The Bourbon Thief(33)

“She’s the one who fired you, right?”

He nodded. “Called me every name in the book, threatened to have me arrested, threatened to have me cut up in tiny pieces and scattered in every ditch from here to Ohio. And all that two days after George Maddox died. You’d think she’d have better things to worry about.”

“Maybe she knows something you don’t know. Maybe she knows George Maddox did want to leave you something in the will.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Andre shrugged, tapped his now empty glass on the table again.

“Maybe you should hear this girl out.”

“Tamara can’t do anything for me. She doesn’t even get the company herself until she’s twenty-one. Her mother’s in charge of it all till then.”

“And you say she doesn’t like her mother?”

“Sounds like Tamara hates her mother as much as I do.”

“Go talk to her, then. Be smart about it. But hear what she has to say. She might know something worth knowing.”

“I don’t want their money.”

“The hell you don’t. You want to keep living in a stable and coming here for your supper all your life?”

That was the last thing Levi wanted. And the first thing Levi wanted was his own farm, his own horses, his own stables. “You think I should go after his money? Really?”

“All I’m saying is if you’re gonna have a cracker for a daddy, might as well be a Ritz cracker, right?”

Levi laughed. “Right.”

Andre stood up and carried his glass over to the sink.

“After the Civil War, they made us a lot of promises. A lot of promises they didn’t keep. A lot of promises they should have kept.”

“Forty acres and a mule,” Levi said. He’d heard all this before. He’d much rather have a horse than a mule.

“I got my forty acres,” Andre said, looking out the back window at his farm. “You go get yours.”





11

At dusk, Levi drove back to Happy Trails and parked outside the stables. He felt like shit for leaving the horses untended. Wearing a saddle for two hours wouldn’t do them any harm, but they wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

Inside the barn Levi found something he hadn’t expected to find. Both Ashley and Scarlett were back in their stalls, their saddles off and polished to a mirror shine and their coats brushed and their manes trimmed. The bedding looked fresh and neat. Scarlett, Ashley, Rhett, Plato, Aristotle, Queenie and Zeppelin—all seven horses had clean stalls and oats in their trays. Nothing but contented horses wherever Levi looked. Paul, the owner, never gave the horses oats in the evening. Must have been Tamara. Well, goddamn. She really did miss her horses, didn’t she?

On the ladder leading up to the loft Levi found a piece of paper nailed into the wood.

He ripped it off the nail and read.

Levi,

I’m sorry I upset you. When you are ready to talk, come to the Red Thread warehouse. I have a key. I’ll be there every night at ten until ten thirty waiting for you. It’s safe there, trust me. Momma never goes near the warehouse. She can’t stand the smell of the angels.

Tamara

The smell of the angels? He’d been right. Tamara was crazy. Had to be, didn’t she? If she really thought Levi had a claim on the Maddox money, there’d be no way to prove it except with that letter that showed she had no claim on it.

Trust me, Tamara wrote. There wasn’t a Maddox on earth Levi trusted as far as he could throw them. And that included himself when it came to Tamara.

Levi didn’t go that night. He refused to cave that easy. He’d cave, yes, but when he did, he’d cave hard.

*

Three days later he made the drive back to Frankfort. Although it was the city closest to Happy Trails, Levi usually drove the extra fifteen minutes and back to Louisville when he needed something. Last thing he’d wanted was to run into Tamara or her mother in town. And here he was driving there for the sole purpose of talking it out with Tamara. If he’d had worse ideas in his thirty years, he couldn’t remember what they were.

Red Thread wasn’t one building; it was several. They covered a good parcel of land from the road to the river. One forked road led to both the distillery and Arden, which was hidden behind a thicket of woods. Take the left fork to the private Maddox property. Take the right fork to Red Thread. Levi turned right, which he’d never done before. He’d had nothing to do with the distillery at all when he worked for George Maddox, but the warehouse wasn’t hard to find. It was the biggest building on the Red Thread property, an ancient and hulking seven-story wood box with narrow slits for windows and an arched wooden door painted green.

Tensing, wary of guards and guard dogs, Levi eased the green door open. According to his watch, it was 10:10 p.m., and if Tamara kept her promise, she’d be here. He looked around and saw barrel after barrel sitting on slanted wooden ricks. Endless barrels receding deep into the cool cave-like recesses. And the smell...pungent, like baking bread, but cold.

“Hey, Levi,” she said, and Levi followed the sound of her voice upward. She sat on a wooden staircase in a slant of a security light reading a big leather-bound book. “I’m glad you came.”

She had on gray sweatpants, a red-and-white baseball T-shirt and flip-flops. Pajamas. Funny, he’d expected a girl like her to sleep in silk nighties. Or maybe that had been wishful thinking.