A sort of fury overcame McQueen. For hours he’d been taunted and teased by this woman. She’d shown up in his bar and had offered him a golden box and had dangled the key in front of him all night long. Even now the key was in the lock. Why wouldn’t she turn it?
But his anger was displaced and he knew it. Paris was in front of him. It was easy to take his anger out on her. He sympathized with Levi’s fury that George Maddox was already dead and buried. McQueen would have enjoyed ripping that heart out, too.
“Levi was her brother,” McQueen finally said.
“He was her husband first, like she said.”
“He was her brother first.”
“If I told you right now my name was Karen or Susan, how would you think of me a month from now? A year?”
“As Paris.”
“She saw him as her husband first. So he was her husband. It’s like goslings imprinting on the first thing they see. She saw her husband. He was her husband. Those threads were tangled long before her birth. We won’t untangle them tonight.”
“My daughter is seventeen,” McQueen said after a long pause.
“Where is she?”
“Her mother’s. Emma and I went on a trip to LA over the summer to visit a college she wanted to see. She took a big stuffed dog with her on the plane to use as a pillow. She’s still a little girl. I’m trying to imagine her getting married. She’d be back home again in a week.”
“Do you love your daughter?”
“What kind of question is that?” he asked. “Of course I love my daughter.”
“I wonder if someone will tell someone else her story someday.”
“I hope it’s a happier story than that one,” McQueen said. A tight knot had formed in his stomach. He’d been drinking all night, but he was terribly sober and wished he wasn’t.
“Oh, but it is a happy story. I know that’s hard to believe. When justice is done, the people rejoice. When mercy has fallen, the angels rejoice.”
“Please... I’m begging you,” McQueen said, leaning forward and holding his hands open in supplication. “Tell me what happened to Tamara. Did she die?”
“We all die. Side effect of being born.”
McQueen let out an exasperated, “Fuck,” and stood up. He walked to the window and pulled the mirror away. He felt imprisoned in this room and the truth stood guard all around him. He stared out at the green lawn, neat as a chessboard. That wasn’t right, was it? If somebody had enough money to turn a wild wood into a chessboard, maybe they had too much money.
“You’re torturing me on purpose,” he said.
“Whoever tortured anyone by accident?”
“Are you trying to make me angry with you?”
“You caught me stealing a bottle of bourbon worth nearly a million dollars at auction and this is what makes you angry? That I won’t tell you more of Tamara’s story?”
“I listened to every word you said tonight. There were so many chances to end it before it started. If Nash hadn’t killed himself... If Virginia had told Tamara the truth instead of leaving it to George Maddox to tell her... If George had acknowledged his son... If Tamara had told her mother what her grandfather did to her instead of keeping it a secret... There were so many times someone could have done something or said something and then...”
“And then what? You think someone could have saved Tamara from Levi? Or saved Levi from Tamara? Or saved them both from George Maddox?” Paris shook her head like she was chiding a small child she’d caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I told you. Fate was what brought them together. Fate was what brought about the end of Red Thread. And fate is just another name for a train that cannot stop until it reaches its final destination.”
McQueen watched one green leaf catch an updraft. It fell up instead of down. When he slept again, later today or tomorrow night, he would dream of Tamara, and in his dream he would see her in a white dress running toward railroad tracks, and a train—red and black and made of unforgiving steel—charging toward her, and if she kept running, she would be hit. And in his dream he would run from nowhere and catch her in his arms at the last second before she ran onto the tracks. She’d giggle and laugh and wriggle like little girls do when you pick them up when they don’t want to be. We were just playing a game, Daddy, she would say, and he would have to chide her without scaring her because he didn’t want her doing it again, but he also didn’t want her to know how close she’d come to being hit. But that’s not a good game. Don’t play that game. You’ll get hurt, baby...
She was a baby, Tamara Maddox. Only gods and little children think they’re the center of the universe. Only gods and little children are right about that.
“There’s no way...” McQueen stopped, his throat inexplicably tight. “There’s no way to go through that and survive it and be okay after. Is there?”
“Why do you say that?” Paris asked, her voice a doctor’s voice now, searching for a diagnosis.
“Because I wouldn’t be able to deal, finding that out about the person I married. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t.”
“But you aren’t Tamara Maddox,” she said. “You aren’t Tamara Shelby.”
“No. I’m not.”
McQueen sat on the coffee table in front of Paris. He reached for her hands and she let him take them in his. He caressed her fingers, her palms, traced the long, curving lifeline down the base of her index finger to her wrist. The ring finger on her left hand retained the slightest indention from a wedding band taken off only recently.
“You loved your husband?”
Paris answered in a whisper. “I did, yes.”
He stroked her pulse point, the lightly throbbing veins.
“Paris...that was what Veritas named her child.”
“She did.”
“And you’re descended from her. That’s who you are, isn’t it? That’s why you say you’re a Maddox?”
“I am a Maddox. Veritas was my grandmother’s grandmother. And that makes Jacob Maddox my grandmother’s grandfather.”
“You drink bourbon.” He grinned at her, clutching her smaller left hand in both of his.
“It’s in my blood. Of course I do. And let’s be honest, it is some good shit, Cooper McQueen.”
McQueen laughed and so did she.
He lifted her wrist to his lips and kissed it.
Over the top of her hand at his mouth, he said to her, “Make me an offer.”
“I’ll tell you what happened to Tamara.”
He raised his eyebrow.
“You drive a hard bargain,” he said.
“Make me an offer,” she said.
“You tell me what happened to Tamara, and you come back to bed with me and stay there until morning.”
“It’s almost morning now.”
“An hour will suffice.”
“I like that you care about Tamara,” Paris said. “It does you credit.”
“I’m trying to buy your body with a bottle of bourbon.”
