The Bourbon Thief

  “But you’re light enough to look white.”

  “But I’m not white.” He said it the same way she’d said, I’m not a Maddox. “I know you think you’re paying me a compliment by saying that, but you aren’t.”

  “I didn’t think I was paying you a compliment. Didn’t think I was paying you an insult, either.”

  Levi exhaled heavily.

  “When I was fourteen, Mom moved us from Frankfort to Lawrenceburg. I started a brand-new high school. New kid at school. New start. Mostly white school. And nobody there knows anything about me. I take tests and get put into the top classes. Girls flirt with me. Guys want me at their lunch table. Coaches tell me to try out for the football team, since I’m half a foot taller than every other boy in my class. I was a new man, reborn. That school handed me the keys to the kingdom. Two weeks after school starts, Mom comes for a parent-teacher meeting. That was the end of Levi Shelby’s Renaissance. You know what I hate most of all?”

  “What?” Tamara asked.

  “Those were the best two weeks of my life.”

  Tamara stared down at her white feet on the whitewashed floor of the landing.

  “I was so mad at Mom for ruining it for me,” he continued. “I was going to tell her off after school that day, tell her to never come to my school again. I march home and there I see her—she’s on her hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the linoleum. Whole day cleaning houses and she comes home and cleans ours. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed enough I got a rag and got down on the floor with her to clean. But I was more angry than ashamed. Those white kids had made me despise my own mother. I didn’t want to be one of them after that. My mother was worth a million of them. And you expect me to bring a child into a world that would do that to a kid? Make him hate his own mother? I’m family to Aunt Glory and Uncle Andre. They don’t care if I stick out like a sore thumb at family reunions. I’m their blood. And my own father gave me a job cleaning horse shit out of his stables. Where was my invitation to the Maddox family reunions?”

  “But I saw a couple of your girlfriends. You dated white girls.”

  “I fucked white girls. There’s a difference.”

  “But why, if—”

  “Because fuck them.”

  They were the three coldest words she’d ever heard him speak. Cold and slow.

  Because. Fuck. Them. Three slaps to the face.

  “Is that why...you know, why you kissed me on my birthday?”

  “No.” He exhaled, rubbed his forehead. She could tell he didn’t want to be having this conversation. “It wasn’t like that with you.”

  “Why wasn’t it?”

  “Because you were...sweet. But you’re not so sweet anymore, are you?”

  A fourth slap. The hardest slap yet. She wasn’t sweet anymore. You didn’t hold your grandfather facedown in cold and nasty floodwater until he stopped fighting and come out still sweet on the other side. He took that from her, too, her grandfather did. He took her sweetness and she’d never get it back. Someday she would have to admit to herself that although she was glad he was dead, she could never be happy she’d been the one to kill him.

  “I’ve spent the past year and a half thinking about how much I hate my family, how much I want to hurt them.”

  “Them? They don’t exist, Tamara. The Maddoxes are all dead but for me, right?”

  “I guess.” She knew of a few second and third cousins, but they weren’t part of the business, they weren’t part of the bloodline from Jacob Maddox.

  “What are you going to do? Go back in time and murder them all?”

  “I wish.” She said it so coldly that Levi stood up a little straighter.

  “Rotten...what’s really going on here?”

  “Daddy—Nash, I mean—wasn’t my father, but he was the only person in the family who loved me. And then Daddy killed himself because of Granddaddy making him marry Momma.”

  “I know he did and I know that’s wrong, but they’re both gone now and there’s nothing you can do to take back what happened to Nash.” Levi put his hands on her upper arms. His voice was soothing, his touch comforting. But she wasn’t soothed, wasn’t comforted. “You can’t hurt people who are already dead.”

  “No,” she said, stepping away from him. “But I can try.”

  Levi didn’t say anything this time. He only shook his head.

  “You can sleep in the blue room,” she finally said. “I want to sleep in this one.”

  “It’s pink,” he reminded her. “You hate pink.”

  “Daddy didn’t know that. He made this room for me. I’m going to use it.”

  “Good to hear it.” He started for the blue room.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked, and Levi stopped.

  “Do what?” Levi asked, but she had a feeling he knew what she was asking.

  “Me. Why did you do me?” Tamara felt heat rise to her face. She wished losing her virginity had magically turned her into a grown-up who could talk about this stuff without blushing like a kid. Not yet.

