You’re a tough cookie, but you understood what I was telling you. You had compassion for me in spite of all of it.
And yes, I have heard that tale about the scorpion and the frog. The poor little frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, even though he worries that the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion promises he won’t, but sure enough, he can’t resist, sinking them both beneath the water.
“Why did you do it?” the frog asks before he drowns. “Now we’ll both die.”
“Because it is my nature,” says the scorpion.
Yes, darling. If that’s the story that my confessions made you think of, I think you might understand all of us better than you know.
You’ll be good for Camden. He’ll be good for you.
And I will sleep well at night, knowing I’ve left Ashby House in the very best hands—the only hands—I could.
-R
September 3, 2013
Ruby,
Well, this is a first for me: writing a letter to a dead lady.
But honestly, I wasn’t sure what else to do. I guess this is the kind of thing normal girls would journal about, but when have I ever been a normal girl? When were you?
You can’t answer that, I know.
Still, I liked writing with you, and I miss it. I miss you, which is strange since we only met that one time. But I guess once someone has shared their murder confessions with you, you feel a certain bond.
Or maybe it’s a family thing. I mean, you’re my great-aunt after all.
Were my great-aunt.
It was a gut punch, reading about your death online. Heart failure, huh? Don’t you have to have a heart for it to fail? (You should imagine a little cymbal crash here, by the way. Or was that joke too mean? I guess it doesn’t matter, what with you being dead. Anyway, I still think you’d laugh.) For a month or so, I waited for … I don’t know. Something. Like, maybe someone would find my letters to you and would know to get in contact with me. Or that there’d be one last secret bequest in your will, and I’d get to show up all dramatic and in a black veil to whispers of, Who is she? (It’s possible I watched a lot of soap operas with my mom as a kid.) Instead, there was nothing but silence.
It’s so weird that for the last year, you’ve been such a big part of my life, and I’d like to think that I was a big part of yours, and yet nobody knew. Now nobody will ever know.
Except me.
When it became clear that no one was getting in touch with me, that you didn’t have any other tricks up your sleeve, I figured I should probably abandon our whole plan. What was the point if you were gone? I mean, sure: I knew that Cam was cute and rich, but I figured there were other cute and rich guys out there, maybe even ones with less fucked-up families (although I’ll admit, probably not any with a house as amazing as Ashby).
Still, I’d already been thinking about moving to California, and I had that money you gave me when we met, so I thought, “Why the fuck not?”
(I’ll try to stick to only one “fuck” in this letter, too. It was a good rule, and I’m sorry my first letter to you probably sounded like a Quentin Tarantino script. You probably don’t know who that is. And it doesn’t matter because I am writing to a dead person who will not read this. But that’s hard to remember sometimes. I guess it’s because I’ve got your letters here in front of me. When I read them, I can see you and hear you so clearly, it’s like you’re in the room with me.) (But also, please don’t be in the room with me—this situation is weird enough without adding ghosts to the mix.) Anyway. California.
I wasn’t going for Cam, I was going for me. Might as well try out the acting thing for real, right? And I had a friend from high school in San Bernardino, so off I went.
I’m not gonna lie, so far, it kind of sucks. California is expensive, for one thing, and also San Bernardino is not L.A. I’m not exactly getting discovered babysitting for my neighbor’s kids, you know? So it has not been the best time, and I was honestly thinking about heading home.
And then tonight happened.
God, Ruby, I wish you were really here. I wish you’d really read this. You probably wouldn’t believe me, but that’s okay. You’d laugh, at the very least. You’d spread your hands wide and say something like, Fait accompli, darling, and I’d wonder yet again if in addition to being a murderess, you were a witch.
Because it had to be magic, Ruby. It had to be something.
I met Camden.
Not on purpose! I didn’t seek him out. I wouldn’t have even known how to, since he seems very committed to never appearing on any social media, ever. But tonight, I walked into this place called Senor Pollo’s, and there he was, behind the bar.
I recognized him from the pictures you sent, and for a second, I’m pretty sure I just stood there with my mouth hanging open because how, right? Of all the wing places and all that.
He smiled at me. He poured me a beer. We talked, and we …
You know what? I’m gonna preserve a little mystery there.
I feel like you’d understand.
Was it fate? Destiny?
Ruby, was it you?
EPILOGUE
Jules
Eight Months Later
Mountain views are overrated.
Watching the morning sun break through the clouds over a navy-blue sea, whitecaps foaming, I sip my herbal tea and let that familiar contentment sink into me, wiggling my toes in the warm sand beneath my chair.
I keep thinking I’ll get tired of it eventually, sitting here just after sunrise, another gorgeous day unfurling before my eyes. But it’s been five months since we bought this place on a tiny spit of land off the coast of South Carolina, and I still feel my stomach flip with happiness every morning.
Or maybe, I think, resting my hand on the firm curve of my stomach, that’s just my little freeloader here.
Yes, it might be a little emotionally manipulative of me, telling you I’m pregnant, hoping you’ll forgive me for everything else, but hey. We use the gifts God gave us.
Ruby had it right, I think, in that last letter.
My great-grandfather sold his own child for a buck (okay, a lot of bucks). My great-grandmother burned that money to a crisp.
My grandmother turned down Ruby’s offer of cash. My mother once stole everything I’d saved from a year of babysitting so that she could buy a bunch of lottery tickets.
We’re made up of many different types of people, is my point.
Good ones, bad ones. Most of them, like me, probably fall somewhere in the middle.
That gives me hope for the little girl currently floating around inside me. Camden is good, through and through. Me? Only middling.
But surely that gives her a better chance than most.
I hope so, at least.
Are you frowning right now, thinking to yourself, Bitch, didn’t you set a house on fire? Didn’t you murder two people? In what world does that make you not a bad person?
That’s fair.
Libby was an accident, though. I didn’t know she had taken an extra Ambien that afternoon, once they got back from the funeral home. She never even woke up; she simply breathed in all that smoke until she never breathed again.
That’s not my fault.
Ben, though …
After I turned to leave Ruby’s office––after he’d cornered and tried to threaten me––he struck me from behind with a paperweight from Ruby’s desk. The pain stunned me, made me stumble, literal stars in my vision. (I always thought people made that up! But nope.)
It makes you crazy, that kind of pain. That kind of fear.
For the first time since I’d read her letters all those years before, I understood what had made Ruby pick up that gun and go after Duke Callahan on that hot Paris night.
For the first time, I felt like we must share the same blood.
Was that what made me curl my fingers around the fireplace poker, the first thing I laid eyes on?
Was that what made it feel so goddamn good when I swung, hard, at his head?
I don’t know. I wish I could have asked Ruby.
Of course, once Ben was dead, I had to do something.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say I didn’t think I’d get away with it.
But I knew I would.