“I would have thrown it in, anyway. Call it gift wrapping.”
“We have a deal?”
Paris turned her hand in his and they shook on it.
“Deal,” she said.
“Tamara?”
“After.”
“You are torturing me.”
“Consider it payback for history.”
He was white. She was black. And she was right. He had no answer to that but to place his hands on her neck, pull her to him and kiss her mouth. Apples and licorice.
McQueen had said “until morning” and “until morning” he lasted. When it was over and the sun returned, he watched Paris rise from the bed. She zipped her dress up by herself and he wondered if every woman he’d ever assisted with that task could have done it themselves, too? One less reason for men to be in the world if women could zip their dresses up all alone.
“You want your ribbon?” He dangled the scarlet bit of silk from his fingers.
“You can keep it,” she said
.
“I don’t keep trophies from the women I sleep with.”
She reached for the ribbon and he pulled it back.
“You’re worth making an exception for,” he said. “And I get the feeling I won’t be seeing you again. Will I?”
“Would you want to even if you could?”
“Are you going to steal any of my other bourbon bottles?”
“I might. You have an excellent collection.”
“Come back and drink it with me. It will be nice to share them with a connoisseur.”
“I might see you again. Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll let the Fates decide. Until then...” She slipped her feet into her high heels and gave him a lady’s curtsy. She held out her hand to him and he kissed the back of it.
“You have given me a strange and memorable night,” he said.
“You have given me exactly what I came for. And came for. And came for...”
“You can come again anytime.”
He followed her down the stairs to the living room and extended his hand to her, giving her the bottle.
“All yours,” he said. “Virginia Maddox didn’t own the bottle. She couldn’t legally sell it. I couldn’t legally buy it.”
“You’re out a million dollars.”
“A night with you—best million I ever spent.”
“Only a million for a night with me. You got a bargain.” And then, without a hint of reverence for the last known bottle of Red Thread in existence, she plucked it out of his hand and dropped it down into her purse.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “Drink it? Save it? Pass it on to your children someday?”
“None of the above.”
“Then what?” he asked.
“The answer to that question wasn’t part of our deal.”
“No, you’re right. It wasn’t. But Tamara...she was part of the deal.”
Paris nodded. “Yes, she was.”
“So what happened to her?”
“Funny you ask about her and not Levi.”
“You can tell me about him, too, if you want.”
“No, he’s another story.”
“Tamara was just a girl, a girl my daughter’s age.”
“A girl who killed a man, eloped with her brother and brought down a bourbon dynasty.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t an impressive girl.”
Paris grinned. “That she was.” She looked past him and away. What she saw he didn’t know, but he would have given anything to see through her eyes.
“Tamara died in her husband’s arms,” she said.
McQueen’s head dropped back. He swore.
“She died in his arms twenty-three years after the night Red Thread burned.”
McQueen’s head snapped up again.
“What?”
“Tamara didn’t die that night. But she did miscarry. It might have happened, anyway. Women lose pregnancies all the time. But after all she went through...you don’t have to blame the angels for that. You can blame the shock and taking an ax to a hundred barrels of bourbon, inhaling that poisoned air.”
Relief so potent it could have been a hundred and fifty proof hit him in the gut. He hadn’t given a damn about the pregnancy, only the girl.
“But she lived. She survived all that?”
“She did. Barely. She bled a lot and had to go to the hospital. And she had to stay at a different hospital for a long time.”
“A different hospital? She was committed?”
“Rich women don’t go to mental hospitals. Rich women go on vacation.”
“But she wasn’t pregnant anymore. I assume she and Levi got divorced and she remarried eventually?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you said she died in her husband’s arms.”
“She did. In Levi’s arms.”
“Why? There was no reason to.” He covered his mouth with his hand and breathed. “She was free.”
“She didn’t want to be free. What was she going to do? Put a personal ad in the newspaper? Find a nice man at church? She’d killed her father and married her brother and burned her family’s legacy to the ground. How do you go on after that? You sure as hell don’t go on alone. They were like two sailors too drunk to stand up on their own, but if they leaned on each other, they could make it.”
“But what about her mother?”
“Virginia Maddox hadn’t been lying. She had ovarian cancer and was dying of it, which was how you ended up with your bottle and its perfect provenance. Tamara died of it, too. If it comforts you at all, and it should, Tamara had a good life with Levi, and although she died too young, she was happy until the end. As happy as any woman could be who had to carry what she carried.”
“You know that for sure?”
“I do. And now if you don’t mind, we’ll be on our way.” She patted her Birkin bag containing the bottle of Red Thread. The first bottle. The original bottle with Vera’s little red ribbon falling to pieces on the neck. Knowing what he knew about it, McQueen would not be sad to see it go.
“Where to now? Off to steal a rare bottle of wine?”
She smiled tiredly. They had been up all night, after all. He liked her tired. She looked human like this, approachable, vulnerable. He wished she’d stay another night. He wished he had more worth stealing.
“I have a little errand to run. And then I’m going home to sleep.”
She started for the door. McQueen put himself between her and it.
“Ever had Fighting Cock?”
“You talking about the bourbon or some sex position I haven’t tried yet?” Paris asked.
“The bourbon,” he said, laughing. “I keep meaning to try it. Haven’t worked up the courage yet. But you could give me the courage.”
“Ever licked a spark plug and then taken a shot of whiskey?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Same aftertaste,” she said. “In other words, highly recommended.”
“Come back,” he said. “Come back here whenever you want. Tell me more stories. Steal all my bourbon.”
“I’ll think about it.”
McQueen opened the door for her but shut it before she could leave.
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked. “There’s more, right? More to the story?”
“There’s always more to every story.”
“What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
“You,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I already told you that.”
“Not everything. Not even close.”