by Lucy Score
GIN FLING
BOOTLEG SPRINGS BOOK FIVE
LUCY SCORE
CLAIRE KINGSLEY
Copyright © 2019 Lucy Score
All rights reserved
No Part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electric or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the publisher.
The book is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-1-945631-47-4 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-945631-48-1 (paperback)
lucyscore.com
061819
CONTENTS
1. Jonah
2. Shelby
3. Shelby
4. Jonah
5. Jonah
6. Shelby
7. Jonah
8. Shelby
9. Shelby
10. Jonah
11. Shelby
12. Jonah
13. Jonah
14. Jonah
15. Jonah
16. Shelby
17. Jonah
18. Shelby
19. Jonah
20. Shelby
21. Jonah
22. Shelby
23. Jonah
24. Shelby
25. Jonah
26. Shelby
27. Shelby
28. Jonah
29. Shelby
30. Shelby
31. Jonah
32. Jonah
33. All of Bootleg Springs
34. Shelby
35. Jonah
36. Shelby
37. Shelby
38. Jonah
39. Shelby
40. Shelby
41. Shelby
42. Shelby
43. Jonah
44. Shelby
45. Jonah
46. Shelby
47. Jonah
48. Shelby
49. Shelby
50. Shelby
51. Jonah
52. Shelby
53. Shelby
54. Jonah
55. Shelby
56. Shelby
57. Jonah
58. Jonah
59. Shelby
60. Shelby
Want more Bootleg
Author’s Note to the Reader
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Lucy’s Titles
To Claire Kingsley for walking this journey with me. You’re my soul sister and my book bestie and I’m so thankful for your friendship.
1
Jonah
“A ctivate those glutes,” I told the nineteen-year-old star of his college baseball team.
“Dude, if I activate them any harder, they’ll turn to stone,” Eric complained, hefting the bar off the floor.
“Looks like he’s doing just fine from where I’m standing,” Mrs. Morganson observed from her vantage point directly behind him.
It was deadlift day.
Once a week, I turned the weight room at Bootleg Springs High School into an open gym for all ages and abilities. The room was crammed full of equipment and smelled like sweaty, unshowered youth. The short windows just beneath the drop ceiling were stingy with the sunlight they let in.
But we made it work.
It should have been a disaster. I was coaching kids on their summer break from college, middle-aged newbies just starting their fitness journey, a few long-time lifters, and a couple of senior citizens. Some were actually here to work out. Others were in attendance primarily for the eye candy.
But somehow, no matter who showed up, we all had a damn good time.
“Nice job,” I said, slapping Eric on the back when he dropped the weight bar with a resounding clang. The kid was a hell of a lot stronger than his long, lanky frame let on.
“Woowee!” Mrs. Morganson cheered.
Minnie Faye, owner and operator of Minnie’s Meow Meow House, elbowed her friend. “Don’t get us booted out of here like you did the football team’s car wash,” she cautioned.
Both ladies bent to pick up their significantly lighter bars. I winked at them as they made an energetic show of practicing the lift.
“How you doing, D?” Doris to her family and D to her gym friends was glaring at her barbell.
“I wanted a PR today.” Frustrated, she swiped the sweat off her forehead with the hem of her t-shirt. Doris was fifty-six and three years on this side of a heart transplant. She’d tracked me down about a whole day after I decided to bring my personal training business to Bootleg last year.
In a town this size with residents this close, news traveled fast.
She’d told me since someone had to die for her to be here, she didn’t want to let them down. We had our first workout together that day. A walk through the lakefront park.
We started small and slow, but her commitment never wavered. She’d already quit smoking before the transplant. After, she’d taken up walking. Soon I had her jogging and hanging around my pop-up boot camps. Then she’d discovered a deep love of heavy lifting. Somewhere along the way, she’d dragged her husband, Josh, into it. Josh had lost twenty-five pounds and started rowing. Doris added ten pounds of lean muscle and was currently glaring at the weight plates on her bar that stood between her and her new personal record.
“How much you got on there?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Two hundred. Can’t get the dang thing off the ground.” She kicked at the bar with the toe of her sneaker.
“Tell you what. Go grab a quick drink. I’m gonna take some of the weight off, and we’ll check out your form at eighty or ninety percent of your max. Okay?”
She sighed, shrugged. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Not every day is a PR,” I reminded her.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“She went to bed early last night so she’d be rested for lifting,” Josh told me when Doris walked away. “Gonna be pissed if she can’t beat her last.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said, pulling a plate off each side of the bar. I swapped a couple out and reassembled the rig.
“That looks like more than—”
“Zip it,” I warned him as Doris came back. Josh busied himself with his own bar and played it cool.
“Ready?” I asked her.
“Yeah. I don’t know what my problem is. Just feeling weak, I guess. Maybe it’s allergies?”
“Maybe,” I said, gesturing for her to step behind the bar.
