Chapter Eight: Camden

CHAPTER EIGHTCamden

“So you’re a teacher, huh?”

Ben and I are in his truck, heading down the mountain into Tavistock. We’d spent yesterday taking stock of what needed to be done, fixing what we could with the few tools Ben had around, but today, we were pulling off the damaged paneling in the upstairs bathroom, and that took more supplies. I should’ve just hired some guys to do it—Lord knew I had the fucking money—but I’d wanted to do it myself. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was some attempt at atoning for all the years I’d been gone, or maybe I’d just wanted to lose myself in grueling but mind-numbing manual labor.

I’m actually on my phone, trying to price new paneling despite the shitty signal, when Ben asks his question, and I briefly glance over at him.

He’s got one arm resting on the door, his elbow jutting out the open window, and the scent of earth and trees is thick in the truck. I always forget just how long it takes to get into town, and now it looks like Ben has decided to fill the time with small talk.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Boys’ school in Colorado.”

“I knew that part,” he says. “What do you teach?”

I look back at my phone, and even though several people, including Ben’s dad, have died on this twisty road, I wish he’d step on the gas.

“English.”

Ben nods at that, thumping his hand on the side of the truck. “You always were reading.”

“And you were always smacking books out of my hands and wondering if I was the first person in my family who ever learned to read,” I can’t help but remind him.

He loved that shit. Not just the mocking—although I’m sure that was very fun—but making sure I knew I came from, as he liked to put it, “fucking hillbilly trash, probably.”

Not One of Us.Could’ve been the McTavish family motto.

Now, though, Ben sighs and reaches up, adjusting his baseball cap. “You know I was just a dick to you because I was jealous, right?”

I can’t help but snort, turning my attention back to my phone. “Sure.”

“I mean it,” he says just as we reach the base of the mountain. I spot a huge oak tree, its bark splintered and raw, but Ben keeps his eyes on the road ahead of us. “Dad was always in my head, man. Nana Nelle, too. ‘All this should be yours, you’re the real heir, maybe Ruby will come to her senses one day.’ Used to drive me nuts.”

“Wasn’t exactly a great situation for me, either,” I say, and he looks over at me then, one corner of his mouth lifting.

“No, I guess it wasn’t.”

A pause.

And then, “But knowing you had all that money coming probably helped.”

It always comes back to the money with them. Even now, even when Ben is, in his own way, trying to make amends, he just can’t help himself. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.

He doesn’t get that the money means fuck all when everything else around you is so toxic. If Ruby had genuinely loved me, if growing up in Ashby House hadn’t felt like I was starring in my own personal version of The Hunger Games every day …

“Whatever,” I say now, like I’m a surly teenager again, and he reaches over to thump my arm.

“You really haven’t touched it?” he asks. “Everything Ruby left you?”

“I told you, I never wanted it,” I say as we pass the big sign welcoming us into Tavistock. It’s a small town, sleepy and quaint, and I’m surprised at how quickly my brain starts racing, reminding me that the K–12 school I went to is just down Main Street and to the left. The bookstore whose aisles I haunted is three doors down from the coffee shop we’re passing now, and up ahead I spot the bright blue door of the Jay, a cozy restaurant with gingham tablecloths and leather booths. It was my favorite place to eat when I was a kid, and when we drive past, there’s a part of me that expects to look through the plate glass window and see Ruby sitting at our usual table.

She liked the booth looking out onto Main Street so she could “people-watch,” she said. I can conjure her up so clearly, red nails clicking on the white mug of coffee the waiter always brought her as soon as we sat down, dark gaze scanning the town outside, a queen secure in her kingdom.

But the restaurant is dark, the painted letters on the glass flaking off, and I look over at Ben. “The Jay closed?”

He shrugs. “We had to raise the rents downtown, and the owner decided it was time to retire.”

My gaze moves over the street, and now I see that the Jay isn’t the only shuttered building. The tearoom is dark, as is the tiny bookstore. So, too, the jewelry shop, where Ruby had an account.

I shouldn’t care about any of it. Tavistock isn’t my home anymore. Hell, I’m not sure it ever really was, but there’s still an oily sensation in my stomach that I’m pretty sure is guilt.

“Did you actually need to raise the rents?” I ask Ben now, and he shoots me another one of those sideways glances.

“If we didn’t want to ask you for more money, then yeah.”

