Angels' Share (Bourbon Springs Book 3) Read online

  ANGELS’ SHARE

  BOOK 3

  THE BOURBON SPRINGS SERIES

  A LAND OF BOURBON AND BLUEGRASS BOOK

  By Jennifer Bramseth

  © 2015 Jennifer Bramseth, all rights reserved

  To the angels of the bourbon industry—every worker, tour guide, truck driver, cooper, bottler, distiller, farmer—to all of you

  Angels’ Share

  The amount of liquid lost from a barrel of bourbon

  during the aging process due to evaporation

  Cover design by Kim Killion

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my family; to my editor, Erin; and to Mary Jo T. for catching my errors yet again.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Lila tightened her dark green barn coat around her slight frame and took a step onto the front porch. Her footfall was hollow on the white, weather-beaten wooden planks, and the empty noise seemed to typify the isolation of her home set in the midst of considerable unfarmed acreage. Although yesterday had been balmy and sunny, the weather had turned quickly as it was wont to do in central Kentucky in November. On this dark Wednesday morning, the sky was like one thick slab of dull blue-gray marble and the air was tinged with an icy sting that hinted at the threat of a cold rain. Thinking about the drive she needed to make into town that day, Lila wondered how long it would take the fog to burn off. It hovered like an unwelcome ghost over the landscape, congregating in thick coils down by Old Crow Creek and creeping up the hill in spectral, finger-like tendrils along the springs and toward her house. She could smell the mash cooking from the distillery around a mile to the north and that warm, yeasty aroma mingled with the woodsy scent of the fire she had started a few minutes earlier. Lila inhaled and closed her eyes. She was home.

  With her steaming white stoneware coffee mug in hand, Lila stared at the gray car bouncing along the dirt track and toward her lonely house. She recognized the car, and her brain led her to the obvious conclusion that her visitor had to be Hannah Davenport, and possibly her cousin Kyle as well, but this realization made absolutely no sense. She knew that Kyle and his new wife were due to return from their honeymoon either that day or tomorrow. But what the hell were they doing paying her a social call on their first few hours back in town?

  It was only dumb luck that she’d even noticed the car’s advance in the first place. She’d been adjusting a curtain rod at a window at the front of the house when she saw the car emerge from around a small stand of trees which blocked her view of the main road, Ashbrooke Pike. Kyle had nagged her for the better part of a year to get some kind of system which would alert her when a vehicle was approaching her house, but she’d put off the purchase out stubbornness. Part of her didn’t want to know when people were coming onto the property; it made it easier to ignore the outside world.

  The car came closer and parked and Lila confirmed the occupants’ identities from a distance of several yards. She walked down the front steps of the porch, willing to be a little more hospitable to her visitors than most since they were technically family and she happened to like both of them, even Hannah. Lila was unable to say the same, however, for Hannah’s brother.

  The newlyweds emerged from the car looking tan and relaxed, although Hannah seemed worried.

  “Congratulations and welcome back,” Lila said. “But to what do I owe the honor of this visit?” Lila said, looking from Kyle then to Hannah.

  Hannah stood a few yards away from Lila, but Lila could clearly see that Hannah was agitated about something.

  “I just came here to say, on behalf of myself, the distillery, and every rational person on the face of the Earth, that I’m so very sorry that my brother is such an idiot,” Hannah said. She pressed her arms into her sides and it looked as though she was physically trying to restrain herself from getting more annoyed.

  “So you already know about that, do you?” Lila said, and titled her head.

  Kyle nodded. “Judge Craft emailed me a copy of the lawsuit while we were gone.”

  “Some wedding present,” Lila cracked as the wind kicked up and tousled her short blonde hair.

  “Can I talk to you?” Hannah pleaded.

  “How did you two know I would be here today?” Lila asked. She was a high school history teacher and usually wouldn’t be at home on a Wednesday morning in the middle of fall.

  “You forget I was married to that jerk that used to be the school superintendent, Lila,” Hannah said. “We had a copy of the school calendar plastered to the front of the fridge.”

  “It’s still there, in fact,” Kyle pointed out, with apparent aggravation at the reminder of his predecessor.

  “I remembered that school is out these next three days for some kind of conference,” Hannah told her.

  “And thank goodness I didn’t have to go,” Lila said.

  “Can we go inside and talk?” Hannah asked again.

  “Sure,” Lila acquiesced. “Let’s get out of the cold.”

  Within a few minutes, the trio sat around the large round table in Lila’s kitchen drinking the last of the coffee.

  “Lila, please know that I didn’t know that Bo was going to go ahead and sue you while I was gone,” Hannah pleaded, and put her left hand on the table. Lila couldn’t help but notice the huge rock of an engagement ring Kyle had given his new wife, and Lila fleetingly wondered where her own wedding set was. Not that she needed it.

  “I believe you,” Lila said, and put her mug on the table. She crossed her legs and put her hands between her tiny thighs to warm them. The chill from outside seeped into her underheated kitchen and the cold was hard to shake.

  “And I hope you also know that I absolutely do not agree with what he’s done. I’ve told him not to sue you, and that he should try to work out some kind of agreement on the boundary.”

