Whiskey Chaser (Bootleg Springs Book 1)

by Lucy Score

  “It’s been brought to our attention that—”

  “Devlin called us chickenshits,” Jameson said, cutting to the chase.

  “He saw how hard all of this is on you. Something that none of us ever noticed before, and we’re sorry,” Bowie added.

  I did not have time for this. “I get it. You’re sorry. Can we just skip ahead to the ‘everybody’s fine’ part and call it a day?” That sweater was going to develop a telltale heartbeat any second now.

  “I don’t think we should skip ahead in this situation,” Bowie argued. “See, I feel like we’ve spent several years screwing up, and a couple of apologies aren’t really enough.”

  “And Gibson feels like he doesn’t have anything to apologize for, right?” I added.

  “You know, Gibs,” Jameson said cryptically. I did. And there were certain things we all knew without talking about. One of those things was that Gibson saw my loyalty to our father as a disloyalty to him.

  I avoided looking at the couch, just in case they’d notice my attention.

  “Scar, we’re family,” Bowie said, taking my chin in his hand. “We should be in things together, and I’m sorry for expecting you to handle all of this shit on your own. It’s not gonna be that way anymore. I’m goin’ to Dad’s tomorrow.”

  “Me, too,” Jameson sighed.

  “We’ll get this settled together, and then we’ll move on together,” Bowie promised. “That’s how it should have been from the beginning. You’ve been toughing it out for a long time on your own, and I don’t want you to ever feel like that again.”

  “Damn it, Bowie.” I stomped my foot on the wood floor. “You couldn’t just leave, could you?”

  “What?” He looked startled.

  Sonsabitches wanted to be family? Then they deserved to suffer with me. “Get up, Jameson.” My brother did as he was told while looking at me like I was having a breakdown. Who knows? Maybe I was.

  I pulled the sweater out from under the cushion and threw the baggy on the coffee table. “Now, how are we going to deal with this as a family?” I demanded.

  They stared down on it.

  “Um. Is it too small?” Bowie asked. “Maybe we could order a new one?”

  “It’s a nice color for you,” Jameson offered.

  “Christ!” I stormed over to my kitchen and dug through drawers until I found what I was looking for. “Here.”

  I threw the old Missing poster on top of the sweater. Jameson picked it up and frowned. I saw the instant he got the connection. The tightening of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes. He handed the poster to Bowie and stared at me.

  “Where did it come from?” he asked me flatly.

  “Holy fucking shit, Scar. You didn’t kill her, did you?” Bowie asked, dumbfounded.

  I don’t know why I found it funny. Or maybe I didn’t find it funny at all and was just flat out hysterical. But I collapsed to the floor laughing so hard I cried.

  “You automatically assume I had something to do with it?” Hadn’t I done the same toward my father?

  “It was a knee-jerk reaction,” Bowie said defensively, staring at Callie’s sweater like it was an angry boar.

  “I found it in Mama’s trunk upstairs,” I told them. “I recognized it right away because of the button. Remember how every girl in Bootleg swapped out their top button for a year afterwards? He’d packed a bunch of stuff in there. Family photos, some of Mama’s clothes, and this was in the very bottom.”

  Jameson picked up the bag and examined the sweater. He dropped it, his face pale. “It’s stained.”

  “What?” I asked, snatching it back from him. I held it up to the light, and there was a little pattern of stains. “It looks like drops or splatter.”

  “Blood,” Jameson said quietly.

  “He didn’t do it,” I said, shaking my head. Someone needed to say the words out loud. I braced for their argument, held my breath.

  Bowie, still staring at the offending sweater, remained silent. “Devlin know about this?” he finally asked.

  I shook my head. “He knows I found the sweater, and he knows it was hers, but he doesn’t know she disappeared wearing it.”

  “He’s a smart guy, Scar. How long does he have to be in Bootleg before he knows every detail of the Kendall girl’s disappearance?”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face. “What do we do? I mean, I know we have to turn it over to the cops, but…”

  The “but” hung in the air.