Tavistock itself is another one of those complications in Ruby’s will. Big chunks of the town still technically belong to me, but back in the early 2000s, Ruby sold a couple of blocks of downtown to Nelle. Howell wanted to open a brewery or something, and Nelle had a bunch of money after her husband died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the details because I’d been only about twelve or so, but Ruby had still made me go down to the lawyer’s office with her, dressed in a fucking suit and tie like I was the world’s youngest Realtor.

I can still feel the cool weight of her hand slipping into the crook of my elbow as we left that office, smell her perfume as she leaned in and muttered, Sometimes it’s fun to give people enough rope with which to hang themselves, my Camden.

I hadn’t understood what she meant, but the words had made something twist in my gut. By then, I knew about all the “Mrs. Kill-more” stuff, the string of dead husbands. I’d found out accidentally the summer before, an offhand comment sending me to the internet, and when I’d asked Ruby about it, she’d taken me to the Jay, to our favorite booth, and calmly told me the story of each of them.

Duke, killed in a robbery.

Hugh, electrocuted in the barn.

Andrew, sick with some mystery ailment.

Roddy, partying too hard and going over the side of a boat.

It all made sense when she laid it out, a series of unrelated incidents, bizarre, sure, but nowhere near as sinister as it had been made out.

I believed her.

Then, at least.

Ben pulls his truck into a parking place just in front of one of the few stores still open along this stretch, a sign reading HENDERSON’S HARDWARE AND SUNDRY GOODES swinging faintly in the breeze.

There are two men at the counter when we step in, one behind, one in front, and they’re smiling as they chat, the familiar accents sliding over my ears and into my heart in a way that makes me feel homesick even as I stand in my hometown.

They stop talking as we come in, and I watch something in both their faces change when they see Ben standing there.

He smiles brightly at them, lifting a hand. “Steve, Hank. How’s it going?”

The guy behind the counter—Steve Henderson, I recognize him now despite the paunch and the gray hair—nods at us. “Mr. McTavish,” he says, and then his eyes slide over to me.

The tightness fades from his expression and his eyes widen slightly. “Holy shit, Camden,” he says, and then he’s coming around the counter, pumping my hand and slapping my back. “How the hell are you, boy? Hank, you remember Ruby’s son, don’t you? Camden? Lord, what’s it been? Ten years now?”

“Something close to that,” I reply, smiling back at him as Hank leans on the counter and takes off his cap, running a hand over his thinning hair.

“Tell you what, son, we still miss your mama something fierce around here,” he says, and I can tell he means it. Ruby was a celebrity in this town, their magnanimous benefactor. If people in Tavistock ever whispered about all those husbands, they did it behind firmly closed doors.

No wonder she never wanted to leave.

“I miss her, too,” I tell him, and I am surprised to realize that’s true. I’ve spent the past ten years trying not to think about Ruby, and when I have, I’ve remembered only the bad things.

There was a lot of bad to remember, after all.

But there had also been good. The meals at the Jay. The standing account at the local bookstore, how Ruby encouraged my love of reading and always let me buy any book I wanted. The way she would ruffle my hair and say, You and me against the world, whenever Nelle or Howell or Ben was being a dick.

Ben emerges from the shelves with an armload of supplies. A crowbar, tarp, some respirators, and a putty knife. He’s still smiling at Hank and Steve, but there are those hard eyes again, and once again, the other men’s smiles fade as they study him warily.

“What are you working on today?” Hank asks, nodding toward the supplies Ben’s holding, and Ben gives him a broad wink.

“Found those hikers, decided to take care of the cleanup ourselves.”

Hank blanches, and, at my side, I feel Steve stiffen slightly even as Ben laughs, loud and long, shaking his head.

“Fucking with you,” he says, then turns to me, gesturing behind the counter where, for the first time, I notice a faded flyer bearing the word MISSING. Underneath, there are two blurry, photocopied pictures of a couple of young men in hiking gear, forested mountains rising up behind them.

“It’s been a whole thing,” Ben explains. “Over the summer, these two dumbasses decided to hike the trail on the east side of Ashby House.”

The mountain the house sits on actually has a name—Mount Trossach, after some place in Scotland—but no one in the family ever uses it. Everything up there is discussed in terms of the house, like it’s the only landmark that matters.

