by Ninie Hammon
Jake grabbed Ben’s arm.
“Come on! We’ve got to go. Now!”
“Where?”
“Just come on!” He pulled on Ben’s arm. Ben yanked it free.
“Leave me alone. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you get it? Sarabeth’s dead!”
“No, she’s not!”
Over Ben’s shoulder, Jake could see the burning whiskey begin to pool around the Quart House. Dammed up by the slave fence in front of the river, the liquid now formed a flaming moat all the way around the raised rock flower beds that encircled the building. There wasn’t much time!
He grabbed Ben’s shoulders and got right in his face, almost nose to nose.
“Do you trust me?” He said each word individually, like plunking four pebbles into a creek one at a time.
Did Ben trust him? He had, after all, gotten him arrested, charged with a Class D felony, looking at prison time.
Tears streamed down Ben’s face, but he met Jake’s gaze. “Yeah, I trust you.”
“Then come on. I can’t explain, it would take too long. We might be able to get to Sarabeth, but we have to go right now!”
Jake turned and tore out toward the woods on the riverbank across from the Quart House with Ben at his side, running as fast as they’d ever run toward the goal line with a football.
Chapter 29
Sarabeth was panting like a dog trying to cool off. Her soaking-wet hair dangled in her face dripping, the way it did when she stepped out of the shower.
And she couldn’t feel her hands at all, nothing below her elbows, though she had stopped worrying about that altogether. She had bigger fish to fry.
She let out a little hiccup of hysterical laughter. Fry. She had fish to fry alright. No, more like bake, and not a fish either. Swathed in a cocoon of duct tape from her shoulders to her waist, she was a Christmas turkey, trussed up in aluminum foil and set in an oven on low.
But as the wall of heat and flame drew closer and closer, the burner on the oven was turned higher and higher.
Billy Joe hadn’t made a sound in a long time, not since he opened his eyes briefly when Black Gold exploded. He just lay there, not moving. She could see he was still breathing or she’d have thought he was dead.
Seth slid in and out of consciousness. He obviously had a concussion. He fought to stay awake and aware, but there were times she knew he didn’t really know what was going on around him.
His eyes were open now, staring out the window at the spectacular panorama of flames. She was certain this would be their last conversation.
“I thought you were a doper,” she said. Inhibition certainly served no purpose now. “Until you started talking about making all those phone calls, trying to track down—”
He didn’t let her finish. “I know what you thought. The day you came to do the story on Double Springs, you figured that’s how I’d managed not to lay anybody off, that I was using dope money.”
She was surprised she’d been so easy to read.
“But if you weren’t using dope money, how were you keeping the distillery afloat?”
“Mortgage. If I couldn’t pay it back in 18 months, the bank would own Double Springs. Instead of handing it free and clear to the sixth generation in McAllister lineage, I’d sign the title over to Farmers State Bank.”
“And that would have been the end of the world because … ?”
He looked up at her with his dark hair plastered in a wet widow’s peak above his eyebrows. The effort of moving planted a grimace of pain on his sweaty face.
“If I had a week, I could explain it to you.”
“But we don’t have a week.”
“No, we don’t.”
“How long? How long do you think?”
Fear as real as a gust of wind passed between them. His dark eyes grabbed hers and held on fiercely. “Half an hour. Maybe.”
Half an hour to live. The prospect of imminent death certainly put a whole new spin on life.
Losing the distillery really would have been the end of the world—then. But now?
Now, Seth couldn’t manage to muster a thimbleful of concern about whether or not his dead father might be proud of him.
The old man never would have been, some voice inside him confided gently. No matter what you did. You could have brought home the gold medal in the bourbon-making Olympics and he wouldn’t even have noticed. Joe McAllister didn’t notice anything after Caleb died. The world went on, the sun came up, the sun went down but the old man was just marking time. His reason for living was gone.
