Secret Blend (Bourbon Springs Book 1)

by Jennifer Bramseth

  Chapter 28

  Over the next several weeks, summer blended into fall and Rachel and Brady took advantage of the glorious autumn weather to spend more and more time together. They hiked almost every weekend at the nature preserve across Old Crow Creek and retired to Rachel’s house for swimming and other recreational activities provided the evenings were warm enough. Rachel got to know and love Marie, and helped Brady with his aunt, occasionally taking her to the grocery store or to get her hair done. Marie was delighted that her nephew had “found someone so nice,” and never said a word about how they had tried to keep their relationship under wraps.

  Yet while Rachel and Brady were a happy and public couple, they continued to pay the price for their initial pretense. They had regular reports of Hannah bemoaning the fact she’d been deceived, but that was the extent of her complaint. She had apparently taken Rachel’s warning to heart and was no longer fostering the misconception that Rachel and Brady weren’t really in love.

  But the damage had been done. Hannah’s campaign signs were everywhere. There were few people at the campaign events for Brady, and his campaign contributions dropped precipitously. Although no one was going to go to the time and trouble of doing an opinion poll in little old Bourbon Springs, if signage were any indication, Hannah was going to win the race by a wide margin.

  “Don’t say that, Brady,” Rachel begged.

  “It’s true,” he said, and took a bite of his sandwich. “I’m going to lose. I accept it.”

  “But I don’t,” Rachel said stubbornly.

  They sat outside around the side of the courthouse eating the lunch Brady had picked up from Over a Barrel. He had obtained the renowned chicken salad that day, and Rachel was impressed and appreciative. A bright sun shone upon them that fall day, with the sky cloudless and a perfect robin’s egg blue.

  Brady put down his sandwich and frowned. “Have you thought about what will happen when I lose my judgeship?”

  “That’s a big if, Brady.”

  “Rachel, there’s no job for me here. It’s a small town. I can’t go back to the Commonwealth Attorney’s office—Jorrie Jones took my spot. And even though Eleanor told me she’d love to have me back, she says her hands are tied because she doesn’t have the money to create another position. There’s no way I’m going to put up my own shingle. I’d starve for sure. I’m going to have to ask Justice Nolan to help me get that job with the Attorney General’s office.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said softly. “So that would mean quite a commute, wouldn’t it?”

  And a lot less time with Brady. The state capital was over fifty miles away, although the roads there weren’t that bad. But after a long workday on top of a commute, Brady would come back to Bourbon Springs exhausted every day. She’d get to see him, but he’d be worn out whenever they did manage to get time together. Hardly the same as working in the very same office.

  “I don’t think I could handle that kind of commute,” he said.

  She blinked and gaped as the understanding of what he was saying sank in. “You’d move?” she asked, and he nodded. “But—but could you do something else, like live halfway between?”

  “And where would that be? Halfway between Bourbon Springs and Frankfort is the middle of nowhere, Rach. There’s no place to go.”

  “So you’re saying we’d have a long-distance relationship?”

  He nodded.

  Why hadn’t she seen this coming?

  That was easy. She was in denial. She was in love.

  “But what about Marie?” Rachel asked.

  “I haven’t figured that out,” he admitted. “I don’t want to leave her here alone. I’m hoping that I can talk her into moving, but I don’t think that will happen.”

  So that at least meant trips back to Bourbon Springs to check on Marie. But that also meant that when he was back in Bourbon Springs, he’d be spending time making sure Marie was doing well.

  Rachel swallowed hard and thought. There was only one thing to do.

  “Maybe she’d move if I went along as well,” Rachel suggested.

  Brady’s face fell.

  “No, Rachel. Don’t walk away from this,” he said, gesturing toward the courthouse.

  “But what’s the alternative? I can’t move out of the jurisdiction and, as you pointed out, there is no in-between place to live.”

  “Maybe we could buy some land, build a house in the rural part of the county. You would still be in the jurisdiction, but I would be closer to the capital and the commute wouldn’t be so onerous,” he said.