I know the trail Ben is talking about. It’s steep and tough, narrow enough in places that you can barely keep both feet on the mountain, and I have a sudden memory of me and Ben on that trail, years ago, his hands gripping my shoulders, his braying laugh in my ear as pebbles skittered from underneath my boots, and the sky and trees swung dizzily around me, my stomach lurching.

Fucking with you.

He’d said that then, too.

“They found one of their packs, but nothing else, and man, we had people crawling all over the mountain for weeks. Nana Nelle nearly had a fit because she could see them from her bedroom window. You were up there, weren’t you, Steve? Were you one of the ones Nana called the cops on?”

Steve’s face is granite now, and I see him clench and release a fist against his thigh. “Nope, can’t say I was. Think they talked to my cousin, though. It was his son that went missing. Tyler.”

I wait for something like shame or even embarrassment to color Ben’s face, but he just shrugs. “Not the first people to go missing up there, won’t be the last,” he says. “My dad used to say that it was like the mountain needed a sacrifice every once in a while. Sucks for Tyler, though.”

He gives the men another nod. “Anyway, thanks, man. Just put it on my tab. You ready, Cam?”

Ben doesn’t wait for an answer, pushing the door open with his hip, the bell overhead ringing.

“Be right there,” I call after him, and once the door slams shut behind him, I turn back to Steve.

“How much does he owe?”

Five minutes later, I’m back in Ben’s truck, over a thousand dollars put on my Visa, and Steve’s last words echoing in my brain.

It’s good to have you back in town,he’d said, his voice low and serious. But if I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open in that goddamn house.

CAMP LUMBEE: WHERE BOYS BECOME MEN

6/28/2004

Dear Ruby,

Camp is okay, I guess. I like the horseback riding, and tomorrow we start archery. Ben won some kind of award in that last year, so I’m probably going to have to listen to him brag about that all day, but that’s nothing new.

I wish you had told me about how much of this place your family owns or bought or whatever? It’s kind of embarrassing seeing my last name on so much stuff, and for the first few days, kids kept asking me if we owned this place. I said no, but do we?

There’s also a picture of you and your dad in the lodge. I guess you came up here when they opened the swimming pavilion? It says you’re “Ruby Woodward,” so I thought maybe it was a mistake or something, but then I looked it up on the computers in the library (those are the only good things in there, by the way. All the books are old Hardy Boys mysteries that I’ve already read, or weird Westerns from the fifties, so if you could send some books, that would be good).

You’ve been married four times? I only knew about Andrew. I guess it’s none of my business, but it was still weird. I asked Ben about it, but he laughed at me and called me a dumbass. (I’m not swearing, I’m repeating a swear someone else said. You can’t get mad at me for that.)

I have to go now or I’m going to be late for canoeing. Thank you for the money you sent to the canteen, but please don’t sendany more because they write your balance on this little sheet behind the counter and everyone can see it. The other guys have like twenty bucks in theirs, and now I have five hundred. Even Ben only has fifty, and one of his friends asked if that meant our family liked me more or something. It sucked (that’s not a swear no matter what you say).

I really want to talk when we get home. There was some other stuff about your husbands I saw online, and it kind of freaked me out. You always say we can’t have secrets from each other, but I think maybe you just meantIcan’t have secrets fromyou.

Your Son, Camden

From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish

March 20, 2013

Isn’t it enough that I wasted three years of my life with Hugh Woodward? Do I really have to waste another few hours on him now, in my twilight years?

Well, I won’t do it. Or rather, I’ll tell you the important bits, namely what I learned about myself through Hugh—or, more specifically, Hugh’s death.

I returned from Paris to North Carolina somewhere between a celebrity and a pariah. Honestly, I hardly remember anything of the rest of 1961 or the first half of 1962; I spent most of it in my room at Ashby in a haze of pills. Pills the doctors gave me, pills Loretta gave me from her own stash, pills that friends offered when they dropped by, ostensibly to talk to me, but mostly so they’d have a story for their next bridge night.

“I saw Ruby, and oh, she just looks dreadful, poor thing, I don’t know how she bears it.”

When something as cataclysmically horrible as your husband being shot to death on your honeymoon happens, people are both fascinated and repulsed by you. Fascinated because, my oh my, what a tale, what a juicy bit of gossip to spend in every dining room and nightclub you enter. Repulsed because … well, what if tragedy is catching? And such a thing would never happen to them, of course. No, they would’ve done this or that differently, because in the end, this is probably somehow all your fault anyway.

To be fair, it was my fault, but they didn’t know that.