Why? Caleb had been a good guy but he wasn’t that special. He got drunk a lot when he was in the academy in Bardstown. He made good grades, but not great. Seth’s were better. Caleb was funny and charming—a real ladies’ man. Seth even wondered sometimes, given Caleb’s way with women, if the sixth generation of McAllister lineage was already out there, growing up somewhere in Bardstown or Elizabethtown, even in Brewster. But no matter how he worried it around in his head, Seth could come up with nothing about his older brother that would inspire the kind of consummate, almost fanatical devotion their father had for him. Seth always hoped that someday, when he had a son of his own, he’d be granted a peek in the window of his father’s soul.
He cut his eyes to Sarabeth, without moving. It hurt too bad to shift the position of his head, even a little bit, made him dizzy. Sarabeth had lost a child. She understood. And he’d let his mind play out fantasies now and then. That the two of them might someday … maybe he ought to tell her about that.
Jake and Ben raced down the shoulder of the road that ran alongside the river, ducking around the gawkers like dodging tackles. No one paid them any heed. All eyes were fixed on the once-in-a-lifetime light and pyrotechnics show on the hilltop. When the road curved away from the riverbank, they plunged into the woods, hanging close to the water, stumbling over tree roots, crashing through thistles and thorn bushes that grabbed their shirts and tore dozens of tiny wounds in their arms and faces.
The heat hit them as soon as they drew even with the Quart House on the opposite riverbank, an island in the center of a flaming sea. Jake wondered what it must be like for Sarabeth inside the building, and he was certain that’s where she was. What must the heat be like in there? Could anybody survive that?
Sarabeth shook her head, tried to get the sweat off her face that was dripping into her eyes. She had to see. So little time left, she didn’t want to squint at the final sights of her life.
They both spoke at once. Sarabeth reloaded first. “I have MS, Multiple Sclerosis. It was diagnosed right before Daddy died, right before I moved here.”
“What does it do to you?”
“It’s the mystery disease. No cause, no cure. I could live a perfectly normal life or I could be in a wheelchair in a month.”
She wouldn’t live long enough to be in a wheelchair! She wouldn’t live long enough to have a normal life either. It was over, now, today. In just a few minutes. All that worry about the future—for what? As it turned out, she didn’t have one.
“Guess I don’t have to care anymore about not being a burden on somebody.” She started to cry. She didn’t mean to; there’d been no warning. The tears had come like the wind. You didn’t see it before you felt it blow your hair into your face. Oh, how she’d like to feel a cool breeze, just one more.
“I’m sorry. I want to be strong. It’s just I don’t want to die!”
“Neither do I.” His voice was gruff, gravelly.
The heat grew more intense with every breath as they watched the flame moat that encircled the Quart House rise higher and higher. The rock wall topped with fried begonias would be breached soon. But they wouldn’t likely last that long. A tree outside the wall was burning like a torch and any second the flames would leap to the roof of the building.
Though the walls were stone, the roof was covered in cedar shingles, and Sarabeth could smell the odor of hot cedar. If they weren’t already on fire, they soon woul
d be. That’s what would get them, she supposed. The burning roof would collapse on them. They certainly wouldn’t live long enough for the barrels of whiskey around them to explode, like they’d done in the warehouses on the hill. But when they did, the whole Quart House would vaporize. And all trace of them, all physical trace that there’d ever been three people in that room, panting in the heat, would vanish.
“Will it hurt? Dying? Do you think?” She supposed she was still crying. It sounded like it when she talked and she was shaking. But the rivers of sweat running down her face made it impossible to tell if there were tears. too. “Will we know we’re burning?”
Jake led the way past the Quart House to a spot about 75 yards downstream where the river was narrower.
“You think she’s in there, don’t you, in the Quart House?” Ben gasped.
“I’m sure she is.” He hadn’t been sure before, but he was now. The certainty had been growing on him as he ran, his mind racing faster than his body. The more he’d thought about it, the more convinced he’d become. He believed Sarabeth Bingham was across the river in the Quart House, and maybe Seth McAllister was there, too.
“How do you know?”
“Trust me.”
