Overproof

Chapter One: The Angel's Share

At five-forty in the morning, Rickhouse Four smelled like the inside of a hymn.

Margaux Thierry stood in the center aisle with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes closed, breathing. She did this every morning before she touched anything. Her grandmother had taught her to do it — walk into a warehouse and stop, and let the building tell you what kind of day it was going to be.

Today it said: warm, faintly sweet, a caramel edge to the top note, wood tannin underneath like the bass line of a slow song. Rain had come through Tuesday and the humidity was still hanging in the rafters, which meant the barrels on the top ricks were breathing hard, pushing whiskey out into the air. The angel's share, they called it — the two, three percent of every barrel that vanished each year into vapor and left the rest more concentrated, more itself. Fifty-one years of angel's share had soaked into the limestone walls of this place. Margaux was fairly certain if you set a match to the air in August the whole building would go up like a birthday candle.

She opened her eyes and started walking.

Four hundred and eighty barrels in Rickhouse Four, stacked three high on hand-built oak ricks that ran the length of the building. She knew them the way other people knew songs. Barrel 112 on the second tier by the east wall was a moody thing, always a half-step behind its neighbors. Barrel 309 had blown its bung twice in six years and had a scorch mark on the head like a birthmark. And at the far end, tucked into the position she'd chosen for it herself when it was three years old and still tasted like sawdust and ambition, sat Barrel 47.

Barrel 47 was twelve years old. It was, in Margaux's professional and entirely biased opinion, the best barrel of bourbon in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

She set her sample glass on the rick rail, pulled the bung with a soft wooden pop, and slid the copper thief into the hole. The thief was a long tapered tube, and using one properly was a trick of the thumb — cover the top, draw it out, release into the glass. Her grandmother could do it one-handed while telling you a story about the flood of '78. Margaux did it with the reverence of a person handling a relic.

The bourbon came out the color of a barn roof at sunset. She held the glass up to the gap in the wall boards where the morning came through in a long dusty blade of light, and she nosed it — not a big greedy inhale, but three short ones, mouth slightly open, the way you'd sneak up on something skittish.

Cherry. Toasted pecan. Something like old leather gloves. And underneath it all, faint and strange and hers, a note she'd been chasing for four years and could only ever describe as the smell of a screen door in July.

"There you are," she said out loud.

She took a sip and held it, let it bloom across her tongue and up behind her teeth. It was going to be the heart of the anniversary release. Fifty-one years of Thierry Spirits, and this autumn her grandmother would hand over the whole operation, and Margaux would put her name to a bourbon for the first time as master blender of record instead of apprentice, and Barrel 47 would carry it.

If they still had a rickhouse to age it in.

The notice from the Boone Creek County building office was taped to the inside of Margaux's office door where she'd have to look at it every day, because she was the kind of person who preferred her problems in her line of sight. NOTICE OF STRUCTURAL DEFICIENCY. Rickhouses One, Two, and Four. Cracking in foundation courses, lateral displacement of load-bearing walls, deferred maintenance of interior timber framing. Ninety days to remediate or the county would condemn, and condemnation meant moving eleven thousand barrels out of buildings they'd spent their whole lives learning, into whatever rented metal shed they could find in a state where every rickhouse was already full.

Bourbon didn't travel well mid-nap. You moved a barrel from a cool stone warehouse into a hot tin one and it stopped being what it had been becoming. It didn't ruin, exactly. It just went ordinary.

The deadline was the twelfth of August. It was the sixteenth of May.

Margaux swallowed, wrote three lines in the little waterproof notebook she carried in her back pocket — 47: cherry fwd, screen-door note present, do NOT touch — and reached for the bung to seat it back in the barrel.

That was when the building groaned.

It wasn't a loud sound. That was the thing she'd remember afterward. She'd expected, later, when she told the story, to say it sounded like thunder or like a train. It didn't. It was a low grinding sigh, the sound of a very heavy thing adjusting its weight from one hip to the other, and it came from the wall about twenty feet behind her, and something in the animal part of Margaux's brain — the part that had been in these buildings since she was six years old — stood straight up and screamed.

She dropped the bung and ran.

She made it maybe fifteen strides down the center aisle before the noise caught up and became enormous. Behind her, a section of the interior stone wall let go. She felt it more than heard it, a punch of pressure at her back, dust surging past her ankles. Wood shrieked. Three barrels came off the second tier and hit the packed earth floor, and one of them burst — she heard the seams give, the low whump of fifty-three gallons letting go all at once — and the smell that came up was so thick and sweet and enormous it was like being hit with a pillow.

Margaux got to the doorway and turned around with her hands on the frame.

Dust hung in the light. The far end of the wall had opened into a ragged mouth about eight feet wide, showing pale morning and a fringe of bluegrass beyond it. Two barrels were rocking slowly on their sides. The third had come apart into staves like a peeled orange, and a dark tongue of whiskey was spreading out across the floor, and the floor was drinking it.

