Whiskey Chaser (Bootleg Springs Book 1)

by Lucy Score

“What did you find?” he asked, standing up and stepping over his neat piles to get to me.

  I stroked a hand over the dress, remembering endless hugs and Easter mornings. Everything always ended. The good and the bad. And while I hated it, it was also a comfort. Daddy was no longer suffering. And maybe now my brothers could start to move on.

  Devlin’s hand squeezed my shoulder. He sank down next to me on the floor.

  “This is some of my mama’s stuff,” I told him, handing over the photo album.

  “May I?” he asked. I nodded.

  He turned the pages. “I like your dad’s suit,” he grinned.

  “He wore it to their prom and then their wedding. And one more time to Gibson’s christening. I don’t think he wore so much as a necktie after that.”

  “Do you think Jonah would like to see this?” Devlin asked.

  I looked at the album in his big hands. “I’d like to show him,” I decided.

  “We’ll start another pile then.” He placed the ivory book on the bare mattress.

  I gave him the dress. “This too.”

  We dug back into the next layer of goodies in the trunk. I was delighted to find Jameson’s baby album and a stack of disciplinary reports from the high school regarding Gibson. These I could use for blackmail.

  Devlin laughed his way through the reports, making sure there wasn’t anything important stuck between the pages of Gibson’s juvenile delinquent-ism. I found more loose family photos and the veil Mama had worn on her wedding day. There was a grimy folder of Sunday school lessons Mama had taught and my father’s neat collection of every single program of the Bootleg Annual Jedidiah Bodine Still Explosion Re-Enactment. We found odds and ends of family life. Mama had kept every sketch and drawing Jameson had done growing up. Even at seven, he’d shown artistic promise. Bowie’s good citizenship trophies and soccer team pictures were stacked neatly in an acrylic box.

  “Oh, Dev. Look at this,” I said, lifting a photo triumphantly from the bowels of the trunk. “Me at prom.”

  Devlin studied it, smiling sweetly at the 17-year-old me. I’d worn an electric blue two-piece dress because everyone else was wearing black. My hair, it had been even longer then, was piled on top of my head in Medusa-like coils. I was the punky Tinkerbell to Freddie Sleeth’s smirking seventeen.

  “What was your prom night like?” Devlin asked.

  “Well, a lady never kisses and tells,” I told him. “But I can tell you that Freddie’s pick-up got a flat on the way to the dance, and we had to change it in a mud puddle. He got flustered and dropped the lug nuts right into the mud, and I ended up having to fish ‘em up. Changed the tire too since someone’s daddy never showed him how. Still made prom queen even covered in mud,” I said smugly. “How about yours?”

  Devlin looked embarrassed. “I borrowed my parents’ driver and Town Car in the tux I already owned and took Lilibeth Paxton to a candlelit seafood dinner on the water followed by an evening of elegant entertainment and dancing.”

  “Could we possibly be more different?” I asked him.

  He tucked a strand of hair behind my ears. “I don’t know, Scarlett. I think we’ve got enough in common to outweigh those very different differences.”

  I liked that answer, and I told him so with a kiss. I kept it sweet and light. I wasn’t about to jump Devlin’s sexy ass here in my parents’ house surrounded by their ghosts. “Thank you for your help,” I whispered, pulling back to admire his just kissed mouth and that neat beard.

  “Anything you need Scarlett, ever. Just ask.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to some lunch after we finish this trunk,” I said hopefully.

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “Anything you want.”

  Happy again, I dug into the depths of the trunk. It looked like we’d already found all the good stuff. What was left were lace curtains—probably my gram’s—that needed a good washing and a balled up plastic bag at the bottom. I pulled the curtains out and sneezed. If I could clean them up, they sure would look pretty in my front windows. I plucked the plastic bag out of the back corner of the trunk and was surprised that it had some weight to it.

