“Yes, and please finish your meal so that I can sample you without a beard in the way.”
Her eyes twinkle. “Yes sir!” she agrees, smacking her lips prettily. “I am just so flattered that you would do that for me… And who knew that you were so gorgeous under there! As a matter of fact, you sort of look like… Wait…”
Her chewing slows as she squints at me, searching my face. As she picks up the remote to turn up the lighting in the room, I realize what she is about to do.
“Carty… Cartman?” she asks timidly.
I nod, already aware.
“Cartman Carruthers?” she whispers.
“The very same,” I admit.
Slowly she pushes the tray away from her and slides toward the side of the bed. She paces a few steps, then stops when her ankle threatens to give out and drops into a chair instead.
“Oh my God… The Carruthers brothers… You guys all died in a plane crash!”
“Well, not exactly,” I murmur, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.
She stares into the middle distance, her expression keen and concerned as she puzzles it all out. Finally, she just looks up at me and shrugs.
“Okay, I could figure this all out,” she says rapidly. “Or, alternatively… you could just explain it to me. What happened, Carty? You didn’t… fake your deaths?”
I raise my hands, palm up, then let them fall. “More or less… Yes. Yes we did.”
“All of you?” she asks incredulously. “Are you telling me that I stumbled upon the Carrutherses, hiding out in a secret mansion in the Sierra Nevadas? Are you seriously trying to tell me that’s what happened here?”
I don’t say anything. There’s no need.
“Oh my God, that’s exactly it,” she says, mostly to herself. “You guys all disappeared, all but Jake… Jason! Jason Carruthers. That’s Jake!”
“It is,” I confirm quietly.
“Wait, I sort of remember this story,” she mutters, tapping her chin with her fingertips. “You were married to… Whitney! Whitney Carruthers. She is still around, right? Did she get all of your money?”
“Close enough. She’s… well off, you might say,” I acknowledge.
“But that’s so unfair!” she retorts, her eyes flashing. “You guys are legacy, right? Didn’t your money come from a gold mine or something like that? The railroads?"
“Okay, let’s just back up,” I suggest. My stomach clenches, the way it always does when I think about any of this. Truth be told, I’m happier here in the mountains, away from everybody, never having to recount any of this.
“Did Whitney steal your money? Did she try to have you killed?”
“Oh, no… nothing like that, I assure you,” I reply. “Let me just start the beginning, okay? I will give you the abbreviated version.”
She pulls her legs up, tucking them under her, careful of her injury. When she is all settled, she nods, as ready as a student to hear the story.
“Okay, some of this might just be family mytholog
y, but here is the basic story. Eli Carruthers traveled to the United States from Scotland in the mid-1800s. He promptly got himself arrested in Boston and was sentenced to hang. But his brother, Liam, staged a heroic rescue at the gallows. They took what little money they could steal and rode out West to start again.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh my God, that sounds like a movie.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” I shrug. “To tell you the truth, nobody knows how much of this actually happened this way. But as the story goes, they came out to this area around Lake Tahoe, to Virginia City. It was a really prosperous mining town, but even better, it was a really prosperous gambling town. Eli Carruthers took his last two dollars to a poker table and won a claim to a silver mine off a man whose only crime was apocalyptically bad luck.”
“He won a silver mine?”
“He’s not the only one,” I shrug. “The history of mines is not like twentieth-century corporate history. Seems like nearly half of the silver mines were won or lost over poker games, duels, or prostitutes. It was a different time.”