CHAPTER EIGHT
Camden
“So you’re a teacher, huh?”
Ben and I are in his truck, heading down the mountain into Tavistock. We’d spent yesterday taking stock of what needed to be done, fixing what we could with the few tools Ben had around, but today, we were pulling off the damaged paneling in the upstairs bathroom, and that took more supplies. I should’ve just hired some guys to do it—Lord knew I had the fucking money—but I’d wanted to do it myself. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was some attempt at atoning for all the years I’d been gone, or maybe I’d just wanted to lose myself in grueling but mind-numbing manual labor.
I’m actually on my phone, trying to price new paneling despite the shitty signal, when Ben asks his question, and I briefly glance over at him.
He’s got one arm resting on the door, his elbow jutting out the open window, and the scent of earth and trees is thick in the truck. I always forget just how long it takes to get into town, and now it looks like Ben has decided to fill the time with small talk.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Boys’ school in Colorado.”
“I knew that part,” he says. “What do you teach?”
I look back at my phone, and even though several people, including Ben’s dad, have died on this twisty road, I wish he’d step on the gas.
“English.”
Ben nods at that, thumping his hand on the side of the truck. “You always were reading.”
“And you were always smacking books out of my hands and wondering if I was the first person in my family who ever learned to read,” I can’t help but remind him.
He loved that shit. Not just the mocking—although I’m sure that was very fun—but making sure I knew I came from, as he liked to put it, “fucking hillbilly trash, probably.”
Not One of Us. Could’ve been the McTavish family motto.
Now, though, Ben sighs and reaches up, adjusting his baseball cap. “You know I was just a dick to you because I was jealous, right?”
I can’t help but snort, turning my attention back to my phone. “Sure.”
“I mean it,” he says just as we reach the base of the mountain. I spot a huge oak tree, its bark splintered and raw, but Ben keeps his eyes on the road ahead of us. “Dad was always in my head, man. Nana Nelle, too. ‘All this should be yours, you’re the real heir, maybe Ruby will come to her senses one day.’ Used to drive me nuts.”
“Wasn’t exactly a great situation for me, either,” I say, and he looks over at me then, one corner of his mouth lifting.
“No, I guess it wasn’t.”
A pause.
And then, “But knowing you had all that money coming probably helped.”
It always comes back to the money with them. Even now, even when Ben is, in his own way, trying to make amends, he just can’t help himself. It would almost be funny if it weren’t so fucking tragic.
He doesn’t get that the money means fuck all when everything else around you is so toxic. If Ruby had genuinely loved me, if growing up in Ashby House hadn’t felt like I was starring in my own personal version of The Hunger Games every day …
“Whatever,” I say now, like I’m a surly teenager again, and he reaches over to thump my arm.
“You really haven’t touched it?” he asks. “Everything Ruby left you?”
“I told you, I never wanted it,” I say as we pass the big sign welcoming us into Tavistock. It’s a small town, sleepy and quaint, and I’m surprised at how quickly my brain starts racing, reminding me that the K–12 school I went to is just down Main Street and to the left. The bookstore whose aisles I haunted is three doors down from the coffee shop we’re passing now, and up ahead I spot the bright blue door of the Jay, a cozy restaurant with gingham tablecloths and leather booths. It was my favorite place to eat when I was a kid, and when we drive past, there’s a part of me that expects to look through the plate glass window and see Ruby sitting at our usual table.
She liked the booth looking out onto Main Street so she could “people-watch,” she said. I can conjure her up so clearly, red nails clicking on the white mug of coffee the waiter always brought her as soon as we sat down, dark gaze scanning the town outside, a queen secure in her kingdom.
But the restaurant is dark, the painted letters on the glass flaking off, and I look over at Ben. “The Jay closed?”
He shrugs. “We had to raise the rents downtown, and the owner decided it was time to retire.”
My gaze moves over the street, and now I see that the Jay isn’t the only shuttered building. The tearoom is dark, as is the tiny bookstore. So, too, the jewelry shop, where Ruby had an account.
I shouldn’t care about any of it. Tavistock isn’t my home anymore. Hell, I’m not sure it ever really was, but there’s still an oily sensation in my stomach that I’m pretty sure is guilt.
“Did you actually need to raise the rents?” I ask Ben now, and he shoots me another one of those sideways glances.
“If we didn’t want to ask you for more money, then yeah.”
Tavistock itself is another one of those complications in Ruby’s will. Big chunks of the town still technically belong to me, but back in the early 2000s, Ruby sold a couple of blocks of downtown to Nelle. Howell wanted to open a brewery or something, and Nelle had a bunch of money after her husband died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the details because I’d been only about twelve or so, but Ruby had still made me go down to the lawyer’s office with her, dressed in a fucking suit and tie like I was the world’s youngest Realtor.
I can still feel the cool weight of her hand slipping into the crook of my elbow as we left that office, smell her perfume as she leaned in and muttered, Sometimes it’s fun to give people enough rope with which to hang themselves, my Camden.
I hadn’t understood what she meant, but the words had made something twist in my gut. By then, I knew about all the “Mrs. Kill-more” stuff, the string of dead husbands. I’d found out accidentally the summer before, an offhand comment sending me to the internet, and when I’d asked Ruby about it, she’d taken me to the Jay, to our favorite booth, and calmly told me the story of each of them.
Duke, killed in a robbery.
Hugh, electrocuted in the barn.
Andrew, sick with some mystery ailment.
Roddy, partying too hard and going over the side of a boat.
It all made sense when she laid it out, a series of unrelated incidents, bizarre, sure, but nowhere near as sinister as it had been made out.
I believed her.
Then, at least.
Ben pulls his truck into a parking place just in front of one of the few stores still open along this stretch, a sign reading HENDERSON’S HARDWARE AND SUNDRY GOODES swinging faintly in the breeze.
There are two men at the counter when we step in, one behind, one in front, and they’re smiling as they chat, the familiar accents sliding over my ears and into my heart in a way that makes me feel homesick even as I stand in my hometown.
They stop talking as we come in, and I watch something in both their faces change when they see Ben standing there.
He smiles brightly at them, lifting a hand. “Steve, Hank. How’s it going?”
The guy behind the counter—Steve Henderson, I recognize him now despite the paunch and the gray hair—nods at us. “Mr. McTavish,” he says, and then his eyes slide over to me.
The tightness fades from his expression and his eyes widen slightly. “Holy shit, Camden,” he says, and then he’s coming around the counter, pumping my hand and slapping my back. “How the hell are you, boy? Hank, you remember Ruby’s son, don’t you? Camden? Lord, what’s it been? Ten years now?”
“Something close to that,” I reply, smiling back at him as Hank leans on the counter and takes off his cap, running a hand over his thinning hair.
“Tell you what, son, we still miss your mama something fierce around here,” he says, and I can tell he means it. Ruby was a celebrity in this town, their magnanimous benefactor. If people in Tavistock ever whispered about all those husbands, they did it behind firmly closed doors.