Epilogue: Jules

EPILOGUEJules

Eight Months Later

Mountain views are overrated.

Watching the morning sun break through the clouds over a navy-blue sea, whitecaps foaming, I sip my herbal tea and let that familiar contentment sink into me, wiggling my toes in the warm sand beneath my chair.

I keep thinking I’ll get tired of it eventually, sitting here just after sunrise, another gorgeous day unfurling before my eyes. But it’s been five months since we bought this place on a tiny spit of land off the coast of South Carolina, and I still feel my stomach flip with happiness every morning.

Or maybe, I think, resting my hand on the firm curve of my stomach, that’s just my little freeloader here.

Yes, it might be a little emotionally manipulative of me, telling you I’m pregnant, hoping you’ll forgive me for everything else, but hey. We use the gifts God gave us.

Ruby had it right, I think, in that last letter.

My great-grandfather sold his own child for a buck (okay, a lot of bucks). My great-grandmother burned that money to a crisp.

My grandmother turned down Ruby’s offer of cash. My mother once stole everything I’d saved from a year of babysitting so that she could buy a bunch of lottery tickets.

We’re made up of many different types of people, is my point.

Good ones, bad ones. Most of them, like me, probably fall somewhere in the middle.

That gives me hope for the little girl currently floating around inside me. Camden is good, through and through. Me? Only middling.

But surely that gives her a better chance than most.

I hope so, at least.

Are you frowning right now, thinking to yourself, Bitch, didn’t you set a house on fire? Didn’t you murder two people? In what world does that make you not a bad person?

That’s fair.

Libby was an accident, though. I didn’t know she had taken an extra Ambien that afternoon, once they got back from the funeral home. She never even woke up; she simply breathed in all that smoke until she never breathed again.

That’s not my fault.

Ben, though …

After I turned to leave Ruby’s office––after he’d cornered and tried to threaten me––he struck me from behind with a paperweight from Ruby’s desk. The pain stunned me, made me stumble, literal stars in my vision. (I always thought people made that up! But nope.)

It makes you crazy, that kind of pain. That kind of fear.

For the first time since I’d read her letters all those years before, I understood what had made Ruby pick up that gun and go after Duke Callahan on that hot Paris night.

For the first time, I felt like we must share the same blood.

Was that what made me curl my fingers around the fireplace poker, the first thing I laid eyes on?

Was that what made it feel so goddamn good when I swung, hard, at his head?

I don’t know. I wish I could have asked Ruby.

Of course, once Ben was dead, I had to do something.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say I didn’t think I’d get away with it.

But I knew I would.

Ruby had showed me how.

No one in Tavistock liked the other McTavishes anymore. They were cruel, and petty, and ungenerous, and Cam still held every purse string.

And I was Cam’s wife.

Mrs. McTavish.

The only Mrs. McTavish.

It didn’t hurt that Officer Jamison hadn’t been as easily dissuaded from looking more closely at Nelle’s death as I’d originally feared, and ultimately found those telltale marks on the inside of her lips.

My story of finding Ben burning something in the office, of asking him what he was doing, his sudden rage, an attack, and then a fire spreading out of control …

It made sense.

Or at least, people accepted it.

The sun breaks through the clouds, and I shade my eyes with one hand, glancing down the beach. Cam is nothing more than a speck, but I know it’s him, wrapping up his morning jog, and I smile to myself, patting my belly.

“That’s your daddy,” I tell my daughter, heaving myself out of my chair to make my way—slowly, very slowly—back up the steps to the deck and the sliding glass door leading into the open kitchen and den.

“Morning, Ruby,” I call.

Her portrait was the one thing that survived the fire. All of Ashby House was in ruins, but Andrew Miller’s painting was somehow mostly intact. The frame was too badly burned to save, and the edges of the canvas were stained with smoke and water damage, but Ruby herself had been no worse for wear.

“That happens sometimes,” one of the firefighters had said. “A whole house can be destroyed, but the paintings are virtually untouched.”

He said it was because the heat tended to snap their hanging wires early on, so they fall face down, protecting them.

Another story that made sense, sure.

But when I meet Ruby’s eyes over the fireplace of this new house, I wonder if there’s more to it.

I’d told Camden we could get rid of it if he wanted. I would understand. Now that I knew the full extent of what she put him through I wouldn’t have blamed him.

“We can donate it or something if you feel weird about throwing it away,” I said. “Any museum would be happy to take it, I bet.”

