The Heiress(22)

Ben keeps grinning. “Anyway, I trust the two of you can entertain yourselves for the evening? Cecilia left a casserole in the fridge that you’re welcome to and, Camden, I assumed you’d want your old room back, so it’s ready for you.”

“Fine,” I say. “Sounds good.”

It doesn’t, actually. I’d hoped to stay in some other room. Any other room. The idea of taking Jules back to my childhood bedroom, even if it had been a bedroom prepared for a septuagenarian, is unsettling for some reason. Like I’m sliding right back into place here.

“Awesome,” Ben says and jerks his head toward the stairs. “I’ll get back to it then. I’ve got a shitload of paperwork for you tomorrow.”

“Can’t wait.”

He gives another one of those smiles that doesn’t come close to reaching his eyes. “Now that? That is clearly bullshit, Cam.”

Chuckling, he turns back to Jules. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Brewster. Welcome to Ashby House.”

His eyes linger on her for another one of those uncomfortable beats, and then he’s headed back to the stairs, taking them two at a time like he’s still fifteen and not in his thirties.

He stumbles just at the top, barely noticeable, and he quickly recovers, but for a moment, I let myself picture another outcome.

The sneaker sliding on that worn carpet. The hand reaching out to catch himself, but finding nothing to grab. The racket nearly two hundred pounds of muscle makes as it crashes into the wall, the mahogany banister.

Head hitting the parquet of the hallway, the sound wet, heavy. A pool of deep red spreading from beneath that blond hair.

I let myself hold that image as Ben rounds the newel post at the top, following his progress until he’s at the landing, and then my gaze slides up to meet Ruby’s.

It’s just a portrait, I remind myself. Canvas and oil paint, brushstrokes from a man who died before I was even born.

But as I look into Ruby’s smiling face, I suddenly feel her here.

Real. Alive. Watching me.

Knowing what’s inside my head right now.

And the thing is? I think she’d be proud of me.





From the Desk of Ruby A. McTavish

March 14, 2013

I suppose you want to know about the murder now.

Well, the first one.

It’s only fair. I spent all that time telling you about my parents and Nelle, Nelle’s birthday and meeting Duke, and maybe you wondered why I started there instead of getting right to the meat of it.

As it were.

I can almost see you frowning at the pages of these letters, unconsciously worrying at your cuticles as you read. (You should stop that, by the way. Picking your cuticles. Not only is it a bad habit, but it’s a tell, darling. A few moments in your company and anyone would pick up on it.)

But as any good writer—or hostess—would tell you, setting a scene is important. If you don’t understand what it was like growing up in Ashby House, the way silences and secrets clung to the drapery, littered the hardwood floors, spun webs just as deadly as those black widow spiders my mother was always so worried about, then you might not understand why I was so desperate to leave. How Duke wasn’t just a man I fell in love with and wanted to marry, but an escape into a whole new life.

You have to know all of that for this next part to make sense.

If a thing like this ever can make sense.

I’ve thought about this moment so much, you see. It’s a scene I’ve replayed countless times in my mind, because it was the beginning of it all, the moment that unlocked something inside me. Something that, until then, I had only suspected might exist.

For a long time, I believed that if I analyzed my memories enough, some answer would come to me, or I might see a way in which it could have been avoided and never happened at all. Where Duke and I each made different decisions that night that led to … what, exactly?

This is the part I always get stuck on. What happened that night in Paris feels so inevitable that, much like trying to imagine Duke as an old man, imagining a world in which we came home from our honeymoon, settled into a life together, had children … it’s impossible. Ludicrous, even.

It’s as though we were always meant to end up there, on that Aubusson rug on the landing of Duke’s father’s Paris flat in a lake of blood.

I abhor blood, I should add, and I remember kneeling in it in my nightgown, the white silk slowly turning red. I was looking at Duke’s shirtfront—what remained of it—and saw that it was no longer white either, and my muddled brain was thinking, I’ve never seen Duke in red before, like he’d simply changed into a new shirt.

Funny what the mind will do in trying times.

All right. I’ve gone to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, and I’ve let myself remember the worst of it, that quiet aftermath, before the police—well, before anyone but me knew that Duke Callahan no longer existed.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

The honeymoon started out well. Magically, even. We’d spent our wedding night here at Ashby House, not in the bedroom I’d slept in all my life (save, of course, those eight months I was with the Darnells and my year at Agnes Scott), but one of the other suites, near the back of the house. The Ruby Suite, my mother called it. Not after me, but because it was done all in red. Heavy red velvet drapes around the window, a deep red carpet underfoot, red bed hangings, red coverlet.