Chapter Two: Camden

CHAPTER TWOCamden

There’s a moment, right before I close the trunk of the car, when I think about calling this whole fucking thing off.

I could. It’s my home, my family. My decision, as Jules has reminded me a thousand times since that night in the kitchen, the night when I read Ben’s email and realized that you can put miles and mountains between you and home, but eventually, home will call you back.

I’d actually forgotten about the other email, the one from Howell. It had come in about six months ago, and I’d read it sitting at my desk, the only sound my students’ pencils scraping across the paper as they’d worked on their persuasive essays.

Clearly a lesson Howell had missed because nothing about that drunken rant had made me even think about coming home. I hadn’t spoken to Howell since the afternoon of Ruby’s funeral, but reading that email, I could hear his voice in my head as clearly as if he’d been standing right in front of me, ten years swept away clean.

I could smell the whiskey, too.

The email was classic Howell, starting out formal and mannered, the benevolent King of Tavistock, North Carolina, calling for the return of a wayward noble. Then by the end, devolving into a typo-riddled, expletive-filled mess dripping with guilt trips and vitriol.

And a threat.

A poorly worded one, but a threat nonetheless.

Ruby’s death had been officially listed as “heart failure,” but the empty pill bottles in her nightstand had told a different story.

That was the first—and maybe the only—time in my life I’d ever wielded the McTavish money and name like the rest of them did. I insisted that there would be no autopsy, no questions, just a simple cremation and a subdued memorial service with only the family in attendance. I hadn’t wanted the circus, hadn’t wanted all those old stories about Ruby dug up and splashed on the pages of magazines again.

If I hadn’t been so young and desperate, I might’ve thought more about how it all looked—how, to minds as poisoned and suspicious as Howell’s and Nelle’s, covering up Ruby’s suicide would make me look like I had something to hide. So it hadn’t been a surprise, that sly, ugly sentence there at the end of his email—Do you ever think about it, Camden?—but it had landed like a weight in my chest all the same.

When I’d gotten my lawyer’s voicemail last month, telling me Howell had driven drunk straight into a tree not far from Ashby House, I hadn’t been surprised. There had been dozens of smaller accidents like that with him, god knows how many cars crumpled, but Howell had always walked away.

Until he didn’t.

I hadn’t told Jules about the call, Howell’s death, any of it. I’d planned on just ignoring it like I did all things Ashby House, but Ben’s message … I don’t know. It got to me.

He was right—he and I had never gotten along as kids. He was a couple of years older than me, and knowing that his family fortune was being left to some skinny kid he wasn’t even related to had not exactly endeared me to him. The Ben I remembered was a preening jock, an asshole who drove a truck that could’ve doubled as a tank and always wore whatever the year’s most expensive sneakers were.

But he’d sounded different in that email. More … I don’t know. Human. Like someone who wasn’t necessarily the Enemy.

Howell’s email from all those months ago had been easy to ignore, but something about Ben’s gave me pause.

We’d talked late into the night, me and Jules, weighing out the pros (Jules had never seen Ashby House, or North Carolina for that matter; it would be the first trip we’d taken together since that camping trip in Estes Park two summers ago; Ben was right, something needed to be done about the tangled bullshit that was Ruby’s will––all that money, all that house) and the cons (literally, every fucking thing else).

In the end, it had been Jules who’d made the decision for us. Sitting there at our kitchen table, our fingers intertwined, exhausted in that way you get when you’ve been talking in circles for hours, she’d finally said, “I think we should go.”

I’d watched her, not saying anything, my heart a steady drumbeat in my chest, and then she’d added, almost sheepish, “It might be nice to know you a little better.”

Married ten years, and my own wife feels like she needs to know me better.

I could understand it, though. When I’d left North Carolina for California, I was so closed off, so determined to keep to myself.

It had seemed safest that way. Ashby House had been a crucible and a fishbowl all at once, the sort of place where despite all the rooms and the endless square footage, it was like you were never alone. There was always someone watching, always someone listening, and all I had wanted was to feel invisible. Unseen.

Unknown.

Until Jules. I’d let her in, but I knew—and apparently, she did, too—that there was still some part of me holding back.

Ashby House was the reason for that.

So maybe it could be the solution, too.

After that, things moved fast. Jules quit her job at Homestead Park and pulled out of the local theater production of Chicago, where she’d been cast as Velma. I put in for extended leave at the school. “Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks,” I’d said to the head of the English department, hoping it was true, but knowing it probably wasn’t.

