Читать книгу The Bourbon Thief - Tiffany Reisz, Tiffany Reisz - Страница 8

3

Veritas

1978

Tamara Maddox wanted to ride her horse the morning of her sixteenth birthday.

And whatever Tamara Maddox wanted to do, Tamara Maddox did.

In all fairness to the girl, spoiled as she was and she knew it, anyone would have wanted to get out of that house and any excuse would do. They’d been fighting again, Granddaddy and Momma. If only they yelled, that would have been one thing, something Tamara could roll her eyes at, laugh at, ignore by turning the volume up on her radio. But no, they whispered their fights behind closed doors, hissing at each other like snakes. Neither of them had the courtesy to tell her what they were fighting about, so Tamara assumed they were fighting about her.

Fine. If they wanted to fight on her birthday, she’d leave them to it. She had better things to do. And the urge to go riding only grew when she saw a blue Ford pickup truck with a white cab wheezing its way down the drive to the stables. What was Levi doing here on a Sunday? She hoped it was because he knew it was her birthday, but even Tamara Maddox wasn’t spoiled enough to think that was the case. Still, one more reason to go riding when one reason—she wanted to—was more than enough for her.

Tamara changed out of her pajamas and into her riding clothes—tan jodhpurs, black boots, a white blouse and a heavy coat—braided her long red hair and raced out to the barn. It was cold today—only forty-five by the thermometer in the barn—but she’d ridden in worse weather. Plus, the rain had stopped finally, and she’d been going stir-crazy inside the house. All she needed was an hour outside in the air with Kermit, her pale black Hanoverian pony, and everything would be all right again.

And if it wasn’t, at least she’d see Levi today, and if that didn’t make a girl feel better, nothing on God’s wet green earth would.

Levi barely acknowledged her when she ran into the barn. Nothing new there. She had to work for his attention and she worked for it very hard. In the summer she’d often catch him shirtless as he mucked out stalls and threw hay bales around. In winter she had to content herself with the memories of his lean strong body that she knew was hidden under his brown coat with the leather collar and a chocolate-colored cowboy hat. Mud crusted his boots. He had dirt on his cheek. And if he got any more handsome, she would die before she hit seventeen. She would simply die of it.

Tamara walked up to him as he was carrying a bale of straw and knocked on his shoulder like she was knocking on a door.

“Nobody’s home,” Levi called out before she could say a word.

“I would like to ride my horse right now, please and thank you.”

“Nope.”

“Nope? What do you mean nope?”

“I mean, nope, no, no way. You can’t ride your horse right now, please and thank you.” Levi walked away from her, straw bale in hand, as if that were the end of it.

Tamara chased after him and determinedly knocked on his shoulder again. He dropped the bale.

“Why can’t I ride today?”

“It’s been raining for days. It’s too wet.”

“It’s not raining now.” She tapped on the glass of the window. “Look—it’s dry. Dry, dry, dry.”

“What part of no do you not understand, Rotten? The N or the O?”

“You shouldn’t call me Rotten,” she said, hands on her hips in the hopes he’d notice she had them. “It’s not nice.”

“I’m not nice. And I wouldn’t call you Rotten if you weren’t so damn spoiled rotten, so whose fault is it really? And again—the answer is no—N and O, no. Even you can spell that.”

He might have been right about her being spoiled rotten, not that Tamara wanted to admit that. Most days he was the only person in the county—other than her mother—who had it in him to say no to her.

“Oh, I can spell. I can spell frontward and backward, and no spelled backward is on, as in I’m on the back of my horse and on the trail for a ride.”

“And on my last nerve,” Levi said. He took his hat off and brushed his sleeve over his forehead. She wondered sometimes if he did this sort of stuff just to torment her because he knew she had a crush on him—not that she did much to hide it. He was a first-class gold-medal tormentor, that Levi. He was twenty-eight and she was only sixteen as of midnight last night, which meant there was no way in hell Momma or Granddaddy would let her date him even if he was more handsome than the men on TV. He had curly black hair and a crinkle-eyed devilish smile he aimed at her often enough to get her hopes and her temperature up. He had a good tan, too, all the time, even in winter, making her wonder how he kept his tan so good even in February...and whether all of him was that tan. These were important questions to one Miss Tamara Belle Maddox.

