The Bourbon Thief(89)

Please, Levi, let my daughter go before it’s too late.

The note was signed “Virginia Maddox.”

And it was already too late.





30

Tamara slipped a hand under her dress and pressed it between her legs into the wetness, cupping herself as if trying to staunch a wound. She pulled her hand away and saw Levi’s semen on her fingers. Her husband’s.

Her brother’s.

She rubbed it off on her dress.

“Tell me it’s a lie,” Levi said, his head buried in his hands.

“I...” Tamara fell back against the door frame. “I don’t know.”

“It has to be a lie. It has to be a lie.”

“I...”

“Did you know?” Levi grabbed her by her upper arms and stared into her eyes. “Did you know this?”

“No. I swear to God I didn’t know.”

Judge Headley hadn’t even taken his jacket off the night of the party where he and her mother had supposedly conceived her.

I’m tired of pretending that Tamara is my daughter. Even Virginia is tired of pretending. Did you know she told me that Tamara was Daniel Headley’s daughter, conceived at Eric’s going-away party? I laughed when she told me. Virginia is more a Maddox than I am. You’ve taught her well.

Daddy laughed.

Daddy laughed at her mother when she told him Daniel Headley was Tamara’s father.

Daddy laughed because it wasn’t true, not because it was.

“Your mother tried to send us a letter. You tore it up...” Levi’s head fell back and for a horrifying second his eyes were nothing but the whites.

“I didn’t know what it said, I swear. I didn’t know.”

“You said she beat you because I kissed you. She didn’t tell you why she hated me so much?”

“She didn’t beat me,” Tamara said. “That’s not what happened. She—”

“Oh, God.” The cry sounded like someone had ripped the words from his chest. He doubled over again, wheezing. Tamara couldn’t see. She was underwater and drowning. There was no surfacing for her.

Bone of her bone.

Flesh of her flesh.

Blood of her blood.

Tamara reached for Levi and he held up his hands in front of his face.

“Don’t,” he said, not looking at her. She had become Medusa and he would turn to stone with a single glance at her. She had become Sodom and with one look back he would turn to a pillar of salt.

She lowered her hand and pressed it against her stomach, the stomach he’d kissed with love and reverence only minutes ago, but now it was a poisoned cup.

It was like someone had lowered a bell jar over her body, muting all sounds and setting her ears to ringing. Outside the clear wall of glass she could hear the faintest murmuring, and she knew if the glass lifted, it would sound like screams. She could see clearly through the glass and she watched Levi from inside it, her hands raised as if pressed to the smoother curved surface inside. She watched Levi grasp at the wall, needing it to help him stand. She watched him push past her. She called his name, but he couldn’t hear her through the bell any more than she could hear him. His shuffling steps turned into a run.

The glass suddenly shattered and Tamara could hear again, although the ringing in her ears remained. She heard sounds of metal and engines. Leaving sounds. He was leaving her. She let him go.

Tamara emerged from the stables into the evening sunlight, blinking and wincing. The light hurt and she shrank from it. Stumbling, she made it to tree cover and she wandered in the little woods where she’d played and ridden her horse as a child. There was the tree she had climbed when she’d fallen off her horse and lacked the height to mount him again. There was the stone she’d lain on half sleeping, half daydreaming the summer after her father’s death, the summer after she’d had her first period and pondered her future. On that rock she’d dreamed her dreams of love and sex and marriage and prayed God would give her a husband who could take away the pain of her losing her father by trading it for pleasure.

“I killed my own father,” Tamara whispered to the rock. Her hands pressed against its rough gritty surface. She waited for the guilt or shame to come to her, but none showed its face. God killed His own Son. Why should He judge her for killing her father? God’s Son was sinless. Her father was not. Neither was she.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered again, trying to explain herself to whatever being would bend an ear to her confession. “I didn’t know who he was. Levi didn’t know...”

They had sinned in their ignorance. But their ignorance had been willful. Her mother had tried to warn her and Tamara had not listened. She’d torn up the letter and scattered it in the ocean. She hadn’t been pregnant then. It hadn’t been too late then.

Tamara heard a sound she knew well and followed it. The sound of water, the river, trickling and skipping over limestone and tree roots. She followed the path down to the dock, where she’d sat with her father and dangled a fishing pole into the brown waters. Her father? Which father? Both Daddy and Granddaddy had been there. At the dock’s splintered edge, Tamara lay down onto her side to look at the water and take her comfort from it. Rise, she prayed. Rise and carry me under and carry me away. She couldn’t do it herself, not with a child inside her. But if the river wanted her, and if the river was where she belonged, it would come for her again as it had come for her before. For surely God had spared her that night to destroy her this day. It had not been her time then. But her time had come.