56 pages • 1 hour read
The Heiress
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Chapters 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Camden”
Cam and Jules sit in the formal dining room with Nelle, Ben, and Libby. Cam knows that the family is aligned against him. As promised, Libby lent Jules a dress but instead of one of her own, she gave Jules one of Ruby’s dresses, the one she most often wore to dinner. Jules looks beautiful, but it makes Cam uncomfortable, as if he’s stepped back in time to dinner when he was younger and Ruby was still alive.
Ben brings out champagne, “the 1959 Dom Pérignon Rosé” (197). It was Ruby’s favorite, and Cam again is reminded of his youth. As Ben toasts the family, Libby throws a file folder on the table. Cam doesn’t open it—he knows what’s in it. He explains to Jules that the file has DNA results that prove Ruby wasn’t a McTavish. Her real name was Dora Darnell.
The chapter closes with a letter from Ruby, dated March 29, 2013. In it, she tells the story of her fourth marriage to Roddy Kenmore. She met Roddy when she was still grieving. He was 26 years old, handsome, fun, and so rich that Ruby began to feel that she could leave her family behind. However, Roddy also had a serious substance use disorder, and Ruby soon tired of their lifestyle. She could have divorced him, but this time, she actually wanted to kill him. She writes that it may be because after killing Andrew, she couldn’t just divorce Roddy.
Roddy didn’t know how to swim, so she convinced him to go for a midnight sail on their boat and then pushed him over the side. Afterward, Ruby thought she would be caught—the crime was so obvious—but once again, her family name protected her. However, in one newspaper, someone called her “Mrs. Killmore,” and the name stuck, much to her dismay.
After Roddy’s death, Ruby became curious about why she killed and why it was so easy. She wondered if her kidnapping when she was three had something to do with it—she didn’t remember anything and believed trauma blocked it from her mind. For the first time, Ruby decided to investigate her kidnapping.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Camden”
Cam enjoys the family’s shock that he already knows that Ruby was Dora Darnell. When he was 18, she did a DNA test of her own and told him the results. Ben loses his temper, claiming that Cam knew Ruby had no right to the McTavish fortune; however, Cam reminds him that Ruby was given everything by name, not as a blood heir. Then, Ben threatens to go public with the news that she died by suicide, but Cam denies it. Ben goes a step further, insinuating that Cam killed Ruby. He claims that Libby saw Cam coming out of Ruby’s bedroom the night she died. Cam knows Libby wasn’t there but realizes that, since all their other plans failed, they are going to try to get him convicted of murder.
Cam and Jules leave the room together. He tells her that he is going to give everything to them but can tell that she wants him to fight. He storms up the stairs but instead of going into their bedroom, he goes into Ruby’s. He opens Ruby’s bedside drawer and takes one of her sleeping pills. The next morning, he wakes to the sound of a door slamming. Then, he hears Jules screaming.
The chapter closes with a letter from Ruby, dated March 30, 2013. Her investigation revealed that she wasn’t really Ruby McTavish—she was Dora Darnell. Although her mother was dead, the private investigator told Ruby that the woman’s daughter, her sister Claire, lived in Tallahassee.
Ruby visited Claire, who knew immediately who she was. She invited Ruby in and sent her daughter, Linda, to her room. Claire told Ruby that she was sold to the McTavishes after their mother commented on how the newspaper photo of Ruby McTavish looked like their own daughter, Dora. Jimmy and Ruby’s father, Mason, made a deal: Mason would pay for Dora, and Jimmy would spend a few months in jail on a kidnapping charge. After they’d sold Dora, however, Mason had Jimmy killed, and their mother burned the money.
Ruby thought she’d feel better knowing the truth, but she didn’t. Now she knew that her father was ruthless, and his inability to accept Ruby’s disappearance led him, as always, to fix the problem with money. With this revelation, Ruby turned her thoughts to how she could balance things. She decided that she would give the McTavish fortune to someone more deserving. She decided to adopt a child and make him her heir. Camden, Ruby writes, has fulfilled her every hope. Ruby is excited for the letter’s recipient to meet him.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Jules”
Jules has a nightmare, and Cam wakes her up. They hold each other until the sun rises. They hear a car in the driveway and look out the window to see a police car in front of the house. Downstairs, Ben’s and Nelle’s lawyers are standing with two police officers. Ben tells them that Nelle is dead. She seems to have died naturally in her sleep, but when one of the police wants to look in Nelle’s mouth, Nelle’s lawyer stops him and the police leave. Jules can’t believe the deference the McTavishes are given because of their wealth and status.