That had been in the early days, before we bought this place, when it was just the two of us (well, three, but we didn’t know it then) in a hotel room in Asheville.

He’d thought about it, but in the end, he’d shaken his head and said, “It’s all that’s left of her, really. Only thing left from Ashby House.”

Not the only thing,I think now, my hand once again going to my stomach. Ashby House may have been reduced to a dark rectangle of earth on a mountaintop miles away, but one night in that red bedroom gave us a permanent reminder of our time there.

And Ruby’s portrait, professionally repaired and reframed, was the first thing we hung in our new house.

I wondered if I’d feel differently about her, now that I fully understood all that she was, all that she’d done. She’d seemed like my savior, all those years ago. A woman who wanted to ease her conscience by fixing everything that was wrong in my life? Setting me up with her handsome son, ensuring that I would ultimately inherit her estate? What wasn’t there to like?

But she’d hurt Camden. Oh, I know that in her own way, she’d thought she was doing the right thing by him. I even think she had known she might die that night, had made her peace with it. She was giving Cam one final test, but in her mind, either outcome would mean that her project had been successful. He’d call the ambulance and prove his loyalty––or he’d let her die and prove his independence. Either way, I’d be waiting in the wings.

Still, she’d manipulated him—manipulated me—in ways I might never fully understand.

And yet.

I couldn’t make myself get rid of that fucking portrait.

Or her letters.

Lost in the fire, I’d told Cam, and that was for the best. Why would we need them now? I knew everything there was to know about Ruby, about her crimes and her schemes and her plans.

I understood her.

And learning the truth about Ruby’s past had released something in Cam as well. No more shadows in his eyes, no more guilt.

No, that was my emotion to carry, but I was fine with that. It seemed like a small price to pay.

The sliding glass door opens, and Cam comes in, damp with sweat and sea air. “How are my ladies this morning?”

“The littlest lady is apparently doing some kind of spin class in there, and this lady is thinking you should make her an omelet.”

“Well, I have my marching orders,” he says, dropping a kiss on my forehead and then heading toward the sink to wash up.

I smile and drift into the den as he hums to himself.

He’s lighter now, Cam. Finally free, from all of it.

The money, it turns out, was not such a terrible burden once it was no longer connected to that place, those people.

Cam is already using it to do good things. He made a major donation to this community center in Tennessee, and there’s a trust his lawyer is putting together in Tavistock that will make sure the town has a sizable endowment for decades to come.

And of course, even with all that generosity, we’ll still have more than we could ever spend. The three of us—or four, five, who knows what shape our family will take?—will never have to worry about money.

Somehow, impossibly, we’ve gotten our happy ending.

I stand in the living room, the soft sound of the waves in the distance a soothing soundtrack as I gaze up at Ruby’s portrait.

Only I know that behind her dark eyes, slid between the canvas and its backing, are all the letters Ruby had sent me. The ones I had saved and hidden for years, the ones I’d taken with us to Ashby House because I’d known that once we were there, it would be time for Cam to learn the truth, too.

The ones I’d run through a burning house to save.

Even that last letter, the one hidden in her office and never sent, was now tucked away with the others, the full accounting of Ruby’s sins—and mine—hiding in plain sight.

Would she be pleased with how things had turned out? This life that Cam and I have built? She said she wanted good things for him, but did she truly? Or had she always been using him—and me—for her own ends?

Glancing over my shoulder, I see him pull out eggs, butter, and I think—probably for the thousandth time—that I should tell him the truth about us.

I found Ruby’s card in my grandmother’s things a week after the accident that killed my mother. Grammy had died two years before, and her entire existence had been contained in two cardboard boxes in the back of my mom’s closet.

I’d taken those boxes out of the closet along with the few other things I could carry because Dan, my mom’s boyfriend, already had another woman moving in and “didn’t have room for Linda’s shit anymore.”

I remember going through those boxes in my dorm room, knowing that next semester I’d have to find somewhere else to live because there was no way I could afford even student housing, not after burying Mom.

I’d been terrified, and more than that, angry.

How unfair it all seemed, to be alone in the world at nineteen.

I almost threw that card away, but for whatever reason, I shoved it in my purse, forgetting about it until I was searching for a ten-dollar bill I thought I’d stashed away. Still, it had been another week or two before I was curious enough to google Ruby McTavish.

There was much more to find than I expected. I spent night after night at my computer, reading about her husbands, about Ashby House. Wondering what in the world my grandmother had had to do with a person like that.

