Maggie Beth was born to Thomas and Ava Arett, a fairly ordinary middle-class couple in Winchester who died in a house fire when Maggie was seven. This foundational trauma gave her a fascination with fires and was the beginning of her investigative abilities, as she - always a very curious child - learned everything she could about how the fire started, how different fires spread, etc..

Following her parents' death she grew up in an overworked but largely benign orphanage in the city, where she befriended an older girl named Cordelia. When Maggie Beth was sixteen, after Cordelia had already moved out of the orphanage, Cordelia took up with an older, wealthier married man. She tried to blackmail him and he murdered her, setting a fire to erase the evidence. The local police claimed it was an electrical fire, the sort that had killed Maggie's parents, and in her own snooping Maggie quickly discovered that this wasn't the case. She brought her evidence to the police but was laughed out of the station.

This injustice ignited Maggie Beth's determination to become an investigative crime journalist, an aim she would dedicate the next several years of her life to despite numerous frustrations. While she did eventually get a job working for a newspaper in Hampshire, she was kept away from the more "masculine" pursuit of crime reporting and was stuck on the society pages instead. This is how she was assigned to cover Isabelle's debutante ball, when she was twenty-four and Isabelle was twenty.