My ninth graders were reading The Odyssey, and just a few weeks ago, we’d gotten to the part about the lotus-eaters, a tribe of people living on an island, gorging themselves with the lotus flowers that make them forget home, forget anything that’s not the island and their fellow lotus-eaters, all of them settling into peaceful, blank apathy.

Ashby House was like that.

Stay there long enough, and you forget there’s a world outside its tall doors, its oversize windows, and shadowed lawns. It swallows everyone eventually. Look at Ben and Libby, for fuck’s sake. Look at Howell.

I barely remembered his ex-wife, Ben and Libby’s mom, Rebecca. She’d taken off early on, when Libby was about five or six, and after that, it was like she had never even existed. Like anyone who left Ashby House had to be erased from the collective memory or something.

But Howell had stayed, and while they’d briefly left for college, both Ben and Libby had drifted back to Ashby eventually. Nelle, of course, had never left. Never would.

Four people rattling around a fifteen-bedroom mansion because the idea of life outside its walls, of buying a smaller place––or, god forbid, renting an apartment like a normal person––was completely unthinkable.

It had been unthinkable to me once, too.

Until the idea of staying had seemed even worse.

I stand there, cold in the chilly morning air, the light jacket I threw on over my long-sleeved T-shirt not doing much against the bite of Colorado in mid-September. I haven’t worn this jacket in years. It’s been buried in my closet alongside the other clothes I brought from North Carolina that I never touched once I got out west. A pair of camouflage cargo shorts, a seersucker suit Ruby had insisted I buy, khakis, Docksiders, and a fucking bow tie of all things, all remnants of a past life––not so much of the Cam I’d been, but the Cam that Ruby had wanted me to be.

Does he still exist, that Cam? Is he tucked somewhere inside my soul, or is he a ghost, wandering the halls of Ashby?

I guess I’m about to find out.

There’s a rattle of keys at the front door as Jules steps out onto the porch, locking up behind her. Her hair is pulled into a messy bun, sunglasses sliding down her nose as she turns to face me, an oversize duffel bag on one shoulder, and something seizes in my chest as I look at my wife.

Again, there’s that overwhelming urge to say, Fuck it––to email Ben that I’m not coming; to instead call my lawyer, Nathan, and tell him to release any funds any of them ask for.

To do whatever it takes to sever that tie for good and keep the thousands of miles, rivers, and a whole goddamn mountain range between me and what I left behind in North Carolina.

But then Jules smiles, practically bouncing down the steps, and says, “I’m so glad we’re doing this.”

I smile back, reaching to pull her close, her chin tilting up so that I can kiss the tip of her nose.

“You’re doing that face,” she tells me, and I don’t have to ask what she means. Any time I’m overthinking things—brooding, Jules would say—I apparently make a face. Jules mimics it for me now, her jaw tight, her brows drawing slightly together, and I huff out a laugh like I always do.

“It’s going to be fine,” she continues, reaching up to rub her thumb over that trio of wrinkles on my forehead. “You’ll see.”

She thinks it’s all the money shit that has made things tense. She gets that Nelle and Howell were never the most welcoming of family members, even though Ruby adopted me when I was only three––still a baby in most regards, and who the hell cold-shoulders a baby? She knows that Ben and Libby are spoiled and more than a little vapid and that I don’t have much in common with them. She understands that I chose to leave the money Ruby left me mostly untouched because I knew that that kind of wealth came with strings attached.

Everything about my estrangement from my family makes perfect sense to Jules because I’ve made it make perfect sense. I’ve told her the truth, or at least the most basic version of it, and she’s accepted it.

And if I call this trip off right this second, she’d probably accept that, too. But she’d be disappointed. Confused, probably. A little sad.

Worst of all, she might be curious.

We’ve already left our jobs and shut down the house. The car is packed. I’ve got Tavistock, North Carolina, plugged into the GPS and hotel rooms booked for nights in Kansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. Sure, we could get there in three days instead of four, but Jules liked the idea of taking the scenic route, and besides, I’m in no hurry to face my family. And if I back out now, how long before my wife starts wondering what was so bad about going home that I’d rather undo all of that planning, all of that effort?

How long before Ben sends another email, one a little sharper, a little colder?

No, I made my choice when Jules slipped her hand into mine that night and said those words.

It might be nice to know you a little better.

She deserves that. I deserve that.

I give her one last squeeze then, lightly swatting at her hip, gesture her toward the passenger seat of the car. “I’ll take first shift,” I tell her. “Seven hours until Wichita.”

“Okay, but I’m picking the music,” she replies as she tosses her bag in the back.

“Shotgun rights, sacred rules of the road,” I say, solemn, and she laughs like I knew she would.