And when he called her Rotten, it made her want to jump on top of him every time he did it.

“You know, today’s my birthday,” she said. “You have to be nice to me on my birthday.”

“I don’t have to do anything but die and pay taxes. Unless you’re the grim reaper or the IRS, you don’t get any of my attention today. Today is my day off. I’m only here because this is the only time the farrier could come and see to Danny Boy’s shoes.”

She stared at him, eye-to-eye. Or as close to eye-to-eye as she could get. She’d come in at five foot six this year and he had to be at least half a foot taller than her. Still, she did her level best to stare him down.

“Levi.”

“Yes, Rotten?”

“I am the grim reaper. Now let me go riding or I’m going to tell Momma I caught you engaged in unnatural acts with Miss Piggy.”

“You mean your momma’s horse or the pig on The Muppets?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters a helluva lot to me if I’m engaging in unnatural acts with one of them. I need to know who I’m sending flowers to after.”

“You are the meanest man ever born,” she said, shaking her head. “Where’s the pitchfork?”

“You finally going to clean out Kermit’s stall without me having to tell you twenty thousand times?”

“No. I’m going to stab you with it so many times we can use you to drain noodles.”

“It’s on the wall where it always is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to do anything that involves not talking to you anymore.”

Levi stepped away, but she stepped in front of him.

“Levi...” she said, her voice cracking in her desperation. “Please let me go riding today. It’s my birthday and I’ll clean the stalls and it’s my birthday and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do and it’s my birthday and—”

He sighed—heavily—and lowered his chin to his chest.

“What crime did I commit in a past life that brought me to this point in my current incarnation?” he said with a heavy sigh.

“You’re talking weird again,” she said.

“Karma,” he said. “I’m talking about karma. Which you would know nothing about as you are obviously so young and so dumb and so naive that the only way to explain it is that this is your very first incarnation. You are a baby soul in this universe. Only cause for your soul to be so wet behind the ears.”

“You know you love me,” she said. “You know I’m your favorite.”

“I don’t even like you, Rotten. Not one bit.”

“Oh, you like me. You like me many bits.”

“Love you or hate you, you can’t go riding. I have spoken.”

“You have to let me go. You work for us. You have to do what I say.”

He stared her down and that stare felt like a rolling pin or worse—a steamroller. She gave him a steamroller back.

“You don’t sign my paychecks, Rotten. I work for your granddaddy, not you.”

“I wish you worked for me. I’d pay you to kiss me and fire you if you didn’t.”

“I realize I’m the last man who needs to be stereotyping anyone, but apparently everything I ever heard about redheads is true.”

“Levi.”

“What?”

“They’re fighting again.”

Levi gave her a tight-lipped look like he wanted to be nice to her but it went against his grain.

“What is it this time?” Levi asked.

“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. But I know Momma wants to move out and Granddaddy doesn’t want us to.”

“Didn’t y’all use to live in your own house?”

She nodded. “We did until Daddy died.”

“You want to move out?”

“I’d rather live in here in the stable than in any house when they’re fighting like this.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” she said, then she grinned at him. “Plus, you’re out here. I’d trade Granddaddy and Momma both for you.”

“Good God, go. Go away. Shoo. Ride your damn horse and leave me alone. But if Kermit gets a leg stuck in a mudhole and throws you and breaks your neck, don’t come crawling to me to fix it. Your head’ll have to hang there on your shoulders all lopsided.”

“Merci, mon capitan.” She grabbed him by the arms, kissed both his cheeks and saluted him like she was a junior officer and he her French captain.

“You are out of your damn mind,” he muttered as she raced to Kermit’s stall.

“Can’t hear you,” she sang out. “I’m riding in the wind with joy at my feet and freedom in my hair.”