Jules finds Cam in Ruby’s room, crying. Jules thinks it is because of the connection between this event and finding Ruby. However, Cam reveals that he already knew Ruby was dead the morning they found her because he had killed her the night before.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Camden”
Cam tells Jules the story of Ruby’s death. He’d come back from college in California to pick up some clothes—he’d chosen California because it was as far away from North Carolina as he could get. He hoped he could work things out with Ruby while he was home.
Ruby confronted him in her bedroom, reminding him of when he’d gotten into a fight as a boy and she offered to have the other boy’s father fired. He then remembered other times when she’d made similar offers, which he’d always refused. Ruby said it proved he was a good person and called him her “redemption.” Then she told him she swallowed pills with a bottle of her favorite champagne. She gave him the choice of letting her die, in which case he would be free of her expectations and demands, or calling the ambulance and saving her. She was convinced he would call the ambulance, but he unplugged the phone and sat against the wall sobbing. After hours of listening to her breath slow, he pressed a pillow to her face until she stopped breathing. He returned to his bedroom, where the housekeeper woke him up the next morning to tell him that Ruby was dead.
When Cam finishes his story, Jules is crying. She hugs him and tells him he is a good person and doesn’t deserve blame for Ruby’s death. Then, she takes him to their bedroom and shows him a stack of letters on Ruby’s stationery. He doesn’t want to read them, but Jules convinces him to. As he reads Ruby’s letters, he begins to feel relief at knowing the truth. He also feels like he understands Ruby better, at least until he gets to the final letter.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
The dynamics around the dining room table in Chapter 12 are complicated, once again, by Ruby’s outsized presence in the family. Chapter 12 is a point of rising action for the novel—the scene at the dinner table is simmering with old tensions and the struggle between Cam and his family is laid bare. Ruby’s presence is brought to the fore by the fact that Jules is wearing Ruby’s dress. This particularly strikes Cam, for whom the dress, “one of [Ruby’s] favorites the one she most often wore when [they] did these dinners when [he] was growing up” (95), adds another layer of unreality to the scene. This event echoes the famous Gothic novel, Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. In that novel, a woman unknowingly wears the same costume that her husband’s first wife wore the night of her death, a trick perpetrated by the housekeeper. The effect is to bring the first wife, Rebecca, out of the past, transcending her death to play an outsized role in the present. In the same way, Jules wearing Ruby’s dress brings her into the scene that is about to play out. Ben also raises the specter of Ruby with his choice of champagne—as Cam says, “Ruby’s favorite, actually. […] She always had it around for special occasions, and it was only after I left this house that I learned those bottles run you around thirty grand” (197). As Cam reveals in Chapter 15, the Dom is more significant than Ben even knows—Ruby used the champagne to wash down the pills she took to die by suicide. Because of this, Cam remembers the champagne both as Ruby’s favorite and an instrument of her death. Between the dress and the champagne, Ruby is almost as present as anyone else at the dinner, showing how much power she still wields in the family.
The Influence of Family Culture on the Individual is highlighted in Ruby’s search for her real family. When she visits Claire Darnell, her biological sister, Ruby becomes aware of the wide financial disparity between them. Ruby tries to offer Claire money, an unknowing echo of her father’s payoff so many years ago. Claire is aware of Ruby’s infamous past and equates her actions with the McTavish family culture: “You may have been born a Darnell, Dora, but they made a McTavish out of you in the end” (229). Ruby herself realizes the power of her family’s culture when she finds out that her father had first bought a child to replace Ruby, then betrayed Jimmy Darnell and killed him—all without any repercussions.
Chapter 13 ends with a surprise revelation—Ruby’s letters aren’t written to Cam. Throughout the novel, Hawkins leads the reader to believe that Ruby’s letters are written, though maybe never delivered, to Cam. He is positioned as the only person Ruby was close enough with to tell the truth. However, with her closing comment—“Oh, my darling. I can’t wait for you to meet him” (234)—Ruby makes clear that she is writing to someone else. Hawkins signals to the reader here that there is another twist to Ruby’s plan and the whole story.
In Chapter 15, Cam confesses his deepest secret to Jules, raising the question of What Makes a Good Person. He reveals that he didn’t call the ambulance after Ruby took her sleeping pills. As Ruby tells Cam, she is testing him, to prove to herself and Cam that he’s “a good person” (249), and further, that he is her “redemption.” Cam, however, doesn’t call the ambulance, because he is so desperate to be free of Ruby’s manipulations. Throughout the novel, Jules continuously refers to Cam as a “good person,” and it is the first thing she reassures him about after he finishes his story. Jules is reassuring him because she loves him and truly believes it—but she also needs to believe that he is a good person because she doubts whether she is.
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