I could tell you that my mother has not been well (which is true), or that it’s occurred to me that thanks to the acrimonious nature of my divorce from the mother of my children, you are the only family they have besides me or their grandmother (also true).
I suspect that neither of these facts will sway you. However, despite our differences, I know that you loved Ruby and shared her deep affection for Ashby House. If family cannot bring you home, maybe the house can. There is flood damage to the east wing, plus I’m told that several of the windows will need to be replaced, along with sections of the roof, the steps to the back veranda, and Lord only knows what else.
Thanks to Ruby’s will, accessing the funds to do these vital repairs involves a jungle of red tape and more phone calls to that dipshit lawyer of yours than I’d prefer to make.
You may have washed your hands of us, but you still have responsibilities here, Camden. Responsibilities that Ruby left for you and would expect you to fulfill. And if you can’t do that, you can at least come down here and sort out a better fucking solution than making my almost eighty-year-old mother call Nathan fucking Collins twelve times a day just to get money that her father made.
So come home. Oversee the work yourself so that you know we’re not scamming you out of money you’ve never even fucking touched. And let’s fix this. Not just the house, but all of it. Because it’s been ten years of bullshit at this point, Cam. I told you when you left it wasn’t that simple, and now here we are.
Ruby is probably laughing at us down there in hell. Mother thinks she killed herself just to fuck us all over, to leave everything this goddamn mess, but I wonder, sometimes, Cam, I really do. Maybe we were too quick to cremate her and find out if she really took those pills herself. Thinking about it a lot here lately for some reason.
Do you ever think about it, Camden?
You may hate us but you always said you loved this house. You always said you loved Ruby. Now prove it.
H.
CHAPTER TWO
Camden
There’s a moment, right before I close the trunk of the car, when I think about calling this whole fucking thing off.
I could. It’s my home, my family. My decision, as Jules has reminded me a thousand times since that night in the kitchen, the night when I read Ben’s email and realized that you can put miles and mountains between you and home, but eventually, home will call you back.
I’d actually forgotten about the other email, the one from Howell. It had come in about six months ago, and I’d read it sitting at my desk, the only sound my students’ pencils scraping across the paper as they’d worked on their persuasive essays.
Clearly a lesson Howell had missed because nothing about that drunken rant had made me even think about coming home. I hadn’t spoken to Howell since the afternoon of Ruby’s funeral, but reading that email, I could hear his voice in my head as clearly as if he’d been standing right in front of me, ten years swept away clean.
I could smell the whiskey, too.
The email was classic Howell, starting out formal and mannered, the benevolent King of Tavistock, North Carolina, calling for the return of a wayward noble. Then by the end, devolving into a typo-riddled, expletive-filled mess dripping with guilt trips and vitriol.
And a threat.
A poorly worded one, but a threat nonetheless.
Ruby’s death had been officially listed as “heart failure,” but the empty pill bottles in her nightstand had told a different story.
That was the first—and maybe the only—time in my life I’d ever wielded the McTavish money and name like the rest of them did. I insisted that there would be no autopsy, no questions, just a simple cremation and a subdued memorial service with only the family in attendance. I hadn’t wanted the circus, hadn’t wanted all those old stories about Ruby dug up and splashed on the pages of magazines again.
If I hadn’t been so young and desperate, I might’ve thought more about how it all looked—how, to minds as poisoned and suspicious as Howell’s and Nelle’s, covering up Ruby’s suicide would make me look like I had something to hide. So it hadn’t been a surprise, that sly, ugly sentence there at the end of his email—Do you ever think about it, Camden?—but it had landed like a weight in my chest all the same.
When I’d gotten my lawyer’s voicemail last month, telling me Howell had driven drunk straight into a tree not far from Ashby House, I hadn’t been surprised. There had been dozens of smaller accidents like that with him, god knows how many cars crumpled, but Howell had always walked away.
Until he didn’t.
I hadn’t told Jules about the call, Howell’s death, any of it. I’d planned on just ignoring it like I did all things Ashby House, but Ben’s message … I don’t know. It got to me.
He was right—he and I had never gotten along as kids. He was a couple of years older than me, and knowing that his family fortune was being left to some skinny kid he wasn’t even related to had not exactly endeared me to him. The Ben I remembered was a preening jock, an asshole who drove a truck that could’ve doubled as a tank and always wore whatever the year’s most expensive sneakers were.
But he’d sounded different in that email. More … I don’t know. Human. Like someone who wasn’t necessarily the Enemy.
Howell’s email from all those months ago had been easy to ignore, but something about Ben’s gave me pause.
We’d talked late into the night, me and Jules, weighing out the pros (Jules had never seen Ashby House, or North Carolina for that matter; it would be the first trip we’d taken together since that camping trip in Estes Park two summers ago; Ben was right, something needed to be done about the tangled bullshit that was Ruby’s will––all that money, all that house) and the cons (literally, every fucking thing else).
In the end, it had been Jules who’d made the decision for us. Sitting there at our kitchen table, our fingers intertwined, exhausted in that way you get when you’ve been talking in circles for hours, she’d finally said, “I think we should go.”
I’d watched her, not saying anything, my heart a steady drumbeat in my chest, and then she’d added, almost sheepish, “It might be nice to know you a little better.”
Married ten years, and my own wife feels like she needs to know me better.
I could understand it, though. When I’d left North Carolina for California, I was so closed off, so determined to keep to myself.
It had seemed safest that way. Ashby House had been a crucible and a fishbowl all at once, the sort of place where despite all the rooms and the endless square footage, it was like you were never alone. There was always someone watching, always someone listening, and all I had wanted was to feel invisible. Unseen.
Unknown.
Until Jules. I’d let her in, but I knew—and apparently, she did, too—that there was still some part of me holding back.
Ashby House was the reason for that.
So maybe it could be the solution, too.
After that, things moved fast. Jules quit her job at Homestead Park and pulled out of the local theater production of Chicago, where she’d been cast as Velma. I put in for extended leave at the school. “Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks,” I’d said to the head of the English department, hoping it was true, but knowing it probably wasn’t.
My ninth graders were reading The Odyssey, and just a few weeks ago, we’d gotten to the part about the lotus-eaters, a tribe of people living on an island, gorging themselves with the lotus flowers that make them forget home, forget anything that’s not the island and their fellow lotus-eaters, all of them settling into peaceful, blank apathy.
Ashby House was like that.
Stay there long enough, and you forget there’s a world outside its tall doors, its oversize windows, and shadowed lawns. It swallows everyone eventually. Look at Ben and Libby, for fuck’s sake. Look at Howell.