The Bourbon Thief(102)

“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.”

“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.