  “Not empty,” I said, peering inside. Something cherry red that rang a distant bell in my head. “Huh.” I pulled it out. It was a cardigan. I spread it out on the floor and ran my finger over the buttons. Four big, red buttons, and the top one was a white button with yellow daisies on it. “Oh, my God.” The memories flooded back. “This is Callie Kendall’s sweater.”

  “The girl who disappeared?” Devlin asked, peering over my shoulder.

  I nodded. “She always had the coolest clothes. She lost a button off of her favorite sweater climbing trees or something, and the next day she came back with this button sewn on. By the next week, all the girls were swapping out their top buttons.”

  “How did it end up here?” Devlin asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. All of us Bootleggers played together. She was practically one of us since she spent every single summer here. I probably had her over to play or something. She was the coolest girl I knew,” I sighed. “Smart, pretty, nice. She was real quiet, but sometimes she just broke out of her shell, and you felt lucky just to be around her. I was jealous of her, and I looked up to her. If that makes sense. I was devastated when she went missing.”

  Something was tugging at my memory and then pulled hard. I was missing something important.

  “How about we collect our spoils for today and...”

  The missing poster flashed into my mind. The piece of paper I’d studied thousands of times in the years since Callie vanished, willing it to give me a clue, to give us all answers.

  Last seen wearing denim shorts and a red cardigan sweater.

  I dropped the sweater as if it were a rattlesnake.

  30

  Devlin

  “I need you to text the Bodines—just the brothers,” I said to Jonah without preamble when I stormed through Gran’s door.

  “Okaaaay.” He drew out the word and put down his sandwich.

  “Text them and tell them to get their cowardly asses over here now.”

  I stomped into the living room and dumped the stack of papers I’d promised Scarlett I’d scan for her and then headed for my bedroom. I needed to shower off the dust and mustiness of Jonah Bodine’s house. And I needed to calm myself down before I told three grown men who weren’t afraid of a little violence that they needed to grow a collective pair and stop dumping shit on their sister.

  She’d been exhausted when we left her father’s house. Had even begged off on lunch saying she just wanted to take a nap. She was shaky and overwrought, and I placed the blame squarely on each pair of broad Bodine shoulders. They shouldn’t have made her see to their father’s house on her own. It had obviously taken a toll. We’d no sooner finished going through the trunk than she’d collapsed in on herself. I’d driven her home—with no argument from her—leaving her truck there.

  I stepped under the stream of hot water from the shower head that Scarlett had replaced herself. Just because the woman could do it all didn’t mean that she should be expected to do it all. I let the anger simmer. Anger was a welcome change to what I’d felt when I’d first come here. There was strength in anger.

  Ten minutes later, I was dressed and pacing the living room when the first car pulled up outside. Bowie didn’t even bother knocking. He rushed in through the kitchen door. “Is Scarlett okay? She’s not answering her texts.”

  “No thanks to you,” I snapped. “Sit down.” If he was surprised by my tone, he didn’t show it. I caught Jonah trying to sneak down the hallway toward the stairs. “You too, Bodine.”

  Jonah slunk into the living room and, shooting me a curious look, took Gran’s favorite wingback.

  “This better be fucking good,” Gibson drawled when he came through the front door. Jameson was behind him. Both were dressed as if I’d interrupted them at work.

  Bowie sniffed the air. “Is that burnt arm hair?”
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  Jameson shrugged. “Phone scared me.”

  “Sit,” I said, jerking my thumb toward the living room.

  “What the hell is this, McCallister?” Gibson demanded.

  “This is about the three of you acting like chicken shits and dumping everything on your sister.”

  “Now just a minute here—” Bowie began.

  “No. I talk. You fix it. I just came from your father’s house with your sister. As you may recall, you dumped the settling of your father’s estate on her. Just like you saddled her with the responsibility of his care. She took him to doctor’s appointments, filled his refrigerator, drove him to work. What did you three cowards do?”

  Gibson rose from the couch, his hands clenched into fists. “This is none of your fucking business. You don’t know what it was like to grow up with him.”

