The Heiress(9)

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





CHAPTER THREE

Jules

You probably know this already, but this country?

It is fucking big.

I thought I knew that, too. I’d grown up in Florida, ended up at college in California, then landed in Colorado. That last move, Cam and I had driven, and it had taken us over thirteen hours. I’d watched the dreaded Inland Empire of San Bernardino turn into the bright lights of Vegas, the high desert of Utah, and eventually, the jagged peaks of the Rockies, but there’s something different about driving farther east.

How all the land flattens out, the sky arching overhead, a big blue bowl turned upside down. The ugliness of nondescript interstates giving way to rolling hills and massive rivers, and then, finally, mountains again.

But not like the mountains out west.

We’re in Tennessee when they first appear, rising gently in the distance, dark and covered in trees, and it makes my stomach drop with nerves and excitement, knowing that we’re close now. Just a few more hours, and we’re at Ashby House.

Cam’s house.

My house.

It’s a very weird thing, living in a just-okay rental when you know that your husband technically owns an estate. But Cam had made it very clear, very early on that he wanted nothing to do with the house, the money, all of it, and I’d done my best to respect that.

But a girl can google.

The first time I saw pictures of the house online, I’d damn near swooned. The gray stone made the house look elemental somehow, like it had carved itself out of the rock of the mountains around it. There was a wide green lawn, and dozens of windows sparkling in afternoon sunlight. A wide veranda in the back had views down the mountain, the treetops covered in mist, and I figured if you sat out there with your coffee for enough mornings in a row, you’d probably be physically incapable of ever being unhappy again.

Camden would, I know, disagree. He’d been plenty unhappy in that house, but that’s because of the people that were in it. If it were just the two of us, just him and me and all that space, all that beauty …

“Okay, now you are doing a face.”

I shake myself out of my real estate fantasies.

“I just can’t believe we’re almost there,” I say, pointing out the windshield. “I mean, those are the mountains of your homeland! Where your family is from! You actually came from this place and did not spring to life directly from my hot wing–induced fantasies.”

Cam grins at that, lifting one hand off the steering wheel to rest on my knee. “Yup, a real live boy, Appalachian born and bred.”

“I always thought that was why you chose Colorado,” I say. “After we got married.”

Neither of us had had roots in California (or anything resembling a career), so a few years after we got married, we started talking about where we might like to settle on a more permanent basis. Even then, I think, I’d been hoping Cam might decide to head back to North Carolina, but instead, he’d started looking for teaching jobs in Colorado.

Now he glances over at me, eyebrows raised in question.

“Mountains,” I elaborate, waving one hand. “That they reminded you of home.”

He scoffs, taking his hand off my knee. “The Rockies are beautiful, but they don’t have shit on the Appalachians,” he says, and now it’s my turn to raise some eyebrows.

“Are you honestly going to tell me the ‘purple mountains majesty’ we left behind only rates a ‘meh’ from Camden McTavish?”

He laughs, leaning back a little. It’s nice, seeing him relaxed. I’ve felt like the farther east we’ve come, the tighter his shoulders have gotten, the longer his silences have grown. Last night, at our hotel in Kentucky, when I’d gotten into bed after my shower, my hand moving toward the waistband of his boxers, he’d stopped me with a murmured, “I’m half asleep already, sweetheart, not much use to you tonight.”

But he hadn’t gone to sleep for hours. I knew, because I’d lain awake next to him, feeling the tension in his body, practically hearing the whirring of his brain.

What was he thinking about? Normally, I would have asked, but there was something that prevented me, instead making my own breathing slow and steady so he’d think I had already drifted off.

Now, though, he seems more like himself. He must have been worn out from the drive, worrying over the logistics that awaited him once we arrived.

“No,” he tells me, his hand coming back to my knee. “I love the Rockies. I love Colorado. I just mean that the Rockies are … they’re babies, right? Young mountains, all jagged and rough. The Appalachians, though, they’re older. Much older.”

I turn back to look out the windshield at those dark shapes in the distance, drawing closer. “All mountains seem pretty old to me.”

“They are,” Camden says with a nod, his hand squeezing my leg. “But the Appalachians are older than just about anything else. They were here before mammals, before dinosaurs. Those mountains”—he points to them—“are older than bones.”