So there I was, a widow at twenty-one, a daughter who became a wife, who was back to being a daughter again, ensconced in my childhood bedroom, no one quite sure what to do with me, least of all myself.

I’d envisioned a whole life for myself with Duke, you see. Before the honeymoon, obviously, before I knew just who I had married. But those months of planning the wedding had been some of the happiest of my life up until that point. It’s always exciting, living in hope.

Oh, darling, the hopes I had had. My own lovely house in Asheville or maybe Raleigh. New friends, new society, an identity separate from “Baby Ruby,” or Mason McTavish’s odd daughter. Yes, my family was rich, yes, we basically owned Tavistock, but I wanted something bigger for myself, something that felt uniquely my own.

And that dream, it seemed, had died with Duke.

I managed to go out in society again in August of 1962, when Nelle married that dreadful Alan Franklin, but other than that, I stayed at Ashby, turning down dinner invitations because I knew I was not a guest, but the main attraction.

Once I emerged from my haze, it was nearly 1963, and every time I went into Tavistock, or drove Daddy’s Plymouth over to Asheville to shop, I had the strangest feeling that I had somehow aged twenty years in two. Everyone seemed so much younger than me, so much freer.

I wondered if it was my penance, this malaise, for killing Duke.

That was what consumed most of my thoughts those days, Duke’s murder. I waited for nightmares to come, for a sudden rush of guilt to prompt me into some drastic action, like throwing myself off one of the bluffs—or, even worse, becoming a nun—but there was nothing of the sort.

Well, not nothing. Mostly, I felt empty, a bit numb, and if I’m honest, rather bored. But sometimes when I lay in bed at night, reliving that moment, I felt a strange sort of elation. I’d done that. This dreadful, horrible thing, a thing they hanged or electrocuted or poisoned or shot you for doing—I had done it and not gotten caught.

At the time, I thought no one even suspected me, but now I know there were whispers and rumors, which is probably why Daddy turned faintly gray when I mentioned that I might be interested in going back to college, and learning about the law.

That must have been why he decided to bring me so firmly into the family business.

I’m going to tell you a little secret, darling. One you’ll eventually find out for yourself, but let me go ahead and spill it now: once you’re as rich as we are, you are not really actively doing things that make money. You’re not, say, selling a product or providing a service. You had an ancestor who did those things once, and he made so much money that now that money makes money. I suppose this is why some countries eventually round up people like us and cut our heads off.

That said, we’d seen families like ours lose everything within a few generations. All it took was one reckless heir, one overindulged new bride, and suddenly you were selling art, selling furniture, off-loading surplus property, and—most offensively to Daddy—selling off parcels of the land you owned.

Would we have gone that way eventually had it not been for me? I really can’t say. What I can say is that I was the one who’d invested in those three nightclubs, the two in New York and the one in Miami. Not with McTavish money, but with the settlement Duke’s father gave me. (Not that he’d wanted to give me one red cent, I should add. But Daddy drove over to Asheville to have a talk with him, and next thing I knew, I was a wealthy woman in my own right. Daddy was always very persuasive.)

I took all that money and poured it into the clubs, and also into the stock market. I had an uncanny knack, it turns out, for investing in the right things. Never finished college, certainly didn’t keep up with the market all that much, but I picked things I liked the name of. Xerox, for one, which sounded like an alien planet to me. And Caterpillar because I’d always loved catching them and setting them up in little jars as a child, watching them make cocoons on the little branches and leaves I stuck into their habitats.

I hadn’t expected either to make me rich, but oh, my darling, did they ever. And soon I was buying up an entire block of Tavistock that Daddy’s father had sold years before, and opening the hotel and restaurant.

If I could not, as I’d once hoped, escape the McTavish name, I decided to simply be the best McTavish that had ever been. Within a year of Daddy bringing me into the fold, our bottom line was healthier than ever, and so was I.

It helped, all that business, all that math, all those numbers. They cooled the fevered thoughts in my brain until Duke’s murder started to recede, a terrible thing that had happened to—and been committed by—someone else.

It also helped that others around me seemed to start to forget, too. I went to more parties, and no longer thought people were using me as some kind of macabre draw. I went to the cinema with one of my childhood friends, Betty-Ruth, and drove to Raleigh to visit a cousin where I ended up going to bed with a man I met at the bar of my hotel.

