The Bourbon Thief

  “Sit,” he ordered. “You can play with the damn horse later.”

  “He’s...so beautiful. I can’t believe you got me a horse.” Tamara couldn’t stop looking at him. She didn’t feel the cuts on her hands anymore or the ache in her ankle. Levi had bought her a horse. It was so sweet she almost felt sweet again.

  “Yeah, I got you a horse. Stupid lovesick idiot I am bought you a horse to make up for you losing Kermit. So there he is.”

  Tamara tried standing up again and didn’t make it. She wobbled on her feet and Levi caught her in his arms.

  “You’re not walking anywhere,” he said as he lowered her to the ground again.

  “Sorry. I wanted to pet him.”

  “Stay there.” Levi pointed at her.

  He walked over to the tree and untied the horse, leading him over to her with his hand on the horse’s bridle.

  “Rex, meet Tamara. Tamara, this is Rex, a Tennessee Walker.”

  “Hi, Rex.” Tamara raised her shaking hand and pressed it to the horse’s velvet nose. It felt good to pat his nose and stroke his long ears. “Hi, there, guy. You’re awfully pretty there.”

  “Don’t tell him that. He’s a man, not a girl. He’s handsome.”

  “Hi, handsome.” Rex batted her hand with his nose, keeping his head lowered so she could reach his face and ears. “You’re a nice guy, aren’t you?”

  “Nicest guy I could find. His last owner was a teenage girl. She went off to college in California and that’s why her parents sold him. He lost his girl and you lost your horse. I thought you’d be good for each other.”

  “We’ll be good for each other.” Tamara smiled. She wrapped her arms around Rex’s neck, and as the horse raised his head, she came to her feet.

  “Tamara—”

  “I’m good,” she said. “I can stand.”

  She couldn’t put her full weight on her right foot, but she could stand as long as Rex stayed right where he was and let her lean against him. She ran her fingers through his black mane, combing out the thick hairs, untangling a knot. A fly landed by his eye and she brushed it off.

  “Do you believe in evil, Levi?”

  “I believe in free will.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is if you think about it.”

  She thought about it. Maybe it was an answer. Maybe it was the only answer.

  “An evil thing happened to a girl once,” Tamara began as she hobbled around Rex, patting his flanks, stroking his long back. “And she wasn’t very old, only fifteen or so. And she was being held hostage in this house.”

  “A hostage?”

  “They used the word slave, but isn’t it the same thing? Isn’t that what you’d call it if someone stole me and put me in a house and wouldn’t let me leave? Isn’t it?”

  “Go on,” Levi said. “Tell me about this girl.”

  “The man who was holding her hostage raped her and got her pregnant. And when his wife found out the girl was having his baby, they sold her for a thousand dollars. And the man took that one thousand dollars and opened his own bourbon distillery.”

  “Someone we know?” Levi asked, looking at her over Rex’s back.

  “Veritas. That was her name, but they called her Vera. And Jacob Maddox, my grandfather’s grandfather, raped her and his wife sold her.”

  “My father’s grandfather. Not yours. Mine.”

  “Now you know why I was so happy to find out I wasn’t really a Maddox.”

  “Now you know why I was so damn angry to find out I was.”

  “Levi...if I tell you something, will you believe me?”

  “I’ll try. All I can do is try. What is it?”

  “I think she talks to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Vera.”

  “Vera? Vera who’s probably been dead a hundred years?”

  “I thought I saw her the night of the flood. And then sometimes I dream about her. The night...after we were together that first time, I dreamed about her. And she told me Daddy knew things. I woke up and went down to the office and found the card for Athens Timber. I thought she was telling me that I was supposed to sell the trees, that that’s what Daddy was going to do. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Now that I say it, I hear how crazy it sounds.”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It sounds...sweet. Kind of.”

  “Sweet?”

  “I didn’t know you had such a tender heart, Rotten. Especially not for a black girl who lived a hundred years before you were born.”

  “A hundred years isn’t anything, Levi. A hundred years is yesterday. If what happened to you happened to her, a hundred years is nothing.”

  “You want to destroy the trees on this island because of what they did to that little girl?”