  Rachel realized these were long-term plans. They were talking about being together forever.

  She smiled. “I think I could handle being in the middle of nowhere as long as you were around to keep me company.”

  He reached for her hands. “Then perhaps we do have some options.”

  “And there’s an even simpler solution,” she said.

  “What would that be? What did I miss?”

  “You win.”

  “I love your confidence,” he said, leaning close to her.

  She tapped his nose with a forefinger. “And I love you.”

  “But let’s come down to earth, Rach,” he said, his tone shifting. “We can both count yard signs and the dollar signs on my campaign account. Hannah’s going to win, and she probably would’ve won even if we’d managed to keep our relationship secret until after the election. She’s a rich, connected Bourbon Springs native. I’m a native, but certainly not rich and not nearly as connected. We both need to accept how this is going to end.”

  Rachel scooted closer to him on the bench and put her head on his shoulder. “I’m not giving up.”

  The courthouse clock chimed one o’clock, their signal to return to chambers. Brady took Rachel’s hand and they walked together toward the backdoor of the courthouse. He was reaching for the door when his cell phone rang, and Brady slipped it out of his pocket, checked the number, and answered immediately.

  “What’s happened?” were his first words. Rachel heard a garbled voice on the other end. “I’m on my way.” He hung up and Rachel saw the color draining from his face. As she asked what was wrong, Brady nearly dropped the phone his hands were shaking so hard. “That was one of the nurses who checks on Marie every other day,” he said, as Rachel took his hands to still and comfort him. “They found her in her bedroom this morning, unresponsive. They think she had a heart attack or a stroke. She—” he choked on the last words and Rachel put a hand on his chest. “She’s gone,” Brady finished, as Rachel immediately wrapped him in an enveloping, protective hug.

  Brady came down with a nasty cold the week after Marie’s funeral. He was in good shape and rarely got sick, but Rachel knew that the last weeks and months had taken their toll on his immune system and the consequences of stress had caught up with him.

  Nonetheless, he dragged himself into work that Monday morning. He’d called her the night before, complaining, saying that he felt lousy and that he wasn’t looking forward to a long day with a docket full of domestic relations matters. Rachel knew that of all the things he had to do as a judge, ruling in domestic cases was the thing he liked least.

  “Why the hell are you here?” Rachel asked.

  They were standing together in the clerk’s office. She’d brought over three boxes of donuts and other pastries from Over a Barrel, and had texted Brady before he arrived at work to join her downstairs. The clerks had gathered around the public filing counter where Rachel stood with the box, all of them eager to snag one of the deli’s famous maple bourbon bacon glazed donuts. Rachel had announced she’d managed to acquire the last three of the coveted treats, and left the clerks to fight over the sugary treasures.

  “Have a lot of work to do,” he said.

  CiCi took one look at him and frowned. “You should let Rachel cover for you,” she suggested, but Brady rejected the idea.

  “If you can please get me some coffee and something to eat, I’ll be fine.”
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  Both Rachel and CiCi gave him a look containing equal parts of disbelief and disapproval. After getting Brady his requests, Rachel ushered him back upstairs to their chambers and got him to rest on the small couch in her office.

  “Don’t let me fall asleep in here and make me miss court,” he said, putting his coffee and donut aside on a nearby table.

  “And maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do,” she whispered as she left him. Sherry, who had given Brady a box of tissues and was backing out of the office with Rachel, nodded in agreement.

  “Poor guy,” Sherry said, shaking her head.

  Rachel sighed, dropped into a chair next to Sherry’s desk, and concurred with her secretary’s sentiments. “He was devastated about Marie,” Rachel said. “He still is. She raised him, and he’s missing her.”