Levi unlocked the door where he kept their saddles. They were too expensive, she knew, too tempting for thieves. Also, Levi knew if he didn’t lock them up, she’d steal them to go riding whenever she wanted, which wasn’t what she wanted, though she would protest otherwise if asked. Half the fun of going riding was bugging Levi until he let her go.

Once she’d saddled Kermit, she led him out to the riding trail that began at the end of the paddock. She hadn’t been too keen on the idea of moving in with her granddaddy after her father died. She’d loved their old house, a rambling brick Victorian in Old Louisville, but there wasn’t much horseback riding in the city. No horses meant no stables. No stables meant no grooms. No grooms meant no Levi. Oh, yes, she’d gotten used to living out here in the Maddox estate, Arden, with her granddaddy pretty quick after laying eyes on her grandfather’s groom. But more and more her mother and grandfather had been fighting their ugly whispering fights, and Tamara hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she’d rather live in the stables than the big house.

Once out in the cold air, Tamara decided maybe a shorter ride was a better ride. Muddy trails meant a slow pace and a nervous pony. Her ears burned with the cold and her nose dripped. She swiped at it with her sleeve and was glad Levi wasn’t around to see that unladylike maneuver. She and Kermit picked their way down the main path that led through a couple hundred acres of trees. Fall had stripped the leaves off the trees, but there was still something beautiful about the barren forest. Not barren at all despite appearances. Not barren, but only sleeping. She sensed the sap under the bark, and the wood drinking up all the water in the ground from the days and days of December rain they’d had. Even bare the trees seemed brutally alive to her. They were bursting to wake up and release the green in them, counting the seconds until spring when they could stretch and bloom and eat warm wet air like candy.

Tamara found her favorite rock, a big chuck of limestone she liked to lie on in better weather, and used it to dismount. After tying Kermit to a tree trunk, she squished her way through ankle-deep mud and muck to the edge of the river. It was high today, higher than she remembered ever seeing it, and darker, too. Faster. It smelled different, a thick, pungent odor like dead fish and dirty metal. It made her nose wrinkle. As the water tripped over the rocks, it turned white like ocean waves. She’d inherited ocean fever from her father, not that he’d ever admitted that was where he went on his business trips. He’d never had to tell her, though. She’d found the sand in his shoes. When she told him to take her with him next time, he’d winked at her like that had been his plan all along.

Instead, he’d shot himself in the head somewhere in South Carolina three years ago while on one of those business trips, and she still didn’t know which beach that sand had come from.

“Come back, Daddy,” she said to the river. This river met up with the Ohio, which met up with the Mississippi, which met up with the ocean. And water could turn to vapor and rise up into the sky. There was nowhere water couldn’t go. If she gave the water her message, maybe it could find her father. “I miss you. You were supposed to take me to the beach, remember? You were supposed to take me with you.”

She sent the same message once a week at least. So far no answer, but today maybe...maybe the river heard her. Maybe today the river would find Daddy.

Tamara returned to Kermit, rubbed his chilled flanks, kissed his velvet nose before mounting up to finish her ride. Without Kermit and Levi, she might very well go haywire in her grandfather’s house. Girls at school envied her the brick palace she lived in, but they didn’t know about the fights. They didn’t know about Momma’s rules. They didn’t know about Daddy and the cloud his death had lowered around Arden House, shrouding it so that screams became whispers and whispers became silence. Her mother and grandfather were keeping secrets from her, secrets that set them to fighting nearly every day, even on her birthday.

Even on her birthday.

The rain had returned by the time she made it back to the stables, her hands cramped in her gloves and her cheeks chapped raw from the cold wind. She unsaddled Kermit and brushed him down, showering him with all the pets and scratches any horse in the world would want. She left to fetch a fresh bale of straw for bedding and found Levi waiting for her in Kermit’s stall when she returned. He’d turned the heater on in the stables and had taken his coat off. In his long-sleeved flannel shirt and jeans he looked more handsome than he had even an hour earlier. An hour from now he’d look even more handsome than he did right this minute. She wasn’t sure how he accomplished this feat, but she was quite happy to observe it in action.

“Here.” Levi held out a small red box no bigger than a deck of cards.

