Page 34 of The Heiress

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 Ireallyhave 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 looksdreadful,poor thing, I don’t know how shebearsit.”

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,whata 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 wouldneverhappen to them, of course. No, theywould’ve done this or that differently, because in the end, this is probably somehow all your fault anyway.

To be fair, itwasmy 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.

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