Slowly but surely, I began to come back to life. To become Ruby McTavish again, not poor Duke Callahan’s widow. (There was a slight setback in November of 1963 when the president was killed—since I was the only person most people knew whose husband had also been shot, that made me the closest thing to Jackie Kennedy that anyone in Tavistock, North Carolina, had ever seen.)

Enter Hugh Woodward.

Lord. I’ve just gotten up from my desk and gone downstairs to brood at the fireplace for an hour because I am that loath to discuss Hugh.

He was Daddy’s right-hand man back then, an accountant who worked his way up until he oversaw all our financial affairs, and once I went to work for Daddy, not a day went by without hearing someone say, “Ask Hugh.”

That’s how it started, actually. I’d been in Daddy’s office in town—he was spending more and more time those days back at the house, indulging in his twin passions of shooting random animals and drinking bourbon—and needed to know why McTavish Limited had spent more than thirty thousand dollars for something obliquely labeled L in the ledger.

“Ask Hugh,” said Daddy’s secretary, Violet.

“Ask Hugh,” said my cousin Shephard, one of roughly a dozen men in suits who spent time at the office, but seemed to have no actual job there.

“Ask Hugh,” said Daddy himself when I called up at the house.

And so that’s how, on a January morning in 1964, I found myself knocking on the door of Hugh’s office on the second floor.

I can still remember the way his face turned red when he saw it was me standing in his doorway, the very tips of his ears a bright scarlet. I’d seen Hugh before, of course, but never really thought about him. He was twenty-five years my senior, and handsome in a bland way—comforting, familiar, will do in a pinch, but nothing to get all that excited about.

The saltines and tomato soup of men.

So it was a surprise to see those red ears and notice the way his eyes—a light blue so colorless as to almost be gray, nothing like Duke’s deep green eyes—roamed over me as though he couldn’t believe I was actually there in front of him.

And yes, it was appealing to see myself through such an admiring gaze. I always made sure I looked nice when I was in the office, my dark hair held back from my face with little ivory or tortoiseshell combs, my skirts and sweater sets expensive, but not flashy, my jewelry tasteful. I had taken off my wedding ring when I returned from Paris, but I still had Duke’s engagement ring on my right hand, a stunning cabochon ruby on a simple platinum band, and that day, I was also wearing elegant ruby studs in my ears.

Later, Hugh would shower me with rubies, including a ring almost identical to the one Duke gave me, but somehow nowhere near as impressive.

A fitting metaphor for Hugh himself, really.

“Loretta,” he told me when I pointed to the L in the ledger, and then he’d given a sheepish smile. There had been a spot of mustard on his tie, and though his sandy blond hair was still thick, I’d seen the slightest hint of pink scalp shining through when he leaned down to tap his finger against the book.

“Your stepmother comes by every few months with her bills, and we pay them all at once for her,” Hugh had gone on, and I’d felt my eyebrows creep somewhere near my hairline.

“What on earth has Loretta spent thirty thousand dollars on?”

Hugh shrugged, perching on the edge of his desk. “Horses this time. Some furs, I believe, as well as a new painting for her bedroom, and…” Trailing off, he’d studied the ceiling. “A necklace, I think.”

I closed the ledger with a snap that made him flinch, but his eyes kept moving over my face, drinking me in, and he said, “I’d be happy to go over the accounts with you sometime. A lot of this stuff is in my own little code.”

(His “own little code” was literally just the first letter of whoever was being paid. L for Loretta, N for Nelle, AH when something was purchased for Ashby House. In retrospect, this says more about Hugh than this missive ever could.)

I can’t remember how I replied to that. I demurred, I’m sure, because it was weeks before I actually took him up on that offer, and then, it was only because of Nelle.

My sister had married, as I mentioned, and she and her husband, the limp dishrag known as Alan Franklin, had taken up residence at Ashby. Within a few months of their marriage, Nelle was pregnant, and that January in 1964, Howell was born.

He was an ugly baby, if you asked me, which no one did. But he was a boy.

Not just any boy, of course. The first McTavish male heir since Daddy, and oh, how Daddy doted on him, right down to making sure Howell’s legal name was Howell Franklin McTavish. He’d take Howell into Tavistock, Howell in one of those ridiculous outfits Nelle always dressed him in that made him look like the tubercular heir to some tiny European country, all smocking and lace and his monogram emblazoned across his chest.

