Would we have gone that way eventually had it not been for me? I really can’t say. What I can say is that I was the one who’d invested in those three nightclubs, the two in New York and the one in Miami. Not with McTavish money, but with the settlement Duke’s father gave me. （Not that he’d wanted to give me one red cent, I should add. But Daddy drove over to Asheville to have a talk with him, and next thing I knew, I was a wealthy woman in my own right. Daddy was always very persuasive.）
I took all that money and poured it into the clubs, and also into the stock market. I had an uncanny knack, it turns out, for investing in the right things. Never finished college, certainly didn’t keep up with the market all that much, but I picked things I liked the name of. Xerox, for one, which sounded like an alien planet to me. And Caterpillar because I’d always loved catching them and setting them up in little jars as a child, watching them make cocoons on the little branches and leaves I stuck into their habitats.
I hadn’t expected either to make me rich, but oh, my darling, did they ever. And soon I was buying up an entire block of Tavistock that Daddy’s father had sold years before, and opening the hotel and restaurant.
If I could not, as I’d once hoped, escape the McTavish name, I decided to simply be the best McTavish that had ever been. Within a year of Daddy bringing me into the fold, our bottom line was healthier than ever, and so was I.
It helped, all that business, all that math, all those numbers. They cooled the fevered thoughts in my brain until Duke’s murder started to recede, a terrible thing that had happened to—and been committed by—someone else.
It also helped that others around me seemed to start to forget, too. I went to more parties, and no longer thought people were using me as some kind of macabre draw. I went to the cinema with one of my childhood friends, Betty-Ruth, and drove to Raleigh to visit a cousin where I ended up going to bed with a man I met at the bar of my hotel.
Slowly but surely, I began to come back to life. To become Ruby McTavish again, not poor Duke Callahan’s widow. （There was a slight setback in November of 1963 when the president was killed—since I was the only person most people knew whose husband had also been shot, that made me the closest thing to Jackie Kennedy that anyone in Tavistock, North Carolina, had ever seen.）
Enter Hugh Woodward.
Lord. I’ve just gotten up from my desk and gone downstairs to brood at the fireplace for an hour because I am that loath to discuss Hugh.
He was Daddy’s right-hand man back then, an accountant who worked his way up until he oversaw all our financial affairs, and once I went to work for Daddy, not a day went by without hearing someone say, “Ask Hugh.”
That’s how it started, actually. I’d been in Daddy’s office in town—he was spending more and more time those days back at the house, indulging in his twin passions of shooting random animals and drinking bourbon—and needed to know why McTavish Limited had spent more than thirty thousand dollars for something obliquely labeled L in the ledger.
“Ask Hugh,” said Daddy’s secretary, Violet.
“Ask Hugh,” said my cousin Shephard, one of roughly a dozen men in suits who spent time at the office, but seemed to have no actual job there.
“Ask Hugh,” said Daddy himself when I called up at the house.
And so that’s how, on a January morning in 1964, I found myself knocking on the door of Hugh’s office on the second floor.
I can still remember the way his face turned red when he saw it was me standing in his doorway, the very tips of his ears a bright scarlet. I’d seen Hugh before, of course, but never really thought about him. He was twenty-five years my senior, and handsome in a bland way—comforting, familiar, will do in a pinch, but nothing to get all that excited about.
The saltines and tomato soup of men.
So it was a surprise to see those red ears and notice the way his eyes—a light blue so colorless as to almost be gray, nothing like Duke’s deep green eyes—roamed over me as though he couldn’t believe I was actually there in front of him.
And yes, it was appealing to see myself through such an admiring gaze. I always made sure I looked nice when I was in the office, my dark hair held back from my face with little ivory or tortoiseshell combs, my skirts and sweater sets expensive, but not flashy, my jewelry tasteful. I had taken off my wedding ring when I returned from Paris, but I still had Duke’s engagement ring on my right hand, a stunning cabochon ruby on a simple platinum band, and that day, I was also wearing elegant ruby studs in my ears.