  Brady had told Rachel that while he was Marie’s sole heir pursuant to the terms of her will, the estate would have very little in it after payment of bills. She had lived in an apartment and her car wasn’t worth that much. Brady said he’d always known that he wasn’t going to inherit much from his great aunt, but Rachel thought he was still disappointed at the paucity of his anticipated legacy. She didn’t think him greedy but suspected his mild frustration was connected to their pie-in-the-sky plans of building a place together in far rural Craig County.

  Rachel didn’t want to think beyond Election Day, two weeks off, but knew that she had to confront the problem. It had eventually hit her that if Justice Nolan could help get Brady a job at the Attorney General’s office, that she could do the same for her. And Rachel still had some contacts in Frankfort; if not the Attorney General, maybe she could work at a state agency. She shuddered. Rachel really didn’t want to go back to working in a cubicle—at least not without Brady. The partition wall was still up in their office, although the work in the other part of the office had been completed. They had decided not to make any big moves into that empty space until the election was over and preferred having their desks so close to each other.

  Rachel hoped that she wouldn’t have to go on a job search. She didn’t want to leave her house, her parents, Bourbon Springs, her judgeship. But she also knew that she would be miserable without Brady.

  “Hello?” Sheriff Sammons said as he cracked open the door to the courtroom. “Is Judge Craft ready? Just want to know because I’ve got a deputy with me today since it’s the domestic docket and there are a few fellas on there that have emergency protective orders against them.”

  Sherry explained Brady wasn’t well, but that he’d be out in a minute.

  “Is there a bench clerk in there?” Rachel asked the sheriff as she rose to get Brady. Kyle confirmed that CiCi herself, who usually didn’t serve as a bench clerk, was in the courtroom that day. A few deputy clerks had called in sick and CiCi decided to pitch in by pulling bench clerk duty and keeping the official record of the proceedings.

  Rachel fetched the sleeping judge, and he was exceptionally grumpy after being awakened.

  “I’d just fallen asleep,” he whined as he put on his robe.

  “Well, get in there and get through your docket as soon as you can. The quicker you’re done, the quicker you can get home,” Rachel told him as he entered the courtroom.

  But that’s not how it went.

  When Brady got to the bench and took a good look at his docket, he remembered that this was the day when he’d scheduled motions in several troublesome cases. Getting through the motions and arguments that day was going to take time and having a cold wasn’t going to help him think quickly or clearly.

  The hearings all involved nasty, contentious issues: custody, child support, and property division. Brady was glad for a little extra security; the sheriff and one deputy had taken up positions on opposite sides of the courtroom serving as bailiffs that morning. He was particularly grateful for their presence when he saw that the last case—a particularly distasteful custody dispute—involved a parent he had encountered when he returned to Bourbon Springs a decade earlier. He had shadowed Eleanor as she handled the case, which was a simple prosecution of a man for possession of a controlled substance. Brady remembered that the guy was stubborn—he had held out for a much lower sentence recommendation—but Eleanor held firm and the guy eventually took the deal. It wasn’t that Eleanor was unreasonable; she’d already come down some on the time the guy was going to have to serve as a condition of probation. But the guy didn’t want to have to serve any time. She wouldn’t agree—and pointed out that even if she did, the deal would never get Judge McDowell’s approval. The man finally took the deal.

  Although he hadn’t personally prosecuted the man, Brady still had offered to get off the case if either side had any objection to him continuing to preside. Both sides declined, and Brady stayed on the case, much to his chagrin. The parties were in court fighting over something every other week (and that was no exaggeration). They were already clogging up the docket and the case had been filed only in late summer. And to make it even worse, it involved the very thing he hated most about domestic relations cases: custody of children. Brady found it easier to sentence someone to decades in prison than to try to decide how and with whom a child should spend his or her most precious years.

  “OK, I get that your client has gone to rehab,” Brady sighed, addressing Drake Mercer, the attorney for the wife, “but she’s in a sixty-day treatment program up in Lexington. Why shouldn’t I give Mr. Hanson here,” and he gestured toward the table where the husband sat with Jon Buckler, his counsel, “temporary custody until she gets out?”