“My grandson!” Daddy would boom, Howell in his arms, little face red, and soon Nelle had a new car, a beautiful and sleek Chrysler that would “be safe enough for the baby.” And then her husband, Alan, had a new office in the McTavish building, an office nearly as large as Daddy’s. And soon Nelle and Alan had moved bedrooms to one of the larger suites, and one night at dinner, I realized that Alan was sitting at Daddy’s left, Nelle at his right, and I was all the way at the other end of the table.

Alone.

That night, I lay in my childhood bed, staring at the ceiling, and those old fears, fears I thought I’d banished years before, began to creep along the walls, sliding in the shadows, slithering up the mattress and into my brain.

He has an heir now. An undoubted McTavish, and a boy at that. What does he want with the cuckoo in the nest?

Before I’d married Duke, I’d dreamed of being more than just Mason McTavish’s daughter, but I’d spent the last few years wrapping the McTavish name and fortune around me, and I suddenly found that I was terrified of losing it.

And since we’re being honest, I can also admit that a part of me wondered just how much my name and Daddy’s money had counted in the aftermath of Duke’s death. Had there been phone calls I hadn’t known about? Money wired to police stations in Paris, whispered conversations and assurances that had kept me free?

I didn’t know, but I was determined to hang on to my position in the McTavish family by any means necessary.

So.

Hugh. A man Daddy depended on above all others. A man who adored me with a kind of simple worshipfulness that was, after Duke, a balm of sorts. A man who, once we were engaged, slid into Alan’s office, moving him back to the smaller space on the third floor where he belonged.

We married on an autumn afternoon in the front room at Ashby. No silk gown this time, no five-piece band and glass lanterns in the garden. A smart powder-blue suit, a dry kiss on the lips in front of a judge, and I was a wife yet again.

Mrs. Ruby Woodward.

I was miserable almost instantly.

Hugh wasn’t a bad man. Certainly not a dangerous one like Duke.

But he asked me where I was going every time I left a room.

He never wanted me to drive myself anywhere, insisting on taking me himself.

He picked up the extension when I was on the phone to ask who I was talking to.

He blew on my coffee before he handed it to me. “It’s too hot, my dove,” he’d say, an endearment I loathed. “Let me get it ju-ust right.”

Now see what you’ve done? I’d blocked that out until just now—can you blame me?—but here it is in my brain again, Hugh Woodward cooing, “ju-ust right.”

You can see how it didn’t take long for my mind to begin to drift to thoughts of ridding myself of him.

Divorce, you say. And yes, that was an option. But a costly one, because, like I said, Daddy adored Hugh—not to mention relied on him and trusted him implicitly. Which meant there had been no legal wrangling to protect my—and Daddy’s—fortune from him. What was mine was his, so say we all.

Hugh wouldn’t have wanted the money, exactly. It was me he was after, but if I were to leave him? I wasn’t sure what that devotion might turn into, were it thwarted.

Plus, I had married him to secure Daddy’s favor. If I divorced him, I’d be right back where I started—only worse, because now, I would’ve disappointed Daddy.

I did bring it up, vaguely, to Daddy once. We were driving into town, rain pelting down on the car, so heavy we could barely see the road. Earlier that year, one of the handymen Daddy hired to keep up the house had driven down the mountain in just such a storm, and ended up running off the road, his car plunging down the side of the mountain. It took them three days to get to him, due to all the rain, and when Daddy took a curve just a little too fast, I had bitten my lip so hard I’d tasted blood.

It was still on my tongue when I started to talk about Hugh, about maybe marrying too soon, about how you don’t really know someone before you start sharing a life together.

Daddy hadn’t replied at first, the only sound the steady drumming on the roof, and then he had tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and said, “Hugh’s a good man, Ruby. I’d reckon any woman who couldn’t make a go of it with him couldn’t make a go of it with anyone. Or anything. She wouldn’t be the kind of woman I’d have much use for.”

I didn’t reply because he didn’t expect me to, but that put a very neat end to any idea of divorce.

And yet I couldn’t see myself pointing a rifle at Hugh’s chest and pulling the trigger. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that, although the coffee situation does come close.

But there were times when he was on top of me in our bed, my nightgown rucked up, his pajama top still on, when I watched his shadow on the ceiling, moving over me, inside of me, and thought, Maybe his heart will give out one of these days. It’s how he’d prefer to go, probably.

