And that dream, it seemed, had died with Duke.
I managed to go out in society again in August of 1962, when Nelle married that dreadful Alan Franklin, but other than that, I stayed at Ashby, turning down dinner invitations because I knew I was not a guest, but the main attraction.
Once I emerged from my haze, it was nearly 1963, and every time I went into Tavistock, or drove Daddy’s Plymouth over to Asheville to shop, I had the strangest feeling that I had somehow aged twenty years in two. Everyone seemed so much younger than me, so much freer.
I wondered if it was my penance, this malaise, for killing Duke.
That was what consumed most of my thoughts those days, Duke’s murder. I waited for nightmares to come, for a sudden rush of guilt to prompt me into some drastic action, like throwing myself off one of the bluffs—or, even worse, becoming a nun—but there was nothing of the sort.
Well, not nothing. Mostly, I felt empty, a bit numb, and if I’m honest, rather bored. But sometimes when I lay in bed at night, reliving that moment, I felt a strange sort of elation. I’d done that. This dreadful, horrible thing, a thing they hanged or electrocuted or poisoned or shot you for doing—I had done it and not gotten caught.
At the time, I thought no one even suspected me, but now I know there were whispers and rumors, which is probably why Daddy turned faintly gray when I mentioned that I might be interested in going back to college, and learning about the law.
That must have been why he decided to bring me so firmly into the family business.
I’m going to tell you a little secret, darling. One you’ll eventually find out for yourself, but let me go ahead and spill it now: once you’re as rich as we are, you are not really actively doing things that make money. You’re not, say, selling a product or providing a service. You had an ancestor who did those things once, and he made so much money that now that money makes money. I suppose this is why some countries eventually round up people like us and cut our heads off.
That said, we’d seen families like ours lose everything within a few generations. All it took was one reckless heir, one overindulged new bride, and suddenly you were selling art, selling furniture, off-loading surplus property, and—most offensively to Daddy—selling off parcels of the land you owned.
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.
Later, Hugh would shower me with rubies, including a ring almost identical to the one Duke gave me, but somehow nowhere near as impressive.
A fitting metaphor for Hugh himself, really.
“Loretta,” he told me when I pointed to the L in the ledger, and then he’d given a sheepish smile. There had been a spot of mustard on his tie, and though his sandy blond hair was still thick, I’d seen the slightest hint of pink scalp shining through when he leaned down to tap his finger against the book.
“Your stepmother comes by every few months with her bills, and we pay them all at once for her,” Hugh had gone on, and I’d felt my eyebrows creep somewhere near my hairline.
“What on earth has Loretta spent thirty thousand dollars on?”