  Brady knew he shouldn’t have expected a short and simple response.

  Drake gave Brady a ridiculously long-winded answer during which Brady decided to take the opportunity to mentally check out. The lawyer wasn’t addressing the issues, but going on and on and on about the efforts the wife had been making to get sober. Great. He got it. But that didn’t address the issue who was gonna keep the kids while she was gone.

  Brady’s eyelids drooped and he slumped in his chair. After a few seconds, he noticed the strange silence in the courtroom; he realized counsel had finished making his argument and all eyes were on him.

  “Very well,” Brady said, trying to recover. He pulled his chair closer to the bench and directed the husband’s attorney to make his argument.

  Jon Buckler was a little better, in that he got right to the point.

  But then he kept talking.

  “Judge, we think that at a minimum, Mr. Hanson should get temporary custody of all three children. But we put in our motion that your ruling should go beyond the sixty days Mrs. Hanson is in the program. While we’re pleased she’s finally sought treatment for her problems, we still have concerns regarding her parenting abilities once she completes treatment. And taking care of three children when you’re fresh out of rehab—well, we don’t want to endanger her sobriety by putting her and especially the children in that kind of stressful, high-stakes situation. So we’re asking for temporary custody to be immediately and indefinitely granted to Mr. Hanson and allow Mrs. Hanson to return to court at a future reasonable time to seek any adjustment to the custody arrangement…”

  Brady started to zone out again as the attorney droned on.

  Could they not catch a clue from his face, from his body language that he’d heard enough? He cringed inwardly, thinking of the times when he, as a prosecutor, had been just as oblivious when Judge McDowell started to lose interest in his arguments.

  Brady had already made up his mind how he was going to rule—neither side would end up liking it, so he thought that he’d come to the correct decision—and he was ready to get off the bench and go home and crawl into bed.

  Once again, it was a few seconds before he figured out that no one was talking. He tried to clear his throat before delivering his ruling, but that only made him cough. He took a sip of water and began to speak.

  “I’m granting Mr. Hanson’s motion and granting him temporary custody until two weeks after Mrs. H
anson is released from rehab. But when she is released, whenever that is, I want to see the parties back in court—when is her release date?” Brady asked.

  Drake spoke up. “She’s supposed to be released December 5, your honor.”

  “Then I’m setting this for review on December 19, and I want both of the parties here with counsel on that date,” he said, and started scratching notes on his docket sheet. “I know that’s awfully close to Christmas, but—”

  “What?” Hanson exploded. “I have to come back here days before Christmas to see if she’s sobered up enough to be a mother?” His large round face was red, and the redness extended up his forehead and over his mostly-bald head.

  Jon Buckler placed a hand on his client’s shoulder. Hanson had his hands on the arms of his chair and looked like he was about to launch himself from its confines.

  “Mr. Hanson,” Brady said, “I understand your frustration, but that’s my order.”

  Brady was watching Tyler Carver, a new deputy sheriff standing next to Hanson. Known around the courthouse as “Peanuts,” Carver looked nervous as he inched closer to the angry litigant.

  For his part, Hanson gave Deputy Carver a quick glance and looked at Brady. Then Hanson, his face beet-red, sat back in his chair as his attorney whispered something to him.

  “Oh, Judge Craft, hold on a moment,” CiCi said. “I think the recording has stopped.” She picked up a spare DVD, ready to pop in a new disk, and scowled at the machine as she punched a button on the front of it.

  During that short moment when CiCi had diverted his attention, there was a scuffle just out of Brady’s line of vision. When he looked up, Hanson was standing next to counsel table.

  And he was holding Deputy Carver’s gun.

  Chapter 29

  “Out!” screamed Hanson, motioning with the gun in his right hand. “Everyone get the hell out of here, except for you,” he said, pointing directly at Brady with his left hand.

  Brady’s mouth went completely dry and he looked over to the sheriff, who had his right hand just above his holster.