  I stood in front of him, daring him to take a swing. “No. I don’t. But your little sister does. And you’re too busy holding onto grudges with a dead man to act like a fucking family.”

  Gibson narrowed his eyes at me.

  “Go ahead,” I shrugged. “Take a shot at me, but you know it’s true. You know that you three washed your hands and saddled your sister with a responsibility that never should have been hers alone.”

  I think Gibson was growling at me. But I was going to say it all.

  “I just drove her home from your father’s house where she was so overwhelmed by memories that she was too upset to drive herself. And which one of you was there for her? Not a single one of you.”

  “I feel like this is a family thing—” Jonah said, starting to rise from the chair.

  “You are family,” I told him. “You came here to see what your brothers and sister were like, and here it is. Your brothers are selfish, negligent assholes who expect someone else to clean up their family’s mess.”

  “Scarlet never said she didn’t want to do all that,” Bowie argued.

  “That’s not true.” Jameson scratched the back of his neck. The room went silent. “She told us all the time. Asked us to run him to appointments toward the end. Wanted us to check in on him when she was working long days and he wasn’t with her. She sure as hell didn’t want to clean out his house by herself.”

  Bowie swore quietly and looked at his hands.

  “You all think she escaped your collective childhood unscathed? She didn’t. She’s just the only one of you with the balls to face it and to forgive. And if you keep using her to do the dirty work, you’re all cowards.”

  “She should have come to us rather than sending you—”

  I laughed a dry, humorless laugh. “You think she knows I called you all here? You think she wants to ask you to help her? She’s tired of being disappointed by you. You’ll stick your noses in her love life, but you won’t lift a finger to help her take care of your own father. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  They sat, stewing in silence.

  “You want to hear the ironic part? The only one of you who volunteered to help her was Jonah. He’s also the one with the best reason for not lifting a damn finger. So why don’t y’all think about that and get the hell out of my house and fix this for Scarlett.”

  It was my first official “y’all,” and I embraced it.

  They left, jaws tight, eyes dark, anger snapping off of their bodies. But not a single one of them bothered trying to defend themselves.

  “Man, you must have been one hell of an attorney,” Jonah said from his chair.

  “Still am. Want a drink?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  I grabbed a couple of beers and headed out to the deck. Summer was slowly sliding into Bootleg, one toe at a time. It was in the mid-seventies today, and the lake was busy. Fishing boats, pontoon boats, floating decks lazily motored past Gran’s deck. People were out enjoying their Saturday without a care to what was going on within the houses that dotted the lake.

  I wondered what other secrets, what other skeletons existed in this little lake town.

  Jonah joined me on the deck. “That was quite the verbal ass-kicking you gave them.”

  I opened my beer. “They deserved it. They expect her to take care of everything because they think she wasn’t hurt by any of it. But she was the only one of them strong enough to deal with it.”

  “Think they’ll apologize?” Jonah asked.

  My lips quirked. “In their own stupid, ineffective way. And maybe Scarlett will finally lay into them like they deserve. And then maybe things will change at least a little bit.” My thoughts shifted to my own family. Had I ever really stood up for myself, or had I let myself be pushed down a path I didn’t want? Did I even know what I wanted?

  “What’s all this?” Jonah asked, looking in the tote I’d carried in from the car.

  “Scarlett wanted you to see some family history. I think she wanted to look through them with you. But she was pretty worn out and told me to show you.”

  I saw his hesitation. But Jonah didn’t seem like the kind of guy who backed away from discomfort. He pulled the first album out of the bag and settled back in the deck chair. “Is this Scarlett?” he asked, a smile tugging at his lips.

  I pulled up the chair next to him and looked. The little girl in pigtails and a pink dress sat astride her father’s shoulders, grinning for all she was worth.

  For the next half hour, we sat in silence and paged through another family’s history.