“How much is this?” she asked, adjusting the headband that tamed her wild, curly bob.
“Don’t worry about the number. I just wanna check your form. We’ll get you to where you want to be when you’re meant to be there,” I promised her.
“I know. I know. It might not be today, but we will get there.” She recited one of my many pep talks with a sigh. “I just really wanted it to be today. Today’s the day, you know?”
“Your anniversary?”
“Three years ago, I was on death’s door and woke up with a new ticker.” She thumped a fist to her chest. “Kinda wanted to be able to email the donor’s family and tell them I hit a big PR today. Let them know that part of him is still living on.”
I put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed. “Hey, I know that’s the ideal, but let’s work with the reality first. Okay? Maybe it’s something simple.” It was relatively simple. The anniversary, the wanting to report to the family of the man whose heart she’d received.
Doris had psyched herself out.
We were four weeks out from our last deadlift day, and I kn
ew that she could hit 200. She just wasn’t sure.
She nodded, still disappointed. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let’s see if you can wave your magic trainer’s wand.”
She hinged from the hips and reached for the bar.
“Use the over-under grip,” I instructed. “It’ll keep you from feeling like the bar’s going to roll out of your hands.”
She nodded again, adjusted.
“This is gonna be a little easier because it’s not your max. So focus on the form. Count of three. One, two, three!”
The class, sensing something big was happening, stopped what they were doing and ranged themselves behind Doris. Watching, holding their breath.
She pulled. Face tight, the cords of her neck straining. The bar raised. Slowly, slowly it inched higher.
“Go! Go! Go! Pull!” I shouted.
“Pull!” The rest of the class echoed in varying pitches.
Doris straightened, fully extended and red-faced, the bar clenched in her hands. The class cheered behind her. She dropped it and bent at the waist.
“Why the hell are you guys making all that racket?” She blew out a breath, swiped her arm across her forehead. “Holy crap. I must be getting sick. That felt like a thousand freakin’ pounds.”
“That’s because it was 215,” I told her.
“Two what?” She blinked.
“Two hundred and fifteen pounds.”
“215? I lifted 215?”
I nodded, grinning.
“215,” she said again, a whisper to herself.
Josh grabbed her from behind in a tight hug. “215,” he repeated.
She squeezed his hands and calculated the weights in front of her. “Oh my god. That is 215! I lifted two hundred and fifteen friggin’ pounds!” She escaped Josh’s hold, turned, and threw herself at him. “I did it! Holy shit!”
“You did it!” He squeezed his eyes shut tight as he held his wife who’d not only survived but was living. I felt the arrow to my own heart and distracted myself by digging out my phone to commemorate the moment.
The celebration was Super Bowl-winning touchdown worthy.
The class passed her from lifter to lifter for a round of back-cracking hugs and celebratory high fives. All celebrating like it was their own personal victory while music thumped in the background.
“You lied to me,” Doris said, returning to me, hands on hips. Her face was flushed with happiness.
“Just a little,” I told her.
“You knew I was psyching myself out, and you mind-tricked me into making it happen,” she insisted. Her eyes were getting misty.
I shook my head. “You made it happen. Now, go stand with your bar so I can take your PR picture. You can send it to your heart’s family.”
Her lower lip trembled.
There were more than a few pairs of glistening eyes surrounding us.
“Don’t do it,” I said, pointing at her. “If you go, we’ll all go, and then it’ll be all over Bootleg that I make my classes cry. You’ll ruin my business if you cry.”
A tear slipped out of the corner of her eye as she came in for a tight hug.
“Thanks, Jonah,” she whispered.
“I’m really fucking proud of you, D,” I whispered back.
“Me, too.”
It was a good way to kick off the weekend. D’s personal record cheered me enough to temporarily forget about my own personal life for a moment.
The body that investigators had found and the questions it represented. Was my DNA tainted? Had my father murdered a teen girl? And what did that mean for those that came after? Me. My brothers and sister. What kind of legacy had he left us?
This was the good in the world. The Dorises and the Erics and the Mrs. Morgansons. They were the good. I’d spend some time enjoying instead of worrying about the things I couldn’t fix.
“You know, Jonah,” Mrs. Morganson said, sidling up to me as I wiped down the bars. “You really ought to think about opening a gym space. Set up shop, plant some roots.”
“I bet that June Tucker would be more than happy for another local investment,” Minnie Faye added, looking innocent.
“Is that so?” I said easily.
The thought had occurred to me.
But the bottom line was, I hadn’t decided if I was staying in Bootleg Springs or not. I’d been here a year. I had family here, a fledgling business with classes and personal training. But that didn’t mean that this West Virginia town was home. Once the Callie Kendall case was resolved, then I would decide.
Stay or go.