  “You can’t sell people,” Tamara said. “You can’t. And they did. And because they did, Red Thread exists. It’s funny, you know. They always said Maddoxes have bourbon in their blood. It’s not true. But this is true—we have blood in our bourbon. Her blood.” She looked at Levi and found him looking at her. “You want to keep selling her blood? That’s what we’re doing. Brewing it, barreling it, aging it, bottling it and selling it with a red ribbon tied around the neck. A red ribbon like the one she wore every day, like the one Henrietta Maddox ripped out of Vera’s hair and left to show her husband what she’d done. A red ribbon like the one he wore on his finger to spite his wife. We still have that red ribbon, you know. It’s on a bottle at Arden. I’ve seen it. She’s real.”

  “I believe she was real. Was real. She’s dead now and you don’t have to take orders from someone who’s dead.”

  “What would you do if that had been me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What would you do if it had been me they raped and sold? Would you still love these trees just as much? Would you still keep Red Thread open?”

  “Tamara, it was a hundred—”

  “It was yesterday,” she said.

  “You want revenge. That’s what all this is about. Revenge for what they did to her.”

  “Revenge for what they did to all of us.”

  “They’re dead. The Maddoxes who did that to her are dead. How are you going to get revenge against dead people? Dig ’em up and stake ’em through the heart?”

  “I asked myself that same question, and I think I know the answer. You destroy what they loved, and you love what they destroyed.”

  “So we destroy Red Thread?”

  “And we love each other.” She looked at him and waited, waited and prayed. If he took the side of Red Thread, there was nothing for it—she would leave him—for her daddy’s sake, for Vera’s sake and for hers.

  “Fine,” Levi said. He stood by Rex’s head and adjusted the horse’s mouth bit.

  “Fine? What do you mean fine?”

  “‘If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.’ Robert Penn Warren said that, and he was probably right. When you told me George Maddox was my father, I was about five minutes away from setting a match to the entire state, so how can I say you’re wrong to want to cut these trees down? But if all you say is true, if you say my family did that to her, cutting trees down isn’t enough. If we owe her for what we did to her, then we pay in full, not half. We’ll close the company. Not sell it, just close it. Shut down production. Stop selling the stuff, all the stuff. That way we both win—I get the island and you get to send every Maddox in the ground spinning in his grave like a top for all eternity. How’s that?”

  “You mean it?” She couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Of course I mean it. I don’t feel any better about making money off the blood of that girl than you do. If we win the case, we’ll have plenty of money to live on. If we lose, then fine. I have a job and we’ll wait it out until you turn twenty-one. It’s not like we’re gonna starve to death. I’ve survived being broke be
fore. Being broke on an island in a pretty house is better than being broke and living in a stable loft, you know.”

  “You do mean it.”

  Levi gave her that wicked half grin that never ceased making her heart jump hopscotch.

  “Hell, you said Judge Headley has money. We’ll tell him you’re his daughter, and he’ll pay us off to keep our mouths shut.”

  Tamara laughed. “Don’t you dare. I like him too much.”

  “Just saying, it’s good to have a backup plan. I have a certain lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to. And I want to provide for my wife. Name-brand Frosted Flakes. None of that generic shit.”

  “Stay there,” Tamara said.

  “Where?”

  “Right where you are. Stay there.”

  Levi held up two hands in surrender. “I’m staying. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m staying right here.”

  Keeping one hand on Rex’s back to steady herself, Tamara hobbled forward step by painful step. She came to Levi and wrapped her arms around him and let him wrap his arms around her.

  “Thank you, Levi,” she whispered.

  “You’re my wife. We’re stuck with each other. Might as well make the best of it.”

  “I want to make the best of it,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what Bowen told Nash when Nash was hell-bent on burning this island to the ground to spite his...our father.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bowen told him that being happy is the best revenge. That there was no way that a man like George Maddox was a happy man, not with a wife in the nursing home, a son in the cemetery and another son in love with a black barrel maker. So if Nash really wanted revenge, he’d be happy instead of trying to make a miserable man more miserable. And that’s what Nash decided to do. That’s why he wanted to bring you down here to live with him. Because he loved you and you made him so happy.”

  “I wish Daddy were still alive.”

