The Bourbon Thief, Page 35

  “Not everything,” she admitted.

  “Then what?”

  “Ask me who my husband was and I’ll tell you.”

  “Who was your husband?”

  Paris leaned forward, put a gloved hand on his chest. She kissed his cheek and he inhaled, wanting to capture her scent forever in his nose. Wildflowers plucked from a field. Not bred for beauty, but beautiful, anyway. Plucked from the earth, wild even in a vase.

  “Thank you for a lovely night, Mr. McQueen.” Then she opened the front door.

  “You said you’d tell me who your husband was.”

  Paris skipped down the stairs, graceful as a gazelle even in those high heels.

  “I said I’d tell you,” she called back. “I didn’t say I’d tell you now.”

  Then she was gone.

  36

  Paris got into her car and it was with some measure of relief that she watched the gates of Lockwood yawn open to allow her to leave. Dawn had come and she put on her sunglasses. She wanted to sleep and she would sleep as soon as she got home. She almost wished she’d slept at Cooper’s. He wasn’t a bad man, and if he’d heard a word she’d said tonight, maybe he could even be a good man someday. But the world was changing and the Cooper McQueens of the world soon would be nothing but relics, like suits of armor and iron maidens. She did like him, though, and he was handsome. And she’d been alone for too long. Maybe she would see him again. Then she would have to tell him another story.

  Good thing she had one.

  Paris would tell Cooper McQueen her story, the one that began when she was sixteen and received a letter in the mail. A black girl who went to Franklin County High School in Frankfort, Kentucky, and lived in a yellow shotgun house one hundred feet from the Kentucky River didn’t get letters on fancy stationary. That was where she’d start the story, with the letter.

  Dear Paris,

  I hope this letter finds you well. The information I’m about to tell you might come as something of a surprise, but it seems we are related...

  Paris had read the letter three times before she could absorb the news. A woman in South Carolina who owned a horse farm that bred and raised Hanoverians and Tennessee Walkers was telling her, Paris Christie, daughter of a single mother with two other children by another man, that she was related to the sort of woman who bred horses and owned islands? Hell, Paris wouldn’t have believed she was related to the sort of woman who bred dachshunds.

  In the letter the writer said she’d had her ancestry investigated (who did that?) as she’d been looking for the descendants of a woman who’d been enslaved on an ancestor’s hemp farm (white ladies sure had a lot of free time it seemed). It turned out that Paris herself was the last living female descendant in the long line from then until now. Paris didn’t know her father very well, but he sometimes sent cards, sometimes a little money. His mother was dead; she knew that because she’d asked her mother about her grandparents on her father’s side and she hadn’t gotten the answer she wanted.

  The letter had been signed “Tamara Shelby.”

  When her mother married her longtime boyfriend, a man Paris had never gotten along with, Paris had made plans to leave home as soon as possible. The letter had come to her the day after she’d inquired at school about taking her GED so she could graduate early and get on with her life. Paris wrote back to the woman, Mrs. Tamara Shelby, and had asked for more information. Another letter followed containing the name Veritas and the name Jacob Maddox and the words Red Thread. Paris went straight to the public library, which was also a stone’s throw from the river, which was not an exaggeration at all. She really could throw stones into the river from the library parking lot. She could have jumped in it and swam had she wanted to. Instead, she went inside and got books and newspapers and discovered the letter writer wasn’t crazy. Red Thread had been a real company in town off what was now Fair Oaks Lane. A bourbon distillery known far and wide for its fine bourbon and the red ribbons on the necks of the pricey bottles, the fancy stuff. The man who started the company had once owned Paris’s grandmother’s grandmother. Apparently to Tamara Shelby, who had been born Tamara Maddox, that made Paris her relative.

  Well, if she insisted.

  When the invitation to come and visit was offered, Paris accepted without asking her mother’s permission first. Her mother was a good woman and Paris was a good girl, but they were good in different ways and living under the same roof wore them both out. She let Paris go, and for the first time in her entire life, Paris left Kentucky.

  It was love at first sight when Paris laid eyes on Tamara Maddox Shelby that June day when the car pulled up to the front of the house, a gleaming white farmhouse, newly constructed from the looks of it. Tamara Shelby stood on the porch, a woman in her midthirties at the height of her beauty. It was love at second sight when Paris saw Tamara’s striking husband, whom she at first thought was Italian with his tanned olive skin and thick black wavy hair with enough gray to give him a distinguished air. But when he spoke, it was in English with a Kentucky accent so familiar he could have been her own cousin. Tamara, it turned out, was thirty-three, and Levi, her husband, forty-five. Paris had been a baby the year she and Levi married. Hard to believe a woman of only thirty-three had already been married for sixteen years.

  As rich as they were, Paris expected them to be pretentious. Wine snobs. Horse snobs. Money snobs. But they weren’t. They were both from Kentucky and they were kind to her, down-to-earth. She was treated like family by Levi and Tamara, doted upon. She was the child they never had. They loved her. Paris loved them.

