Now Duke leaned forward, his fingers loosely clasped on one thigh. “Go on.”
I could see myself in my room in Atlanta, the pale green phone cord twisting around one finger as Daddy relayed the gruesome story to me, my mind conjuring up the falls, those sharp rocks at the bottom. The sound of rushing water not loud enough to drown out Peter Whalen’s screams or Jill’s cries of horror as he lay broken and bloody.
It had felt like a scary story, the sort of thing you tell around campfires. Not a thing that had happened to real people, people in the same woods that had once taken me.
I suppose I should now say that I feel guilty for how much I relished the darkness of the account, how vividly I could picture those horrific details, but surely there’s no point in lying to you.
“They found him—most of him, at least—a few hours later,” I told Duke, my voice barely above a whisper, the air hushed and heavy around us. “He’d tried to crawl away, they thought, get out of the water. But something found him.”
“Something?” Duke’s voice was as low as mine now, his pupils wide and surrounded by the narrowest band of blue.
“A bear, probably. Maybe a mountain lion.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, I don’t think it was him,” I answered without thinking, the quip entirely inappropriate, one of those dark jokes that always sat on the tip of my tongue, but very rarely slipped out in front of someone.
And Duke laughed.
I found myself smiling back, secret, conspiratorial, and his eyes dropped to my mouth. “I have no idea what to make of you, Ruby McTavish,” he said, and until that moment I had never realized that you could feel someone’s voice like a touch.
“No one does,” I said.
I didn’t say it to be cute. It was just the truth.
No one knew what to make of me. I was a rich man’s daughter who hid at parties rather than flirt with available bachelors. I was pretty enough, but there were other more beautiful girls. I did well enough in school, but wasn’t a brain.
And there was this darkness that seemed to cling to me, a past that people only ever spoke about in whispers. A suspicion, even inside my own heart, that I had been placed in the wrong life, living out a role written for someone else.
Maybe it was the darkness that Duke liked.
He had his own streak of it, I’d learn, hidden beneath that smooth, implacable sheen.
But let’s leave that for the next letter. For now, let me leave us here in the dim light of my father’s office, the low murmur of voices and muffled music from the band downstairs the soundtrack to a kiss that would change my life and end his.
You’ll let me do that, won’t you?
-R
BABY RUBY A BRIDE!
She stole hearts around the nation as the famous “Baby Ruby” during the 1940s, but now, Ruby McTavish has captured one heart in particular––that of tobacco heir and man-about-town Duke Edward Callahan.
The bride, daughter of Mr. Mason McTavish and the late Anna McTavish of Tavistock, North Carolina, walked down the aisle this past Saturday, April 22, on the grounds of her family home, Ashby House. Wearing her mother’s wedding gown from 1937 （altered and updated by Mme. Durand of Paris, a personal friend of the groom’s father, Edward Alton Callahan）， Miss McTavish carried a bouquet of white roses, pink camellias, and the crested iris native to her home state. Her maid of honor was her younger sister, Miss Eleanor McTavish, and the rest of her bridal party consisted of friends from childhood and her school chums from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta where, up until her engagement, Miss McTavish had been studying literature.
The couple plan on settling in the groom’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, after a lengthy European honeymoon that will see them sail to Paris before moving on to Nice, the Loire Valley, Rome, Milan, and finally London.
Congratulations, and bon voyage to Mr. and Mrs. Duke Callahan!
—Society Chatter Newsletter （Southeastern Region）， Spring 1961
CHAPTER FOUR
Camden
I feel the house before I see it.
That probably sounds stupid to you, and if I had grown up in anything resembling a normal family, I’m pretty sure it would have seemed stupid to me, too.
But as our car winds its way up the mountain, my fingers tighten around the steering wheel, and cold sweat breaks out on my upper lip, my lower back. The trees here are still green, leafy and huge, their roots burrowing into the dirt and the rocks, and the blacktop cuts a dark ribbon in front of me as we go up, up, up.
It’s impossible not to think about the last time I was on this road.