  If Daddy were still alive, she would be living with him down here. If Daddy were still alive, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near Kentucky when the flood happened. If Daddy were still alive, she wouldn’t have had to kill anyone, to hate her mother, to destroy Red Thread. She’d still be sweet if Daddy were alive. Right now she missed that more than anything.

  “I know, baby. I do, too. I never got to know my own brother. I always wanted a brother or a sister and here I had one all along and never knew it. Too late now.”

  “You really think we can be happy? After all this?”

  “We can. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll be happy.”

  “You said you were lovesick.” She grinned up at him. “Does that mean you love me?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “You absolutely said that. I heard you say that.”

  “You’re getting messages from beyond the grave in your dreams. I’m entirely certain this calls the testimony of your senses into question.”

  “It’s cute when you talk all funny like that.”

  “I’m very cute.”

  “Can you take me back home? I need a bath.”

  “Can you ride? I can lead Rex if you can ride. But if not, I’ll have to go get the truck. We’re five miles from home.”

  “I can ride.”

  “Okay, but first I gotta do something.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I gotta kiss you like they kiss on The Young and the Restless.”

  “Can I be the restless this time?” she asked.

  “You can be anything you wanna be, Rotten.”

  She rested her entire body against his and lifted her face to his for a good hard kissing. That was not what she got, however. She got a good gentle kissing with soft hands on her arms and her back and soft lips against her lips and soft sighs mingling with her sighs.

  Levi rested his forehead against hers.

  “You scared the shit out of me, Rotten,” he whispered. “Two days. I looked for you for two days and I was ready to cut the whole island down to stumps with my bare hands to find you.”

  “I’m sorry. I am. It’s hard to trust...anybody.”

  “You can trust me. You have to trust me. We’re never going to make this work—not for a day, not for a year, not for a lifetime—if you can’t trust me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good.”

  “Trust me, too,” she said.

  “I can do that. I’ll trust you more when you don’t smell like a swamp.”

  “Take me home and put me in the bathtub.”

  “Right this second,” he said. “Come here, and I’ll give you a leg up.”

  He stood on the stone block she’d been sleeping on when he found her. Carefully she stepped up onto it, wincing as her sprained ankle screamed at the merest suggestion of weight. She was going to be spending the next week in bed. If everything went the way she wanted it to, Levi would be spending it in bed with her.

  “Alley-oop,” he said, what he always said when he helped her mount a horse. It hurt and it was hard, but he got her securely into her saddle. She settled in, adjusted her seat and reached for the reins.

  “No, ma’am. You sit. I’m leading,” Levi said. Tamara grabbed hold of the saddle pommel. “Better. Ready to go home?”

  “More than ready.”

  Levi clicked his tongue and Rex raised his head. As Levi led the horse, Tamara glanced down and saw the outline of a word carved deep into the stone she’d been lying on. One word—Louisa. Dirt and moss obscured the rest, but Tamara knew she’d found Louisa St. Croix’s tombstone. And this place was her tomb. And there, the line of black bricks, burned to cinders, was the foundation of St. Croix’s house.

  “Levi?”

  “What is it, Rotten?”

  Tamara started to tell him what she’d seen, what she’d found. But when she looked up, for a split second she saw a girl, a pretty girl with black lace eyelashes peeking at her from behind a tree. She smiled like she’d played a trick on someone and gotten away with it. Tamara smiled back, the same smile for the same reason.

  “Thanks for coming to find me, Levi.”

  “What else is a stupid lovesick husband for?”

  “I knew you loved me.”

  “Somebody has to, Rotten. Might as well be me.”

  25

  Paris

  Somewhere between the witching hour and dawn, Paris unfurled her long legs from where she’d tucked them under her on the sofa, stood up and took a bottle of Four Roses off the bar. McQueen put his hand over the top of his shot glass when she brought the bottle to it.

  “I don’t need any more,” he said.

  “For what I’m about to tell you next you do.” Paris looked down at him and he looked up at her, and if this had been a game of tug-of-war, she’d have all the rope in her hands and he’d have nothing but rope burn.

  “But they were so happy,” he said. Paris looked at him with sympathy. He knew that look. It was the look he’d given his daughter the day she discovered there was no Santa Claus.