Then Jake waded out into the water, Ben right behind him.
Seth’s heart broke for Sarabeth. He would gladly have given his life to get her out of here. He didn’t feel afraid, not for himself. But he ached to hold her and comfort her, yearned to protect her.
“I wish I could put my arms around you. There are so many things I should have told you and now there’s no time. Sarabeth, you have to know—that day at Elsie Bingo, when you turned down my barbecued chicken. That’s when it started. That’s when I began to fall in love with you.”
The boys started swimming when the cool water was chest high. The current wasn’t strong, but still it washed them downstream, farther away from the Quart House. Jake grabbed an overhanging branch to slow his progress and tried to pull his feet under him. The water was still too deep. He let go, swam another couple of strokes and tried again, and then he could feel the muddy bottom. He turned, reached out to Ben, dragged him in and the two of them slogged their way out of the deep water toward the riverbank.
But they didn’t climb out of the river. Brush, bushes and briars had grown up on the riverbank so dense it would be impossible to get through. As quickly as they could, they made their way upstream in the shallow water to a slice of riverbank that connected to a dirt and rock embankment about 8 feet tall. The rock fence that surrounded the distillery was built on top of the embankment.
“How are we going to get through these bushes?” Ben asked as they sloshed through the water. “And once we get to the rock fence and climb it, how are we going to get through 10 feet of flaming alcohol?”
“We’re not going to climb the fence.”
“Then how—?”
“We’re not going over it; we’re going under it.”
Sarabeth was so surprised by Seth’s words that she wondered if maybe she’d misunderstood him. He loved her? Oh, she had sensed something, or thought she had. She’d felt an attraction, like a magnet drawing her. But he’d been a doper and she couldn’t let herself get involved with him. Dopers were the enemy. Besides, she had MS.
“I love you, too.”
There was silence then. What was there left to say? The truth was out there, and it was truth, too. Deathbed statements were even admissible in court. She looked into his dark eyes. You could drown in the depths of those eyes. It was such a shame…
Smoke!
They both smelled it in the same breath. Cedar smoke. The roof was on fire.
If Jake had had time, he’d have explained to Ben how he used to play in these woods as a boy. His house was on the other side of the knob, and he’d spend all day in the woods in the summertime, just being by himself. Anything to keep from going home. As soon as the sun was up in the morning, Jake was gone. He came home as late as possible, ate supper and went to bed. He forged an entire life built around maintaining as little contact with his father as possible.
And that meant he’d had almost no contact with Jennifer either. A bolt of pain shot through him so fierce he almost gasped. She had been in that house all those hours he’d been outdoors, or playing baseball or football or running track. In that house, slowly losing her mind.
The ache of regret and longing was so intense he almost missed it. But there it was, a break in the thickness of the bushes, a small opening. He’d been afraid he might not be able to find it after all these years, but he had. And on the other side of the bushes, indented into the dirt wall was the grate, the rusty old grate he’d first discovered when he was 12 years old.
He’d been fishing in the shade of the covered bridge when his baseball cap blew off in a sudden gust of wind. It landed in the water and floated like a paper boat downstream. He’d dropped his rod and chased it, wading along in the shallow water, reluctant to get his jeans completely wet. But the hat stayed just beyond his reach, a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey. He finally made a lunge, got wet all the way up to his knees, and grabbed it. He straightened up and fit it on his head, turned to go back to the bridge, and that’s when he saw what looked like sort of an opening in the bushes on the riverbank. From the far shore, the thicket seemed absolutely impenetrable. But from here … He stepped out of the water, pushed branches and limbs out of his way, burrowed back into the undergrowth. And there on the embankment wall in front of him, totally hidden from view, was a metal grate.
The grate was old, industrial-strength old. About 4 feet tall and probably 3 across. It was set in an iron casement that had been chiseled into the rock. The grate was iron, too, worn and pitted. It swung inward on hinges that had rusted solid 100 years ago. The latch had rusted solid, too. He’d tried that day to get the grate open so he could explore inside, because he’d understood immediately what this was. This was the opening run-away slaves had used to get in and out of the refuge under the Quart House that was one of the stops in the Underground Railroad.