“What’s this?” she asked, taking the box from him.

“Your birthday present.”

Tamara’s eyes widened.

“How did you know it was my birthday?”

“You said so about ten million times today.”

“You got this for me today? While I was riding?”

“Well...no.”

“Then you already knew it was my birthday. So you must have gotten it earlier. Unless you keep presents for me hidden around here all the time. You do, don’t you?”

“George told me he bought you a Triumph Spitfire for your sweet sixteen. I don’t give a damn it’s your birthday. I just wanted to borrow your car.”

“I’ll trade you the car for a kiss.”

“Forget it. I’m keeping your present.”

He reached for the box and Tamara yanked it away, nearly biting off her fingertips in her urgency to pull her gloves off her hands. They were shaking by the time she got the box lid open. One of the girls at school—Crissy, God help her with a name like that—said girls should always play it cool with guys, not act too eager. Well, Crissy had never been given a birthday present by the most handsome man in the entire world, and Tamara couldn’t play it cool if she were sitting in an igloo.

From a bed of yesterday’s newspaper, Tamara pulled out a little gold horse on a little gold chain.

“You like horses,” he said before she could say anything about it.

“I like you,” she said.

“An hour ago you were threatening to turn me into a spaghetti strainer.”

“I only threaten to turn people into strainers if I like them. Is this a bracelet?” The chain was only a few inches long.

“Necklace,” he said.

“If you put this short chain around my neck, I’ll choke to death.”

“Exactly.”

She glared at him.

“It’s an ankle bracelet, Rotten,” he said. “Unless you have really fat wrists, then it’s a regular old bracelet.”

“I don’t have fat wrists.”

“All I’m saying is if you did happen to have unusually fat wrists, it could be a bracelet.”

“I weigh one hundred pounds, Levi.” She draped the ankle bracelet around her wrist to show how loose it fit on her.

“One hundred pounds of wrist. I’m not saying it’s a normal place to carry extra weight, but it happens. Maybe you could do some wrist exercises or something...”

Tamara kissed him.

It wasn’t a cheek kiss this time. She wasn’t playing junior officer to his mon capitan. She kissed him like she meant it. Because she meant it. God Almighty, did she mean it.

Levi gripped her by the upper arms and pushed her back gently, but still, it was a definite move to put distance between them.

“Sorry,” she said, flushing slightly. “Got a little twitterpated there. You know, because I like horses.”

“You know you can’t go around kissing guys like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like me. You can’t go around kissing guys like me.”

“Why not?”

“You’re sixteen, Tamara.”

“I was fifteen yesterday.”

“That’s the opposite thing of what you should say.”

“What should I say?”

“Maybe that you won’t kiss me on the mouth again. Or anywhere else. I think that would be a good start.”

He crossed his arms over his chest.

“But it’s my birthday.”

“You don’t get to do everything you want to do just because it’s your birthday.” He sounded wildly exasperated with her, and wildly exasperated Levi was her favorite version of Levi. “Try telling a police officer you’re allowed to kill anybody and everybody you want just because it’s your birthday. That duck won’t fly.”

“I didn’t kill anyone. I kissed. Two S’s, not two L’s. Makes all the difference.”

“Rotten, I’m way too old for you. I work for your granddaddy. He’d have my hide if he caught me messing around with you.”

“I want a kiss, Levi, not a marriage proposal. I’ve never been kissed before. Not really. And that didn’t count because you didn’t know it was happening.”

“I think I knew. Parts of me sure did.”

She bounced up and down in her boots.

“Just one? Please? A real kiss?”

“What do you consider a real kiss?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders, shook her head. “I don’t know. Like the way they kiss on The Young and the Restless?”

“Which one am I? The young or the restless?”

“You’re the restless, obviously,” she said. “Because you’re so so so old, and I’m so so so young.”

“Will it shut you up if I kiss you?”

“Can’t talk with a tongue in my mouth, right?”

He took the box from her hand and tossed it on the pile of hay. He took her hand and pulled her flush against his body.

“Finally,” he said, smiling down at her. “Now we have a persuasive argument.”