  “The usual reason a man fucks a beautiful girl.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Finishing what we started on your sixteenth birthday. And we’re married now, right? Sort of.”

  “Daddy and Momma never slept together. He said so in his suicide note.”

  “Well, then, Rotten—there ya go. You’ve already beaten her.”

  “Guess I have.”

  “I’m going to sleep now. If you need me, you know where to find me.” Levi stepped past her into the hallway. The door to the blue bedroom was only a few steps away. “But, Tamara, you come into this room, it better be for a good reason. There better be a snake, a bear or a hillbilly with a gun coming after you. I mean it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m not going to jump you in your sleep.”

  “No, you aren’t. And I’m not coming near you, either. If we’re going to make this thing work without killing each other before we get your money—”

  “Our money.”

  “If,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “we are going to live in this little house together for months while we wait, I’d appreciate it if you—”

  “What?”

  “Just leave me alone, okay?”

  Levi looked at her like he wanted to say something else. She waited.

  But instead, he went into the blue bedroom and shut the door. Funny, she’d known Levi since she was thirteen and came to live at her grandfather’s house. He’d called her young and dumb and crazy and spoiled and rotten. He’d called her a twerp, a brat, a hellion, a wildcat. He’d told her to behave herself, to straighten up, to grow up, to act her age, to run along and let him work. And none of it had hurt. Not a word of it had hurt because he hadn’t meant a word of it. But telling her to leave him alone? He’d meant it. And it hurt.

  Wounded, Tamara slunk into her little pink room. Her lips were a tight line of tension and misery as she pulled down the covers on the bed and settled into the strawberry sheets. The rain still fell soft on the rooftop. In the dark night with the stars hidden behind the oak trees, the rain looked like Christmas tinsel waving outside the window. She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, but worn-out from the drive and the sex and the fight that had nearly finished her marriage before it started, Tamara fell asleep not long after her head hit the strawberry pillow. She slept, and as she slept, she dreamed.

  * * *

  She is in a house she’s never been in before. It smells of cooking smoke and chimney soot. She’s standing in a kitchen of sorts, but it’s not like any kitchen she’s ever seen except in the pages of history books. There’s no faucet, but there is a pump handle. There’s no refrigerator, no toaster, no big yellow-and-chrome KitchenAid mixer on the countertop. The floor is wood and covered in a woven rug. A witch’s broom hangs on a hook by the pantry. It’s hot in the kitchen, hot in the house, hot as hell with no breeze blowing through the open door.

  There is a stove in the kitchen
, an iron woodstove. A girl stands at the stove. A girl Tamara’s age. No, she’s a little younger. Fourteen? Fifteen. She has smooth dark skin and large dark eyes framed by long eyelashes, delicate as black lace. She wears a gray wool dress and a red ribbon in her hair. The hardwood floor makes not a single sound as Tamara walks from the doorway to the stove, where the girl stands and stirs a pot of something on the stove top. It’s like she’s not here. Not in her body, anyway. But something of her must be here because the girl with the red ribbon in her hair looks up at her. Tamara sees the girl has tears on her face and the tears fall in the steaming copper pot as the girl stirs and stirs with a heavy wooden spoon.

  “What are you making?” Tamara asks her.

  “Saltwater tea.”

  “You make it with tears?” Tamara asks.

  “I make everything with tears.”

  “Does it taste good?”

  “No. It tastes bitter. All I taste is bitter.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “How can you help me?” The girl with the red ribbon speaks softly as if afraid to be heard.

  “Do you need my tears, too?”

  “What good are your tears to me? I have enough of my own.”

  “What can I do? Let me help. I’ve made this tea before, too.”

  “Who drank your tea?”

  “My grandfather. I made him drink a river full of it.”

  “I don’t want to make this tea anymore. But they want it.”

  “Who wants it?”

  “Jacob and his wife want it. He loves to drink my saltwater tea.”

  “I’ll serve it to him this time,” Tamara tells the girl. “If you’ll let me.”

  “A whole river full of it?” The girl is so young, too young, and pretty, so pretty. Yet Tamara sees her stomach is rounded as if she, too, has been forced to swallow a river of salt water.

  “A whole river.”

  “I don’t want to make saltwater tea anymore,” the girl with the black lace eyes says.

  “Neither do I. But I don’t know how to stop making it.”