  “But what?” Bowie asked. “We have to take this to Sheriff Tucker.”

  Jameson swiped a hand over his forehead. “I don’t know man. What if it was an accident?”

  “What kind of accident?” Bowie demanded.

  “What if he was driving drunk that night. She left the lake, and it was dark, right?”

  My stomach dropped out. My brothers believed there was a possibility that our father had done this.

  “And then what?” I demanded, my voice a near shriek. “He dumped her body in the lake? He buried her in our backyard? He wouldn’t have done that. You can’t believe that.”

  “What’s the other option, Scar?” Jameson demanded. “Why else would he have her blood-stained sweater hidden away?”

  “We have to take this to the sheriff,” Bowie said again.

  “And say what? Our dad might be a murderer? You know what that will do,” Jameson argued.

  “We’ll all be guilty by gossip,” I said to myself.

  “We can’t not take this to the cops. There’s blood on it. This might be the answer that that poor girl’s parents have been looking for,” Bowie said.

  “But it might not be the right answer, Bowie,” I argued. “Before we throw ourselves on the mercy of this town and beg them to believe us, don’t you think we owe it to Daddy to at least dig a little deeper ourselves?”

  “We’re not crime scene investigators,” Bowie snapped. “We have evidence in the highest profile missing person case in the state, and you want to sit on it and hope that our father had nothing to do with it?”

  “We vote then,” I said. Jameson was with me. Together we could overrule Bowie.

  “We’re not all here,” Bowie said.

  Gibson would love to crucify daddy in the court of public opinion. To have the rest of the town believe like he did, that Daddy was a low down, dirty loser? Gibson would gladly sell us all out for that tasty slice of revenge.

  “Look,” I began. “I agree that we need the police at some point. But can we just sleep on it? Bow, I’m not ready for everyone to start looking at us as the reason she’s gone. Think about it. Your job could be on the line. What will your friends say? Your neighbors?” I was shamelessly pushing him to think of Cassidy. And it was all selfish.

  The second the sweater went to the cops was the moment I’d have to say good-bye to Devlin.

  “This is a fucking nightmare,” he said.

  “No one can know about this for now, Bowie,” I told him. Not Dev, not Cass. And I wasn’t even sure about Gibson at this point.

  “So, what do we do?” Bowie asked.

  “We think back. Where were we when Callie went missing? Do we remember anything specific about Dad at the time?”

  “How the hell are we supposed to remember?” Bowie growled in irritation. “It was over a decade ago.”

  “It’s one of those things where you always remember where you were when it happened,” I told him.

  “Gibson’s,” Jameson said suddenly.

  I looked at him, the memory dawning. “Yeah. That’s right. We were all at Gibson’s. Cassidy called over to tell us.”

  “Why were we all at Gibson’s apartment?” Bowie asked, frown lines carving into his forehead.

  32

  Scarlett

  The subterfuge was killing me. I’d been avoiding Devlin for twenty-four hours. Good guy that he was, he was giving me space with the occasional sweet reminder by text or voicemail that he was around if I wanted to talk or not talk.

 
; I didn’t go back to Daddy’s house. I’d promised I wouldn’t go there without Bowie or Jameson, and to be honest, it hadn’t been a hard promise to make. One little sweater, tucked in the corner of memories, and the whole house felt foreign to me. Everything felt strange and new as if my childhood hadn’t been what I thought it had. My family hadn’t been who I was sure they were.

  There was one person who might have some answers, and I wasn’t looking forward to asking him the questions. After he ignored my texts and calls for a full day, I decided enough was enough. Gibson Bodine would talk to me if I had to string him upside down over a camp fire.

  I hopped in my pick-up that Devlin and Jonah had thoughtfully returned to me and headed up the mountain. Gibson took his outsider role seriously, building himself a cabin on three acres of woods on a dead-end lane half a mile back from the road. The land had belonged to our grandfather. The shack that still stood at the backside of the property was where Great-Granddaddy Jedidiah hid his still during Prohibition.