Her heart was going so hard it hurt her ribs.

"Barrel 47," she said to nobody. It came out cracked. She looked down the aisle at the far end, and there it was, still on its rick, untouched, sitting fat and calm with its bung out and a copper thief lying beside it in the dirt.

"MARGAUX!"

Curtis Poe came around the corner of the building at a dead run for a man of sixty with two bad knees, and behind him Dwight Mabry with a fire extinguisher he clearly had no plan for. Curtis grabbed her by both shoulders and looked at her face like he was checking a barrel head for weeps.

"I'm fine."

"You are not fine, your hands are shaking."

"Those are two different statements, Curtis."

He swore, and then he apologized for swearing, which was the most Curtis Poe sequence of events possible, and then he called it in.

By seven o'clock there were nine people standing in the gravel apron outside Rickhouse Four, and Margaux had a paper cup of coffee she wasn't drinking, and her sister had arrived.

Odette Thierry-Walsh did not run anywhere. She came across the yard at a fast, furious walk in a linen blazer and boots, phone in one hand, and she stopped six feet from Margaux and looked her up and down.

"Are you hurt."

"No."

"Were you inside."

"Yes."

"How far inside."

"Twenty feet from it."

Odette's jaw did a thing. She was thirty-six, four years older than Margaux, and she had their mother's height and their grandmother's mouth, and when she was frightened it came out the far side of her looking exactly like anger.

"Twenty feet," Odette repeated. "Twenty feet. And you'd be under it right now if you'd been standing where you usually stand at six in the morning, which is up against that wall pulling your little samples, and then I'd be calling Grandmother from a hospital parking lot. Do you understand that I have been telling you for eight months —"

"Odette."

"— eight months that these buildings needed money spent on them, and you and Grandmother sat in that kitchen and told me the walls had stood since Nixon and would stand a while yet —"

"Odette." Margaux's voice came out low. "I lost a barrel. I want to be angry at somebody about the wall and there isn't anybody, so please don't make it be you."

Her sister stopped. She looked at the hole in the rickhouse, and she breathed out slowly through her nose, and something in her face gentled about ten percent.

"Which one did you lose?"

"Two hundred and six. Nine-year, it was going to be filler in the small batch." Margaux's throat did something ridiculous and she made it stop. "And two more got knocked around. I'll have to check the seams."

"And the twelve-year?"

"Fine."

"Well," Odette said. "Small mercies." She put her phone away, which for Odette was the equivalent of taking off a wedding ring. "I'm calling an engineer. Today. Not the county's man, ours, someone who actually knows old stone. I've got two names from the historical society in Lexington and I am going to call both of them before lunch, and Margaux — I need you not to fight me on this."

Margaux looked at the ragged mouth in the wall, the whiskey drying dark in the dirt, the dust still hanging in the blade of morning light. Her hands were shaking. She was already composing what she'd say to her grandmother, who was seventy-eight and who had built this place out of a dead husband's insurance money and a copper still, and who would want to hear the truth without decoration.

"I'm not going to fight you," she said.

Odette blinked, honestly startled, and then recovered and got her phone back out.

That night, in the farmhouse kitchen, Clementine Thierry listened to the whole story without interrupting once. She sat very straight in the ladder-back chair at the head of the table with her hands folded, a small dry woman in a cardigan the color of oatmeal, her white hair pinned up the way she'd worn it in every photograph since 1976.

When Margaux finished, her grandmother said, "Which wall."

"North interior, back third."

"Mm." Clementine's eyes went past her, out the dark window toward the shapes of the rickhouses on the ridge. "That's barn stone."

"What?"

"The lower courses of that wall came out of the tobacco barn that was standing on the site when I bought the place. I had it taken down and I used the stone. Couldn't afford to buy new." She said it flatly, the way she said everything about the early years, as though frugality had been a weather event that happened to her. "Never did like how that wall sat."

"You never mentioned that."

"You never asked me about the walls, sugar. You ask me about the whiskey." Clementine reached over and patted the back of Margaux's hand twice, briskly, which from her was an embrace. "Your sister's hiring an engineer."

"She is."

"Good." A pause. "Who?"

"Someone out of Lexington. Historic restoration. She said his write-ups were the best she'd read." Margaux rubbed her eyes. "Kittridge, I think. Jesse Kittridge."

Her grandmother did not move. Not one muscle. But the kitchen changed temperature, the way a rickhouse changes when a door opens somewhere out of sight, and Margaux — who had built a career on noticing exactly that kind of shift — noticed it and filed it and was too tired to ask.

"Kittridge," Clementine said.

"You know the name?"

"I know a lot of names." The old woman stood, went to the sink, and ran water over her hands for longer than she needed to. "Bring him by when he comes. I'd like to look at him."