It’s possible that I’m completely alone in the house, but I still try to be as quick and as quiet as I can as I slide open the top drawer of her desk.
My heart leaps at the sight of that familiar paper, but the pages are all blank, and the other drawers are nearly empty, like I’d known they’d almost certainly be.
Fuck.
I straighten up, looking around the office for another hiding place. But the thing with fancy offices in mansions belonging to homicidal heiresses is that everything looks like a hiding place. For all I know, I could go pull one of the books on the far wall and an entire room would open up.
Still, I move in that direction, my fingers dragging along the spines, looking for anything likely.
I’ve just picked up The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám—Ruby strikes me as both vain enough and potentially crazy enough to choose something that sounds like her own name as a hiding place—when a shadow falls across the shelf.
“Stuffing your pockets with valuables before you slink out of town?”
Ben stands there, still in the suit he’d worn to accompany Nelle’s body to the funeral home, that blinding grin on his face.
“Just looking for something to read,” I lie, and he winks at me.
“I liked you, you know. Thought you had spunk.”
Of course, he did.
“I didn’t like you. I thought you were a dick,” I reply, and his grin widens as he points at me.
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. A straight shooter!”
If he does finger guns at me, I swear to god––
“Kapow!”
He blows imaginary smoke from the tip of his finger, and I grit my teeth.
“Really cheerful for a man whose grandmother just died,” I tell him, and finally, he drops some of that Good Ol’ Boy bullshit.
“She lived a long life and died happy in her bed. None of us could wish better for someone we love.”
“Right, because love is in such abundant supply in this family.”
I head for the door, frustrated and anxious. This was my one chance, and now it’s gone. It’s already late in the afternoon, Cam will be back soon, and then we’ll never step foot in this house again. This will become Ben’s office, probably, and what if he finds––
“I’m guessing you’re looking for this.”
He pulls a tight rectangle of folded papers from his suit jacket, and my mouth goes dry.
Still, I make myself say, “I wasn’t looking for anything.”
“Oh, you weren’t?” He raises his eyebrows. “Huh. Well, I’ll be damned. Because I found this not long after Daddy died. Right before you got in touch.”
He nods at the bookcases, specifically at a jeweled box nestled onto one of the shelves, glittering dully in the low light. Its top sits at a drunken angle, the hinges broken.
“Didn’t make much sense at the time,” he goes on, “but I hung on to it anyway. Just in case.”
What a stupid fucking mistake I’d made, assuming Ben was annoying, but harmless. A toothless Doberman. How many other people had been suckered by his surface charm covering simple meanness, not knowing that he was smarter than he let on?
“And then, of course, when you got in touch after Dad died, Camden’s sweet wife Jules, just wanting to see his family home one time, promising the moon if I would just tell him we needed him here … well, some things, you just don’t forget.”
Still holding the papers in one hand, he lifts them and snaps his wrist, the pages unfolding in front of his face as he makes a show of squinting, scanning through the lines until he gets to the one he wants.
“Right, here it is. ‘I think your idea of using another name is very smart, dear girl, and of course I can help with the paperwork. Julianne is a lovely middle name, so I agree, use that.’”
I’m shaking, my vision going gray around the edges, and I think of Camden, wherever he is right now, coming back to me, coming back to this.
“‘And besides,’” Ben goes on, his voice a high, syrupy imitation of what Ruby sounded like, grating over my ears. “‘You can go by Jules. Ruby, jewel, do you see? Clever of us, isn’t it?’”
Ben looks at me over the top of the paper.
“Clever, indeed.” His voice is his own again, dripping with menace as he moves closer. “Guess she never got around to sending this before she died, but I’m guessing there were others, weren’t there? Because there’s all this talk of ‘confessions.’ Confessing to what, Mrs. McTavish?”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t try to brazen this out,” he says sharply, cutting me off. “You can’t, although I admire the effort. Like I said. Spunk.”
He bites the ending of the word off between his white teeth, and I grimace.
I try another tactic. Licking my lips, I say, “What’s the point of this now? Camden’s agreed to give you everything. You don’t have to go to court over it, you don’t even have to hire lawyers. All he wants is to be free from this, from you. You’re getting everything you want, so why would you even bother to show this to him?”
But he doesn’t have to answer.
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, as soon as I look into his eyes, I know the answer.
“Right,” I say softly. “Because it will hurt him.”
Because Cam had the gall to exist alongside them, even though he wasn’t one of them. Because for all the petty cruelties they threw at him, they couldn’t break him.
Because he made them afraid that the life they’d known would someday be taken away from them.
Of course, they can’t forgive that.
Of course, even now, with everything they want stretching out in front of them, it’s not enough.
It will never be enough.
The anger that floods through me is hot. Clean. Maybe the purest thing I’ve ever felt.
“What won’t you people do?” I say, my voice still barely above a whisper. “Every opportunity in the world, and you turned out like this. These … these sad, grasping, pathetic fuckers who’d kill each other just to get a bigger piece of the pie.”
I’m not thinking of Nelle when I say it, truly. It’s just a figure of speech.
But maybe you’ve figured out by now that I think fast on my feet, and while Ben may be smarter than I thought he was, that still doesn’t make him smarter than me.
I see the way he blanches, see the vein that ticks in his forehead, his eyes sliding from mine just for a second, and I almost start laughing.
“Fuck me,” I say, shaking my head. “You did. You did kill your own grandmother.”
If Camden relinquished his hold on the McTavish inheritance, Nelle was next in line for the whole thing. Sure, she was almost eighty, and bound to kick it sooner rather than later, but Ben couldn’t wait even that long.
“Shut your mouth, bitch,” Ben growls, and now I do laugh.
“Oh my god, that’s why you didn’t want that cop looking at her mouth, right?”
Cam’s confession, that horrible story, Ruby seizing on the bed, his sobs, the pillow over her face …
I knew that after ten years in the grave, there wouldn’t be any evidence left if someone decided to exhume Ruby, if Ben decided to follow through on his threat and actually accused Cam of murder. Nevertheless, I still found myself frantically Googling on my phone after he had left.
How to know if someone has been smothered.
Apparently, the evidence is usually in their mouths.
Bruising inside their lips, from their teeth pressing hard against the skin.
“And yet you tried to come in here, and hold it over my head that I lied?” I say to Ben now, my voice growing louder. “Yeah, I did, okay? I lied, and I schemed, and I wanted Cam to throw all of you out. I wanted this house, and to be a McTavish, but I am nothing like you. And neither is Cam. We’re better than all of you, and that’s what you can’t stand.”
I snatch the letter from his limp hand, the pages almost tearing. “Get fucked, Ben. Sincerely. I’ll DVR your episode of Dateline.”
And then I make one last, stupid mistake.
I turn my back on a man with nothing to lose.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Camden
I used to make this drive a lot when I first got a car.
Two hours to Knoxville, almost on the nose.