And then, finally, I stumbled on the story about her kidnapping, about her miraculous recovery. About the poor family in Alabama who had stolen this golden girl.

Suddenly, the pieces clicked into place, and the rush I felt as I realized who this woman might be to me––it still sends chills up my spine, just thinking about it.

I somewhat regret that stupid, heedless phone call––but miraculously, it led to me standing here in this house with this man, this child just months away from being born.

I will tell him, I promise.

But you’ll keep my secret for now, won’t you?

I think you will. I trust you.

Here––I’ll even tell you one more secret, for good measure.

When I cut that slit in the back of Ruby’s portrait to hide her letters, I discovered I wasn’t the first person to use it as a hiding spot.

As I’d shoved the papers inside, my fingers had brushed a crinkled piece of newsprint. When I’d pulled it out, it was yellowed with age, the date at the top reading August 18, 1987.

The article that had been carefully clipped out was some fluff piece about a parade in some small Iowa town called Bishop, the faded color photo showing people lined up along a flag-bedecked street as an old car drove by, a beauty queen waving from the back.

I couldn’t figure out why Ruby had cut it out, much less hidden it, but I knew it had been her handiwork. I recognized her elegant, spidery script in the blank space alongside the photo.

F & L (R & G?)she’d written, and then, underneath, a list.

Iowa, 1987Missouri, 1970–1987Ohio, 1962–1970Kentucky, 1960–1962Before:??It didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d turned the clipping over in my hand, hoping for more clues, but there was only an ad for the local Ford dealership. I looked more carefully at the picture, studying the beauty queen. She was pretty, her red hair curled back from her face, but there was nothing familiar there, and my eyes drifted to the crowd.

It took awhile—all the faces were a little blurry, and several were wearing sunglasses—but finally, I saw a dark-haired woman standing just at the edge of the photo, her hand shading her eyes.

Mrs. Faith Carter watches the parade with her mother, Mrs. Lydia Hollingsworth.

Faith and Lydia. F & L.

I swear to you, I felt Ruby in that crinkled old piece of newspaper. I could almost see one shiny red nail tapping the picture, and those dark hazel eyes—my eyes—settling on those two women.

There was something familiar about the dark-haired one, something about the way she stood, the set of her shoulders, the slight purse in her lips as she watched the parade.

She looked, I realized with a dawning horror, exactly like Nelle. The older woman at her side—her mother, according to the caption—was taller, her hair twisted into an updo that was old-fashioned even forty years ago, and her hand was resting on her daughter’s arm.

I stared at that picture for a long time, thinking back through everything I’d read about Baby Ruby and her kidnapping. About the nanny, Grace, who had vanished from North Carolina only days after Ruby went missing.

R & G?

In her letters, Ruby had imagined what must have happened to the other Ruby, thinking of that poor baby sent off to find her nanny, searching the woods for Grace, before stepping off a cliff, plunging into all that dark, thick greenery, swallowed up forever.

But maybe …

Maybe there had been another story there all along.

A woman—a girl, really; Grace had been only about twenty—seeing the sickness in Ashby House before anyone else had known to look. A woman who loved a child enough to try to save her from it. Who had found a way to make them both disappear.

Or maybe this was simply another fantasy of Ruby’s. Nothing more than a delusional hunch, a wish that the real Ruby, Dora Darnell’s spiritual twin, had been a fighter, too. That she had, perhaps, survived.

In any case, it was another one of Ruby’s many secrets.

One I decided to keep.

Well, except from you.

That piece of newspaper is still there in the painting, wrapped gently in all of Ruby’s letters, and I think about it every time I look into the eyes Andrew Miller so lovingly painted all those years ago.

The love of his life.

And his doom.

Here’s one final secret for you.

Sometimes, when I look up at Ruby’s portrait, I think about how happy she was when it was painted. She thought she’d beaten it then, the dark thing that was lurking inside her.

She thought it could be that easy.

And I think about me and Cam, how happy we are.

How easy it is to think the darkness has been exorcised from us both.

Even though Cam pressed a pillow down on his mother’s face until she stopped moving.

Even though I swung that poker at Ben without one second of hesitation.

Were we forced into the role of murderer? Did we have any other choice?

I think I know the answers, but sometimes …

Sometimes I lie awake at night, our child kicking inside me, half him, half me, and remember that Cam and I are both Ruby’s heirs.

Me by blood, him by a different, but no less powerful bond.

And I wonder.