  “Well, what’s done is done,” Lila sighed. “I’m going into town today to meet with my lawyer.”

  “Who is it?” Hannah asked.

  “Drake Mercer,” Lila said. “He knows this land. Did my parents’ estate,” Lila said without further elaboration. “I would’ve hired Harriet Hensley but she’s at Jon Buckler’s firm, and he’s Bo’s attorney. I went to high school with Harriet.”

  “Have you ever walked the land with Bo like you have with me?” Hannah said, referring to the time the previous summer when Lila had given Hannah a small tour of the disputed portion of the property between the Old Garnet Distillery grounds and Lila’s land.

  “We’ve walked that line I showed you,” Lila said, and shivered a little. “Walked the line several times, in fact. Ended up arguing each time.”

  “Have you ever shown him the springs?” Hannah asked.

  Lila shook her head. The historic site was Lila’s special place and reputedly the source of the town’s name: Bourbon Springs. She granted few people the privilege of seeing the spot.

  “He’s asked but I don’t think that seeing those springs would change his mind,” Lila said. “He’s convinced of his position.”

  “Why did my father do this?” Hannah sighed.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Lila said, and rose from her seat. “He wanted Bo to be in charge. His decision. We can question the wisdom of it all we want, but there it is.”

  Lila knew the division of Old Garnet ownership thanks to countless conversations she’d had over the past months with Bo and his mother, Emma. Hannah’s father, Cass Davenport, had divvied up ownership of Old Garnet Distillery amongst his children and wife. He left Bo a 49% share, Hannah 45%, and the rest to Emma. And while Lila originally thought that Emma Davenport and her daughter could gang up on Bo and run the distillery as the
y saw fit, that wasn’t in the plan. Lila learned that Emma supported her son in every business decision, to no end of frustration on Hannah’s part. Emma’s argument was that Cass intended Bo to be in charge and she wasn’t going to get deeply involved in business decisions unless Bo became incapacitated. So Hannah, while working alongside her brother at the distillery and helping him run it, was technically shut out on the really big decisions.

  Like whether to sue the distillery’s neighbor to the south, in order to settle a long-standing boundary dispute so Bo could get land to build another rickhouse to store and age his precious Old Garnet bourbon.

  Lila unsuccessfully tried to negotiate and ultimately refused all offers to purchase the land Bo wanted. She loved her land and didn’t want to see it forever altered in any way—not one blade of grass crushed, not one pebble moved around those springs. Lila sure as hell didn’t want to see a big old rickhouse—more or less a tall, multistoried barn to store aging bourbon–looming over her property every time she looked north.

  “I’m going to try to talk Bo into dismissing the case,” Hannah said.

  “Good luck with that,” Lila sniped. “And I don’t know that I’d agree to dismiss since this is my big chance to get this dispute settled.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” Hannah said, and looked at Kyle.

  “Hannah, I know he’s your brother, and he’s pleasant enough when not talking about the land, but I cannot for the life of him understand how you can work with that man on a daily basis,” said Lila with a shake of the head.

  Hannah laughed. “I ask myself that all the time. But I guess it’s the challenge. He needs someone like me telling him when he’s wrong.”

  “Then you must be constantly exhausted,” Lila said, and Kyle erupted into a fit of laughter, shortly followed by Hannah.

  “Seriously, I am going to talk to him,” Hannah claimed and rose from her seat.

  “I think you’d be wasting your time, but give it a shot. But if he doesn’t change his mind, you understand that this lawsuit is it, right? We’re finally going to get this boundary pinned down and everyone’s going to have to live with it, win or lose. Does Bo get that?”

  “Sure he does,” Hannah said. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he thinks he’s going to win.”

  Lila knew at that moment Hannah had no chance of changing her brother’s mind.

  Bo hated this kind of weather.

  One day could be the picture-perfect fall day: crisp and clear, the flawless blend of the warmth of the unobscured sun with the coolness of the breeze. But the next day was a bitter atonement for the preceding day’s perfection: dark, bitingly cold, and just plain ugly. The wind would whip up and strip the still-lush trees and scatter the precious, glittering emblems of the season until all one could see ahead through the spindly, leafless branches was the bleakness of the winter to come.

  He didn’t want to come to town that day. The new mash tub was going to be steamed and cleaned for the first time after it had held its first batch. Hannah wasn’t back yet to check on that process, and Bo had wanted to be there just to make sure everything was fine with the new tub. He’d wanted a new one for the longest time to increase production, and not to be there during its first cleaning seemed wrong to him. Some of the workers had looked at him like he was nuts when he’d voiced his regret about being absent for the event. But Bo would be the first to acknowledge that when it came to the distillery, he wanted to make sure everything was as it should be. Which meant everything went the way he wanted it to go.

  Jon Buckler, his attorney, wanted him to come in that day to discuss the possibility of amending the complaint they had filed last week against Lila McNee. Bo didn’t completely understand what Jon wanted him to agree to do, but if it helped with the lawsuit, he would be all for it.