  Gibson’s only neighbors were deer and bear and birds. Just the way he liked it.

  His house was dark, but the lights were on in his shop. He’d built a metal pole building to house his cabinetry business and spent more time out there than inside the house. He was a restless soul, preferring to work long into the night than make small talk with acquaintances over beer. Everyone in town believed him to be the asshole our father had told him he was his whole life, and they accepted it about him. Gibson had never seemed inclined to prove them wrong, even though I knew there was more to him than a bad temper and broody looks.

  I pushed open the heavy door next to the garage bay. He was sanding down a set of base cabinets. The space smelled of sawdust and stain. Gibson, asshole that he was, was a master craftsman and made beautiful cabinetry. He charged a hell of a premium, too. But he poured his heart and soul into every piece, making them perfect in ways he could never be.

  “I’m busy,” he said without turning around.

  In a way, Gibson and I were the closest out of the siblings. Jameson was off in his own world, creating art, avoiding people. Helpful, friendly Bowie, on the other hand, immersed himself in the outside world. But Gibs and I understood each other. Even though we didn’t always agree.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” I told him, sliding onto a padded stool against his lacquer red metal cabinets. “It’s bad.”

  I saw the hitch in his shoulders, and then he turned to face me. “What?”

  No matter what went on in our normal daily life, no matter how much my love of our daddy upset him, I could always count on him. “I found something when I was cleaning out his house.”

  Gibson wiped his hands with a cloth and tossed his safety glasses onto a work table. He strolled over to a mini fridge and pulled out two bottles of water. He tossed one to me, and I caught it in mid-air.

  “Go on.”

  I wasn’t going to sugar coat it for him. “I found the sweater that Callie Kendall disappeared in. It’s stained with what might be blood.”

  He stared at me as if I weren’t speaking English. “You’re fucking with me.”

  I shook my head. “I wish I were. It’s hers, Gibs. The top button—”

  “Daisies,” he said, interrupting me. And I wondered how in the hell he remembered that. But then again, everyone in Bootleg knew everything about Callie except where she disappeared to.

  I pressed on. “We were all at your apartment when she went missing. We spent the night.”

  He took another drink and looked away. Remembering.

  “Why were we there, Gibs? I was fourteen, Jameson sixteen, and Bowie eighteen. Why did we spend the night at your apartment?”

  I closed my eyes and prayed for an answer that wouldn’t gut me.

  “It was a long time ago,” he hedged.

  “Gibs.”

  He sighed and pulled out a stool that matched mine from under a sawdust-encrusted table. “Mom called. She asked.”

  “She just asked you to keep the three of us at your place that night?”

  He shrugged tired shoulders. “I don’t know. It was late. Like after ten. She sounded upset. Said it would help her out. I assumed they were fighting.”

  What did Mama know? What was there for her to know?

  I rubbed my forehead, a new worry blooming bright. “It wouldn’t have been the first time,” I said. They’d fought before. Usually Gibs or Bowie would keep me entertained in their rooms until the shouting stopped. Sometimes we went to Cassidy and June’s house and stayed there until the fight was over and all was normal again.

  “Bowie drove y’all over,” Gibson said with a small smile.

  “Did you think it was odd that she asked you to keep us for the night and then Callie up and went missing?” I asked.

  “The connection never occurred to me,” he said. “You think he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “He” meaning our father. And it definitely wasn’t a question.

  I shook my head and jumped on the defensive. “I know what you’re gonna say, Gibs. Daddy was many things. But he didn’t take Callie. He didn’t hurt her.”

  “Then how the fuck did her sweater end up in his house?”

  “He could have found it—”

  His rage, poker hot, surprised me. He threw his half empty water bottle across the room. “When are you going to finally realize what a low-life he was, Scar?”

  “He never hit us,” I said, rallying. It was an old argument.

  “Since when in the fuck should that ever be the line?” Gibson demanded. “Why would everything else up to physical abuse be okay? He told me over and over again that I ruined his life. That I was the reason he wasn’t off playin’ in a band or makin’ something of himself. He told me I was nothing.”