“Think about it,” Mrs. Morganson advised. “Your own space to set up any way you want. A set schedule. I bet a gym would do real well in Bootleg so folks could work off all that moonshine.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I promised. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I’m gonna go celebrate D’s victory with an egg white omelet before my next class.”
2
Shelby
T he Brunch Club served up fancy breakfast with steaming sides of hot gossip. Bootleg Springs residents bellied up to the restaurant’s sleek concrete bar or leaned forward in cushioned booths to catch up on the town’s latest rumors while enjoying goat cheese frittatas and fried chicken biscuits with mango chia smoothies.
As a natural observer, I couldn’t get enough of the crowd.
“Did y’all hear that Moe Dailey’s bloodhound got loose again? Knocked up Lacey Dickerson’s purebred Shih Tzu,” Mrs. Varney shouted over the restaurant din. In deference to the sunny late spring morning, she was decked out in cropped black elastic waist pants that stopped just short of her boobs.
There were seven of us squeezed into a big corner booth at the back of the restaurant. I was the youngest by at least three decades.
“There’s something for your notes, Shelby.” Old Jefferson Waverly, the only male member of our gathering, poked a fork in my direction. “Bootleg Springs has a long memory and a fine appreciation for karma.”
“Mm-hmm.” The group nodded enthusiastically. They waited for me to write it down, and I obliged. I’d been adopted by The Breakfast Club—not to be confused with the Brunch Club—a collection of Bootleg elders who generally doled out advice and caused mischief. Especially on bingo nights.
I’d come to town with a very specific objective and quickly came to the realization that I wouldn’t be able to simply hang out on the sidelines and observe. No, this small town required full-contact participation before it would open its arms to an outsider. It was participant observation at its finest. I was Jane Goodall, and Bootleggers were my subjects.
They had tentatively accepted me as one of their own. Well, most of them had. There were a few outliers still holding out on me. But I’d wear them down. I always did.
By involving myself in town life, I’d gained more than just the insight I was looking for. These crafty neighbors took my original plan and narrow thesis, doused it with moonshine, then set it on fire.
At their behest, rather than conducting a few dozen or so face-to-face interviews, I’d built an online survey and made it available to the entire town as of two days ago. It included brief personality assessments, questions around how residents related to the larger community, as well as role identification tags and rating systems for compassion, social justice, and participation.
Essentially, my little nerd survey was designed to pick apart exactly who Bootleg Springs was made up of and why they worked so well together. The most recent shiny example of their community activism occurred when the town banded together to evict a crowd of overzealous, disrespectful journalists.
Those same residents were now helping me earn my doctorate one survey answer at a time.
“Guess they’ll have a litter of shithounds on their hands,” Granny Louisa mused. Her life partner, Estelle—black to Louisa’s lily white and genteel South Carolina to Louisa’s rough-and-tumble West Virginia—high-fived her.
“Better than havin’ bloodshits,” Jefferson cackled.
“Anyway, serves her right for dumping that poor Jonah Jr. at the prom,” Gertrude, AKA Gram-Gram, commented while scooping up grits.
The rest of the table clucked their sympathy, voicing their concerns that the man would never find a decent mate. I made a few notes in my notebook. The elders of Bootleg Springs shared an interest in the love lives of what they deemed the “youngins.” Apparently with the pairing off three of the five Bodines, they were itching for a full house resolution.
The “poor” Jonah Jr. they were discussing was Jonah Bodine. Illegitimate son of the deceased Jonah Sr. and one of the holdouts who still didn’t think highly of me. He’d shown up in town days after his father’s funeral upon discovering from the obituary that he had four half-siblings. Jonah was, according to Myrt Crabapple, “the spittin’ image of his father and brothers.”
Which meant Jonah was very, very attractive.
He was tall. Lean. Strong. Muscular, but not in a steroidal way. He had an easy smile and eyes the color of the grass after a good rain. He was—here.
“Well, speak of the handsome devil,” Estelle said, pointing her bacon in the direction of the door.
My little nerd heart beat out an approving tempo.
He strolled inside in shorts and a sweaty t-shirt. I magnanimously decided not to take offense to the fact that my brunch companions had complained to high heaven about me showing up for our meal in my running clothes and my aches and pains that I tried to cover. They obviously didn’t have the same qualms about post-workout Jonah.
Every woman in the restaurant held her breath as he used the hem of his shirt to mop at his brow. That flash of abs had me bobbling my coffee cup against the saucer. The resounding clash tore eyes off Jonah’s very nice eight-pack and delivered them to my flushed face.
He dropped his shirt and looked at me. The friendly smile faded to stone. Strong jaw, subtle hollows under the Bodine cheekbones. Those eyes were cool, annoyed. My table mates took notice.
“Brrrr. Is it just me, or did it get real cold in here?” Mrs. Varney said in what she thought was a whisper.
I met Jonah’s blank stare with a bright smile. It said a lot for the man that he could dislike me intensely but still not bring himself to be rude.