  That damned lawsuit. He knew Hannah was going to kill him for doing it, but he finally had to go ahead and file suit. He’d deliberately done so while Hannah had been off on her unexpected honeymoon. Might as well take advantage of her absence and not have to listen to her bitching at him for a while. He knew he was in for it when she got back, so he tried to enjoy the silence in her absence.

  But the truth was that he hadn’t wanted to file the damn case. He’d wanted to negotiate a solution with Lila. And that’s all they’d done for well over a year. Negotiate. Well, if that’s what you called yelling. Because that’s how almost every meeting with Lila had ended up. The only times they didn’t wind up shouting at each other were the occasions when they hadn’t talked about the dispute at all or when Bo’s mother had been present. Emma Davenport had a calming effect on everyone, and Bo thought that Lila and Emma had actually gotten to like each other throughout the whole drawn-out and ultimately fruitless process.

  Bo’s father had claimed for years that a large strip of land on the southern part of the distillery grounds was part of the property. Cass Davenport’s explanation involved a lot of old surveys and his logic that of course distillery land would include within its borders a natural spring. But that ancient property line had gotten obscured or forgotten or ignored over the past hundred or so years, leaving the distillery at odds with whoever happened to be the landowners to the south.

  Things had come to a head recently because Bo was eager to expand the distillery and desperately wanted to build a new rickhouse to store more product. And the southern part of the property—the disputed area—was perfect. In fact, it was the only part of the grounds which he thought was suitable for a new rickhouse of the size he wanted to build. There might be room to build a smaller (and thus inadequate) one near the creek and close to the three very old rickhouses. The larger, newer rickhouses dotted the rest of the property and there was simply no room left to build. So he had to look to the land to the south.

  But damned if it didn’t have to be Lila’s land.

  She was driving him crazy. It had finally gotten to the point where she would barely talk to him and would completely shut him down if he tried to bring up a sale. He would call her and they would have tense conversations, although twice he did manage to get her to come to the distillery and have lunch with him. During those visits, they got along and he remembered actually enjoying himself. He had found himself too easily distracted by her large blue eyes and delicate features. And on the rare—very rare—occasion she smiled, he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. But after those pleasant encounters, Bo had kicked himself for not bringing up the land issue; the only way they seemed to be able to talk was when the boundary problem was ignored.

  And truth be told, he wished he could ignore it. He wished he didn’t have the problem of where and how to build. Because the issue was getting in the way of him getting to know Lila better. Yet it was also the issue that had been the only thing to bring her back into his orbit. She’d grown up next door, so to speak, but she was several years younger than him so they hadn’t been in school together. From a distance, he’d seen her on the property sometimes, or around town, but he’d only gotten to know her over the past few years after she moved back to Bourbon Springs. Fragile and bitter, he understood that she craved and protected her self-isolation, but little wonder. Within the span of around a year, she’d lost both her parents and her husband in separate car accidents. Bo sometimes wondered whether she was angry with him or just with her circumstances in general; he sensed that sometimes he served as nothing more than a convenient punching bag on which she could release her frustrations.

  When he’d finally realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere with Lila and that he might actually be drawing out the process just to have the excuse to talk to her, he knew it was time to take action. He had shared his thoughts with Hannah, with the predictable result that she told him suing Lila was a stupid idea. But Hannah could not come up with any other way to build a rickhouse the size they needed on the property.

  And that was crucial to Bo. The bourbon was made at Old Garnet, aged on the site. If not, it wasn’t Old G
arnet. Bo realized that by suing Lila, he’d probably ensure that she’d never speak to him again. But he had to get the land thing put to bed. It was one of the last things his father had left undone.

  The meeting with Jon went quickly. He told him that he would draft an amended complaint and get it filed as soon as possible. Bo approved the move because Jon had, as he had expected, advised that including a few more bits of information and allegations about some of the history of the properties would be a strategically good move.

  When he left Jon’s office and stepped out onto the sidewalk along Main Street, it was nearly noon and a cold rain peppered down from a limestone-gray sky. Hungry and more than a little grumpy, he decided to go grab something at Over a Barrel, a deli at the corner of Main Street across from the courthouse square. Over the years, Bo had been to the deli many times; he knew the food was excellent and that the bourbon balls were made freshly every day—with Old Garnet, of course.

  When he got to the doors of the deli, he had to squeeze inside; it looked like everyone else in downtown Bourbon Springs had come to the same spot on that chilly day to grab a decent hot lunch. He ordered a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Bo had yet to shake off the chill of the day, and a hot lunch seemed like the best way to warm up and fill his tummy at the same time. But when he pulled out his wallet, he realized he’d left his credit cards at the distillery (didn’t think he’d need them to visit his lawyer) and he was short on cash.

  “Great,” he mumbled, and started rummaging through the pockets of his jeans and his old gray parka trying to find enough cash to salvage his hopes of a nice hot lunch on a cold day.

  This went on for several long seconds and Bo could sense the impatience of the people in line behind him.

  “For crying out loud, here!” someone cried at his back.

  Around his left side an arm appeared with a twenty-dollar bill in a delicate, small-fisted hand.