I hold tight to that laugh as I slide into the driver’s seat, my fingers flexing on the wheel. The sun is bright, making me squint and reach for my sunglasses, and as I do, the light catches on the clasp of my watch.

An eighteenth birthday present from Ruby. There’s an inscription on the back, one I haven’t looked at in years, but remember all the same.

For Camden. Time Brings All Things to Pass.

And as I drive away from the new life that I’d built for myself, heading back toward my past, I wonder if those words were supposed to be an encouragement or a warning.

Or a threat.

From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish

March 12, 2013

Well, darling, here we are.

You asked for me to tell you the truth, all of it, the glorious and golden, the ugly and unvarnished. I think you wanted me to tell it to you all at once, the last time we spoke. I could see how disappointed you were when I told you that it would take time. I’m seventy-three, for goodness’ sake, and I’ve lived an eventful life. Too eventful, honestly. And anyway, this isn’t the kind of thing you chat about over coffee. Something like this, it needs an old-fashioned touch, a bit of formality (I can see you rolling your eyes already, and if you were in front of me, I’d slap your hand for it).

After you read these letters, you’ll probably think I’m a mad old fool for putting any of this in writing, but I’ve found that writing things down makes them real. Firms up details. Allows less room for … eliding, let us say. (If you don’t know what that word means, then I’m clearly overpaying for your education.)

And to be honest—that’s what you’re after, yes?—I don’t care anymore. If people find these and read them and finally know the truth of everything, it no longer matters to me. I know my end is coming—soon for some, I suppose, but right on time for me. And if you can’t tell the truth at the end of it all, then what, I ask, is the fucking point?

I’ve never written that word before. I’ve hardly ever said it. I know I got on you about crass language, but now I see why people use it. How satisfying! This experiment is already going so well!

You wanted to know mostly about the men, I think. The pile of dead husbands, “Mrs. Kill-more,” all of that. And we’ll get there, I promise.

I also promise to skip the non-interesting bits. My school years, the business, most anything to do with Nelle (although she will make an appearance in this letter, I’m afraid, but sadly for Nelle, the only times in her life when she has ever been interesting are the times she was being a nasty little bitch, and the story I’m going to tell involves one of those times).

But before I can get to all of that, we have to talk about my tragic disappearance and miraculous rescue.

You can read the newspaper articles about the whole saga. They’re all saved in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. Or you can go on the internet. Libby tells me there’s an entire entry about it on some online encyclopedia.

And yes, yes, I know we’ve already covered some of this, but only the facts. How I vanished on a family picnic when I was just three, how I was found months and months later living with the Darnells in Alabama. How Mrs. Darnell insisted that I was not Ruby McTavish at all, but her own child, Dora, and how Mr. Darnell eventually confessed that while in North Carolina on a construction job (for my own father, as luck would have it), he had gotten drunk on a Sunday afternoon and wandered into the woods. How he had seen me alone, a miscommunication between my nanny and my mother meaning that both women thought the other was watching me. How he had thought of his wife, Helen, and the child just my age who had died only a month or so before. How easy it had been to scoop me up, carry me to his truck parked on some back logging road, and spirit me away to his family’s shack in Alabama. A replacement for the child his wife so mourned.

Of course, I remember none of this.

Or rather, I remember fragments that I’m not sure are actually memories. I read the stories so many times, you see, and envisioned so much of it that I can’t be sure if something is a memory or a conjured-up image.

A dream.

That’s why I spent so much time in my father’s office as a child.

He kept all the newspaper clippings there, in the very same drawer I mentioned earlier.

I learned that by accident one afternoon in 1950, when I was just ten years old. I’d had a doll, one of those fancy ones with the eyes that opened and closed and silky blond hair, her lips strawberry pink, and her cheeks dotted with painted-on freckles.

I’d gotten her when I was seven or eight, for Christmas or a birthday, I can’t remember which. What I can remember is Nelle howling that her doll had brown hair and mine had yellow hair, and that was unfair since Nelle herself was a blonde and I was a brunette. I had been worried that my parents might make me trade dolls with Nelle, and I had sat there, only a little bitty thing, thinking, If they do, I will throw this doll into the fire. I will burn it before I let Nelle have it.

I meant it, too. The image of that beautiful doll melting and folding in on itself, the yellow hair sparking, the pink paint of the lips bubbling and cracking, was far less painful than picturing the doll, whole and complete and perfect, in Nelle’s arms.

Do all children think like this? I’ve never spent much time with children other than the ones either born into or brought into this family, so I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s all perfectly normal, and not some quirk of either my DNA or the very essence that seems to emanate from the walls of Ashby House. But at the time—and hell, who am I kidding, even now—it seemed that there must be something uniquely wrong with me.

