“I want my baby to come home to us,” she says, her voice cracking slightly. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to have Ruby back.”
Ruby McTavish has been missing for over three months now after disappearing on a family picnic. Even now, Mrs. McTavish tells us, she can hardly bear to think that such a lovely day ended in tragedy.
“It was such a pretty afternoon, and Ruby was so sweet in her little sailor dress. She’d fallen down at one point and scraped her knee, but she didn’t even cry. I think she was as happy as her daddy was to be out in these mountains.”
The Blue Ridge Mountains surrounding the McTavish mansion are indeed stunning, but they are also full of hidden dangers—steep cliffs, boggy areas, and, of course, wild animals.
Faced with such perils, it’s no wonder the Tavistock County Sheriff’s Department says that, while the search is ongoing, they do not hold much hope of finding the child alive.
“With children this young, if we don’t find them within the first few hours, we don’t anticipate a happy ending,” Sheriff Nicholas Lewis told this reporter.
But Christmas is the season of hope, and Mrs. McTavish clings to it with all the tenacity of her pioneer ancestors.
“Ruby is out there,” she says, her aquamarine eyes shimmering with tears, but her words firm. “This is her home. She belongs here. And we will do whatever it takes—anything it takes—to bring her home.”
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.