She lifted one hand off the table, zooming it through the air. “So off you went to North Carolina, Daddy right behind you. Only you went to a mansion and he went to the county jail.”
A headache started behind my eyes, sweat soaking through my silk blouse. “And what? That was your father’s grand plan, to just go sit in jail? Go through a trial for something he didn’t do?”
“Of course not,” Claire scoffed. “McTavish told him he’d fix it. Said if Daddy confessed and just sat tight in the county jail for a couple of days, he would make it so that Daddy could ‘escape,’ and get him back to Alabama. He’d given us enough money to start a brand-new life somewhere else. Mama said Daddy kept talking about Mexico, maybe South America.”
She scoffed again, took another sip of tea. “That would’ve been nice, I guess. Growing up down there. Wasn’t in the cards, though.”
“The escape was planned, then,” I said slowly. “And went wrong.”
The look Claire gave me is one I’ve never forgotten. In part, because she had my eyes, a dark hazel that changed from green to nearly black in the light.
But mostly, because it was the first time in my life anyone had ever looked at me with such pity.
“There was no escape plan,” I said, understanding washing over me.
Claire made a gun of her finger, fired it at me. “McTavish had what he wanted. He had you. He didn’t need some Alabama farmer who could barely read holding a secret like that over your heads for the rest of his life.”
I told myself there was no way Claire could know that for sure. She was a baby when all this happened; plus, it was coming to her from her mother, a woman who’d had her life shattered by Baby Ruby’s disappearance. Of course, she’d think the worst of Daddy. Of all the McTavishes.
But here it is, darling: I knew it was true. I felt it, as certain and primal as I’d ever felt anything. And I knew that Daddy had that man killed. I could practically see Jimmy Darnell dashing through the dark woods of Tavistock County, thinking to himself that just through the trees, he’d find a car, ready to take him home to his wife, his baby girl, and all that money.
I bet the last thing that went through his head before that bullet hit was a vision of crystal-blue water and white sands.
And the reason I knew? It’s exactly what I would’ve done, if I were Daddy.
“The real kicker,” Claire said, sighing as she rested her elbows on the table, “is that Mama had proof of the deal. She had all that cash. Like I said, I never really knew how much it was. Thousands of dollars, for sure. But the night they took you and Daddy, she burned every last bill. Big stacks of cash, going up in smoke in the yard.”
Claire pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “‘What kind of mother would I be if I took that money?’ she always said. ‘What kind of mother sells her own child?’ Sometimes, I’d be like, ‘Well, hell, Mama, probably a bad one, but at least you would’ve been a rich one!’”
She laughed, but the sound faded quickly, her smile dimming. “That was before I had Linda, though. I understand it better now.”
Heaving a sigh, she stood, the chair squeaking across the linoleum. “We’ve managed okay, as you can see, but Mama never got over it. She died last year, but I sometimes think she’d been dead for forty years before that. She was just marking time.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and Claire looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You were just a kid. Although I admit, I used to be jealous of you when I was younger. We didn’t get much North Carolina news down here, but sometimes you made the bigger papers, and I used to dream about what it would be like to live in a big house and have all that money. It wasn’t very nice of me, but when your first husband died, I thought, ‘Well, that’s what she gets, isn’t it? Her daddy had my daddy shot, and now someone’s shot her man.’”
She kept looking at me, her gaze steady. “And then I read about your second husband, and thought, ‘Shit, maybe God really does dole out vengeance.’ And when the third died, I thought, ‘How is one woman this unlucky?’ It wasn’t until the fourth one that I understood.”
The sweat prickling on my skin suddenly turned cold. In the bedroom, the TV clicked off, the door opening as Linda dashed out, crying, “Debbie’s outside, I’m gonna go play!”
“Stay by the building!” Claire called back as the front door opened and slammed shut, but she never took her eyes off me.
“You may have been born a Darnell, Dora, but they made a McTavish out of you in the end.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
I stood abruptly, my hands fluttering nervously in a way they never did. “It … it sounds so crass to say this, but I’d like to … if there’s anything I could do, or … your child might need…”
Claire let me ramble on, making me feel smaller and smaller until finally my words came to a stop. I didn’t even manage to get out a full sentence.
“That’s really sweet of you to offer, Mrs. McTavish,” she said after a long silence. “But I think this family’s done with y’all.”
I nodded meekly. “Thank you,” I said. “For the tea. And … well. Thank you.”
I moved to the door, but before I opened it, slipped my hand into my pocketbook, pulling out one of my calling cards. It looked ridiculous, made me feel ridiculous, that heavy eggshell card stock with its swirling black print, Mrs. Ruby McTavish, Ashby House.
Scribbling a number on the back, I said, “In case you change your mind,” then laid the card on top of a wicker and glass table by the front door.
“I won’t,” Claire replied, but I pretended not to hear.
I thought it would feel better.
Knowing at last. The true story, the one that made the pieces click into place. Mama’s weeping and drinking, her face sometimes crumpling when she looked over at me. In her heart, she must’ve known. Daddy had thought the loss of Ruby would eat her up, and it had. My presence only made those teeth sharper.
And Daddy. My beloved father, ruthless in business and now, I knew, in everything.
His wealth and his family name were supposed to protect him and his own from tragedy. Parents lose children in a myriad of ways every day, but Mason McTavish was not supposed to be like ordinary people. He was supposed to be blessed.
Special.
He couldn’t accept his loss, so he did the only thing he knew how to—threw money at it until it went away. Until his world was right again.
No matter who got chewed up in the process.
I might have had my answers, but I didn’t know what to do next.
Amends felt called for, but Claire wouldn’t take my help, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Besides, if I had given her money, it would’ve made me just like him, like Mason (I couldn’t bear to think of him as “Daddy” for some time after that).
There had to be some way, though, something I could do. Something that would, if not right the wrong, then balance the scales of the universe somehow.
It would be almost ten more years before I’d figure it out.
I couldn’t give the Darnells back what they’d lost, but I could take from the McTavishes. What’s more: I could take and give to someone else, someone more deserving.
Claire’s question, about if I’d had children, kept coming back to me. I had never gotten pregnant despite my many husbands—the fear I’d had in Paris had proven unfounded—and I suspected I wasn’t capable of it. And by that point, I was in my midforties with no intention of marrying again, so that door was firmly shut to me.
It was yet another sign of my strangeness within my own family—well, not my family at all, I knew that now—that the question of who would inherit after me had never really raised its head until that moment. The money, the house, everything that came with being a McTavish … I had been happy enough to embrace it for myself with little thought to what would happen after I died.