(A side note: Duke was an amazing lover, and a shit human being. Hugh was a terrible lover, and a … well, not amazing, but decent enough person. It seems to me that it should not be that hard to be both good in bed and a good man, and yet the vast majority of men never cease to amaze me in their refusal to master this particular skill set. Something to make note of for yourself, perhaps.)

So this is where my head was in the autumn of 1967. Hoping for some accident to befall Hugh, or for some trick of biology to snuff him out, anything that meant I would no longer have to put up with him driving my car and singing all the wrong lyrics to songs he didn’t actually know on the radio.

It was that car that set the whole thing in motion.

I’d gotten a flat tire on the road up to Ashby House, and managed to limp into the drive, planning on calling a mechanic in the morning.

Hugh, however, had decided to be my knight in shining armor as usual, and went to change it himself.

An absolute comedy of errors.

The jack was in the wrong place and dented the body, lug nuts were spilled not once but three times, the hubcap nearly went spinning off the mountain at one point, and then, even though he’d finally gotten the jack in the right position, it slipped just as he’d come out from under the car, one of those missing lug nuts in his hand.

“Oof!” he said cheerfully, looking at the car and the place where, only moments before, his head had been. “Almost found yourself a widow two times over, Roo!”

(I do not need to tell you how I felt about this nickname, or how I felt when I discovered he signed all our correspondence to friends and family, “Love from Hugh-Roo!”)

Yes, almost a widow again. Seconds away from finally being free, but despite being the klutziest man alive, Hugh had gotten lucky.

Would that luck hold?

It took awhile, figuring it out. I ginned up and tossed out a million different schemes from a fall during a hike to a swimming mishap, all of them discarded because they required my presence. I could be present for one husband’s terrible death, that was one thing. But there when the second one corks it?

Harder to explain.

And then I remembered the barn.

It wasn’t really a barn, in that at no point had it ever held animals. It was more an outbuilding that my father had had grand plans for at one time, a place to entertain his hunting buddies and drink while trading war stories. He’d had it wired for electricity, no easy feat, back in 1949, but it was dodgy, and once, when I’d gone out there exploring, I’d found a dead raccoon on the barn’s wood floor, its body stiff, tiny droplets of blood on its mouth and nose.

When I’d told Daddy later, he’d nodded and said, “Probably touched the wrong wire.”

I hadn’t thought about that barn in ages, and had rarely been into the woods surrounding Ashby House since I was a child. Daddy took me on walks and shooting expeditions when I was younger, but I’d never much enjoyed it. I’d always told myself it was the memory of being taken from those same woods that made the trees feel so close, the light seem so far away, but the truth was, being in the wilderness was not my idea of a good time. Honestly, it wasn’t until I married Andrew that I started …

Well. We’ll get to that later.

In any case, when I began to think of the issue of What to Do with Hugh, the barn—and that dead raccoon—came back to me in glorious Technicolor.

I could not ask Hugh to go string lights up in the barn. Obviously.

What I could do was start dreamily sighing to others when he was nearby about how I wish Daddy had fixed up the barn, remember how he was going to hang Christmas lights out there? Oh, that would be so pretty. Why, if we had those, it might be nice to hold my and Hugh’s anniversary party out there! But no, it was too much work, and who had the time to fuss around with silly little lights in a barn when we could have the party in Ashby House?

I maintain that I did not really kill Hugh Woodward. I had no way of knowing if the plan would work, after all. He might have hung those lights up just fine, or hired someone else to do the job, and I would’ve had to dance with him under their twinkling glow while he sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” off-key in my ear.

I left it to fate.

And fate, once again, was on my side.

-R

Tavistock, North Carolina, doesn’t have as much to offer as its nearby neighbor Asheville, but it is a charming slice of Appalachia with a walkable downtown, various shops selling everything from hiking gear to stationery, and a selection of surprisingly good restaurants.

And if it’s an Instagram Moment you’re after, be sure to head to the square where you’ll find a classic gazebo lit up with fairy lights on all sides. The site of many a wedding, the gazebo is surrounded by green lawn, and if you time it just right, you’ll get a gorgeous sunset background, complete with the Blue Ridge Mountains rising in the distance.

The gazebo was financed by local philanthropist Ruby McTavish in the 1960s, and a bronze plaque on the floor bears the inscription: In Loving Memory of Hugh Woodward, Devoted Husband to the End of His Days.

—North Carolina Hiking Guide,2015 Edition