Chapter Four: Camden

CHAPTER FOURCamden

I feel the house before I see it.

That probably sounds stupid to you, and if I had grown up in anything resembling a normal family, I’m pretty sure it would have seemed stupid to me, too.

But as our car winds its way up the mountain, my fingers tighten around the steering wheel, and cold sweat breaks out on my upper lip, my lower back. The trees here are still green, leafy and huge, their roots burrowing into the dirt and the rocks, and the blacktop cuts a dark ribbon in front of me as we go up, up, up.

It’s impossible not to think about the last time I was on this road.

Back then, I was headed down, down, down, away from Ashby House, away from the McTavishes, away from memories that I couldn’t bear to recall. I remember turning up the radio so loud that it made my back teeth ache, the drums and the bass crashing through my brain, the kind of noise that would have made Ruby say, “Turn that down, for goodness’ sake, Camden! I can’t hear myself think!”

That’s what I was going for, a sound so loud that thoughts were impossible.

But it turns out there are some thoughts that no amount of noise can silence, and I’d made that drive down the mountain with nausea coiled in my stomach and my face wet with tears.

I swore I’d never go back.

So it feels slightly unreal to make that last turn, that place where the asphalt becomes dirt for just a few yards, pitted with holes, thick tree roots bumping us along hard enough that Jules grabs what she calls the “Oh Shit Handle” above her head.

Nelle wanted to pave this part of the road, but Ruby said that would make it too easy for people to come and gawk at the gates of the house. I always thought she overestimated just how much people wanted to see a random chimney or the hint of a window, but there had been several times I’d driven out of those gates as a teenager to see a family in a rented Subaru pulled over on the side of the road near the gate, phones in hand, standing up on their tiptoes in bright white sneakers as they strained to catch a glimpse.

Personally, I couldn’t give a shit if tourists came to look—isn’t that why people build places like this, anyway?—but I agreed with Ruby that we shouldn’t make the road smooth. Let all these bumps and jostles and the fear of a blown tire serve as a warning of what they’d find at the top of this mountain.

A haunted house where the ghosts hadn’t had the courtesy to die yet.

I clench my teeth.

Thisis why I didn’t want to come back here. I don’t think shit like that in Colorado. There, I’m mostly focused on work, on things I need to do around the house, on Jules. I like that version of myself—a normal guy, with a normal life––and I had started to believe that, maybe, that’s who I was now.

But apparently not. Put me on the road to Ashby, and I’m that Cam again. Ruby’s project, heir to the McTavish estate, the “Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.”

That was a real thing someone wrote about me. It was for some magazine profile Ruby did when I was twelve. I remember the photographers coming to the house, the scratchy suit Ruby made me wear. The photographer took a picture of me in my bedroom, a massive suite on the west side of the house that had gorgeous sunset views, but was decorated like it belonged to one of the Golden Girls. All chintz and florals, a big canopy bed (every twelve-year-old boy’s dream, a canopy bed).

They had me sit in the middle of that massive bed, wearing my suit and bow tie, holding a basketball in my lap. I didn’t even play, but North Carolina is basketball country, and I guess they thought it would make me look more like a regular kid.

I looked like a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy who’d come to life in an assisted-living facility. No basketball was going to undo that.

But I smiled and let them take the picture because that’s what Ruby wanted and later, when the magazine arrived at the house, I flipped through it, mostly to see how bad the picture was. I needed to brace myself for the merciless mocking I was no doubt about to endure in school once the issue hit Tavistock mailboxes.

The picture was as terrible as I thought it would be, but what I hadn’t been prepared for was the caption.

Camden Andrew McTavish: The Luckiest Boy in North Carolina.

Even then, I’d known what bullshit that was. But I also got it, I guess. I’d been an orphan, in and out of the foster system since birth. A multimillionaire plucking me out of poverty, installing me in her palatial home, making me heir to her fortune?

Yeah, I see where that sounds pretty fucking lucky.

If you didn’t know Ruby.

The dirt track turns into gravel, and my heart beats faster. This is it, the last approach to the gates. The trees on each side nearly block out the sun now, their limbs arching and meeting overhead. It always made me feel like I was being slowly swallowed by something as I drove up this road. Everything gets darker, tighter, funneling you in.

I glance over at Jules, wondering if she senses the same claustrophobic air settling in, but she’s sitting up in her seat, her sunglasses shoved up on her head, her eyes taking everything in.

She’s smiling a little, hands clasped on her lap, and I try to see this place through her gaze.