  Gibson came by his musical talent honestly. But as a “fuck you” to our father, he purposely never pursued it.

  I wasn’t hurt by the anger I heard behind the words. That was Gibson, a walking fit of rage. It was the pain that got me.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “He told me I was nothing. And you know what? He was right. Because I’m just like him. He made sure Bowie knew he’d never be good enough for him no matter how hard he tried. And Jameson? He shut that boy down every time he came in for a hug, every time he asked to go fishing, every time he made that fucker a special drawing. Jonah Bodine crushed his spirit, Scarlett, and the sooner you realize what a monster he was, the better.”

  I had tears spilling down my cheeks now. We’d danced around this topic for years, neither one of us ever daring to say all of the words.

  “He was sick, Gibs. Sick. Alcoholism is a fucking disease like cancer or Alzheimer’s.”

  “He had a damn choice in the way he treated us.”

  “Did you deserve better?” I asked, my voice breaking and echoing around the metal walls. “Of course, you did. We all did. We deserved a dad who would be there for us. One who’d coach the soccer team or cook dinner or even just listen when we spoke. One who didn’t look at each one of us as the ball and chain to a life he never wanted. But we didn’t have that. We had him.”

  “And he’s gone now. Finally,” Gibson spat out.

  “Jesus, Gibs. He was our father.”

  “He was nothing to me. And now? Now, you expect me to give him the benefit of the doubt and say maybe this drunken asshole didn’t have something to do with that girl’s disappearance? Then how the fuck did that sweater end up in his house?”

  “I don’t know, but I believe—”

  “Goddamn it, Scarlett!” Gibson snarled. “Stop it. Just stop defending him!”

  “Jameson doesn’t think he did it—”

  Gibson rounded on me. “They know?”

  I nodded. “I told them when they came to apologize to me for being fucking lousy brothers and dumping all of the responsibility on me!” It wasn’t fair, but I was tired of being fair. I was tired of brushing things under the rug and hoping t
hey’d get better. “You saddled me with him for all these years because you couldn’t handle dealing with him.”

  “Fuck you, Scarlett.”

  “Fuck you back, Gibson.”

  I hopped off my stool and flipped him the bird for good measure. “You have fun up here in your lair avoiding life while I clean all of this up for you. As usual!”

  I didn’t hear his response because I slammed the door so hard the garage doors rattled. I’d expected it to go this way. But that didn’t mean I was happy about being right just this once.

  33

  Devlin

  “You can’t just will her to appear, man,” Jonah said as I peered through the deck doors at the bright mid-morning. It was Day Three of no Scarlett.

  “Don’t you have something to do?” I asked mildly, knowing full well he didn’t.

  Between the two of us spending just about all day, every day, together, we were entering territory where someone’s face was going to get beat.

  One of us needed a job. Or my fucking girlfriend needed to come back. She was still responding to texts. But she wouldn’t pick up the damn phone, and she wouldn’t talk to me about what was wrong. That wasn’t like her. Scarlett Bodine didn’t not talk about what was on her mind.

  I’d given her about as much space as I was willing.

  “I’ve got nothing but time on my hands,” Jonah said airily, but I could hear the irritation in his tone.

  We needed to get out of the house.

  “You want to get out of here? Maybe get a pepperoni roll?” I suggested.

  “Yes and yes.”

  We took Jonah’s car, a late model Mustang, and dropped the top to cruise into Bootleg. In the sunshine, we drove down crowded Main Street and turned onto Bathtub Gin Alley to complete the circuit. There wasn’t much to Bootleg. Most of the retail spaces occupied those two streets. And it was a busy day in town with tourists enjoying the charm.

  We ordered pepperoni rolls to go from the Moonshine Diner. It seemed a crime to avoid the fine early summer weather, so we took the food down to the lakefront. There were people here. Families on the sandy beach. Kids splashing in the bath water warm lake. Teenage girls sunning themselves and giggling over the antics of sunburnt teenage boys.