  At the end of the summer, Paris refused to go home. Tamara and Levi told her she could stay with them, and her mother’s new husband wasn’t too sad to see her go. They taught her everything they knew about horses, about the island, about the park they were turning it into. She learned to ride. She learned the business of running a farm. She learned how to make herself indispensable to these two people she worshipped almost as gods. They had plucked her from her old life living in a decaying two-bedroom house with a mother and stepfather she couldn’t stand to be around a minute more and brought her to paradise. They valued her, Tamara and Levi did. They loved her. And when Tamara learned she was dying of the same disease that had killed her mother, she brought Paris to her bed, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and told her the true story of Red Thread, who she was and who Levi was. The story Paris had told Cooper tonight.

  Paris hadn’t taken it nearly as well as Cooper had. She’d run away from home, run back to Kentucky, driving all night in the truck Levi and Tamara had given her, Levi’s old truck he’d paid a fortune to keep running. She made it halfway to Frankfort before turning around and driving back to the island. Levi was waiting for her when she pulled into the drive.

  “I’ve made that drive, too, kid,” he’d told her. “And I came back.”

  “I don’t know if I can carry it,” she’d said.

  “You’ll carry it here or you’ll carry it away, but you have to carry it. At least if you stay, we can help you carry it. I can help you,” he’d said, remembering that the plural would soon become that terrible singular.

  After Tamara was gone, gone to wherever gods go after they die, they buried her in a clearing on the island, Levi and Paris and Bowen Berry and a dozen horses standing around her grave. Paris couldn’t leave after that. Her heart was in that island and to leave that farm was to leave herself behind. She stayed and she worked. And she learned.

  She went to school down in South Carolina. Went to college, went to graduate school and eventually got her PhD in chemistry. Levi didn’t say a word about it, although she knew he knew what she was planning to do. He had plans of his own, too. When Paris was thirty-four years old, he gave her the shock of her life by asking her to marry him. She’d been horrified at first—this man who’d been a second father to her proposing marriage. But he promised it wasn’t like that. He wanted to ensure that all he had would be hers when he died and that no ot
her Maddox—and she knew by that he meant none of the white members of the Maddox clan—could take it from her.

  So Paris had married Levi because she knew that was what Tamara would have wanted her to do.

  Out of respect for her husband, who had been her husband in name only, she waited until he was gone before she put her plan into action. She bought a house in Frankfort, Kentucky, a historic Georgian home on Wapping Street that had once been home to a general in the Union Army. Paris moved her now divorced mother in with her and found all their old fights mysteriously resolved. Their only disagreement these days was over Paris’s decision not to have children. She was still young enough, although time was running out. Better do it, her mother said. Better hurry. For a long time Paris had ignored that advice. It gave her a grim sort of satisfaction to kill off the Maddox line simply by not having children. But it wasn’t only the Maddox line that would die with her, it was Veritas’s, too, and truth was, she wouldn’t mind being a mother. She might even like it. So before she’d gone into The Rickhouse last night to take her chances with Cooper McQueen, she’d decided to take her chances with God and fate, too. Maybe in nine months Cooper would find out last night had been even more interesting than he’d thought it was. Fate was a train that didn’t stop until it reached its final destination. Paris knew this ride was only starting.

  Now, that was a story.

  Paris drove into town but didn’t go straight home yet. One more thing to do before she was done and she wanted to get it over with because Tamara was out there somewhere watching.

  Inside the iron gates of the Frankfort Cemetery she parked her car and stepped out onto the soft lawn. A storm must have hit Frankfort last night, as the ground was sodden and spongy and the heels of her shoes stuck in the grass. She nearly lost one trying to pull herself free. From then on she kept to the paved walkway until she found the row she sought.

  Famous men were buried in this cemetery. Men like Daniel Boone and Judge John Milton Elliott, who’d been murdered by a fellow judge, assassinated for the crime of ruling against the man’s sister in a dispute over land. The murder had made national news and the New York Times had said of it that “such a crime could scarcely have taken place in any region calling itself civilized...except Kentucky.”

  Kentucky was a border state, after all. On the border between North and South, on the border still between old-world and new, between civilization and the sort of place where the names Hatfield or McCoy still meant something.

  A few feet off the main path lay a series of mossy grave markers. Paris stepped carefully onto the lawn and walked past the tomb of Eric Maddox, who died in Vietnam, Nash Maddox, who died by his own hand, George Maddox, who died at the hand of his daughter. She walked down the line, descending decades into the past with each step.

  1978.

  1968.

  1965.

  1927.

  1912.

  Before Paris hit the turn of the century, she paused. This was it.

  The gravestone was dark granite, two inches thick and about two feet tall. The top of it was a pointed arch and beneath the arch were angel wings carved into the stone.