  31

  Scarlett

  I’d talked myself down from hysteria twice so far and was working my way back up once more as I paced my living room rug. I tried coming at it from every conceivable angle and could not come up with a single reason why my father would have had the sweater Callie Kendall disappeared wearing. Unless he had something to do with that disappearance.

  I’d begged off of lunch with Devlin and made up an excuse about being tired. I was so wired with adrenaline I thought I might actually launch into orbit on the ride home. But Devlin didn’t ask any questions. Instead, he held my hand the whole way home and then deposited me on my doorstep, promising to take me back to my dad’s to get my truck whenever I was ready.

  I might never be ready.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Daddy was many things, lots of them bad. But he wasn’t a kidnapper, a killer. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it.

  I shot an apprehensive glance at the sweater, folded neatly on my kitchen counter. By itself, it was harmless. It was just cotton and buttons. But the bigger picture was much darker. This could be the first clue in a twelve-year-old cold case, and it pointed squarely at my father.

  Maybe he’d found it somewhere? Alongside the road or in a ditch. There was no crime in that. But then why would it have been tucked away, hidden like a family memento... or a trophy?

  I shook the thought out of my head. I couldn’t go there.

  My father was no murderer.

  And how many others would believe like I did, I thought. I couldn’t even count on my own brothers to know that Daddy wouldn’t have done this. Gibson wouldn’t even be surprised. He’d take it as a vindication that our father was as bad as he’d claimed him to be for all these years.

  “Fuck,” I muttered to myself. “And things were going so good, too.”

  The knock at my door shoved my heart into my throat. I raced the four steps into the kitchen and grabbed the sweater that I’d shoved in a sealable freezer bag. It was evidence

  “Scar? Open up.” It was Bowie.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” I ran around in a circle like a teenage boy about to get busted in his girlfriend’s bedroom. Finally, I stuffed the sweater under the couch cushion and tried to look natural when I opened the door.

  “What’s wrong?” Bowie asked.

  Damn him and his stupid sensitive nature.

  “Nothing. What do you want?” I asked woodenly.

  Jameson stared at me. “We’re sorry,” he announced.

  “Great. I accept. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m busy.”
I tried to shut the door on them, but they muscled their way inside.

  “Now, Scarlett,” Bowie drawled. It’s how he always talked me down with his annoying logic and his shiny good nature.

  “Don’t ‘now Scarlett’ me. I just don’t feel like talking right now.”

  “And we’re here to talk about why you don’t feel like talking.”

  There was no fucking way in the entire world that they could know what I’d found. Unless, they were in on it? Oh my God. What if my brothers caught Daddy—

  “Sit,” Jameson ordered, shoving me into Gram’s rocking chair.

  “Jesus, Scar. You look like you’re gonna pass out. Do you need a doctor?” Bowie asked, crouching down in front of me.

  I sprang out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box and side-stepped him. “Can y’all just tell me why you’re here so we can all get on with our lives?” I demanded.

  Bowie and Jameson exchanged a look. I’d seen that look every time I had my period in my teens and they bore the brunt of my hormones.

  “Do you want like a hot pad or some chocolate?” Bowie ventured.

  “What I want is for you to get to the point and then get out.”

  “We’re sorry for being assholes,” Jameson said. He made himself comfortable on my couch. On the cushion under which I’d just shoved evidence in a case that had fascinated the east coast for over a decade.

  I swallowed hard. “Be more specific.”

  Bowie took a deep breath. “We’re sorry for expecting you to take care of everything related to Dad, including his house.”

  “Apology accepted. Go away.”

  “Now, don’t be like that, Scarlett. We were wrong. And it was unfair of us to expect you to handle everything just because we had grudges and hard feelings.”

  “Speaking of grudges and hard feelings, where’s Gibson?” I asked.

  They shared another look. Gibson’s MO was to run off when things got tricky or sticky or annoying. “Y’all have been doing this for years. Why the sudden apology?” I caught the winces.