It’s pretty, of course: the trees are thick and lush, and a few glimpses of the sky and the valley below peep out between the leaves. The mist that tends to linger in the treetops can make you feel like you’re up in the clouds, and I can see that for some people—for Jules—that might feel magical. That you’d feel tucked in and safe up here, not trapped.

I want to feel that way, too. More than anything. I want the past to stay buried, and to find a way to at least tolerate this place, because I think that Jules is going to love it. I think she wants to love it.

So for her sake, I’m going to try.

Making myself smile, I reach over and take one of her hands. “We’re almost to the gates. Once we’re through, the road turns a little, and you’ll want to look out your window to get the best view. There’s a sunflower garden on that side, and they should still be blooming. It’s nice.”

She smiles back at me, wiggling a little in her seat. “A sunflower garden? I was not aware that you grew up like a pretty, pretty princess, Cam.”

The smile is frozen on my face, and I wonder if she can tell how hard I’m forcing it. “Ruby’s idea,” I tell her. “Planted at some point in the eighties. Nelle hated it, thought it was tacky, but I always liked it. Or I did, until the time I was hiding in there and found a corn snake. Slithered right over my foot.”

Jules wrinkles her nose. “Okay, hard pass on that,” she says. “Definitely going to admire the sunflower garden from afar.”

I wish she could admire the whole damn house from afar.

I wish snakes were the worst things that lived on this property.

We’re almost at the gate now, and my fingers drum on the steering wheel, my gaze technically in front of me, but my thoughts far away.

The passcode for the gate is still there, in my head.

13–6–61

It’s the day Ruby’s first husband, Duke, died. She switched the month and day because, as she’d told me when she first gave me the code, “He died in Europe, after all.”

She said it with a light shrug, like it was obvious, just a completely normal thing to say. A completely normal thing to do, making the passcode to your house the date of your husband’s murder. But then she always did that. She’d say the craziest shit in the most cheerful voice, and it was stunning how quickly you found yourself agreeing with her.

Right, yeah, day then month! Like in Europe, since that’s where someone shot him in the chest with a rifle twice. Makes perfect sense, Ruby!

I asked her only once why that date. Why not his birthday or their wedding day? Or any other date that wasn’t associated with blood and a dead body?

Well, no one will ever guess that date, will they, my darling? It’s too morbid, so it’s the last thing anyone would think I’d use.

Sitting at her dressing table in her room, slathering her hands with some fancy cream that arrived by courier every six weeks from France. I’ve never smelled it before or since, but I bet it still lingers in the rooms of Ashby House. Sharp lavender, so astringent it almost made your eyes water, and some other scent underneath, woodsy and rich.

I’d been ten, maybe? Something like that. Too young to point out the obvious alternatives.

No one would guess random numbers, either. Or digits from a phone number you barely use. Or my real birthday since you just told everyone it was the same day as yours so we could celebrate at the same time. So why thefuck is it this day? Why do you want to remember that date every time you go in and out of those gates? Why––

“Cam?”

I blink, and realize Jules is looking at me, her hand on my arm. I’ve stopped the car without realizing it, and the gates to Ashby House rise up before us.

There’s a wrought iron fence running out in either direction from the granite columns, but—family secret here—it doesn’t enclose the whole property. A section fell down about twenty years ago, and Ruby never bothered to get it fixed.

If I got out of the car right now, I could walk along this fence with my eyes closed, and I’d know exactly where that hole was, and I fucking hate that.

I hate that this place still lives inside of me.

“Sorry,” I tell Jules now. “Zoned out trying to remember the code.”

Her eyebrows draw together, concern puckering her lips. “The code?”

“To open the gate.”

Now she’s openly frowning. “Camden,” she says slowly. “It’s … it’s already open, babe. See?”

In my mind, the gate loomed up to the sky, bars thick and black, locking McTavishes inside, locking anyone else out.

But now I see that if you were in decent shape and had stretched first, you could probably climb the gate with no problem. And the bars are thinner than I remembered, flecked with rust now, some of the filigree details almost eaten through with it.

And Jules is right—one side of the gate hangs half open.

Stepping out of the car, I get my first deep breath of that North Carolina mountain air, feeling my chest expand with it. Pine, the loamy smell of damp earth, the slight chemical tang of a thunderstorm not too far away.

It smells like home.

Because, like it or not, that’s what this place is.

I push the gate all the way open and get back into the car.

Next to me, Jules is still looking a little worried, so I throw her a quick smile and make my voice as cheerful as I can. “You ready for this?”

“Are you?” she counters, and I laugh, but it’s a weak sound, more like a huff of air than an actual chuckle.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

And then I put the car in drive, and let Ashby House pull me back in.