  “Your daddy knows,” the girl says, glancing up to meet Tamara’s eyes.

  “Daddy’s dead. Is that how you stop making the tea? By dying?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Then the girl dips a ladle in the copper pot and Tamara sees the tea is a rusty red.

  The color of old blood.

  The color of old bourbon.

  * * *

  Tamara woke with a start, tangled up in her sweat-stained strawberry sheets. She got out of bed and walked downstairs in the dark, her hand clinging to the railing, her feet finding her footing, since her eyes were of no use.

  Your daddy knows. Why don’t you ask him?

  She couldn’t ask her father anything anymore, but still, she had to look for answers. This house was where her father kept all his secrets. The sand...she remembered the sand in his shoes and the wink he gave her. The room upstairs he’d prepared for her because he’d planned to bring her here to live. If this was where he wanted them to live, then this was where he’d keep his secrets.

  The rain had stopped at last and her eyes quickly adjusted to the light of the half-moon that filled the office.

  On top of the filing cabinet was another cabinet, a liquor cabinet. Anyone else would store his important papers in one of those filing cabinet drawers. But Nash was Granddaddy’s son by nature and nurture. She opened the door of the liquor cabinet and pulled out bottle after bottle of bourbon, of whiskey, of scotch and soda. There in the back behind all the bottles she found a business card. One little business card for one big business.

  Athens Timber and Lumber, Athens, Georgia. There was a phone number printed on the card and a name written on the back in her father’s handwriting. Tamara smiled. Finally the river had gotten a message to Daddy and Daddy had found a way to get a message back to her.

  Tamara tucked the card away in the cabinet, put the liquor bottles in front of it again and shut the door. She went back to bed and fell fast into a heavy dreamless sleep.

  Levi said you couldn’t hurt people who were already dead.

  But maybe she could.

  19

  Paris

  McQueen rose from his seat and took a white linen napkin off the bar. He brought it to Paris, holding it out for her. If she wanted it, she could have it, but he wouldn’t force it on her.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking the napkin from him and using the corner to dab her tears.

  “Saltwater tea?” McQueen asked.

  “My least favorite drink. Too bitter by far.”

  “I’ll stick to bourbon,” McQueen said.

  “I’m sure you will.”

  She smiled slightly and it transformed her face. He saw the real Paris in that smile, the real Paris behind the veneer of the red dress, the role she played, his femme fatale, his Brigid O’Shaughnessy, his Maltese Falcon. He wanted to touch her. For the first time since she’d stolen his bottle, he wanted to touch her. But he dared not.

  “Maybe it’s not a rock fence around you at all,” he said. “Maybe it’s an eggshell.”

  “You’d like to think that.”

  “I would like that, yes. Very much.”

  He took his seat again and waited for her to speak. Usually he wasn’t the sort of man to wait on others. Others waited on him. But for her he would wait. For her he might wait a very long time.

  “Tamara wasn’t pregnant,” Paris said. She laid the napkin on her crossed knee and carefully folded it. He watched her fingers dance over the linen and soon she’d transformed it from a square into a swan.

  “I’m sure Levi was relieved.”

  “Profoundly.”

  “And Tamara? Disappointed?”

  “No. Only determined. Still determined.”

  “I imagine.” McQueen sat back, put his arm over the back of the armchair and watched Paris turn her swan back into a square. “Should I feel bad I got a little turned on by their first time together?”

  “Yes.”

  McQueen shrugged. He was what he was. He wouldn’t apologize for it. Not in his nature.

  “I assume Levi didn’t go through with his threat to take them back to Kentucky?”

  “He did not, no. A week passed on Bride Island. Two weeks. Levi fixed the fuse box and they had electricity at the house, which made the waiting a little easier. Every couple of days Levi went into town and called Judge Headley’s office to see if the will had been fully executed yet. Not yet, the judge’s secretary said. These things take time. So they waited. And waited.”

  “Sounds nice, peaceful. Spending a summer on your own island isn’t so bad. I’ve done it myself.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  McQueen winced. Why couldn’t he stop saying the wrong thing to this woman? She was a minefield. He knew it. So why did he keep walking?

  “Peace and quiet they had aplenty. And too much for Levi’s sake. But peace and quiet should always be appreciated while it lasts because, as you and I know, it never lasts.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tamara and Levi had houseguests.”

  “Houseguests ruined their peace and quiet. Must have been bad