In any case, Mama didn’t ask me to trade, and Nelle was eventually consoled with an extra piece of cake or some other sop, and the doll was mine. I had named her “Grace,” but when I said the name, something had passed over Mama’s face, an ugly look like someone had suddenly hit her.

“I don’t like that name,” she’d said sharply. “What about Kitty?”

I thought Kitty was a stupid name, but Mama so rarely paid any attention to me that I’d readily agreed even as I’d known that in my head, I would still call her Grace.

And it was Grace’s fault I was in Daddy’s office that hot summer afternoon.

One of her eyes had gotten stuck, half-opened, half-closed. There was something about that half-mast gaze that reminded me of Mama when she had her headaches. That’s what we called them then, although of course now I know that Mama drank too much, which meant that she was perpetually either intoxicated or dealing with the aftermath.

Do you know, to this day, I cannot stand the smell of gin? It was her favorite, and any time I get a whiff of that herby, medicinal scent, I think of Mama, swaying in her bedroom door, her face puffy, eyes red.

The last time Grace’s eye had gotten stuck like that, Daddy had fixed it with a paper clip, and the only place I could think to find one was his office, so I’d crept in there, the air stifling, smelling like cigar smoke, furniture polish, and the faint hint of my father’s cologne.

We weren’t forbidden from entering, exactly. It’s just that Daddy was out of town for business (well, “business.” Later we’d learn he was driving to Charleston to stay with his mistress and our future stepmother, Loretta), and I’d never been in there without him.

I can still remember how hard my heart was beating as I crept across that thick green carpet, the same carpet that is under my feet now as I write this. How the brass knob of the drawer felt hot in my hand, my fingers sweaty.

I didn’t mean to snoop, but when I opened the drawer, the very first thing I saw was my name. It was emblazoned across the top of a newspaper, the letters inches high, bold and black:

BABY RUBY HOME AT LAST!

I remember wrinkling my nose at the “baby” part, already sophisticated enough at ten to reject anything that smacked of babyishness, but then I started to read.

And kept reading.

I’d known about the kidnapping. This is not that moment where a child learns some dark family secret by accident. Our town was too small, our family too well known for that kind of thing to stay hidden. But I only knew about it in the vaguest sense. A bad man had lost his child and saw me, taking me home to his wife so she wouldn’t be so sad anymore, but that wasn’t right, you could not take someone else’s child, and Daddy had spent so much of our money to find me, to bring me home where I belonged.

But here, in this newspaper, I learned the name of the man who had taken me.

Jimmy Darnell.

His wife was Helen. They had called me Dora. They had another baby, too, born just after I was returned to my family. Her name was Claire, a pretty name that I immediately resolved to give to the next doll I got.

And then I’d seen another name.

Grace.

There in black and white, a sentence: The child’s former nanny, Grace Bennett, left North Carolina after questioning, and her current whereabouts are unknown.

Paper clip and doll forgotten, I’d sat in Daddy’s big leather chair and pulled out all the papers in that drawer.

It took me awhile to find it, but eventually there had been a picture splashed across the front page of The Atlanta Constitution. I recognized Mama and Daddy, their expressions serious, Mama’s hat tilted so that the brim covered most of her face. And behind her, another woman, younger, her hair dark, her face a rictus of anguish, tears streaming, one gloved hand clapped over her mouth.

The parents of Baby Ruby leave the Tavistock, North Carolina, police station accompanied by the child’s nanny—and the last person to see Baby Ruby—Grace Bennett.

I looked at that face for what felt like hours.

The grief on it. The pain. The horror. How she must have loved me. How tormented she must have felt, letting me slip away on her watch.

Guilt crept into me, too, a sick, slippery feeling.

How could I not remember someone who loved me this much? How was the only thing left of this person the faint memory of a name, a name I gave to a doll?

But mixed in with the guilt was that strange sort of elation you feel when reading about yourself. Pages and pages of newsprint, all about something scandalous that had happened to me.

What child can resist that?

So, naturally, I wasn’t listening as closely as I should have been, which is why, when Nelle pushed her way in and pointed at me, I actually jumped in my seat.

“You’re in Daddy’s office!” she cried, triumphant. “I’m gonna tell him!”

“I’ll say you’re lying,” I fired back. “You’re just a baby. He won’t believe you.”

Her narrow face creased into a frown. Christ, I’ve just realized it’s the same expression she wears ninety percent of the time now. How tragic for her.

“He will, too!” she replied, her voice shrill. “He’ll believe me over you. You’re not even my real sister.”

