I didn’t sleep with Landon until six weeksafterwe met, and it was on expensive sheets in the bedroom of his yacht. (Don’t worry, I’ll give you enough details on that night to make Jackie Collins blush.)
Honestly, I sometimes wish it had just been sex between us. That would’ve been a lot easier, a lot simpler.
But no, I actually fell in love with the guy. And I think he was in love with me.
And in the end, I guess that’s why he’s dead.
Pages of unfinished manuscript titled “Be a Good Girl: Lo Bailey, Landon Fitzroy, and the Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty.” Found among possessions of August Fletcher, 8/3/2025
St. Medard’s Bay had seen its share of deadly storms before, including one in 1965 that killed Lo Bailey’s own father, but from the start, everyone agreed that there was something suspicious about the death of Landon Fitzroy.
For one thing, unlike most of the bodies found in the aftermath of a hurricane, Landon hadn’t drowned. Though he was discovered face down in the surf near a local nature preserve, his lungs were free of water, according to the autopsy.
It was initially suspected that Landon’s death hadn’t come from the raging surf, but instead from the wind. It appeared that he had been struck by something heavy in the back of the head, an object that had fractured his skull and driven fragments of bone into his brain.
It would not have been an abnormal cause of death in a storm, especially given the magnitude of Hurricane Marie, but something unusual caught the attention of Buddy Byrd, the coroner and owner of St. Medard’s Bay’s only funeral home (something that might be seen as a conflict in some places, but not Alabama). According to Byrd, Landon appeared to have sustainedmultipleblows to the head, as opposed to a single fatal strike, as you’d expect to see in a storm death.
There was also the odd positioning of the body when it was recovered. Landon was face down, his arms stretched out straight over his head—almost as though someone had pulled him down the beach. Abrasions on his chest were consistent with being dragged through sand, while the otherwise intact nature of his body and his clothing suggested that the fatal injury had occurred on dry land. Even his wristwatch was still tight around one wrist.
But the truly odd discovery was found snagged on theinner lining of Landon’s tuxedo jacket: the jagged tip of a hot pink fingernail.
The chaos and destruction of a storm could explain many of these details. And if Landon Fitzroy had been anyone but Beau Fitzroy’s son, his death probably would have been classified, at most, as “undetermined.”
But Governor Fitzroy knew there was something odd about his boy being in St. Medard’s Bay at all that night. Landon had actually been in Birmingham earlier that evening, a solid five-hour drive away, set to attend a glitzy gala that was meant to be the soft launch of his own political career.
Instead, Landon had vanished from his own coronation only to show up dead on a beach less than twenty-four hours later.
Why?
The answer, Beau decided, was Lo Bailey, and when he put that bug in the ear of Buddy Byrd and the local police chief, Ron Steensland, Lo was hauled down to the station for questioning.
Right from the beginning, there were clear inconsistencies in her story. She claimed to have called Landon’s office once the day he died but that she’d talked only to his secretary, Linda Green, as Landon wasn’t in. But Miss Green countered that Landon had receivedtwophone calls that day, both of which were from Lo, and that the second time, Landon Fitzroy had taken the call. Miss Green said she heard him talking to someone in his office, making promises that he would see whoever it was “as soon as I can.”
Phone records later confirmed Miss Green’s version of events, but Lo never changed her story.
And then there were her bruises.
Lo showed up at the station in, according to Steensland, a tight T-shirt advertising a local seafood spot.
“Who goes to see the police in a shirt that says, ‘Shuck ’em, suck ’em, eat ’em raw’?” Steensland later said on the local news, his beady eyes widening as much as they could in disbelief. “I knew right then that Governor Fitzroy was right to tell us we needed to talk to that little girl.”
But it wasn’t the shirt that Steensland focused on initially. No, what struck him was the cardigan she was wearing over it.
A sweater.
In Alabama.