  Decades of wind and rain and neglect had worn the stone down so that the words were hard to read. But Paris could make out most of it.

  Here lies the body of Jacob Jude Maddox and his loving wife, Henrietta Mary Maddox. In heaven they shall be reunited with their children...

  After that Paris couldn’t make out the words or the names.

  Henrietta had died first, but Jacob Maddox had followed soon after. Her sire. Her ancestor. Her grandmother’s grandmother’s rapist.

  She tried to feel something for him. Hate? Bitterness? Anger? Begrudging gratitude he’d been horrible enough to do the deed that not only had brought about her existence but had started the company that had eventually made Paris a very wealthy woman?

  She had all Jacob and Henrietta’s money, Paris did. The Maddox money she’d inherited from Levi, who’d inherited it from Tamara, who’d inherited it from her father, George, who’d inherited it from his father and his father. It was hers, all hers. Jacob was dead and she was alive. Alive and rich. The girl whom he’d raped had given birth to a girl who’d given birth to a girl who’d eventually brought about the existence of Paris Shelby, who was standing on Jacob’s grave in five-thousand-dollar Manolo Blahnik heels and carrying a sixty-thousand-dollar handbag, which to her was nothing more than a costume she’d put on to seduce Cooper McQueen. It had worked, for in that overpriced handbag was a bottle of bourbon worth a million dollars.

  Two bottles were in her handbag actually. The Red Thread and another bottle of bourbon worth far more than money to Paris.

  Paris took out the first bottle, the Red Thread, and unscrewed the ancient rusted cap. She took a whiff. Its scent had faded long ago. It was nothing but dirty water now. Paris didn’t drink a drop of it.

  Instead, she flipped the bottle over and poured the contents onto the graves of Jacob and Henrietta Maddox, who were, to the best of Paris’s knowledge, burning in hell at that very moment.

  “A little fuel for your fire,” she said, and when the bottle was empty, she dropped it on the ground. With one well-placed kick of her toe, she shattered the bottle against the tombstone. Then she took the second bottle from her handbag and set it on the grave, twisting it into the ground like a knife into a chest.

  The label of this bottle read “Veritas Single Malt Bourbon,” the first fruits of Paris’s distillery. Veritas was one label, the high-end fancy stuff she’d worked her ass off perfecting. The other brand currently aging at Paris’s distillery—which had once been Red Thread Bourbon Distillery—was called Truth Serum in honor of old Bowen Berry. Bowen still worked the cooperage on Bride Island and had taught the trade to his nephew, who was learning now to make the bourbon barrels that his uncle had stopped making thirty-five years ago.

  “The barons are dead,” she said. “Long live the baroness.”

  If and when she told this story to Cooper McQueen someday, she would tell him that she laughed when she stood on their graves. A better story than the truth, that she didn’t laugh. Instead, she cried. Only a little and only for Tamara and Levi and Veritas and herself, too. She cried for herself because she’d been carrying this burden a long time and it hurt to let it down even more than it hurt carrying it.

  As Paris walked away, she tied the red ribbon from the Red Thread bottle around her finger.

  It was done. It was finished.

  Love what they destroyed.

  Destroy what they loved.

  And with that, Tamara’s vengeance was complete.

  But Paris’s was only beginning.

  And it began with a million-dollar bottle of bourbon seeping into the ground. Paris shook her head, finally laughing like she wanted to. Hard to believe she’d conned that bottle out of Cooper McQueen with nothing more than a few fucks and a dirty story. Paris owned him last night and perhaps she owned him still.

  Like Tamara always said, you can’t sell people.

  Oh, but you can buy them.

  * * * * *

  HISTORICAL NOTES AND

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This story is a work of fiction in its entirety. While the Kentucky River did flood on December 10, 1978, and crested at historic highs of forty-eight and a half feet, no bourbon barons were found dead in its dirty waters the next day. The destruction of Red Thread detailed in the book was inspired by the unsolved fire at Heaven Hill’s distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, on November 7, 1996, which—to the best of this author’s knowledge—had nothing to do with an inheritance dispute or revenge. George Maddox’s fathering a secret child by a black employee was inspired by the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who fathered a daughter by a teenage black maid. This author wishes to honor the memory of the many Essie Mae Washington-Williamses in this world.

  Special thanks to Kentucky attorney and writer Lucie Witt for her help with the legal aspects of the
book—inheritance and marriage law both—and her special insights into the social and legal and personal challenges faced by Americans in interracial marriages. Thank you also to early readers Alyssa Linn Palmer, Karen Stivali and Andrew Shaffer. Very special thanks to Tqwana “The Q is Silent” Brown for her thoughtful critique and invaluable insights, as well.

  Thank you to all my readers of all my books. As always, my deepest gratitude to my editor, Susan Swinwood, and agent, Sara Megibow, without whom I would have no writing career at all, much less one that allows me the freedom to write books such as this one.