Every argument with Nelle reached this point eventually. It was her favorite weapon, even though the one time Mama heard her say it, Nelle had gotten a whooping with a belt, a punishment neither of us had ever received before or since.

But, apparently, even that wasn’t a deterrent.

“I’m gonna tell Daddy you said that.”

Her little face flushed, and she crossed her arms over her chest, lower lip wobbling. If she started crying, she might wake Mama up from her nap, and then we’d both be in trouble.

“Or-r-r,” I said, drawing the word out, “I won’t tell, and you won’t tell anyone I was in here.”

It was always like this with Nelle. Attack, counterattack, and then, eventually, a reminder of mutually assured destruction, and we headed back to our corners until the battle began anew over something else.

It was exhausting, frankly.

It’s still exhausting. How are two women our age still locked into such silliness? I sometimes think about asking her. Was there ever a time when we could’ve broken this pattern? Been something more than wary enemies? There must have been. Obviously, there was no chance of it after everything with Duke, but maybe before that.

Maybe that moment in Daddy’s office was our chance, and I’d missed it.

Ah, well. No use in trying to undo what’s long been done. And besides, I can admit that I could never forgive Nelle for voicing my greatest fear so often.

That I wasn’t Ruby McTavish. That I was Dora Darnell, a cuckoo in the nest, and that’s why Nelle hated me, had always hated me, wailing her head off when she was just a baby anytime I came near her. Because she knew, even then, that I wasn’t her sister.

What chance did we ever have, with something like that between us?

In any case, she slunk out of the office, and I carefully replaced the papers, picking up my doll as I went, forgetting the paper clip altogether. Although now that I think about it, I never played with that doll again after that day.

It sat there with my other toys, one eye forever half-open until I was old enough not to have toys anymore.

I wonder where it ended up.

But you didn’t ask for childhood memories, you asked for the truth! That’s what you’re saying to yourself right now, aren’t you?

Darling, I’ve given it to you.

The fear that I was not Ruby McTavish was an open wound, one Nelle knew to pour salt in and one that I, with my newspapers and my dreams I called memories, was forever trying to heal. It was a fear that I could never speak aloud myself because even as a child, I knew it would shatter something inside my family for good.

Because what would that mean?

Too many horrors to contemplate.

Even for me, even now.

Especially when there are still so many horrors to come.

-R

HOPE DIM, BUT NOT YET

EXTINGUISHED FOR

FAMILY OF BABY RUBY

Tavistock, North Carolina

When Anna Ashby McTavish was a young girl, she tells us, the only thing she ever wanted for Christmas was “ribbon candy and a sack of oranges.”

A modest wish for a girl born to one of the finest families in Wichita, Kansas, but in keeping with Mrs. McTavish’s character. This is a woman who offers reporters tea poured by her own hand rather than relying on the maids that surely people the halls of Ashby House, and whose anguish is only visible in the slight redness of her eyes, the elegant fingers reaching up to touch a delicate diamond cross around her neck as she tells us of the one wish she has for Christmas 1943.

“I want my baby to come home to us,” she says, her voice cracking slightly. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to have Ruby back.”

Ruby McTavish has been missing for over three months now after disappearing on a family picnic. Even now, Mrs. McTavish tells us, she can hardly bear to think that such a lovely day ended in tragedy.

“It was such a pretty afternoon, and Ruby was so sweet in her little sailor dress. She’d fallen down at one point and scraped her knee, but she didn’t even cry. I think she was as happy as her daddy was to be out in these mountains.”

The Blue Ridge Mountains surrounding the McTavish mansion are indeed stunning, but they are also full of hidden dangers—steep cliffs, boggy areas, and, of course, wild animals.

Faced with such perils, it’s no wonder the Tavistock County Sheriff’s Department says that, while the search is ongoing, they do not hold much hope of finding the child alive.

“With children this young, if we don’t find them within the first few hours, we don’t anticipate a happy ending,” Sheriff Nicholas Lewis told this reporter.

But Christmas is the season of hope, and Mrs. McTavish clings to it with all the tenacity of her pioneer ancestors.

“Ruby is out there,” she says, her aquamarine eyes shimmering with tears, but her words firm. “This is her home. She belongs here. And we will do whatever it takes—anythingit takes—to bring her home.”

This reporter has covered enough tragedies to know how unlikely that is, but walking the graceful halls of Ashby House, looking out as light pierces a cloud over those same mountains that seem to have swallowed Baby Ruby, one feels that surely, this family must have angels on their side.

The Atlanta Constitution,

Thursday Morning, December 23, 1943