“This leads to a room under the Quart House,” he told Ben. At least he assumed it did. He’d never actually seen for himself. The day he found the grate, he’d spent the whole rest of the afternoon trying to get it open. But it wouldn’t budge. It was possible the way was blocked now, possible that even if they got into the tunnel, it no longer connected to an opening in the Quart House cellar.
“How are we going to get this thing open?” Ben asked.
“I have no idea.”
Sarabeth began to cough. A white cloud settled into the room and burned her eyes, too, made her squint. The smoke hadn’t gotten to Seth yet, on his knees beside her.
“Do you believe in God?” she coughed out the words, then tried not to breathe so deeply.
“Absolutely!” Seth hadn’t realized until he heard the word come out his mouth how firmly convinced he was that there was a God. It had been that sense of God, of right and wrong, that was the primary reason he had turned down the opportunities to get out of his financial difficulties with a little seven-pointed green leaf. He’d been propositioned by a former schoolmate, offered a ridiculously large sum of money to set up transport of a barrel full of dope along with the other used barrels hauled away from the distillery to greenhouses and wineries all over the country. But Seth turned him down, told the guy to get off Double Springs’ property and never come back.
There was an order to the universe. God had established it and maintained it. An understanding of right and wrong, the triumph of good over evil—that was all from God.
“When you die, do you think you—?”
“You go to Heaven.” Then Seth began to cough, too.
“Sonny knew that.” She was coughing hard now. It was almost impossible to speak. “Before Hayes shot him … ” She gasped. Coughing stole her words away. Sarabeth dragged in a breath of smoke-filled air and her head began to swim. “Sonny told him, ‘I forgive you.’”
“You don’t know how to get this thing open?” Ben was incredulous, almost crying with frustration.
Jake’s voice was fierce. “We’ll rip it off with our bare hands if we have to!”
He turned to find a piece of wood to use as a pry bar. Ben kicked at the gate in anger and it moved.
“Jake, lay down! Come here and lay down, like this.”
Ben dropped to his back on the ground with his head toward the river. He put his feet on the grate and scooted up so his knees were bent. Jake did the same.
“On the count of three, rear back and kick it.” Ben said. “One, two, three!”
Both boys pulled back and slammed their feet into the grate with all the strength in their legs. Bam!
The rusty clasp snapped with a popping sound and the grate scraped inward a couple of inches.
“Again! One, two, three!”
Bam!
Another few inches.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
After half a dozen blows, the grate was open wide enough to squeeze through and Jake plunged into the darkness beyond it.
Sarabeth felt herself beginning to pass out. And she didn’t fight it. It was a good thing. She didn’t want to know when the fire gobbled her up. Maybe she’d already be dead when it got to her; at the very least she’d be unconscious. Wouldn’t feel the flames. Wouldn’t know the pain.
Oh Ben, poor Ben! His face swam in front of her eyes and she’d have cried if she’d had enough air. What would he do without her? He needed her and she wouldn’t be there for him. How she ached to see him one more time! Tell him how much she loved him. She could hear the sound of his voice, hear him calling her name.
“Sarabeth! Sarabeth, can you hear me? Sarabeth!” The smoke was so thick Ben could barely catch his breath. He lifted his sister’s head and shouted into her pale, sweaty face with its swollen black eye. But there was no response.
Jake reached into his pocket and pulled out his Swiss Army knife. The best knife money could buy. Daddy’d given it to him for Christmas. He whipped open the longest blade, stepped behind the post Sarabeth was taped to and sliced down the duct tape until he reached her arms. He and Ben each grabbed a side of the jacket of sliced tape and ripped if off her. Ben produced a knife then, not a Swiss Army knife, but it would do, and began to cut the tape off her wrists while Jake sliced the tape off the post behind where Seth McAllister hung limp, his head dangling.
